Meaning and Use
The notion of meaning and use are closely interrelated. It means that the meaning of a word can’t be entirely separated from it’s use in speech.
What are relations between them:
Leach: the lexical meaning is meaning in abstraction and use is meaning in situation.
The difference between:
Meaning Use
1. Found in dictionaries 1. Found in actual use
2. Denotative 2. Conotative
3. Isolated 3. Deriving from context
4. Conventionalized by authority 4. Creative
5. Regulated by authority 5. Negotiated between users
6. Base meaning 6. Extended meaning (расширенное)
7. Predictable 7. Unpredictable
8. Generalized 8. Particular
The nature of meaning is best described with reference to functions of language in human communications.
R. Jacobson ( formulated these functions)
The process of communication includes:
1. The speaker
The Addressee
The Code
The Message ( is what the speaker says in the code)
The Context (the things, qualities, actions that the speaker wants to talk about)
The Contact ( the relations between the speaker and the addressee)
6 functions of the language:
The Emotive (speaker related)
The speaker tries to express his feelings by using emotive language.
type writer (only referential meaning, it serves as a name of a particular object)
America (besides it’s referential meaning, emotive meaning it evokes some attitudes with the
name of the country)
fascist
American life, American English, American Dream
Fascist- the emotive meaning matters much more than the referential meaning.
The larger is the emotive component within the words meaning, the smaller is the significance of it’s referential meaning.
Conative (функция усвоения)
(addressee related)
patterns of speech are chosen with regard to parameters of the situation.
We make the message more listener friendly.
The Metalinguistic (oriented towards language itself)
Every language is a code used to communicate smth.
Languages presents a set of conventions, it means that in actual speech certain words are not our free choice.
A flock of birdswe can observe the restricting function of lang.code
A herd of cows
A school of fish
A pride of lions
A swarm of flies, bees
The Poetic (message related)
Some scholars consider language to be the dress of thought (Quirk)
The Poetic function turns language into a deliberately well- tailored dress of thought.
The Referential (context related)
The main function of the language to convey information.
The Phatic (contact related-контактноустанавливающая)
The speaker wants to establish a social bond with a listener, he uses a lot of words which do not convey meaning, but have a purely interactive function.
Nice to see Uformula of politeness
How are U?
Talk about the weather
The Identity-Unit_Problem
(проблема тождества слова)
The size- of-unit (проблема отдельности слова) considers words as separate units in the flow of speech (where one word ends and the other word begins).
The identity-of-unit-problem establishes where one word ends and another begins on the dictionary level.
Custom (обычай)different or one word?
Customs (таможня)
In the Longman dictionary- one word despite various.
In the Cambridge dictionary there are free different entries ( the case of “custom” is a homonym)
Speaking about different types of relationship between expression and content.
We should bear in mind one to one correspondence between them is very rare in natural human languages.
For example: polycemy means singleness of form and multiplicity of content.
It’s an instance of the violation the law of the sign which prescribes the direct correspondence of expression of content.
But it’s not typical of the vocabulary of natural language.
Other examples of the violation of the law of the sign.
Homonymy and Synonymy
Identity of expression singleness of content
Difference of context variability of expression
hair-hare
But the law of the sign is not always violated, there are cases of smaller disagreement between expression and content.
Variants of one and the same word.(phonetic, morphologic, semantic are discusses under the title of the identity-of-unit-problem)
The expression plane or content plane of the word may vary. But these variations may not be significant enough to split the word up into different units.