TYPES OF MEANING

The whole object and purpose of language is to be meaningful. Languages have developed and are constituted in their present forms in order to meet the needs of communication in all its aspects. It is because the needs of human communication are so various and so multifarious that the study of meaning is probably the most difficult and baffling part of the serious study of language. Traditionally, language has been defined, as in the definition quoted above, as the expression of thought, but, as was seen, this involves far too narrow an interpretation of language or far too wide a view of thought to be serviceable. The expression of thought is just one among the many functions performed by language in certain contexts.

First, one must recognize that the meaning of any sentence comprises two parts, the meanings of the words it contains and the structural or grammatical meaning carried by the sentence itself. In English "the dog chased the cat" and "the boy chased the cat" differ in meaning because "dog" and "boy" are different words with different word meanings; the same applies to equivalent sentences in other languages. The two sentences "the dog chased the cat" and "the cat chased the dog, "though containing exactly the same words, are different in meaning because the different word orders distinguish what are conventionally called subject and object. In Latin the two corresponding sentences would be distinguished not by word order, which is grammatically indifferent and largely a matter of style, but by different shapes in the lexical equivalents of "dog" and "cat."

Some stylistic devices are based on the particular use of lexical meanings. It is important, therefore, to define the types of meanings words may have.

The most common definition of a word is that a word is a language sign that expresses a concept by its forms and meanings. By concept is meant an abstract or general idea of some phenomenon of objective reality, including feelings and emotions of human beings. The forms of a word show its relations with other words in a sentence. The meaning of a word is the means by which the concept is materialized. Some concepts may be materialized not only by means of the signs of language, words, but by other signs - by gestures, music, painting, sculpture, etc.

A word may have a number of meanings. When there is a connection between different meanings, we call them shades of meanings. Scientists distinguish three types of meaning: logical, emotive and nominal.

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