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management— a group of persons in charge of some enterprise,
chorus— a group of singers,
team— a group of persons acting together in work or in a game.
The degree and character of abstraction and generalisation in lexico-grammatical meanings and the generic terms that represent them are intermediate between those characteristic of grammatical categories and those observed on the lexical level — hence the term lexico-grammatical.
The conceptual content of a word is expressed in its denotative meaning.1 To denote is to serve as a linguistic expression for a concept or as a name for an individual object. The denotative meaning may be signifiсative, if the referent is a concept, or demоfistrative, if it is an individual object. The term referent or denotatum (pl. denotata) is used in both cases. Any text will furnish examples of both types of denotative meaning. The demonstrative meaning is especially characteristic of colloquial speech where words so often serve to identify particular elements of reality. E. g.: “Do you remember what the young lady did with the telegram?” (Christie) Here the connection with reality is direct.
Especially interesting examples of significative meaning may be found in aphorisms, proverbs and other sayings rendering general ideas. E. g.: A good laugh is sunshine in the house (Thackeray) or The reason why worry kills more people than work is that more people worry than work (Frost) contain words in their significative meanings.
The information communicated by virtue of what the word refers to is often subject to complex associations originating in habitual contexts, verbal or situational, of which the speaker and the listener are aware, they give the word its connotative meaning. The interaction of denotative meaning and its pragmatic counterpart — connotation — is no less complicated than in the case of lexical and grammatical meaning. The connotative component is optional, and even when it is present its proportion with respect to the logical counterpart may vary within wide limits.
We shall call connotation what the word conveys about the speaker’s attitude to the social circumstances and the appropriate functional style (slay vs kill), about his approval or disapproval of the object spoken of (clique vs group), about the speaker’s emotions (mummy vs mother), or the degree of intensity (adore vs love).
The emotional overtone as part of the word’s communicative value deserves special attention. Different approaches have been developing in contemporary linguistics.2
The emotional and evaluative meaning of the word may be part of the denotational meaning. For example hireling ‘a person who offers his services for payment and does not care about the type of work'
There are other synonymous terms but we shall not enumerate them here because terminological richness is more hampering than helpful. has a strong derogatory and even scornful connotation, especially when the name is applied to hired soldiers. There is a considerable degree of fuzziness about the boundaries between the denotational and connotative meanings.
The third type of semantic segmentation mentioned on p. 39 was the segmentation of the denotational meaning into semantic components. The componential analysis is a very important method of linguistic investigation and has attracted a great deal of attention. It is usually illustrated by some simple example such as the words man, woman, boy, girl, all belonging to the semantic field “the human race” and differing in the characteristics of age and sex. Using the symbols HUMAN, ADULT, MALE and marking them positively and negatively so that -ADULT means ‘young’ and -MALE means ‘female’, we may write the following componential definitions:
man: + HUMAN + ADULT + MALE
woman: + HUMAN + ADULT — MALE
boy: + HUMAN — ADULT + MALE
girl: + HUMAN — ADULT — MALE
One further point should be made: HUMAN, ADULT, MALE in this analysis are not words of English or any other language: they are elements of meaning, or semes which can be combined in various ways with other similar elements in the meaning of different words. Nevertheless a linguist, as it has already been mentioned, cannot study any meaning devoid of form, therefore these semes are mostly determined with the help of dictionary definitions.
To conclude this rough model of semantic complexities we come to the fourth point, that of polysemy.
Polysemy is inherent in the very nature of words and concepts as every object and every notion has many features and a concept reflected in a word always contains a generalisation of several traits of the object. Some of these traits or components of meaning are common with other objects. Hence the possibility of using the same name in secondary nomination for objects possessing common features which are sometimes only implied in the original meaning. A word when acquiring new meaning or meanings may also retain, and most often retains the previous meaning.
E. g. birth — 1) the act or time of being born, 2) an origin or beginning, 3) descent, family.
The classification of meanings within the semantic structure of one polysemantic word will be discussed in § 3.4.
If the communicative value of a word contains latent possibilities realised not in this particular variant but able to create new derived meanings or words we call that implicational.1 The word bomb, See also the term epidigmatic offered by D.N. Shmelev for a somewhat similar notion of the elements of meaning that form the basis for semantic and morphological derivation and characterise the similarities and differences of variants within the semantic structure of one word. for example, implies great power, hence the new colloquial meanings ‘great success’ and ‘great failure’, the latter being an American slang expression.
The different variants of a polysemantic word form a semantic whole due to the proximity of the referents they name and the notions they express. The formation of new meanings is often based on the potential or implicational meaning. The transitive verb drive, for instance, means ‘to force to move before one’ and hence, more generally, ‘to cause an animal, a person or a thing work or move in some direction’, and more specifically ‘to direct a course of a vehicle or the animal which draws it, or a railway train, etc.’, hence ‘to convey in a vehicle’ and the intransitive verb: ‘to go in a vehicle’. There are also many other variants but we shall mention only one more, namely — the figurative — ‘to mean’, as in: “What can he be driving at?” (Foote)
All these different meanings can be explained one with the help of one of the others.
The typical patterns according to which different meanings are united in one polysemantic word often depend upon grammatical meanings and grammatical categories characteristic of the part of speech to which they belong.
Depending upon the part of speech to which the word belongs all its possible meanings become connected with a definite group of grammatical meanings, and the latter influence the semantic structure of the word so much that every part of speech possesses semantic peculiarities of its own.
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