NAMA : NENI WINARTI

NPM : 20168100039

MATKUL : SEMANTICS

“THE DIMENSION OF MEANING”

 Anything meaningful in a language is a linguistic expression, that has of various

length. Three units of meaning: morphemes (which may be less than a word),
lexemes (roughly, words and idioms), and sentences.
 Three aspects of meaning in lexemes: the relation to phenomena outside
language, the relation to people’s attitudes and feelings and the relation to other
lexemes.

A. REFERENCE AND DENOTATION

 Children learning their native language first learn words in association with
observable items and situations and events. This simple fact can give rise to an
overly simple idea about what ‘meaning’ is.
 Ogden and Richards (1923), developed a mentalistic theory about meaning, an
attempt to explain meaning in terms of what is in people’s minds.
 Ogden and Richards called the bond between word and concept an
‘association,’ the bond between concept and object ‘reference,’ and the bond
between object and word ‘meaning.’

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  Distinction between reference and denotation: Reference is the relation
between a language expression such as this door, both doors, the dog, another
dog and whatever the expression pertains to in a particular situation of
language use, including what a speaker may imagine. Denotation is the
potential of a word like door or dog to enter into such language expressions.
Reference is the way speakers and hearers use an expression successfully;
denotation is the knowledge they have that makes their use successful.

B. CONNOTATION

 A denotation identifies the central aspect of word meaning, which everybody

generally agrees about.
 Connotation refers to the personal aspect of meaning, the emotional
associations that the word arouses.
 Connotation is the affective or emotional associations elicited by a word,
which clearly need to be the same for all people who know and use the word.

C. SENSE RELATIONS
 The meaning that a lexeme has because of its relationships with other lexemes
they are associated with in an utterance is the sense of that lexeme.
 Eg.
1. A window broke.
Tom broke window.
2. A happy child, a happy family. (Who enjoys)
A happy accident, a happy experience. (That produces)
A happy story, a happy report. (Containing a happy event)
 Syntagmatic is the relation of the lexeme with other lexemes with which it
occurs in the same phrases or sentences. It is mutual association of two or
more words in a sequence so that the meanings contribute to the meaning of
the larger unit, the phrase, or sentence.
 Paradigmatic: A relation of choice.
 Syntagmatic relations as horizontal and paradigmatic relations as vertical. A
compound expression, such as book and newspaper, cautious but arbitrary,

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 read or write puts two lexemes that are paradigmatically related into a
syntagmatic relationship.

D. LEXICAL AND GRAMMATICAL MEANINGS

 A referring Expression, A piece of language that is used as if it is linked to
something outside language, some living or dead entity or concept or group of
entities or concepts. The entity is called referent.
 Grammatical Meanings are expressed by bound morphemes, by function
words, and by arrangement of forms in a sentence.
 Referring expressions and predicates have lexical meaning while
grammatical morphemes and function words express grammatical meaning.
E. MORPHEMES
 Morpheme is a minimal meaningful part
 Free morphemes is which can occur by themselves.
 Bound Morpheme is the ones which are always attached to something else.
 The minimal form that can have reference or can predicate is a lexeme. A set
of forms with grammatical affixes is a single lexeme. A non-minimal form
with single meaning is a single lexeme, an idiom.

F. HOMONYMY AND POLYSEMY

 Homonyms …two or more forms that are identical in speech (pronunciation
and spelling) but have different meanings…. different lexeme.
 Homographs …. forms identical in writing (spelling) but not in speech
(different pronunciation) nor in meaning and also different lexemes.
 A polysemous lexeme has several (apparently) related meanings.

G. LEXICAL AMBIGUITY
 When homonyms can occur in the same position in utterances, the results is
lexical ambiguity.
 E.g : I was on my way to the bank.
 Ambiguity occurs also because a longer linguistic form has a literal sense an a
figurative sense.
H. SENTENCE AND MEANING

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 What sentence meaning is?
 First, the meaning of a sentence derives from the meanings of its constituent
lexemes and from the grammatical meanings it contains.
 Second, at least if the sentence is a statement, if you know the meaning of the
sentence, you know what conditions are necessary in the world for that
sentence to be true.
 In semantics, we are not interested in intuitions or hints but we are interested
in the instances when the language of the message implicates some additional
meaning that accounts for our inference.
 Truth-conditional semantics is the study of meaning through a consideration of
the conditions that must exist for a sentence to be true, and how the truth of
one sentence relates to the truth or falsity of other sentences