Task 3

Mariam Gorgisheli

Grammatical meanings refer to that part of the meaning of the world which indicates grammatical
concept or relationships such as part of speech of words, singular and plural meaning of nouns, tense
meaning of verbs and their inflectional forms. For example, toy- toys, ball- balls, tree- trees etc. In these
examples we can see common elements, which are grammatical meaning of plurality.

The lexical meaning of the word may be described as the component of meaning proper to the word as
a linguistic unit, i.e. recurrent in all the forms of this word. For example drive, drives, drove, driven,
driving. We can see that these word-forms possess different grammatical meanings of tense, person and
so on, but in each of them we find one and the same semantic component.

It is usual to classify lexical items into major word-classes (nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs) and
minor word-classes (articles, prepositions, conjunctions, etc.). All members of a major word-class share a
distinguishing semantic component which though very abstract may be viewed as the lexical component
of part-of-speech meaning.

Denotative meaning is the meaning given in the dictionary and forms the core of word-meaning. Being
constant and relatively stable, conceptual meaning forms the basis for communication as the same word
has the same conceptual meaning to all the speakers of the same language. Take ‘The sun rises in the
east’ for example. The word sun here means a heavenly body which gives off light, heat, and energy’, a
concept which is understood by anyone who speaks English. Connotative meaning. In contrast to
denotative meaning, connotative meaning refers to the overtones or associations suggested by the
conceptual meaning, traditionally known as connotations. It is not an essential part of the word-
meaning, but associations that might occur in the mind of a particular user of the language. Mother,
denoting a ‘female parent’, is often associated with ‘love’, ‘care’, ‘tenderness’, ‘forgiving’, etc. These
connotations are not given in the dictionary, but associated with the word in actual context to particular
readers or speakers.

The emotive charge is one of the objective semantic features proper to words as linguistic units and
forms part of the connotational component of meaning.

Words differ not only in their emotive charge but also in their stylistic reference. Stylistically words can
be roughly subdivided into literary, neutral and colloquial layers.

Literary words are not stylistically homogeneous. We may single out various specific subgroups, namely:
1) terms or scientific words 2) poetic words and archaisms 3) barbarisms and foreign words.

The colloquial words may be subdivided into:

1) Common colloquial words.

1) Slang, i.e. words which are often regarded as a violation of the norms of Standard English.
2) Professionalisms, i.e. words used in narrow groups bound by the same occupation;
3) Jargonisms, i.e. words marked by their use within a particular social group and bearing a secret
and cryptic character;

2) Vulgarisms, i.e. coarse words that are not generally used in public;

3) Dialectical words;
4) Colloquial coinages.