Mastering The Basic Concept Of Meaning

Supporting lecturer ;

Rohima Nur Aziza al Hakim S.hum.M.hum

Made by group I

1. Nugroho Tri Laksono (180230147)

2. Siskayana ( 180230167)
3. Rini Pridia Ningsih ( 180230158)

Universitas Sembilan Belas November

Fakultas Keguruan dan ilmu pendidikan

Prodi Bahasa Inggris

2020/2021
 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

Preface

Alhamdulillah for the presence of Allah SWT, because of The Grace and
Guidance so that the author can complete the preparation of this paper, which is
entitled: ‘’Mastering the basic concept of meaning’’, towards a real that is
brightly like this time. Also don’t forget to say shalawat and salam toward our
prophet Muhammad S.A.W.

Even though the author has made every effort possible for the completion of
this paper, the writer still realizes that the writer's abilities are far from perfect,
and there are certainly still many shortcomings. For that the authors would like to
thank all those who have worked together in making this paper. And writers with
open arms are looking forward to constructive suggestions and criticism from
readers.

In conclusion, the authors hope that this paper can provide benefits and
inspiration from readers.

Kolaka, 7th September 2020

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 Table of contents

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

1.1 Preface i
1.2 Table of content ii

CHAPTER II CONTENT OF PAPER

2.1 The meaning of ‘meaning’ 1

2.2 Use and mention 4
2.3 Object language and metalanguage 6
2.4 Type and token 8
2.5 Forms, lexemes and expression 10

CHAPTER III CLOSING

3.1 Critical and suggestions 12

3.2 Conclusion 12
3.3 Reference 13
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CHAPTER II CONTENTS

2.1. The meaning of ‘meaning’

Semantic is generally defined as the study of meaning and this is the

definition that we will provisionally adopt. In general, meaning is the relationship
between the object and the symbol language that represent it. The meaning of a
phrase or sentence is a product of the meaning of thewords of which it is
composed. It is however, the besetting temptation of semanticist to attempt to
force all answer to the questions “ what is the meaning of (something)?” into the
same theoretical mould. This temptation is to be resisted.

According to Kridalaksana (2001:1993), meaning is the intend of the

speaker or what the speaker want to say, influence of unit language and
perception understanding. Hornby ( Pateda, 1989:45), said that meaning is what
we mean to and what do we mean. Based on definition above we can said that
there are 3 main understanding;

 Meaning is the result of the relationships between the language with

eksternal object.
 The decision about the relationships was happened because there is
consensuss together among the speaker.
 The shape of the meaning itself also can be use to deliver information, so
people can respect and understand each other.

So after we read all perspective above, we can conclude that the word
meaning is the meaning from the word or what the speaker want to say that make
the word itself different from another word.certain of the meanings can be
distinguished by the technique of substituting other words in the same context
and enquiring wheter the resulting sentences are equivalent.
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 Types of meaning
a. Lexical meaning
Lexical meaning is the real meaning or the truth that the
result of our sense observation. For example ‘head’ is something
that belongs to human parts of body.

b. Grammatical meaning
Grammatical meaning is meaning that contains after
grammatical proses finished. For example the word ‘horse’, in
lexical meaning it means animal, but in grammatical it could mean
one of traditional transportation.
c. Idiom meaning
Idiom meaning is meaning that cannot interpret from the
elements of the language even in grammatical or lexical
perspective. For example ‘ killing two birds with one stone’ and it
means do something efficiently.
d. Non-referencial meaning
Non-referencial meaning is meaning that doesn’t have
referencial in real life. For example,conjuction doesn’t belongs to
anything in real life, but still have meaning.
e. Denotation meaning
Denotation meaning is the real meaning of the word that
refers to dictionary, or even could be refers to consensuss among
speaker. For example, ‘flower’ it just means beautifull plants that
you can find in the garden,etc.

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f. Connotation meaning
Connotation meaning is not the real meaning of the
language it self, we cannot use the dictionary description into
connotation meaning because the meaning is created by
consensuss among speaker. For example ‘ apple and pie’ in UK it
means stairs.
g. Conceptual meaning
Conceptual meaning is the meaning that lexemes has
despite from any context or association.
h. Word meaning
Word meaning is meaning in general, not specific and
could be interpret as long as the word itself has similarities. For
example, arm and hand, foot and leg, etc.
i. Term meaning
Term meaning is the specific meaning, clear and no doubt
about it based on what we can witness. For example; arm and
hand is different object and we need to separate them based on
what we need them to be.
j. Proverb meaning
In proverb meaning, the meaning couldn’t tracked by dictionary,
but we still have clue to translate because it consist of elements,
vibe that guide you to the real meaning of it. For example, dog &
cat, we interpret it as 2 people that always argue to each other.

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 2.2. Use and mention

Confused by ambiguities in such terms as “word” and “phrase“. Consider for

example the following two sentence;

a. John has four letters

b. I hate John

The majority of philosopers, Linguists and logicans would say that it is

the same word that is being used in both instances and that in each instances it is
being used reflexively ( or that it is being mentioned, rather than used ) it is by
no means clear, however that the same entity is in fact being referred to in (b)
as the entity that is referred to in (a); and by employing italic in the one case and
quotation marks in the other we are in fact presupposing that there is a difference
in the entity that is being referred to. What is being referred to in (a) is
reasonably clear, it is a aequence of four shapes. In (b), it might mean that I hate
the English name referred to, in whatever medium. In the classic discussion,
Quine (1940. 23-6), employs as examples the following sentences;

c. “Boston” has six letters

d. “Boston”is a noun
e. Boston is disyllabic

And he says that, unlike

f. ‘boston’ is populous

They each describe properties to the name ‘Boston’ rather than to the city

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 Boston, that is named by Boston. Quine is here following the standard
hilosphical convention, according to which single quotation marks are
employed to indicate that an expression is being mentioned rather than used.
The name of a name or other expression is commonly formed by putting the
named expression in single quotation marks. Quine say ; to mention Boston we
use ‘Boston’ or a synonym. It follows that ‘Boston’ is an expression which
names Boston.

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 2.3. Object language and Metalanguage

This distinction is similar to, and by some authors identified with the
distinction between use and mention and It is nonetheless worthy of separate
discussion. The terms object language and metalanguage are correlative, in the
sense that the one depends upon the other. As we saw in the preceding section,
we have to use language to talk about or describe language. Instead of using a
given language, reflexively, in order todescribe itself, we can employ one
language to describe another. In this case we may say that the language being
dscribed is the object language which is used to make descriptive statements is
the metalanguage. We might use English to describe Indonesian or the opposite,
and so on.

An object language is a language which is the "object" of study in various

fields including logic, linguistics, mathematics, and theoretical computer science.
The language being used to talk about an object language is called a
metalanguage. An object language may be a formal or natural language.
Metalanguage is the language used to talk about language. Terminology and
forms associated with this field are called metalinguistic. The term metalanguage
was originally used by linguist Roman Jakobson and other Russian Formalists.

Metalanguage is a semantic analysis tools that used to explain concepts

that consists inside the word in any language,and also can neutralized minimize
how far the bias language itself. This idea is found by Wierzbicka and he is
expand it in what he called as universal semantic primitives. a metalanguage
is a language used to make statements regarding statements made in another
language, known as an object language. Metalanguage helps in describing the
concepts, grammar and objects associated with a particular programming
language.

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 The language under study is called the object language and the language
being used to make assertions about it is the metalanguage. In the quote
above, the object language is English.

a. The French word ‘homme’ is a noun

Might be used to make metalinguistic statements in English about a word

in French is the object language. Here we have one natural language serving as
a metalanguage with respect to another. It is perhaps more common, however,
to restrict terms metalanguage to specially constructed and formalized system
and we will use the metalanguage tough not metalinguistic throughout in this
sense. The metalanguage will then normally contain terms for identifying and
referring to the elements of the object language (words, sounds, letters, etc.)
according to the customary conception of the relationships between object
language and metalanguage, expression of the metalanguage which refers to
words or phrase of the object language do so by the naming them and the
metalanguage name of an object language word or phrase is constructed as we
saw in the previous section by enclosing the conventional written citation form
of the letter in one single quotation mark. Look at this point of view, therefore
‘man’ is the name of particular English word and ‘homme’ is the name of a
particular French word.

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 2.4. Type and token

The terms type and token were introduced into semantics as were the number
of other terms by the American philosopher C.S Pierce. The distinction is now
widely employed, although it is frequently confused with other important
distinction. The relationships between token and type will be referred to as one
of instantiation ; tokens we will say instantiate their type. For example;

a. There are nine letters in the word reference

b. There are five different letters in the word reference

Invoking the type-token distinction, we can say that on each and every
occasion on which the word reference occurs, the letter e is instantiated four
times, the letter r twice and the letter f,n,c once. Tokens are unique physical
entities, located at a perticular place in space or time. They are identified as
tokens of the same type by virtue of their similarity with other unique physical
entities and by virtue of their conformity to the type that they instantiate.

Token is an individual occurrence of a linguistic unit in speech or writing.

This is contrasted with type which is an abstract category, class, or category of
linguistic item or unit. Type is different from the number of actual occurrences
which would be known as tokens. The distinction between a type and its tokens
is an ontological one between a general sort of thing and its particular concrete
instances (to put it in an intuitive and preliminary way).

The important point to grasp is when we say that the same letters occurs
twice in a written word or that the same word occurs twicw in the same
sentence (or indeed that the same letter occurs in different words or the same
word in different sentence ) the kind of identity that is involved is what we are
calling type-token identity.

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 The important point is to have grasped the nature of the type-token
relationships to be alive to the possibility of ambiguities which result from it
and to be able to draw upon the terminology when it is helpful to do so.

We also need to mention another kind of identity-relationship similar to

that type-token identity but to be distinguished from it. This is the relationships
which holds between the original and the copy, or reproduction of it the
relationships which holds between an original and what I will call its replicas is
nonetheless clearly distinct from the relationships which holds between a type
and its tokens. The example just given of the relationship of replication is
rather trivial more interesting is the identity relationships which holds between
a speech and a tape recording of that speech played back subsequently and
even more complex and theoretically more interesting as we shall see is the
relationshipps between speech and writing. Within certain limits it would seem
to be appropriate to describe written words as replicas of spoken words, even
though they do not normally replicate particular word-tokens.

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 2.5. Forms, lexemes and expressions

The term ‘form’ has already used in the previous section . so too,
without any explanations has expreessions. But philosophers and logicans rarely,
if ever, draw a consistent distinction between forms and expressions on the one
hand, and and between lexemes and expressions on the other hand.

A lexeme has a morphological form, semantic content (or meaning) and a

syntactic category. Lexeme is basically an abstract notion used in linguistic
morphology, the concrete realisation of which is a word. One lexeme can take
up more than one inflection to form a set of many words known as inflected
variants. A lexeme is usually defined as a set of inflected word-forms that
differ only in their inflectional properties. As it is usually assumed that not all
regularly formed word-forms are listed in the lexicon, a lexeme in this sense is
a lexical item, while a word-form is not (normally) a lexeme is the smallest or
minimal unit of lexicon in a language that bears some “meaning”. A lexeme
has a morphological form, semantic content (or meaning) and a syntactic
category. ... For example, the lexeme PLAY can take up many forms like play,
playing, plays, and played.

Word in this kind of forms more pricesely, they are word-forms. As we

have seen the normal convention in linguistics for the citations of forms ( when
they are represented orthographically rather than phonetically or phonologically)
is to use italics. Let us now consider the following example; “ the words found
and find are different forms of the same word” the term ‘word’ is clearly being
used in two different senses here. In the sense of ‘word’ in which found and find
are said to be forms of, or belong to, the same word it is vocabulary-word that is
being referred to and vocabulary words constitute to one subclass of what we are
calling lexemes.

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 The reader is warned, most linguists use italics for both forms and
lexemes and philosophers tend to use quotation-marks to refer to forms,
expressions and lexemes. The distinction between forms and lexemes is
applicable not only to words but also to phrases. That this is so clear from that
the fact that conventional English dictionary will list, not only words but also
phrases as items of vocabulary.the point here is word-lexemes are but a subclass
of lexemes. Roughly speaking we can say that lexemes are the words and the
phrases that a dictionary would list under separate entry.

Expression is the act of making your thoughts, feelings, etc., known by

speech, writing, or some other method : the act of expressing something.

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 CHAPTER III CLOSING

3.1. Critical and suggestions

In this paper authors want to share about The basic concept of meaning.
The material is very important for students that want to start learning about
semantic because learning in fundamentals level and try to grow up by time is
how learning should be. And this paper was design for that fundamentals level.
But even if the authors working together to make the paper fully worth to read,
author still believe that there are mistakes and weakness in explanation strategy,
the paper design, also how effective the language to help reader to understand
about the paper. For that reason, authors fully welcome for everyone to
participate to give suggestions, share the opinions about the paper in order to help
the author can make better paper in the future.

3.2. Conclusion

The basic concept of meaning is exist to provide reader fundamental or

basic understanding before jump into more specific branch of study inside
semantic. The paper contains 5 major subtopic which are; 1. The meaning of
‘meaning’, 2. Use and mention, 3. Object language and metalanguage, 4. Type
and token, 5. Forms, lexemes and expression.

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3.3. References

1. Cambridge

2. Blog.unnes.ac.id

3. Plato.stanford.edu

4. John Lyons, Semantic Volume 1

5. Lezione Journal

6. Patrick Griffiths, An Introduction to English Semantics and Pragmatics

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