2010522 Meaning and Translation Study Note

Seven Types of Meaning

Leech, G. 1981. Semantics: The study of meaning (2nd ed.). Penguin Books.

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2010522 Meaning and Translation Study Note

1. Conceptual Meaning

• ʻconceptualʼ = ʻdenotativeʼ = ʻcognitiveʼ meaning

• an agreed-upon sense; a core meaning which all members of a speech community share; the
central aspect of meaning, which everyone generally agrees with
• e.g. ʻwomanʼ can be conceptually defined by three features (+ HUMAN, - MALE, + ADULT)
• Three structural principles
o The principle of contrastiveness
§ The conceptual meanings of a language can be studied in terms of contrastive
features
o The principle of structure
§ Larger linguistic units are built up out of smaller units.
§ It is now widely accepted that the semantics of natural language has its own
counterpart of syntactic structure or of symbolic logic.
o The principle of linguistic organization
§ Any given piece of language is structured simultaneously on more than one level.

§ The aim of conceptual semantics is to provide a configuration of abstract symbols

which is its ʻsemantic representationʼ, and which shows exactly what we need to
know if we are to distinguish that meaning from all other possible sentence
meanings in the language.

2. Connotative Meaning

• Connotative meaning is the communicative value an expression has by virtue of what it refers to,
over and above its purely conceptual content.
• It includes non-criterion properties such as physical, psychological, and social characteristics.
o e.g. woman ‒ biped, having a womb, gregarious, subject to maternal instinct, capable of
speech, experienced in crookery
• Connotations are apt to vary from age to age and from society to society. They also vary, to some
extent, from individual to individual within the same speech community.
• Connotative vs. conceptual meaning:
o Connotation is incidental to language rather than an essential part of it. Connotative
meaning is not specific to language but is shared by other communicative systems.
o Connotations are relatively unstable: they vary considerable according to culture,
historical period, and the experience of the individual
o Connotative meaning is indeterminate and open-ended.

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2010522 Meaning and Translation Study Note

3. Social Meaning

• Social meaning is what a piece of language conveys about the social circumstances of its use.
• Variation according to:

• Examples:

• In the more local sense, social meaning can include what has been called the illocutionary force of
an utterance̶whether it is to be interpreted as a request, an assertion, an apology, a threat, etc.

4. Affective Meaning

• Affective meaning conveys the personal feelings of the speaker, including his attitude to the
listener, or his attitude to something he is talking about. (e.g. politeness)
• It is often explicitly conveyed through the conceptual or connotative content of the words used.
o Emotional expression through style comes about when we adopt an impolite tone to
express displeasure, or when we adopt a casual tone to express friendliness.
• There are elements of language (chiefly interjections, like Aha! and Yippee!) whose chief function
is to expression emotion.

5. Reflected Meaning

• Reflected meaning is the meaning which arises in cases of multiple conceptual meaning, when one
sense of a word forms part of our response to another sense.
• One sense of a word seems to ʻrub offʼ on another sense in this way only when it has a dominant
suggestive power either through relative frequency and familiarity or through the strength of its
association.
• e.g. the process of taboo contamination, as seen from intercourse, ejaculation, and erection

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2010522 Meaning and Translation Study Note

6. Collocative Meaning

• Collocative meaning consists of the associations a word acquires on account of the meanings of
words which tend to occur in its environment.
• Examples:

7. Thematic Meaning

• Thematic meaning is what is communicated by the way in which a speaker or writer organizes the
message, in terms of ordering, focus, and emphasis.
• It is mainly a matter of choice between alternative grammatical construction.
• Examples
o Mrs Bessie Smith donated the first prize.
The first prize was donated by Mrs Bessie Smith.
o A man is waiting in the hall.
Thereʼs a man waiting in the hall.
o They are stopped at the end of the corridor.
At the end of the corridor, they stopped.
o I like Danish cheese best.
Danish cheese I like best.
Itʼs Danish cheese that I like best.

Associative Meaning: A Summary Term

• Connotative meaning, social meaning, affective meaning, reflected meaning, and collocative
meaning all have the same open-ended, variable character, and lend themselves to analysis in
terms of scales of ranges, rather then in discrete either-this-or-that terms.
• Associative meaning is contrasted with conceptual meaning because the latter seems to require the
postulation of intricate mental structures which are specific to language and to the human species.
• Associative meaning contains so many imponderable factors that it can be studied systematically
only by approximative statistical techniques such as the Semantic Differential.