TYPES OF MEANINGS

Lectures by Alfred Chuma Mhango

GENERAL DEFINITIONS

 The symbolic value of something.

 The significance of a thing.
 (semantics) the objects or concept that a word or phrase denotes, or
what which a sentence says. (ENGLISH DICTIONARY)
 (absolute) intention.
 The thing that one intends to convey especially by language.
 In semantics and pragmatics, meaning is the message conveyed by
words, sentences and symbols in a context. ( also called lexical meaning
or semantic meaning because the study of meaning raises a host of deep
problems that are the traditional stomping grounds for philosophers. )
TYPES OF MEANING

 In language, there are seven types of meaning in semantics;

- conceptual
- connotative
- stylistic
- affective
- reflected
- collocative and
- thematic meaning
CONCEPTUAL OR DENOTATIVE
MEANING

 Also called logical or cognitive meaning.

 It’s the basic proposition meaning which corresponds to the primary
dictionary definition.
 Such a meaning is stylistically neutral and objective as opposed to
other kinds of associative meanings.
 Conceptual meanings are the essential or core meaning while other six
types are the peripheral. (it is peripheral in a sense that it is non-
essential. They are stylistically marked and subjective kind of
meanings.)
 It deals with the core meaning of expression. It is the denotative or
literal meaning.
Cont.…

 Its aim is to provide an appropriate semantic representation to a

sentence or statement.
 The conceptual meaning is the base of all as language depends on it for
communication.
 For example (according to leech):
/p/ can be described as –voiceless +bilabial +plosive
similarly,
boy = +human +male –adult
woman = +human –male +adult
CONNOTATIVE MEANING

 Is the communicative value of an expression over and above its purely conceptual
content.
 Something connotative is something that implies or suggests something else.
 It is something that goes beyond mere referent of a word and hints at its attributes in
the real world. It is more than the dictionary meaning.
 Thus purely conceptual content of a woman is +human +female +adult but the
psychosocial connotations could be ‘gregarious’, ‘having maternal instincts’ or typical
(rather than invariable) attributes of womanhood such as ‘babbling’, experienced in
cookery’, ‘skirt or dress wearing etc.’
 Still further, connotative meaning can embrace putative properties of a referent due to
view point adopted by individual, group, and society as a whole. So in the past, woman
was supposed to have attributes like frail, prone to tears, emotional, irrigational,
inconstant, coward and some positive qualities.
CONT…

 Sometimes the connotations vary from person to person also E.g

connotations of the word woman for misogynist and a person of
feminist vary.
 The boundary between conceptual and connotative seems to be
analogous. Connotative meaning is regarded as incidental,
comparatively unstable, in determinant, open ended, variable
according to age, culture and individual, whereas conceptual meaning
is not like that. it can be codified in terms of limited symbols.
SOCIAL MEANING

 The meaning conveyed by the piece of language about the social

context of its use is called the social meaning.
 The decoding of a text is dependent on our knowledge of stylistics and
other variations of language.
 The way someone pronounces his or her words or his slang can tell us
the social background of that speaker. It can also tell us where at to
whom the message was being delivered to. E.g “I ain’t done nothing”
the line tells us that the speaker is probably a black American,
underprivileged and uneducated. Another example can be “come on
yaar, be a sport. Don’t be a lallu” the social meaning can be that of
Indian young close friends.
CONT…

 Style helps us to know about the period, field and status of the
discourse. Some words are similar to others as far as their conceptual
meaning is concerned but they have different stylistic meaning e.g.
‘steed, horse and nag’ are synonymous meaning horse but steed is
used in poetry, horse is used in general while nag is a slang.
 the illocutionary force of an utterance also have social meaning.
According to a social situation, a sentence can be uttered as a request,
an apology, a warning or a threat for example the sentence “I haven’t
got a knife”. This sentence if uttered to waiter it may be a request for a
knife. And thus we cam understand that the connotative meaning plays
a vital role in the field of semantics and in understanding the
utterances and sentences in different context.
AFFECTIVE OR EMOTIVE MEANING

 For some linguists, it refers to emotive association or effects of words

evoked in the leader, listener.
 It is what is conveyed about the personal feelings or attitude towards
the listener.
 Affective meaning can help us to know how the speaker is feeling or
what the speaker is towards the addressee.
 For example; ”you are a vicious tyrant and a villainous reprobation and
I hate you” or “I hate you, you idiot”. We left with little doubt about the
speaker’s feelings towards the listener. Here the speaker seems to have
a negative attitude towards his listener ad this is called affective
meaning.
CONT…

 But very often we are more discreet (cautious) and convey our attitude
indirectly e.g. “I am terribly sorry but if you would be so kind as to lower
your voice a little”. This conveys our irritation in a scaled down manner for
the sake of politeness.
 Intonation and voice quality are also important here. Thus the sentence
above can be uttered in biting sarcasm and the impression of politeness
maybe reversed.
 Words like darling, sweetheart, or hooligan, vandal have inherent emotive
quality and they can be used neutrally. I,A Richards argued that that
emotive meaning distinguishes literature or poetic language from factual
meaning of science.(affective meaning overlaps heavily with style,
connotation and conceptual content.)
REFLECTED MEANING

 Reflected meaning arises when a word has more than one conceptual
meaning or multiple conceptual meaning.
 A reflected meaning is a word which generally means something but
mostly is used to mean another thing which is like reflecting it.
 For example; “the comforter and the holy ghost” refer to the third in
trinity. They are religious words but the ghost can be used non religious
where it means the spirit of a dead person, mostly.
 Some of the words which their meaning are reflected tends to lose their
real meaning in semantics.
 For example: words like gay, erection, intercourse and ejaculation.
CONT…

 The word ‘intercourse’ immediately reminds us of its association with sex

(sexual intercourse). This sexual association of the word drives away its
innocent sense In the communication.
 The taboo sense of the word is so dominant that its non-taboo sense almost
dies. In some cases, the speaker avoids the taboo words and uses their
alternative word in order to avoid the unwanted reflected meaning.
 For example, as Bloomfield has pointed out, the word ‘cock’ is replaced by
speakers, they use the word rooster to indicate the general meaning of the
word and avoid its taboo sense. These words have non-sexual meanings too.
(eg erection of a building, ejaculate – throw out somebody) but because of
their frequency in the philosophy of sex is becoming difficult to use them in
their innocent sense.
COLLOCATIVE MEANING

 Collocative meaning is the meaning which a word acquires in the

company of certain words.
 Collocative meaning refers to associations of a word because of its
usual or habitual co-occurrence with certain types of words. ‘pretty’ and
‘handsome’ indicate ‘good looking 'however they slightly differ from
each other because of collocation or co-occurrence. The word pretty
collocates with girls, woman, village, garden, flowers. On the other
hand, the word ‘handsome’ collocates with boys, men etc.
 So pretty woman and handsome man. While different kinds of
attractiveness, hence ‘handsome woman’ may mean attractive but in a
mannish way.
CONT…

 The verbs ‘wander’ and ‘stroll’ are quasi-synonymous, they may have
almost the same meaning but while ‘cows may wonder into another
farm’, they don’t stroll into that farm because stroll collocates with
human subject only.
 Similarly, one trembles with fear but quivers with excitement and
shivers with coldness.
 Collocative meanings need to be invoked only when others categories
of meaning don’t apply.
 Generalizations can be made in case of other meanings while
collocative meaning is simply idiosyncratic property of individual words.
THEMATIC MEANING

 It refers to what is communicated by the way in which a speaker or a writer

organizes the message in terms of ordering focus and emphasis.
 Thus. Active voice is different from passing but they bear the same
conceptual meaning.
For example, the following statements in active and passive voice have same
conceptual meaning but different communicative values.
1) Mrs. smith donated the first prize
2) the first prize was donated by Mrs. Smith
In the first sentence, who gave the prize is more important, but in the second
sentence what Mrs. smith gave is more important. Thus the change of focus
also changes the meaning.
CONT…

 Alternative grammatical construction also gives thematic meaning. For

example:
 1) he likes Indian goods most.
 2) Indian goods he likes most.
 3) it is the Indian goods he likes most.
 Like the grammatical structures, stress and intonation also make the
message prominent.
 Sometimes thematic contrast i.e. contrasts bwtween given and new
information can be conveyed by lexical means.
…CONT

 E.g. Asante owns the biggest shop in London.

 the biggest shop in London belongs to Asante.

 The ways we order our message also convey what is important and
what is not. This is basically thematic meaning.
SUMMARY OF THE SEVEN TYPES OF
MEANING

 1) CONCEPTUAL MEANING = logical, cognitive or connotative content.

 2) CONNOTATIVE MEANING = what is communicated by virtue of what
language refers.
 3) SOCIAL MEANING = what is communicated of the social circumstances
of language.
 4) AFFECTIVE MEANING = what is communicated of the feelings and
attitudes of the speaker through language.
 5) REFLECTED MEANING = what is communicated through associations
with another sense of the same world.
 6) COLLOCATIVE MEANING = what is communicated through associations
with words which co-occur with another word.
CONT…

 7) THEMATIC MEANING = what is communicated by the way in which

the message is organized in terms of order and emphasis.