WORD MEANING

   

a. Definition of Word Meaning

According to :

1.      (Saussure 1964:166)  The meaning of a given word consists in being different from other words.

2.      Lawrence define the meaning of words or phrases in terms of the things (or actions, qualities, relations, etc.) that the word or phrase denotes.

3.      Murphy (1991; 2002),who argues that while not every human concept is associated with a word, word meanings show  many of the same phenomena as concepts in general; word meaning is “made up of pieces of conceptual structure”.

So, it can be concluded that word meaning is meaning carried by a word.

The branch of semantics that deals with the meaning of words is called lexical semantics. It is concerned with the relationships among meanings of words.

b. Example of Word Meaning

The examples of word meaning are as follows :

1.Church means building for public Christian worship.

2. Flower means part of a plant that produces seeds, often brightly coloured.

3. God means the creator and ruler of the universe.

4. Human means people or person.

5. Mosque means building in which Muslims worship.

6. Pen means instrument for writing with ink.

7. Picture means painting, drawing, etc, that shows a scene, a person or thing.

8. Pilot means person who operates the controls of an aircraft, especially as a job.

9. Plane means flying vehicle with wings and one or more engines.

10. Television means piece of electrical equipment with a screen on which, you can watch moving pictures and sounds.

c. Additional Information

As stated above lexical semantics is a branch of semantics that deals with word meanings. It is concerning with the relationships among word meanings. It is the study of how lexemes, units or meaning, are organized and how the meanings of those lexical items are interrelated. The focus of this study is discussing how meanings of words are related to each other. The relationships of meanings of words are discussed in a branch of Semantics called Lexical Fields.

Lexical Fields are groups of words having identifiable semantic features. Semantic features refer to the meaning of all nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs or function words related to a word.

For example      : The word “female” is related to the meanings of the words “hen, queen, girl, woman, actress, widow, mare, vixen”, etc.

Therefore, the word “female” is the semantic feature of those words.

There are six categories of relationships of meaning of words :

1. Hyponymy : the idea of how meanings of words are included in the meanings of other words. e.g. : vehicle  has a referent of the term motorcycle, car, bus, etc.

2. Part/whole relationship: a term of word is a part of another term or word. e.g. :

A nose is a part of head; a head is a part of a human body, etc.

3. Synonymy : all referents of the first word are also the referents of the second words and vice versa. e.g. :

The term of movie and film have the same referential meaning, therefore they are synonymous.

4. Antonymy : it denotes opposition in meaning. e.g.: The word tall and short.

5. Polysemy and Homonymy : Polysemy is a word which has more than  one meaning. e.g.: the word “plain” can be mean “easy”, “clear”, “undecorated”, or “not good looking”.

Homonymy is two words or more are pronounced similarly but they have different meanings. e.g. : “for”, “four” sound the same but differ in meanings.

6. Metaphorical extension : an extension of use of a word beyond its primary meaning. e.g.:

The word “eye” normally means “a part of human organ”, but metaphorically it means “a part of needle” or “the center of a storm”