Semantics I acknowledgements
Lexical and Grammatical Meaning
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| 2.3 Lexical and Grammatical Meaning We have mention that the sentence is understood in terms of lexical items and the grammatical relations among the lexical items. The former in concerned with lexical meaning, the latter with the grammatical meaning. Lexical meaning is the sense of a speaker attaches to linguistic elements as symbol of actual objects and events. Thus words such us boy, book, pen, have lexical meaning, which maybe found in dictionary. Grammatical meaning is the relationship that maybe said to exist between linguistic elements such as the words within the sentence. Those two definitions which are taken from dictionary of language and linguistics SEMANTICS Page 21 (Hartmann, 1973 : 138), of which the former contains the word sense. It may confuse us with the term refer (reference) that has been mentioned in the previous part of this analysis. So what is the notion of sense and reference (is there a distinction between the sense and the reference of a word?). Gottlob Frege the German philosopher and mathematician made a distinction between sense and reference. He noted that the reference of evening star and morning star are identical, equal to that or venus. But Frege expressed that the sentence ; Venus is Venus does not have the same meaning as ; The evening star is the morning star. He concluded that the meaning of words involves more than just reference. It is something extra sense. What Frege called sense is what we have been calling meaning (see Fromkin, 1973 : There is no direct relation between the word or symbol with the objector referent (to which it refers. The relation exists via our thought, as illustrated by CK. Ogden and IA. Richard in their Semantic Triangle below : (3) idea ; sense) symbol) thing The broken lines between the symbol and object show their indirect relation, instead we use our thought (idea or sense) to relate id. The word bird, for example \, it is possible to think not only the real object but also specify its feature as having two wings, animate, etc. |