THE THEORIES OF MEANING
According to:
1. Oxford Dictionary. "Meaning' is thing or idea that a word sentence that, represents’
2. Stevenson (Shipley. 1962:261) meaning is a symbol. Meaning things how the symbol, should be, that is wants to product a certain answer under certain condition.
3. Lyons 0968,400) Semantics may be defined, initially and provisionally, as the study of meaning
Based on the definition above we can conclude that meaning is the purpose that said by some speaker to the listener to tell about information and something by our language and used by our context
Kinds of Meaning
There are 7 kinds of meaning:
- Conceptual Meaning
Conceptual meaning is sometimes called denotative meaning or cognitive meaning, it is widely assumed to be the central factor in linguistic communication. Larson noted that denotative meaning is also called as primary meaning that is the meaning suggested by the word will suggest to most people when the word is said in isolation. It is the meaning learned early in life and likely to have reference to a physical situation (Larson.1984:100)
The denotation of word is its agreed-upon sense-what it refers to, stands for, or designates, a part from the feeling it may call up, and this again is able for a good deal on the context the words that appears in. It is said that the aim of denotative meaning is la provide, for any given interpretation of sentence, a configuration of abstract symbols, in which shows exactly what we need to know if we are to distinguish that meaning from all other possible sentence meaning in the language.
- Connotative meaning
As we experience, words are human situations, they not only take on certain denotation, but also often acquire individual flavors. They have come to have emotive tone, the associations, and suggestiveness of the situation in which they have been a part. For example let us examine the word “brink”. This denotes on “edge”. However in the phrase “the brink of the cliff” or “they brink of disaster”, this word suggests danger and its emotive tone is that of fear.
According to Leech (1974: 40-41) connotative meaning is the communicative value an expression has by virtue of what it refers to, over and above its purely conceptual content. It will be clear if we are talking about connotation, wea rea in fact talking about the “real world experience”. Someone assosiates with an expression when someone uses and hears it. The fact if we compared connotative meaning with denotative meaning is that connotations are relatively unstable; that is they vary considerably we have seen, according to culture, historical period, and the experience of the individual. Although all the speaker of particular language speaks the language exactly the same conceptual framework, actually each of them has individual perception of words. Connotative meaning is indeterminate and open in the same way as our knowledge and belief about the universe are opened-ended. Connotations play a major role in the language of literature, of politics, of advertising, and a greeting card.
3. Stylistic meaning
Stylistic meaning is that which a piece of language conveys about the circunstances of its use. A recent account of English has recognized some main dimentions of stylistic variation. For instance:
a. They chucked a stone at the cops, and then did a bunk with the loot.
b. After casting a stone at the police, they absconded with the money.
Sentence (a) could said by the two criminals, talking casually about the crime afterwardds; sentence (b) might be said by the chief of the police in making the official report; both could describe the same happening (Leech, 1974: 15).
4. Affective meaning
Affective meaning is a sort meaning which an effect the personal feeling of speakers, including his/her attitude to the listener, or his/her attitude to something he/she talking about. In order to get people attention to be quite, we might say either (1) “I’m twrribly sorry to interrupt, but I wonder if you would be so kind as to lower your voice as a little” or (2) “will you belt up”. Factors such as intonation and voice timbre are also important here. The impression of politeness inthe sentence (1) can be reserved by tone of biting sarcasm; sentence (2) can be rurn into playful remark between intimates if delivered with the intonation of a mild request.
5. Reflected meaning
Reflected meaning involves an interconnection on the lexical level of language, it is the meaning, which arises in case of multiple conceptual meaning, when one senses of word forms part of our response to another sense. For instance, on hearing the church service, the synonymous expressions the comforter and the holy ghost both refer to the third trinity, but the comforter sounds warm and comforting, while the holy ghost sounds awesome.
6. Collocative meaning
Collocative meaning consist of asssosiation of a word aquires on account of the meanings of the words, which tends to occur in its environment. For instance the word preety and hansome share common ground in the meaning of good looking. Buy may be distinguished by the range of noun in which tey are like to occur or collocate; pretty woman and handsome man. The range may well match although they suggest a different kind of sttrsctiveness of the adjectives.
7. Thematic meaning
This is the final category of meaning, thematic meaning is the meaning that is communicated by the way in which the writer or speaker organizes the message, in terms of ordering, focus, and emphasis. It is often felt an active sentence such as (a) below has a different meaning from its passive equivalent (b) although in conceptual content hey seem to be the same (Leech, 1974: 19).
a. Mrs. Bessie Smith donated the first prize.
b. The first prize was donated by Mrs. Bessie Smith
We can assume that the active sentence answer an implicit question “what did Mrs. Bessie Smith donate? ”, while the passive sentence answer the implicit question “who donates the first prize? ”, that the other words (a) contrast to see (b) suggest that we know who Mrs. Bessie Smith.
