Page 400 - DENG504_LINGUISTICS

Linguistics

Notes meaning as ‘the situations in which the speaker utters it and the response which it calls forth in the
hearer’. According to Harris, “the meaning of an element in each linguistic environment is the
difference between the meaning of its linguistic environment and the meaning of the whole
utterance.” In the opinion of J.R. Firth meaning is a group of ‘situational relations in a context of
situation and in that kind of language which disturbs the air and other people’s ears, modes of
behaviour in relation to other elements in the context of situation.

31.6 Semantic Theories

Traditional Approach

Linguists and earlier scholars of language often had very clear ideas about the importance of
meaning and the need for its study. There were, to begin with, numerous preconceptions and false
ideas about the nature of meaning which hindered clear thinking, but which it was difficult to get
rid of because of their separable ancestry. One was the tendency to identify words and things or
to think that meaning were somehow concrete entities— words would be called ‘dirty’, ‘dangerous’,
‘beautiful’, and so on, instead of the objects or events being referred to. This conception goes back
to Plato. To the old philosophers such as Plato and Socrates, the semantic relationship was that of
naming of ‘significant.’ This traditional view of the relationship between name and things is
customarily represented by the triangle of ‘signification,’ sometimes referred to as ‘the semiotic
triangle’ :

MEANING (THOUGHT/CONCEPT/SENSE/IMAGE/REFERENCE

FORM (NAME/SYMBOL) REFEREND (INFORMATION/THING)

Analytical or ‘Referential’ Approach
The traditional approach gave birth to the analytical approach. An important analytical approach
is the one by Saussure. Saussure’s theory of meaning is based on speech word relationship. Saussure
uses the analogy of a sheet of paper whose one side is sound, the other thought, and therefore
thought cannot be divided from sound nor sound from thought. Linguistics then operates on the
borderland where the elements of sound and thought combined their combination produces a
form, not a substance (Saussure). The sound is the ‘signifier’, the thought is the ‘signified’ and the
thing signified is the ‘significant’. There is no direct relationship between word and the things
they ‘stand for’; the word ‘symbolizes’ a ‘thought or reference’ which in its turn ‘refers’ to the
features of event we are talking about. We know that the sound ‘dog’ we use in speech to refer to
the four legged, domestic animal forms an arbitrary or conventional symbol. The dog, the living
creature that we see with our eyes, we may call the referend, and the picture of it that we have in
our minds as we speak, whether a memory picture or one actually seen at the moment, may be
called the image. We may once again represent it through a simple diagram :

(IMAGE)

SYMBOL REFEREND

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