Languages & Linguistics
Definition
A definition is a statement that explains the meaning of a word, phrase, or concept. It aims to provide clarity and understanding by outlining the essential characteristics or boundaries of the item being defined. In linguistics, definitions play a crucial role in establishing the precise meanings of words and terms within a language.
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eBook - PDF- Dieter Wunderlich(Author)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
The study of a language’s lexicon is lexicology . A network of semantically related lexical items, such as the words for colour or fruit, is a lexical field (or semantic field ). In generative grammar, the lexicon is the component containing all the information about the structural properties of lexical items. Lexical syntax is an approach which incorpo-rates syntactic rules within the lexicon; lexical phonology is an approach where some of the phonological rules are transferred to the lexicon. In psy-cholinguistics, the stored mental representation of what people know about their language is called the mental lexicon , and the study of the psychology of word meanings is sometimes called psycholexicology . (Crystal 1992: 227–228) ———–———————————————————————————— 3 Most of the German dictionaries we checked restrict their Definitions and expli-cations to the ‘dictionary’-reading. This is e.g. true of Klappenbach & Steinitz (1977: 3.2361) and Pfeifer et al. (1989: 1011). The distinction under discussion is made in Duden (1994: 819f.). Concepts of the lexicon in theoretical linguistics 29 This Definition is basically in agreement with the Definition by Bußmann (1996): Lexicon [Late Grk lexicón (sc. biblión) ‘book of or for words’]. 1 An alpha-betically or semantically ordered list of words for a language, dialect , or sociolect , or a list of terminology for a specific discipline. Such lists are generally compiled as reference works ( also lexicography , vocabulary ). 2 In its most general sense the level of description which codifies the mor-phol. and semant. aspects (i.e. the forms and meanings) of the vocabulary of a lang. which cannot be derived from the regularities of the ling. system. 3 In transformational grammar , one of the basic components of grammar in the form of a subordinated list of all lexical formatives . The lex. entry consists of a phonetic-phonolog. descr.
- Alex Barber, Robert J Stainton(Authors)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- Elsevier Science(Publisher)
Linguistics: Discipline of 383 The situation is akin to that in biology, viewed as the science of living things. Despite their importance to us, biology has nothing to say about the Definition of pets; similarly, despite their relevance to us, linguistics has nothing to say about the Definition of dialects. In everyday usage, ‘language’ is used differently, depending on whether it is construed as a property of the individual, of society, of the species, or as an autonomous entity in the world. Linguists working in the tradition of ‘generative’ grammar, the framework that has dominated linguistics for the last 50 years, argue that an ‘individual’ approach to language is logically prior to any other, but in principle we have the possible domains shown in (1), each suggesting different kinds of questions: (1) Language and the Individual Language and the Brain Language and Society Language and the Species Language and Literature Language and the World Looking at ‘Language and the Individual’, the central question raised is ‘what constitutes our ‘‘knowledge of language’’?’ What properties or attri-butes does one have to have to be correctly described as a speaker of English, or Burmese, or any other ‘natural language’ – the term linguists use to refer to languages naturally acquired and spoken by humans, as opposed to the ‘artificial’ languages of logic or computing? An extension of this question is how and where knowledge of language is represented in the brain, and what mechanisms need to be postu-lated to enable us to account for our use of this knowledge. Neurolinguistics is an area of remark-able growth, supported by technological advances in imaging.
- (Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Cuvillier Verlag(Publisher)
31 2.2.3.2 Meaning in corpus linguistics Concepts of meaning differ from one linguistic theory to another. The question of how to embed semantic aspects into language description has been approached from various angles or even been avoided in some linguistic theories. American Structuralism, for example, associated meaning with characteristics such as instability and uncertainty. That is why Bloomfield ([1933] 1979: 140), for example, excluded meaning from appropriate linguistic description: “The statement of meanings is [ ] the weak point in language study, and will remain so until human knowledge advances very far beyond its present state”. Similarly, meaning was still dispelled within the (early) framework of Generative Grammar. According to Tognini-Bonelli (2001: 174), Chomsky, especially in his earlier work, did not accept “any interference on the part of a theory of meaning”. He claimed that “only imperfect correspondences hold between formal and semantic features in language” and that “[g]rammar is best formulated as a self-contained study independent of semantics” (Chomsky 1957: 106). The reason for excluding semantics from proper (grammatical) description of language was that it was interpreted to inhere extra- or non-linguistic features and a strong dependency on the situational context that could not be accounted for systematically (cf. Tognini-Bonelli 2001: 157). That is also why meaning has often been studied in terms of ‘reference’ and ‘denotation’ only, which are concepts that express relations with the extra-linguistic world and which often put too much emphasis on the meaning of single words in isolation (cf. Robins 1991: 20). Corpus linguistics, and particularly corpus-driven language study can generally be interpreted to employ a theory of meaning, which was proposed within the framework of British Contextualism and mainly by J.R.
eBook - PDFLanguage and Thought
Anthropological Issues
- William C. McCormack, Stephen A. Wurm(Authors)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter(Publisher)
These things may or may not be relevant in defining the meaning of each individual linguistic item. A general Definition of linguistic meaning, however, must be made in broader terms, over and above these con-tingent circumstances. Perhaps we can approach the problem of the Definition of meaning in a profitable way by analyzing what is involved when we say that an ideal speaker knows the meaning of a linguistic item. Take the case of a man who is thrown into a society whose language he does not know. At first, although he may well understand that some sort of linguistic communication is going on around him among the native members of the society, he does not understand what is being meant by the linguistic expressions that he hears. He does not even understand which sequences of sounds are the units that carry meaning in that language. In short, he does NOT KNOW THE MEANINGS of the linguistic items used by the native members. He may, however, get used to their language bit by bit and, after a certain period of time, may reach a stage where he not only can understand it but also use it himself in a way that is understandable to the natives. He now KNOWS THE MEANINGS of the linguistic items in the language. Now when is it that we can say that he KNOWS THE MEANING of a certain linguistic item? Suppose the linguistic item in question is the English word boy (in its most usual sense). He cannot be said to know the meaning of the word if he applies the word to a female child, an old male, or a puppy or kitten. If he does so, he is said to use the word incorrectly. The possibility of judging his linguistic behavior in terms of being correct or incorrect implies that meaning is something that lies behind the whole rule-governed activity called language. Thus meaning, like syntax, which is far better studied as a systematized
- Piotr Stalmaszczyk(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
(understood for the purpose of these remarks as including also theoretical and empirical aspects) as the unifying element of the following general Definitions of the four disciplines and approaches discussed throughout this chapter, and relevant for the whole Handbook: • Linguistics is the systematic study of human natural language. • Philosophy of language is the systematic study of foundational issues con- cerned with the nature and properties of language; an investigation of universal properties of language (natural human language and formal languages). It is the name of a discipline within philosophy. • Philosophy of linguistics is a systematic philosophical reflection on the status of linguistic theories and linguistic investigations. It is a branch of philosophy of science. • Linguistic philosophy is a systematic approach to philosophy. It is the name of a philosophical method. Thus understood, philosophy of language constitutes one of the (sub) disciplines of philosophy, together with metaphysics and epistemology (cf. Strawson, 1992), philosophy of science, philosophy of mind (cf. Burge, 1992; but see Searle, 1979, 1983, 2004 for an attempt at grounding philo- sophy of language within philosophy of mind), and philosophy of logic (on the status of logic, philosophy of logic, and philosophical logic, see Haack, 1978; Burgess, 2009; and Cohnitz and Estrada-Gonza ´lez, 2019). 8 Philosophy of linguistics could be viewed as “the meta-level proper of linguistic theories” (see Chapter 7 by Kasia Jaszczolt, this volume, espe- cially §7.2; see also Ludlow 2011, on philosophy of generative linguistics); linguistic philosophy in this perspective might be considered as the “meta- level” of philosophy of language. For further studies on the linguistics/ philosophy interface, see the contributions in Harre ´ and Harris (1993), Murasugi and Stainton (1999), and Altshuler (in press).
eBook - PDFLanguage
Its Structure and Use
- Edward Finegan, , , (Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Cengage Learning EMEA(Publisher)
Semantics is the branch of linguistics that examines word and sentence meaning while generally ignoring context. By con-trast, pragmatics attends more to the relationship of an utterance to its context. Lexical Semantics The lexicon of a language can be viewed as a compendium of all its words. Words are sometimes called lexical items , or lexemes (the -eme ending parallel to that in phoneme and morpheme ). The branch of semantics that deals with word mean-ing is called lexical semantics . Lexical semantics examines relationships among word meanings. For exam-ple, it asks what the relationship is between the words man and woman on the one hand and human being on the other hand. How are the adjectives large and small in the same relationship to each other as the pair dark and light ? What is the difference between the meaning of words such as always and never and the meaning of words such as often and seldom ? What do speakers actually mean when they say that a dog is “a type of” mammal? Lexical semantics investigates such questions. It is the study of how the lexicon is organized and how the meanings of lexical items are interrelated, and its principal goal is to build a model for the structure of the lexicon by categorizing the types of relationships between words. Lexical semantics focuses on linguistic meaning. Semantic Fields Consider the following sets of words: 1. cup, mug, wineglass, tumbler, chalice, goblet 2. hammer, cloud, tractor, eyeglasses, leaf, justice The words of 1 denote concepts that can be described as ‘vessels from which to drink,’ while the words of 2 denote concepts that have nothing in common. The words of 1 constitute a semantic field —a set of words with an identifiable semantic affinity. The following set is also a semantic field, all of whose words refer to emotional states: angry, sad, happy, exuberant, depressed, afraid Words, then, can be classified into sets according to their meaning.
Index pages curate the most relevant extracts from our library of academic textbooks. They’ve been created using an in-house natural language model (NLM), each adding context and meaning to key research topics.
