Semantics/Semasiology. Lexical semantics. Word meaning: different approaches. Aspects and types of word meaning. Methods of analysis оГ word meaning

ll. Semantics/Semaaiologv. 1 етлеа! semanticsl

The term 'meaning' is the most difficult term to define. Everybody seems to ип4егя1ап4 it but nobody has defined it satisfactorily. In their famous book "The Meaning of Meaning" (1923) С.К. Ogden and I.А. Richards mentioned about 20 definitions of this term, and they were not quite satisfied with any of them.

Meaning of а linguistic unit, or linguistic meaning is studied by semantics (from Gk. semanttcos 'significant*). The necessity for this particular linguistic study was pointed out in 1897 by М. Breal who also coined the name for it Breal 1964/. Semantics ы егу close to the philosophy of language and semiotics and widely uses their complex notions and terminology.

Semasiology (from Gk. semasia 'meaning' + logos 'learning') is а synonym for 'semantics' coined ноте time earlier in Germany by Ch. К. Reisig (his works were published posthumously in 1839), who added а third component to prevailing then studies of etymology and syntax — the study of word meaning. In воте countries this term is still more preferable than 'semantics'.

There are different theories оП|прцв1|е meaning and difFerent schools of semantics.

Meaning тау be understood as conditions of truth. The proponents of logical semantics work out formulae for conditions in which sentences describing unreal situations like The present king of Ггапсе is bald may be considered true and thus meaningful.

Meaning тау be understood as lnteiition — what the hearer (Н) rationally determines the speaker (S) intends her/hts meaning to convey, or as Leonard Bloomfield suggested in 1933, the situation with the speaker s stimulus and the hearer 's response (bebavioristlc, or S — R theory) /Bloomfield 1933:139/. This theory, however, is пюре relevant to pragmatics and psychology.

The ostensional theory states that meaning is nstension, because people all over the world teach and learn meaning ostensively — by pointing to something and uttering the пате. Though ostension plays an important role in teaching and learning а language, it is not crucial to language acquisition. Ludwig Wittg

аде~ of а language in order to understand ostensive definition" /Wittgenstein 1953:33/. sother difficulty with this theory is that we cannot point to many things that language names for. The ostensive theory works better when the referent is а physical object or physical property, but it is much more problematic for abstract entities, events or ocesses, like idea, war, or rhink. It also fails to answer the question why the same object iy be called totally different names which do not have the same meaning. For example, apple on the table may be referred to as apple, /гид, thing, or ir which is clear proof it words with the same ostension, the same referent, may have totally different ..ад~пу. And then, teaching or learning meaning ostensively is not identical to defining ;адing, Ostension tells us nothing about what meaning is, it explains nothing about the

ture of meaning.

sguistic meaning may be defined differently in various branches of semantics that study 'ferent types of linguistic units: syntactical semantics, semantics of text, and!ехка1 nantics.

~у overview of the rich variety of approaches to defining linguistic meaning will be zplistic, and we shall mention only some of them here that are most relevant to lexical nantics — а branch of lexicology and general semantics that considers the meaning of rds and other lexical units.