18 Semasiological and onomasiological perspectives of the English lexicon

These are two points of view from which to observe and analyze a given discourse or text (linguistic or other).  The semasiological point of view corresponds to an "ascending path" that links the signified (or content) to the signifier (or expression). This is the generative point of view (a discursive point of view). It provides a representation of semiotic production.  The onomasiological point of view is a "descending path", that links the signifier (expression) to the signified (or content). This is the hermeneutic point of view (a textual point of view). It provides a representation of semiotic interpretation.

Onomasiology (Gr. ònomasía ‘name, designation’, logos ‘study’) is a subdiscipline of lexical semantics that studies the word meaning in the direction ‘from the concept – to a sound form (or forms)’. Thesauruses are compiled according to onomasiological principles.

Semasiology (Gr. sēmasia ‘signification, meaning’ and lógos ‘study’) is a sundiscipline of lexical semantics concerned with the studies of the word meaning in the opposite direction: ‘from the sound form – to its meaning (or meanings)’.

The distinction was introduced by the Austrian linguist Adolf Zauner in 1903 his study on the body-part terminology in Romance languages. Both disciplines can be treated diachronically and synchronically.

19 Approaches to the definition of word meaning: functional, referential and others

There are three classical theories of meaning:

analytical or referential (F.de Saussure’s disciples)

Meaning is the relation between the object or phenomenon named and the name itself;

notional or conceptual (Aristotle, John Locke, A.I. Smirnitskiy, etc.)

Meaning is a certain representation of an object / phenomenon / idea / relation in the mind;

functional or contextual (L. Bloomfield)

Meaning is the situation in which a word is uttered, i.e. its context.

Semiotic Triangle

Geometric schema developed by C. K. Odgen and I. A. Richards in The Meaning of Meaning (1923) to illustrate the dependent relationship between symbol, thought, and referent; or, in more common terms, sign, meaning, and object (of reference).

Germane to this approach, whose basic ideas are to be found as early as in the works of Parmenides (c. 540–470 BC), is the hypothesis that there is no direct relation between the symbol and referent, between the linguistic expression and the state of affairs in the real world; that is, linguistic expressions relate to the real world only through their meaning.

20.. Types of word meaning.

Objective aspect (denotation): word ↔ referent;

Notional aspect, i.e. significant features common for classes of objects (signification): word ↔ sense;

Pragmatic aspect, i.e. the speaker’s attitude to the referent (connotation);

Systemic or differential aspect, i.e. the relations of the signified word with other words within a word-group or in speech.

Word-meaning is not homogeneous but is made up of various components the combination and the interrelation of which determine to a great extent the inner facet of the word.

Grammatical meaning is the meaning which unites words into big groups such as parts of speech or lexico-grammatical classes. It is recurrent in identical sets of individual forms of different words, e.g. stones, apples, kids, thoughts have the grammatical meaning of plurality.

Lexical meaning is the meaning proper to the word as a linguistic unit; it is recurrent in all the forms of this word and in all the possible distributions of these forms, e.g. the word-forms write, writes, wrote, writing, written have different grammatical meanings of tense, person, aspect, but the same lexical meaning ‘to make letters or other symbols on a surface, especially with a pen or pencil’.