SEVEN TYPES OF MEANING
CONCEPTUAL MEANING Conceptual meaning sometimes called ‘denotative’ or ‘cognitive’ meaning is widely assumed to be the central factor in linguistic communication, and it can be shown to be integral to the essential functioning of language in away that other types of meaning. Conceptual meaning is the most important element of every act of linguistic communication.
The priority of conceptual meaning is that complex and sophisticated organization of a kind which may be compared with, cross-related to, similar organization on the syntactic and phonological level of language.
There are two structural principles in conceptual meaning, that are principle of contrastiveness and the principle of structure.
CONNOTATIVE MEANING Connotative meaning is the communicative value an expression has by virtue of what it refers to, over and above its purely conceptual content. To the large extent, the notion of reference overlaps with conceptual meaning.
There are 3 facts in connotative meaning:
First, about the ‘real world’ experience one associate with an expression when one uses or hears it.
Second, connotative meaning is peripheral compared with conceptual meaning is that connotations are relatively unstable: that is, they vary considerably, as we have seen, according to culture, historical period, and the experience individual.
Third, is indeterminate and open-ended in a sense in which conceptual meaning is not.
SOCIAL MEANING Is that which a piece of language conveys about the social circumstances of it use. The social meaning of a text through our recognize of different dimensions and levels of style within the same language for example dialectal.
AFFECTIVE MEANING Affective meaning is that the steps to consideration of how language reflects the personal feelings of the speaker, including his attitude to the listener, or his attitude to something he is talking about.
e.g in politeness part.
‘I’m terribly sorry to interrupt, but I wonder if you would be so kind as to lower your voices a little.’
REFFLECTED MEANING Is the meaning which arises in case of multiple conceptual meaning, when one sense of a word forms part of our response to another sense. Reflected meaning intrudes through the sheer strength of emotive suggestion is most strikingly illustrated by words which have a taboo meaning.
The process of taboo contamination has accounted in the past for the dying out of the non-taboo sense of a word: bloom field explained the replacement of cock in its farmyard sense by rooster as due to the influence of the taboo use of the former word, and one wonders if intercourse is now following a similar path.
COLLOCATIVE MEANING It is consists of the associations a word acquires on account of the meanings of word which tend to occur in its environment. For example; pretty and handsome share common ground in meaning “good looking”, but may be distinguished by the range of nouns with which they are likely to co- occur or (to use the linguist’s term) collocate:
Pretty = girl, boy, women, flower, garden, color, village, etc.
Handsome = boy, man, car, vessel, overcoat, airliner, typewriter, etc.
THEMATIC MEANING Is that what is communicated by the way in which a speaker or writer organizes the message, in terms of ordering, focus, and emphasis. It is often felt, that an active sentence such as (1) has a different meaning from its passive equivalent, (2) although in conceptual content they seem to be the same.
Thematic meaning is mainly a matter of choice between alternative grammatical constructive, as in:
a man is waiting in the hall
there is a man waiting in the hall.
The kind and contrast by ordering and emphasis also be contrived by lexical means; by substituting. In other case, it is stress and intonation rather than grammatical construction that highlights information in one part of a sentence.
