Grammatical meaning

Types of word-meaning

Functional approach to meaning

The functional approach maintains that the meaning of a linguistic unit may be studied through the relation of this unit to other linguistic units within a context. For example, the meanings of the words move, movable and movement are different because their functions and distribution in the sentence are different.

The same is true of the different meanings of one and the same word in different contexts. For example, we can observe the difference of the meanings of the word move as it fulfills different functions in different linguistic contexts: move a chair, move quickly, move into town, move smb to tears.

It follows that in the functional approach meaning is understood as the function of the use of a linguistic unit in a linguistic context.

The referential and functional approaches to the study of meaning supplement each other; each handles its own side of the problem and neither is complete without the other.

Meaning, in general, may be defined as a certain reflection in our mind of objects, phenomena or relations, that make part of a linguistic sign. It is a component of the word through which a concept is communicated, in this way endowing the word with the ability of denoting real objects, qualities, actions and abstract notions.

Within the word we distinguish grammatical, lexical, part-of-speech, significative, denotative, connotative, pragmatic and word-formation meanings.

Let us compare, for example, a set of the following word-forms: boy’s, girl’s, day’s, night’s. All these words, though denoting different objects, have a common feature. This common semantic element is their grammatical meaning of the possessive case, which is regularly represented by the formal element ‘the apostrophe & s’.

In the same way we can distinguish the grammatical meaning of plurality if we compare the following set of word-forms: boys, girls, days, nights. The grammatical meaning of plurality is regularly represented by the formal element – ‘the ending –s’.

The grammatical meaning of the Past Indefinite Tense is evident in the set of word-forms asked, wanted, thought, taught, though here it is expressed by different morphological means.

So grammatical meaning may be defined as the component of word-meaning recurrent in identical sets of individual forms of different words. By grammatical meaningwe designate the meaning proper to sets of word-forms common to all words of a certain class.

In modern linguistics it is commonly held that some elements of grammatical meaning can be identified by the position of the linguistic unit in relation to other linguistic units in speech, that is by its distribution.

For example, the word-forms reads, speaks, writes have one and the same grammatical meaning of the Present Indefinite Tense, third person, singular not only because they possess the common inflexion ‘ –s ’ but also because they can be found in identical distribution – only after the pronouns he, she, it.

It follows that a certain component of the meaning of a word is distinguished when this word is identified as a part of speech, since different parts of speech have different distribution.

So grammatical meaning can also be defined as an expression in speech of relationship between words based on contrastive features of arrangements in which they occur.

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