2024年6月6日发(作者：)

Chapter 6 Semantics

Semantics: it is generally defined as the study of inherence or intrinsic

meaning, the meaning in isolation from the context.

The naming theory:命名论 it is one of the oldest notions concerning meaning

proposed by Plato, which holds the view that the relationship between linguistic

forms and what they stand for is one of naming. Its defaults: firstly, the theory

seems applicable to nouns only. Secondly, even within the category of nouns,

there are nouns which denote things that do not exist in the real world at all or

things that do not refer to physical objects, but abstract notions. Finally, some

words may have different meanings in different contexts while the same reference

may have different names such as “the morning star” and “the evening star”

The conceptualist theory : 意念论C. K .Ogden Richard created the semantic

triangle to show the indirect relationship between symbols and their supposed

referents.

Symbol: it refers to the linguistic elements such as word or sentence.

Referent: it refers to the object in the world of experience.

Context: it refers to what comes before and after a word, phrase, statement,

etc. helping to fix the meaning; or refers to circumstances in which an event

occurs.

Contextualism : 情境论、语境论 John Firth

Situational context: it refers to the particular spatiotemporal situation in

which an utterance occurs, the main components of which include, apart from the

place and time of the utterance, the speaker and the hearer, the actions they are

performing at the time, the various objects and events exists in the situation.

The linguistic context: sometimes known as context, it includes a word’s

co-occurrence or collocation with another word, which forms part of the

“meaning” of a word, and, also the part of text that precedes and follows a

particular utterance. For example, the meaning of the word “paper” differs in the

two collocations of “a piece of paper” and “a white paper”。Linguistic context

also includes the part of text that precedes and follows a particular utterance.

Bloomfiled defined the meaning of a language form as the “situation in

which the speaker utters it and the response it calls forth in the hearer”

Behaviorism :行为主义 it is a theory of animal and human learning that only

focuses on objectively observable behavior and discount mental activities.

Sense :意义it is the inherent meaning of the linguistic form.

Reference : 所指it is what a linguistic form refers to in the real physical world.

Dialectal synonyms:方言同义词 they are the synonyms used in different