yles into ‘formal’, ‘neutral’ and ‘informal’.
Affective meaning indicates the speaker’s attitude towards the person or thing in question. Words that have emotive values may fall into two categories: appreciative or pejorative.
Collocative meaning. This meaning consists of the associations a word acquires in its collocation. In other words, it is that part of the word-meaning suggested by the words before or after the word in discussion.
Chapter 6
1 - A word which is related to other words is related to them in sense, hence sense relations.
2 - When a word is first coined, it is always monosemic.
3 - The problem of interrelation of the various meanings of the same word can be dealt with from two different angles: diachronic approach and synchronic approach.
Diachronic approach. From the diachronic point of view, polysemy is assumed to be the result of growth and development of the semantic structure of one and same word. At the time when the word was created, it was endowed with only one meaning. This first meaning is the primary meaning. With the advance of time and the development of language, it took on more and more meanings. These later meanings are called derived meanings as they are all derived from the primary meaning.
Synchronic approach. Synchronically, polysemy is viewed as the coexistence of various meanings of the same word in a certain historical period of time, say. Modern English. In this way, the basic meaning of a word is the core of word-meaning called the central meaning.
4 - The development of word-meaning from monosemy to polysemy follows two courses, traditionally known as radiation and concatenation.
Radiation is a semantic process in which the primary meaning stands at the centre and the secondary meanings proceed out of it in every direction like rayes. Concatenation, meaning ‘linking together’, is the semantic process in which the meaning of a word moves gradually away from its first sense by successive shifts until.
Unlike radiation where each of the derived meanings is directly connected to the primary meaning, concatenation describes a process where each of the later meaning is related only to the preceding one like chains. Generally, radiation precedes concatenation. In many cases, the two processes work together, complementing each other.
5 - Homonyms are generally defined as words different in meaning but either identical both in sound and spelling or identical only in sound or spelling.
6 - Based on the degree of similarity, homonyms fall into three classes: perfect homonyms, homographs and homophones.
Perfect homonyms are words identical both in sound and spelling, but different in meaning. Homographs are words identical only in spelling but different in sound and meaning. Homophones are words identical only in sound but different in spelling and meaning. Of the three types, homophones constitute the largest number and are most common.
7 - There are various |
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