Seven types of Meaning

Generally meaning means the communication through language. Words,

phrases, clauses and sentences have meanings, which are studied in semantics. A
piece of language conveys its dictionary meaning, connotation beyond the
dictionary meaning, and information about the social context of language use.
Speaker's feelings and attitudes are rubbing off one meaning on another
meaning of the same word when it has two meanings and meaning because of
habitual co-occurrence. Geoffrey Leech has given seven types of meanings:-

1) Conceptual/Denotative meaning: It is variously called denotative, referential, cognitive, logical meaning. It is an

important factor in linguistic communication; it deals with the core meaning of
expression. It is the basic prepositional meaning, which corresponds to the
primary dictionary definition; such a meaning is stylistically neutral and
objective as opposed to the other kinds of associative meanings. It is the
essential core meaning while the others are peripheral in a sense non-essential
meaning. They are stylistically marked and subjective kinds of meaning.

e.g./p/ can be described as -vd+ bilabial+ plosive similarly 'boy' can be

described as human+ male+ adult. The hierarchical structure of s-s-p-s-det-n-pc-o-det-n. Similarly boy = +human +male- adult and hierarchy will be: human male/female.
Conceptual meaning is literal meaning of the word indicating the ideal/concept
to which it refers. The concept is a minimal unit of meaning, which could be
called 'sememe'. As we define sememe 'woman' as +woman +female+ adult. If
any of these attribute change the concept ceases to be the same.

Associative Meaning: Leech uses this as 'an umbrella' term for the remaining six types of meanings.
All these have more in common with connotative than conceptual meaning.
They all have the same open-ended variable character and can be analyzed in
terms of scales or ranges (more/less) than in either/or contrastive terms. These
meanings contain many imponderable factors.

2) Connotative Meaning: It is the communication value of an expression. It refers to over and above the
purely conceptual 'meaning of an expression. It is something that goes beyond
mere referent of a word and hints at its attributes in the real world. Thus purely
conceptual meaning of 'woman' is +human +female +adult, but psychosocial

connotations could be gregarious having maternal instinct or typical attributes

of womanhood such as babbling, experienced in cooking, skirt/sari wearing etc.
Still further connotative meaning can embrace the portative properties of a
referent due to viewpoint adopted by an individual/group/society as a whole. So
in the past woman was supposed to have attributes like frail, prone to tears,
emotional, irrational, inconstant, cowardly etc. as well as positive qualities such
as gentle, sensitive, loving, compassionate, hardworking etc. sometimes
connotations vary from person to person also e.g. A cynic person's connotations
with word 'woman' and feminist persons connotations will be definitely
different. Connotative meaning is regarded as incidental, comparatively
unstable, and indeterminate.

3) Social Meaning: It is related to situation in which an utterance is used. It is that which is a piece
of language conveys about the social context of its use. The decoding of the
social meaning of a text is dependent on our knowledge of stylistic and other
variations of language. It is concerned with the social circumstances of the use
of linguistic expression. We recognize some words or pronunciations as being
dialectical or social origin of the speaker.

e.g. 1) I ain't done nothing = black 'Am' uneducated speaker.

2) Come on yaar be a sport. Don't be lallu. Social meaning- Indian young
close friends.
Similarly styles convey about relationship between the speaker and hearer
situation etc.
Stylistic variation represents the social variations. This
is because styles show the geographical region and social class of the
speaker. Style helps us to know about the period field and the status of the
discourse. Some words are similar to others as far as their conceptual
meaning is concerned but they have different stylistic meanings,
e.g. 'steed, horse and nag' are synonyms. They all are meant a kind of
animal i.e. horse. But they different in style and so have various social
meanings. Steed is used in poetry; horse is used in general while nag is
slang,
e.g. father

formal context

daddy

home conversation

dad

colloquial

Stylistic variations are also found in sentences, e.g. Two criminals will
express the example the following sentence:-"They chucked a stone at the
cop and then did a bunk with the loot".

But the same idea will be revealed by the chief inspector to his officers by
the following sentence:'After casting a stone at the police they absconded the money'.
The illocutionary force of an utterance also can have social meaning. According
to the social situation a sentence may be uttered as a request, an apology, a
warning or threat.
e.g. "I haven't got a knife". Has the common meaning in isolation. But the
sentence uttered to a writer will mean a request for a knife. 4) Affective

Meaning:For some linguistics it refers to emotive associations or effects of words evoked

in the reader/listener, e.g. 'home' for a sailor/soldier expatriate and mother for
motherless child. A married woman especially in Indian context will have
special effective/emotive quality. Affective meaning is often conveyed through
conceptual/connotative/context of the word used. e.g. "You are vicious tyrant
and a villainous reprobate and I hate you or I hate you, you idiot". Here we are
left with little doubt about the speaker's feelings towards the listener. But very
often we are more discreet and convey our attitude directly. Thus "I am terribly
sorry but I wonder if you would be so kind as to lower your voice a little". For
the sake of politeness intonation and voice quality is also important here. Thus,
the above sentence can be uttered in tone of biting sarcasm and the impression

of politeness may be reversed while "Will you belt up?" Can be turned into a
playful remark.
Finally associative meaning is largely a parasite category overlaps heavily with
style connotations and conceptual content.

5) Reflective Meaning:Reflective and collocative meanings are involving interaction at the lexical level
of language. Reflective meaning arises when a word has more than one
conceptual meaning. In such cases, while responding to one sense of the word
too. Leech says that in church service 'The comforter and the Holy ghost' refer
to the third in the Trinity but unconsciously there is response to their nonreligious meaning too. One sense of the words seems to rub off on another
especially through relative frequency and familiarity, e.g. a ghost is more
frequent and familiar in non religious sense.

Reflected meaning is also found in taboo words, e.g. the word s intercourse,
ejaculation, erection etc. The sexual association with sex its innocent sense. The
taboo sense of word is so dominant that its non-taboo sense almost dies out. In
cases the speaker are avoids the taboo words and use their alternative words in
order to avoid the unwanted reflective meaning.

e.g. As Bloomfield has pointed out, the word 'cock' is replaced by speakers
by the word 'roaster' to indicate general meaning of the word and avoid its
taboo sense.

6) Collocative Meaning:Collocative meaning is the meaning, which a word acquires in the company of
certain words. The words collocate or co-occur with certain words only.
Collocative refers to associations of a word because of its usual or habitual cooccurrence with certain types of the words. Thus 'pretty and handsome' both
mean the same but 'handsome' collocates with man/boy/salary/typewriter etc.
while pretty collocates with woman, girl, car or flower etc. So pretty woman and
handsome man are indicate good or woman because of their habitual cooccurrence.

7) Thematic Meaning:It refers to what is communicated by the way in which a speaker or writer
organize the messages. In terms of ordering focus, emphasis various parts of the
sentence such as subject, object, complement can be used for prominence.

e.g. Mrs. Smith donated the prize. Seems to answer the question- What did Mrs.
Smith donate? While the first prize donated by Mrs. Smith seems to answer the
question Who donate the first prize? The first suggest that we already know Mrs.

Smith. Thematic meaning is largely a matter of choice between alternative

grammatical constructions as in:
i) A man is walking in the hall- There is a man walking in the hall,
ii) They stopped at the end of the corner - At the end of the corner they stopped.
Sometimes the thematic contrasts i.e. contrast between given and new
information can be conveyed by lexical means.
e.g. John owns the biggest shop in London, or The biggest shop in London
belongs to John.
Sometimes stress and intonation conveys this kind of contrast.
e.g. Bill uses an electric razor. (It is an electric razor that Bill uses.)
Finally it is not always easy to demarcate one meaning from the other type.

Bibliography
1) Modern Applied Linguistics - N. Krishnswamy, S.K. Verma (2006)
Macmillan Publication, India
2) Socio linguistics - Hudson, (1980) Cambridge Press.
3) Principles of Pragmatics - Geoffrey Leech (1986), Longman.

Conclusion:
Study of meaning, on of the major areas in linguistic study. Linguistic have
approached it in a verity of ways .Members of the school of interpretive semantics
study the structure of language independent of their conditions of use. In a
contrastive way, the advocates of generative semantics insist that the meaning of
sentences is functional in their use. Still another group maintains the semantics
will not advance until theorists take in account the psychological question of how
people from concepts and how these relate to words' meanings.