Review and Introduction

We have now looked at four of the six subdivisions of linguistics. Phonetics and phonology both deal with the study of speech sounds but in different ways. Phonetics looks at the speech sounds themselves. Phonology looks at the rules that govern how the sounds combine together. Morphology is the study of how words are formed. Where phonetics and phonology can best be seen as issues of teaching pronunciation in an ESL classroom, morphology is best seen as the issue of teaching vocabulary in an ESL classroom. Syntax looks at how sentences are formed and includes the description of the rules that combine words together into phrases, clauses, and sentences. Syntax is typically what is meant when most people say the word grammar, and it forms the bulk of what is traditionally called grammar study.

This lesson will move on to yet another of the six divisions of linguistics: semantics. Semantics is the study of meaning in language and encompasses the meanings of morphemes, words, and sentences. We will focus primarily on word meaning in this lesson.

The Study of Meaning in Language

Review of Signs

To better understand how we attach meaning to language, it will help to review what we have already learned about signs and how they work in systematic ways:

Language is a symbolic system.

The signs in a language system are arbitrarily connected to their referents. There is no particular reason why one word should have the meaning it does other than that the users of the language agree to give the word that meaning.

Because there is no inherent reason for a word to have a particular meaning, there must be other ways that humans have to connect meaning to a word. After all, we know that words have meaning. We don't give a word a new and different meaning every time we use it, so meaning is connected in ways that make sense and that we can remember. The ways that people connect meanings to words are related to the existing connections between words and the other elements of the language system.

Activity: What Is a Word Connected To?

Click Word Association to open the activity.

Fill in the answers as requested. Your responses will show how your mind stores words.

If you're like most people, you gave another color such as green or blue when you saw the word red, or perhaps you thought color. In any case, you connected one word, red, to other words. This is one way our minds store words and how we remember their arbitrarily assigned meanings--by connecting them to each other. There are other connections that exist, too.

Signs and Meanings

The first thing to look at is all the possible connections that exist between a sign (a word or a morpheme) and other elements of a language system.

• We have the sign itself (a word or a morpheme).
• We have the thing the sign arbitrarily refers to (the referent).
  
• We have the other signs that are in the system (other words).
• We have the users of the sign (speakers of a language).

Meaning can be created by using all of these different connections. We will now look at each of these connections between a sign and the other elements in the language system to see how meaning is created.

We have already looked at the basic relationship a word has to its referent and we have seen that it is an arbitray relationship.

We will next look at the relationships between words in a language. That is, we will study how meaning is created through connecting a word to another word. This will cover some rather familiar ground from earlier lessons, but some new understanding may also arise.

Then we will study how words are related to the users of a word, or to the speakers of a language. This will loop us back to a consideration of the referent, and we will see that a connection between the referent and the user exists, but not in the same ways we typically think.