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Semantics




How do common people describe "blue"? Many of them will explain it as the color of deep ocean and bright sky that bring the joy and calmness. But do you know that this color can be expressed as sad feelings? Why tho? That's we called semantics. Behind the word "blue" it has another meaning. Geoffrey Leech defined semantics as a study of meaning, one of linguistics branch. Semantics deal with such as word, phrases, and sentence structure and it also refer to how people can understand the meaning.

Geoffrey Leech in his book “Semantic: A study of meaning” (1974) divided meaning into seven types.

1.      Conceptual meaning
Conceptual meaning is also called logical or cognitive meaning. It is basic meaning which linked to the primary dictionary definition. The conceptual meaning is the base for all the other types of meaning.
Ex: woman = human, female, adult.

2.     Connotative meaning
Connotative meaning refers to a meaning that is implied by a word apart from the thing which it describes explicitly.
Ex: “That woman is a dove at heart.” – Here, the dove implies peace or gentility.

3.      Social meaning
The meaning conveyed by the piece of language about the social context of its use is called the social meaning. Social meaning is related to the situation in which an utterance is used.
ex: the word ‘Home’ can have many use also like domicile (official), residence (formal), abode (poetic), home (ordinary use)

4.      Affective or emotive meaning
It refers to emotive association or effects of words evoked the reader and listener. It is what is conveyed about personal feelings or attitude towards the listener. Affective meaning is often conveyed through conceptual, connotative content of the words used.

5.      Reflected meaning
Reflected meaning arises when a word has more than one conceptual meaning. The term reflected meaning refers to certain associations with another sense of the same expression.

6.     Collocative meaning
Collocative meaning is the meaning which a word acquires in the company of certain words. collocative meaning refers to associations of a word because of its usual or habitual co-occurrence with certain types of words.
Ex: ‘pretty’ and ‘handsome’ indicate ‘good looking’

7.     Thematic meaning
Thematic meaning denotes the organization of a message in terms of information structure. It refers to what is communicated by the way in which a speaker or a writer organizes the message in terms of ordering focus.

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