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1 - Reference is the relationship between language and the world.
2 - Meaning and concept are closely connected but not identical. They are both related directly to referents and are notions of the words but belong to different categories.
Concept, which is beyond language, is the result of human cognition, reflecting the objective world in the human mind. It is universal to all men alike regardless of culture, race, language and so on whereas meaning belongs to language, so is restricted to language use.
Therefore, a concept can have as many referring expressions as there are languages in the world. Even in the same language, the same concept can be expressed in different words.
3 - Generally speaking, the meaning of ‘meaning’ is perhaps what is termed ‘sense’. Unlike reference, ‘sense’ denotes the relationships inside the language. Every word that-has meaning has sense (not every word has reference)
4 - Motivation accounts for the connection between the linguistic symbol and its meaning.
Onomatopoeic Motivation:I n modern English one may find some words whose sounds suggest their meanings, for these words were created by imitating the natural sounds or noises.Knowing the sounds of the words
means understanding the meaning.
Morphological Motivation: Compounds and derived Words are multi-morphemic words and the meanings of many are the sum total of the morphemes combined. Quite often, if one knows the meaning of each morpheme, namely affix or stem, one can figure out the meaning of the word.
Semantic Motivation: Semantic motivation refers to the mental associations suggested by the conceptual meaning of a word. It explains the connection between the literal sense and figurative sense of the word.
Etymological Motivation: The meanings of many words often relate directly to their origins. In other words the history of the word explains the meaning of the word.
5 - Word-meaning is not monogeneous but a composite consisting of different parts. These are known in familiar terms as different types of meaning.
6 - Grammatical meaning refers to that part of the meaning of the word which indicates grammatical concept or relationships such as part of speech of words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs), singular and plural meaning of nouns, tense meaning of verbs and their inflectional forms. On the other hand, the same word may have different grammatical meanings. Lexical meaning itself has two components: conceptual meaning and associative meaning.
7 - Conceptual meaning (also known as denotative meaning) is the meaning given in the dictionary and forms the core of word-meaning.
Associative meaning is the secondary meaning supplemented to the conceptual meaning. It differs from the conceptual meaning in that it is open-ended and indeterminate. It is liable to the influence of such factors as culture, experience, religion, geographical region, class background, education, etc. Associative meaning comprises four types: connotative, stylistic, affective, and collocative.
Connotative meaning. In contrast to denotative meaning, connotative meaning refers to the overtones or associations suggested by the conceptual meaning, traditionally known as connotations. It is not an essential part of the word-meaning, but associations that might occur in the mind of a particular user of the language.
Stylistic meaning. Apart from their conceptual meanings, many words have stylistic features, which make them appropriate for different contexts. ‘ frozen’, ‘formal’, ‘consultative’, ‘casual’ and ‘intimate’. People generally do not go that far. They normally classify styles 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.
