Word Meaning and Sentence Meaning

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Word Meaning and Sentence Meaning

CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION

A.  Background Issues

Semantics  is a branch of linguistics  that deals with meaning. According to Griffiths (2006: 15), “Semantics, the study of word meaning and sentence meaning, abstracted away   from   contexts   of  use,   is   a   descriptive   subject.   It   is   an   attempt   to describe and understand the nature of the knowledge about meaning in their   language   that   people   have   from   knowing   the   language.” So that is way,  it is very important to understand what is exactly word meaning and sentence meaning. So in  this paper, the writers will discuss about the definition of word meaning and sentence meaning and the examples.

B.  Problem Formulation

      To explain the syllabus, there are some problem formulations are to be explored, they are:

1.      What is the definition of word  and word meaning?

2.      What are the examples of word meaning?

3.      What is the definition of sentence and sentence meaning?

4.      What are the examples of sentence meaning?

C.  Purpose

Based on the formulation of the problem above, the purposes of writing this paper are:

1.      To explain the definition of word  and word meaning

2.      To explain the examples of word meaning

3.      To explain the definition of sentence and sentence  meaning

4.      To explain the examples of sentence meaning

CHAPTER II

DISCUSSION

A.    Word Meaning

1.    Word

Words or a single word are lexical items. Lyons (1977) distinguish the distinction between two types of words; full words and form  words. The word forms of English, like the word forms of many languages, can be put or categorized into two classes, one class consists of full forms (full words), the other of empty forms (empty words).

·         Full words:

They are lexical items that can stand alone and seem to have a certain meaning that we would expect to find in a dictionary. Full word- forms in English are forms of the major parts of speech, such as nouns, verbs and adjectives examples of full word- forms are: “sing”, “blue”, “gently”, “man”, “came”, “green”, “badly”.  These examples of full words are represented by: nouns, verbs, adjectives and even adverbs

·         Empty words:

                 Empty words are also called “form words”, “grammatical words” “function words”, “structural words”. All these terms stand for what is called “empty word- forms” which differ grammatically and semantically from full word forms.

                 Empty word forms belong to the grammar and have only grammatical meaning .Such a meaning can be stated only in relation to other words and even sometimes to the whole sentence. Empty word forms (in languages that have them) belong to a wide variety of classes such as prepositions, definite and indefinite articles, conjunctions, and certain pronouns and adverbs, which combine with the major parts of speech in well-formed phrases and sentences, and which are defined in terms of their syntactic function rather than semantic function. These are instances of empty word- forms: “it”, “the”, “of”, “and”, “to”, “it”, “is”. This is a set of grammatical words that can not stand alone to give a particular meaning in the sense that they should be combined with other elements or items to express a certain meaning. They are to be considered as dependent words relying on other words to express an idea, a thought or stand for something. Let’s take this example to make clear distinction between full word- forms and empty word- forms.

E.g: Boys like to play

In this example, the full word forms are “boys”, “like”, and “play” and they have a particular meaning that enables them to be put in isolation. But, it is not the case for “to” which is a meaningless item that has no sense as a single unit.

2.      Explanation of Word Meaning

            According to Sugianto, Word meaning is meaning that carrierd by  word. The branch of semantics that deals with the meaning of word  is called lexical semantics (words are also called as lexicon or lexical items). Lexical semantic is concenred with the relationship among meaning of words.

E.g.      Human" means peaople or person according to dictionary

            God "means the ceature and rule of the universe (inreligion such as islam and christianity)

B.     Sentence Meaning

1.      Definition of Sentence

            In the field of linguistics, a sentence is an expression in natural language often defined to indicate a grammatical and lexical unit consisting of one or more words that represent distinct concepts. A sentence can include words grouped meaningfully to express a statement, question, exclamation, request, or command.A sentence can be said also as: a statement that express a complete thought, which contains a subject and a verb. This is an example of a sentence:

“The boy is happy”.

In this sentence “the boy” is the subject and “is” is the main verb and the whole sentence expresses a complete thought that of the feeling of happiness of the boy.

2.      Explanation of Sentence Meaning

            It is referred to as the meaning that can be predicted from the semantic relationship between the words that the sentence contains. In other words, the meaning of the sentence is bound up with the meaning of each lexical item it comprises. This means that the sentence meaning is mainly related to words, and the grammatical features with which they are associated (but there has been some debate whether the meaning is to be related to the actual surface structure or some more abstract deep structure).

So, each sentence will have a meaning, or two meanings in the case of ambiguous sentences like:

I went to the bank (the financial institution)

Or:

I went to the bank (the edge of the river)

An example to clarify a sentence meaning, which is identified by means or from its lexical and grammatical features, is the following:

·         “It is very hot today”.

Words of this sentence that have a certain grammatical function, including a pronoun, a verb, an adverb, and an adjective, denote a certain meaning that of “the heat of the weather” .So, “It”, “is”, “very”, “hot” and “today” are words grouped to signal what is the weather like in the present day.

·         the man opened the door (the noun phrase “the man “ serves as an agent of the verb “opened” )

CHAPTER III

CLOSING

Conclusion

           

            As we know that word meaning is meaning that carrierd by  word and sentence meaning is referred to as the meaning that can be predicted from the semantic relationship between the words that the sentence contains. After knowing that explanation, we should be able to distinguish word meaning and sentence meaning.

Bibliography

Griffiths, Patrick.  2006. An Introduction to  English Semantics and Pragmatics.Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press

J. Lyons, (1995). Linguistic Semantics An introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sugianto.2014.  Semantics (Material Book) . Kediri (Unpublished Book)