Kamil Wiśniewski - linguist, translator, and philosopher :)

What is meant by ‘meaning’

The question of what is ‘meaning’ is very complex, thus the answer is far from straightforward. Although certain aspects of meaning are seemingly easy to explain, such as, for example, the denotation of concrete nouns, in many instances the issue is not quite clear-cut. The meaning of words has traditionally been studied by semantics, a branch of linguistics dealing with the meaning of words and phrases as such, frequently omitting their use in sentences. The meaning of words and their use, as well as the differences between the ‘dictionary’ meaning of words and speaker intended meaning is studied by pragmatics in general, or by semantics in cognitive linguistics. Going even further, the meaning of larger extracts of both spoken and written texts is analyzed by discourse analysis.

According to Finch (1998:136) discourse analysts suggest that what one utterance means can in some cases have up to five possible interpretations. The first is a surface meaning which is described as the meaning, or sense of which all parties are aware. The second constitutes of the speaker’s meaning, i.e. what the speaker really intended to convey. This is not consciously known by the listener. Next comes the hearer’s meaning, which is what the hearer perceives, but may not be consciously intended by the speaker. Finally there is the listener’s meaning, i.e., what is understood by a person who overhears the conversation, but does not participate in it.

However, even in the case of the most easily explainable words, i.e., nouns, there are many intricacies which make it difficult to state appropriately what a given word indeed means. Dictionary entries usually give the most basic explanations based on various relations between words, or in the case of concrete nouns pictures are sometimes shown to illustrate what the word denotes. Yet, it is not so easy with abstract nouns such as love, truth, or strength. Also, many words seem to mean something more than what the dictionary shows at the first glance. For instance ‘Friday the thirteenth’ could be defined in a dictionary as a day between Thursday the twelfth and Saturday the fourteenth, and that would reflect the location of the day in concrete terms of the phrase. Yet, for many speakers from western countries this day is associated with misfortune, but probably even the most advanced and thorough dictionaries will not mention it.

Being aware of the difficulties mentioned above while trying to account for all the words and all their possible senses, various scholars have undertaken the study of this complex matter. Philosophy, as a queen of all sciences, demanded a language that would both enable the unambiguous formulating of thoughts and at the same time provide the flexibility which would allow it. That is probably why philosophers were among the first scholars to analyze languages thoroughly. At the end of the XIXth century, quite some time before the birth of modern linguistics tradition, Gottlob Frege, a German philosopher and mathematician, distinguished between the meaning of a word as a sense, and as a reference. According to Frege, the word’s meaning as a reference is to tell that a thing is, while the meaning as sense tells the language users what a thing is. In other words, “meaning as reference proposes an identity, while meaning as sense proposes interpretation” (Cunningham, 2005:566).

Such views made some advances in the study of words and their meanings. Needles to say, this got incorporated into semantics as the difference between denotation and connotation. However, in the western linguistic tradition it was the very famous scholar Ferdinand de Saussure who started systematically describing the meanings of words and his pioneering works paved the way for further analysis and the emergence of modern linguistics.

The nature of signs according to Saussure.

Saussure claimed that a word is made up of two elements, namely the physical form (string of letters in writing, and phonemes in speech) and the sense, also known as the meaning. However, in Saussurean terminology a sound image is called the signifier, whereas what the word refers to is described as the signified. This is so, since, for Saussure, words are signs and the signifier acts as a label not for any object, but for the mental concept. Only the combination of signifier and signified can denote an object which Saussure calls the referent. Finch (1998:139) summarizes it in the form of a graph on the example of the sign tree: