'Levels' of Language
The Meaning Level: Lexis, Semantics and Pragmatics
In our brief look at the phonological and grammatical levels of language
we have already mentioned another linguistic level, the level of meaning.
One aspect of meaning is word-meaning (lexis). Changing the 'c'
or /k/ in 'cats' or /kats/ to 'h' or /h/ changes the word and hence the
meaning, in this case dramatically. The different words refer to completely
different referents:
But note that, in lexical terms, it is also possible to change the word
without changing the referent, in which case other aspects of meaning
get changed (e.g. the connotations and associations we have for the different
words). If, for example, we change 'cats' to 'moggies', the referent stays
the same but the feline connotations are much more offhand and down-market.
Change 'cat' to 'feline quadrupeds' and you get an odd clash between the
scientific connotations of the phrase and the emotional characteristic
of the verb 'like' of which it is the grammatical object.
When we changed the syntax in sentence (1) to produce sentence (3) we
also changed the meaning of the sentence in dramatic fashion. This sort
of sentence meaning is included in the aspect of meaning usually called
semantics.
The linguistic levels we have briefly explored so far explain what is
needed when we consider a single decontextualised sentence. But of course
sentences don't just occur on their own. They turn up next to other sentences
in texts and talk, and, especially in talk, they occur within a situational
context. This fact brings into play some other aspects of linguistic organisation,
a couple of which we need to mention here.
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