Words: types of definition

The word

Introduction

The basic units of semantic is the word. However, words do not have the same meaning; some words such as girl, car, cow…etc, seem to have ‘full’ meaning, while others such as ‘it’, ‘the’ ‘and’ do not seems to have any clear meaning. On the basis of that, Henry Sweet (1891: 22) drew a distinction between ‘full’ words and ‘form’ words. The form words have only grammatical meaning; they only belong to the grammar. That is why, their meaning cannot be understood in isolation, but only in relation to the whole sentence they belong to.

How ever, there are some elements within words that grammatical, but they have little or no meaning. Take; for example, a word such as cranberry and you will fine that cran- doesn’t have any independent meaning and it doesn’t occur in any other words. In contrast, words such as black in blackberry or blackboard do have independent meaning, and their meaning affect the meaning of the whole word. Thus, if one says a yellow-board then he is referring to a different entity. Furthermore, there are some words in English which are called Phonaesthetic, in which the first cluster of consonants indicates some special meaning. For instance, words which begin with sl- are in some way ‘slippery’, such as slide, slip, slush, sluice, etc. while words beginning with sk- usually refer to surfaces or superficiality like skate, skin, skimp etc.

Linguists were more interested in the status of words such as ‘killed’, where they identify it as two morphemes which are ‘kill’ and ‘d’. It is clear enough to distinguish between the meanings of the two morphemes( kill + past), but then it would be hard to analyze words such as ‘saw’ or ‘fought’. The word 'fhought' cannot be devided in the same way as ‘killed’. Thus, linguists (such as Bloomfield) propose that ‘kill’ and ‘kill-ed’ should not be considered as two different words, but rather as forms of the same word. To do that linguists use the technical term ‘lexemes’ instead of the words. Using those lexemes is a way talk about the meaning of words without refereeing to the meanings of grammatical elements such as past or plural. And this may help a lot in avoiding the problem of identifying separate elements of the same words.

There is a strong disagreement about the meaning of words because it is not a “clearly defined linguistic unit.”(Palmer, 1981: 33) However, since these explicit accounts of the meaning of a word or phrase can be offered in distinct contexts and employed in the service of different goals, we can distinguish several kinds of definitions.

types of definitions

To start with, a lexical definition simply reports the way in which a term is already used within a language community. The goal here is to inform someone else of the accepted meaning of the term, so the definition is more or less correct depending upon the accuracy with which it captures that usage. The definitions of technical terms of logic are lexical because they are intended to inform you about the way in which these terms are actually employed within the discipline of logic.

At the other extreme, a simulative definition freely assigns meaning to a completely new term, creating a usage that had never previously existed. Since the goal in this case is to propose the adoption of shared use of a novel term, there are no existing standards against which to compare it, and the definition is always correct (though it might fail to win acceptance if it turns out to be inapt or useless).

In relation to meaning and definition of the words, it is useful to refer to the notion of Extension and Intension, since a very large and especially useful portion of our active vocabularies is taken up by general terms, words or phrases that stand for whole groups of individual things sharing a common attribute. Thus, Extension and Intension are two distinct ways of thinking about the meaning of any such term.

The extension of a general term is just the collection of individual things to which it is correctly applied. Thus, the extension of the word "chair" includes every chair that is (or ever has been or ever will be) in the world. The intension of a general term, on the other hand, is the set of features which are shared by everything to which it applies. Thus, the intension of the word "chair" is (something like) "a piece of furniture designed to be sat upon by one person at a time." (Ogden, C. K., & Richards, I. A., 1923)

Obviously, There is a close interrelation between these two kinds of meaning. It usually supposed that the intension of a concept or term determines its extension. To decide whether or not each newly-encountered piece of furniture belongs among the chairs is by seeing whether or not it has the relevant features. Thus, as the intension of a general term increases, by specifying with greater detail those features that a thing must have in order for it to apply, the term's extension tends to decrease, since fewer items now qualify for its application.

Another two important kinds of word definitions are denotative definition and connotative definition. A denotative definition tries to identify the extension of the term in question. Thus, providing a denotative definition of the phrase "this logic class" is simply by listing all names involved . However, a complete enumeration of the things to which a general term applies would be cumbersome or inconvenient in many cases. In fact, some philosophers have held that the most primitive denotative definitions in any language involve no more than pointing at a single example to which the term properly applies.

But there seem to be some important terms for which denotative definition is entirely impossible. The phrase "my grandchildren" makes perfect sense, for example, but since it presently has no extension, there is no way to indicate its membership by enumeration, example, or extension.

A connotative definition tries to identify the intension of a term by providing a synonymous linguistic expression or an operational procedure for determining the applicability of the term. Of course, it isn't always easy to come up with an alternative word or phrase that has exactly the same meaning or to specify a concrete test for applicability. But when it does work, connotative definition provides an adequate means for securing the meaning of a term.

Bibliography

Ogden, C. K., & Richards, I. A. (1923). The meaning of meaning. (Chapter: VII) London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, Trubner.

Palmer, F. R. (1981) Semantics (2nd edition). (Chapter: 2.4 )Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bloomfield, Leonard. (1933) Language. New York: Henry Holt

--Mas.eng (talk) 17:41, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

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