The structural Treatment of Lexical Meaning

The structural Treatment of Lexical Meaning

           

            Some Structuralists have tries to study language without meaning. But the study of a language without meaning is quite incomplete. In the ‘Vedas’ its meaning is treated as the essence of language and the speech without meaning has been called as the tree without fruit and flowers. Ancient Indian linguistics such as Patanjali and Vyas remarks that there is an eternal relationship between word and meaning. Patanjali points out those words naturally express meaning. There is a large variety of words in different languages of the world. There will be nothing like semantics if a word means the same thing in all languages. Some western scholars today have started talking about semantic universals and there is a wide agreement that  meaning is the soul of word.

            When we talk about meaning we talk about the ability of human being to understand one another when they speak. This ability to some extent is connected with grammar. There are many sentences which are perfectly grammatical, but meaningless. The most famous example is Chomsky’s sentence,

1. ‘colourless green ideas sleep furiously’ – other similar example are
2. ‘the tree ate the elephant’,
3. ‘the pregnant bachelor gave birth to six girls tomorrow’ and
4. ‘the table sneezed.”

In a sentences such as ‘Did you understand the fundamentals of linguistics? A linguist has to take into account two different types of meaning, lexical meaning and  grammatical meaning. They refer to objects, actions and qualities which can be identified in the external world. Such as, table, banana, sleep, eat, and red. These words have lexical meaning. Empty words have little or meaning. They exist because of their grammatical function in the sentence. For examples, ‘and’ is used to join items or indicate alternatives. These words have grammatical meaning. Grammatical meaning refers to the meaning of grammatical items such as ‘did’, ‘which’, ‘ed’ etc. Grammatical meaning may also cover notion such as ‘subject and ‘object’ sentences type such as interrogative or imperative. But the study or lexical items is more meaningful.

Collocation

            Collocation can be defined as the association of a lexical item with other lexical items. This word comes from the Latin word ‘Colloco’ which means ‘to be in the same place with’. This theory of collocation is very useful in the study of the structure of the vocabulary. For example the word, ‘ink’ collocates with words such as pen, paper, letter, notebook etc. ‘Red’ collocates with roses, blood, apple, tomato etc. ‘sea’ collocates with rough, cruel, blue etc. and ‘climb’ with mountain, hill, tree, peak, stairs etc.

            “The mountaineer climbed to the top of the mountain peak”. But we should be very careful while studying idioms and compound words because ehre we may not fin such collcoative relationship. For example, the word ‘maiden’ in modern English is scarcely used as a synonym for ‘girl’, but it is idiomatically used with ‘voyage’, ‘speech’, ‘over’ (in cricket) etc.