Understanding Linguistic Meaning: Designation, Sense, and Structure
Understanding Linguistic Meaning
Linguistic content types are defined by three key concepts:
- Designation: The relationship between words and things, connecting the signifier and the reality it represents.
- Meaning: The concept of language, encompassing the significant features that identify a sign.
- Sense: Related to meaning but more concrete, influenced by all factors involved in communication. It’s the specific content of messages transmitted through speech or writing.
Types of Linguistic Meaning
There are lexical and grammatical meanings:
- Lexical: Refers to words and their connection to extra-linguistic reality (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs).
- Grammatical: Features corresponding to words or phrases within a language.
Grammatical Meaning Categories
Grammatical meanings can be further categorized:
- Categorical: Bridges grammar and vocabulary, marking different classes or categories of words. Lexical concepts fall into categories like nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs.
- Instrumental: Meaning derived from morphemes rather than lexemes.
- Structural: Meaning derived from the combination of morphemes and lexemes. All text structures carry structural significance.
- Ontic: Expresses doubt, certainty, etc., using intonation or introductory links to convey the perceived reality.
The same words can have different ontic meanings based on intonation.
Substance and Form in Language
Modern linguistics emphasizes that language is a form, not a substance. The crucial aspect is the mutual relationship between the expression level and the content level. This relationship creates a form, regardless of the raw material of the signs. The levels are differentiated as phonemes and significant elements at the expression level, and meaning at the content level.
Organization of the Linguistic System
Languages are organized into three distinct levels or subsystems:
- Phonological Level: Encompasses all sound elements that serve a function in the language. This includes:
- Segmental elements: phonemes
- Suprasegmental elements: accent and intonation
- Morphology: Studies word variations through fixed forms for specific functions.
- Syntax: Includes combinatorics, integrating simple structures into complex structures with a unified function.
Number of Phonemes in a Language
The number of phonemes in any language is limited, typically not exceeding fifty. Spanish, for example, has 24. This number is sufficient to create all necessary combinations of signs.