Reference （领会） – the relationship between language and the world. By means of reference， a speaker indicates which things in the world （including persons） are being talked about.

　　The reference of a word to a thing outside the language is arbitrary and conventional. This connection is the result of generalization and abstraction.

　　Although reference is abstract， yet with the help of context， it can refer to something specific.

　　Concept（领会） – which beyond language is the result of human cognition reflecting the objective world in the human mind. It isn’t affected by language. Meaning and concept are closely connected but not identical. Meaning belongs to language， so is restricted to language use.

　　A concept can have as many referring expressions as there are language in the world.

　　Sense （领会） – denotes the relationship inside the language. Every word that has meaning has sense.

　　The sense of an expression is its place in a system of semantic relationships with other expressions in the language.

　　It is also abstraction.

　　Motivation——accounts for the connection between the linguistic symbol and its meaning.

　　English does have words whose meanings can be explained to a certain extent.

　　Most words are non-motivated. The connection of the sign and meaning dose not have a logical explanation.

　　Onomatopoeic Motivation – the words whose sounds suggest their meaning. （Indicate the relationship between sound and meaning）. Knowing the sounds of the words means understanding the meaning. These words were created by imitating the natural sounds or noises. For example， bang， ping-pang， crow by cocks， etc.

　　Such echoic words are also conventional for the sounds we say in English may not be the same in other language.

　　Morphological Motivation ——Compounds and derived words are multi-morphemic words and the meaning of many words are the sum total of the morphemes combined. （Indicate the relationship between word meaning and each morpheme meaning）. For instance， airmail means to “mail by air”， miniskirt is “a small skirt”。

　　There are a lot of words whose structures are opaque， their meanings are not the combinations of the separate words.

　　Semantic Motivation——refers to the mental associations suggested by the conceptual meaning of a word. It explained the connection between literal sense and figurative sense of a word）. E.g. When we say the mouth of a river， we associate the opening part of the river with the mouth of a human being or an animal.

　　Etymological Motivation——The history of the word explains the meaning of the word. （Indicate the relationship between word meaning and its origin）.

　　E.g. the word ’laconic’ meaning ’brief’ or ’short’ is derived from Laconic， a tribe of people who were known for their ’brevity of speech’ and for their habit of never using more words than necessary. Hence a laconic answer is a ’short answer’。

　　All the words communized from proper nouns can be interpreted in terms of their origins.

　　Types of meaning （领会，运用）

　　Word-formation is not monogamous but a composite consisting of different parts.

　　Grammatical meaning – refer to that part of the meaning of the word which indicates grammatical concept or relationships， such as part of speech of words， singular and plural meanings of nouns， tense meaning of verbs and their inflectional forms.

　　Grammatical meaning becomes important only used in actual context.

　　Different Lexical meaning may have different grammatical meaning.

　　The same word may have different grammatical meaning.

　　Functional words， though having little lexical meaning， posses strong grammatical meaning， content words have both meanings and lexical meaning in particular.

　　Lexical meaning —— is constant in all the words within or without context related to the notion that the word conveys.

　　It has two components conceptual meaning and associative meaning. 转贴于：自考_考试大

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