Approaches to word meaning

Approaches to word meaning

1. Word meaning is primary and sentence meaning secondary

2. based on the primacy of word (lexeme) meaning. We've two approaches:

   • referential theory
     • assumes that lexemes mean what they refer to.
       • concentrates on the extensions of lexemes.
     • there are lexemes which perform grammatical functions in sentences
       • function words
       • also that do not refer to anything in the extralinguistic word
     • e.g. if, very, why, and, etc.
   • conceptual theory
     • is based on the concepts with which lexemes are associated
       • a set of semantic features
         • are pieces of information
         • componential analysis
     • (e.g. eat)

3. We cannot propose a definition of word meaning suitable for all words, without taking sentence meaning into consideration