semantics

1.             Full Word and Empty Word

John Lyons state on his book (1995) The word form of English, like the word form of many languages, can be put into two classes:

A.            Full word-form

A word that has lexical meaning rather than grammatical meaning; a word or morpheme that functions grammatically as a contentive.  Full words is  also mentioned they are lexical items that can stand alone and seem to have a certain meaning that we would expect to find in a dictionary. such as nouns, verbs and adjectives examples of full word- forms are: “sing”, “blue”, “gently”, “man”, “came”, “green”, “badly”.These examples of full words are represented by: nouns, verbs, adjectives and even adverbs, which can be put in isolation and give a meaning. Full word-form in English are form of the major part of speech such as nouns, verbs, and adjective. Full words are divided into three subclasses:

1.    Nominals

2.    Verbals

3.    Auxiliaries

1.    Nominals: are full words that occupy as  Subjects (S), Complements (C), or Adjectives (A)

Nominals can be divided into 4 subclasses:

a.     The diterminatives:

b.    The nouns:

c.     The adjuncts:

d.    The Interrogative nominal:

2.    The Verbal Presented into two classes:

a. Non-derived forms: these consist of one free morpheme

b. Derived forms: these forms are composite of full words (transitive and intransitives)

B.            Empty word-form

a word or morpheme that has no lexical meaning and that functions as a grammatical link or marker, rather than as a contentive. Empty word is meaningless, nonsense (a massage that seems to convey no meaning), loud and confused and empty talk and rethoric.

Empty words are also called “form words”, “grammatical words” “function words”, “structural words”. All these terms stand for what is called “empty word- forms” which differ grammatically and semantically from full word forms. Empty word forms belong to the grammar and have only grammatical meaning .Such a meaning can be stated only in relation to other words and even sometimes to the whole sentence. Empty word forms (in languages that have them) belong to a wide variety of classes such as prepositions, definite and indefinite articles, conjunctions, and certain pronouns and adverbs, which combine with the major parts of speech in well-formed phrases and sentences, and which are defined in terms of their syntactic function rather than semantic function. These are instances of empty word- forms: “it”,“the”,“of”,“and”,“to”,“it”,“is”. This is a set of grammatical words that cannot stand alone to give a particular meaning in the sense that they should be combined with other elements or items to express a certain meaning.

They are to be considered as dependent words relying on other words to express an idea, a thought or stand for something. Let’s take this example to make clear distinction between full word- forms and empty word- forms:“Boys like to play”
In this example, the full word forms are “boys”, “like”, and “play” and they have a particular meaning that enables them to be put in isolation. But, it is not the case for “to” which is a meaningless item that has no sense as a single unit.Empty word-form may not be entirely devoid of meaning (though some of them are in certain contexts). But, in an intuitively clear seen of ‘meaningful’, they are generally less meaningful than full-word are: they are more easily predictable in the context in which they occur. Hence, their omission in headlines, telegram, etc. and perhaps also in the utterances of very young children as they pass through early stages of language acquisition.

Empty word-form (in language) that have them belongs to wide variety of classes –such as preposition, definite and indefinite articles, conjunction and certain pronoun and adverb-which combine with the major part of speech in grammatically well –formed phrase and sentence and which (unlike the major part of speech) tend to be defined mainly in term of their syntactic function, rather than semantically.

The distinction between two classes is not always clear- cut. But it is intuitively recognizable in the example that I have just given. And it has been drawn on non-intuitive grounds by grammarians, by a playing a variety of criteria. Essentially the same distinction was drawn, centuries ago, in the Chinese grammatical tradition at the end of the nine-tenth century, by the English grammarian Henry sweet; and at the height of post-Bloomfieldian structuralism. In the 1950s, by the American English C.C. Fries (1952) it subsequently found it way in to many of the text book of a play linguistics and practical teaching-grammars of English and other language.

2.             Descriptive Meaning

The descriptive meaning of an expression is that aspect of meaning which only concerns the relationship between a given sign and its denotation. It contrasts with non-descriptive meaning, which concerns attitudes held by speakers towards a given denotation (e.g. emotive meaning, social meaning).

Quality is the most important dimension of variation within descriptive meaning and it is this  which constitutes the difference between black and white, pear and banana, here and there, walk and run, and eat and drink.

Cruse based on Langaker, sticks to lyon terminology and maintain the term descriptive meaning for what other have labeled ideational, referential, logical, and propositional meaning. Cruse also list a number of prototypical that descriptive meaning displays. Among them we can mention the following: this aspect of meaning determines whether the proposition is true or false, it constrains what the expression can be used to refer to, it is objective in the sense that it establishes between the speaker and what he says and finally this aspect of meaning is fully conceptualized.  The first is that we shall not require descriptive meaning to be categorically determinant for truth values/conditions, but merely that it should directly relevant to truth in the sense of rendering the truth of a proposition more or less likely. Differences of quality can be observed at all levels of specificity. We may think of hierarchies of semantic domains of various scope, or, alternatively of different ontological types. A typical set of ontological types at the highest level of generality is the following:

THING QUALITY QUANTITY PLACE TIME STATE PROCESS EVENT ACTION RELATION MANNER

These represent fundamental modes of conception that the human mind is presumably innately predisposed to adopt. At lower levels of generality, we find (among other types) hierarchically arranged sets of conceptual categories: Living things: animals, fish, insects, reptiles. . .

Animals: dogs, cats, lions, elephants. . .

Dogs: collies, alsatians, pekinese, spaniels. . .

We shall adopt the above criteria for our conception of descriptive meaning, with two modifications, or provisos. The first is that we shall not require descriptive meaning to be categorically determinant for truth values/ conditions, but merely that it should be directly relevant to truth in the sense of rendering the truth of a proposition more or less likely. For instance, the truth of "Fido is an animal" may be said to be crucial to the truth of "Fido is a  dog", in that if Fido is not an animal, then he/it can in no wise be a dog. However, "Fido can bark" is not crucial in this way: it is quite conceivable that a particular dog may not be able to bark. But if "Fido can bark" is false, that makes it less likely that Fido is a dog. Of course, "Fido can bark" is part of a normal description of a normal dog, so the inclusion of such  tters under the heading of descriptive meaning is not so perverse.

The second hedge is that we hall not require of descriptive meaning that it be within the normal scope of negation, questioning, etc., provided that it is of the type that can normally be negated, or whatever. In other words, we shall distinguish between descriptive meaning which is, as it were 'ring-fenced' against contradiction, and meaning which cannot be contradicted because it is the wrong type (usually because it does not present a proposition). For instance, It's a dog will normally be taken to indicate that (the referent of) it is an animal, that is, its being an animal is part (in some sense) of the meaning of It's a dog. But if someone points to a creature and says Is that a dog?, they are unlikely to be asking whether or not the referent of that is an animal. With these provisos, let us proceed to an examination of a number of dimensions along which descriptive meaning may vary.

Descriptive meaning may vary in intensity, without change of quality. For instance, one would not wish to say that large and huge differ in quality: they designate the same area of semantic quality space, but differ in intensity. It is characteristic of intensity differences that they yield normal results in the following test frame(s):

(13) It wasn't just X, it was Y.

I wouldn't go so far as to say it was Y, but it was X.

If these are normal, then Y is more intense than X:

(14) It wasn't just large, it was huge.

(cf. ?It wasn't just huge, it was large.)

I wouldn't go so far as to say it was huge, but it was large.

(15) I wasn't just scared of her, I was terrified of her.

I wouldn't go so far as to say I was terrified of her, but I was scared of her. From (14) and (15) we can conclude that huge is more intense than large,and terrified than scared. (Note that virtually any pair of items can be made toseem normal in this frame, given a suitably elaborated context: the test isintended to work in a zero context.)Variation in intensity is of course possible only in certain areas of qualityspace. But it is not confined to those areas designated by gradable adjectives(i.e., is not confined to the domain of QUALITIES). Examples from other areas are:

(16) It wasn't just a mist, it was a fog.

I wouldn't go so far as to say it was a fog, but it was a mist.

(17) He didn't just beat her, he thrashed her.

I wouldn't go so far as to say he thrashed her, but he did beat her.

Differences of descriptive specificity show up in various logical properties.These differ according to the exact type of specificity involved (see below). Forone major type of specificity, these properties include, for instance, unilateral entailment (in appropriate contexts):

(18) It's a dog unilaterally entails It's an animal.

It's not an animal unilaterally entails It's not a dog.

Note also that dogs and other animals is normal, but not ?animals and other dogs. From all this, we can conclude that dog is more specific than animal (alternatively,animal is more general than dog). Similarly, slap is more specific than hit, scarlet is more specific than red, woman is more specific than person. In all these cases one can say that one term (the more general one) designates a more extensive area of quality space than the other. Langacker (1993) likens difference of linguistic specificity to viewing something from different distances, the less specific the greater the distance. For instance, from a great distance, a dog may just look like an object; from closer in, one can see it is an animal, but not what kind of animal; closer still, and the fact that it is a dog becomes clear, but perhaps not what variety of dog, and so on. It is possible to distinguish several types of specificity. All the cases illustrated above involve type-specificity, that is to say, the more specific term Types and dimensions of meaning 51 denotes a subtype included within the more general type. But there is also part-specificity, illustrated by, for instance, hand-finger (where finger is the more specific), bicycle:wheel, university:faculty. John injured his finger is more specific than John injured his hand. The logical consequences of this type of specificity are different to those for type-specificity. Unilateral entailment appears (in general) only with locative expressions:

(19) The boil is on John's elbow unilaterally entails The boil is on John's arm. John lectures in the Arts Faculty unilaterally entails John lectures in the university.

A third type of specificity is intensity-specificity, where one range of degrees of some property is included in another range. For instance, one reading of large includes all ranges of intensity of "greater than average size". Hence It's huge entails It's large, but It's large does not entail It's huge. The logical properties here are the same as for type-specificity.