Учебное пособие: Lectures in Contrastive Lexicology of the English and Ukrainian Languages

The functional approach maintains that a linguistic study of meaning is the investigation of the relation of sign to sign only. In other words, they hold the view that the meaning of a linguistic unit may be studied only through its relation to either concept or referent.

e.g.: We know that the meaning of the two words a step and to step is different because they function in speech differently. To step may be followed by an adverb, a step cannot, but it may be proceeded by an adjective.

The same is true of the different meanings of the same word. Analysing the function of a word in linguistic contexts and comparing these contexts, we conclude that meanings are different (or the same): to take a tram, taxi as opposed to to take to somebody. Hence, meaning can be viewed as the function of distribution.

When comparing the two approaches described above we see that the functional approach should not be considered as alternative, but rather a valuable complement to the referential theory. There is absolutely no need to set the two approaches against each other; each handles its own side of the problem and neither is complete without the other.

3. Types Of Meaning

The two main types of meaning are the grammatical and lexical meanings.

Grammatical Meaning

We notice, for example, that word-forms such as tables, chairs, bushes though denoting widely different objects of reality have something in common. This common element is the grammatical meaning of plurality.

Thus, grammatical meaning may be defined as the component of meaning recurrent in identical sets of individual forms of different words. e.g.: the tense meaning in the word-forms of verbs (asked, spoke) or the case meaning in the word-forms of various nouns (the girl’s, the night’s).

In modern linguistic science it is commonly held that some elements of grammatical meaning can be identified by their distribution. The word-forms asks, speaks have the same grammatical meaning as they can all be found in identical distribution (e.g. only after the pronouns he, she but before such adverbs and phrases as yesterday, last month, etc.). It follows that a certain component of the meaning of a word is described when you identify it as a part of speech, since different parts of speech are distributionally different. The part-of-speech meaning of the words that possesses but one form, as prepositions, is observed only in their distribution (cf: to come in (here) and in (on, under) the table.

Lexical Meaning

Unlike the grammatical meaning this component of meaning is identical in all the forms of the word. e.g.: the words write – writes – wrote – written possess different grammatical meanings of tense, person but in each of these forms we find the same semantic component denoting the process of putting words on the paper. This is the lexical meaning of the word which may be described as a linguistic unit recurrent in all the forms of the word and in all possible distributions of these forms.

The difference between the lexical and the grammatical component of meaning is not to be sought in the difference of the concepts underlying the two types of meaning rather in the way they are conveyed. The concept of plurality, for example, may be expressed by the lexical meaning of the word plurality. It may also be expressed in the forms of different words irrespective of their lexical meaning (girls, board