5 - Personal, social and affective meanings

Summary

Chapters 3 and 4 discussed ideational or conceptual meanings of grammar and lexis, respectively. The other categories of meaning in Leech's taxonomy are collocative and thematic, which are textual and discussed in Chapter 6, and reflected, connotative, affective and social which are (inter-)personal and the topic of this chapter. The latter, social meaning, will be elaborated by reference to Crystal and Davy (1969), who point out that utterances might tell you who the speaker writer is (idiosyncrasy), their age or when they were speaking (age), where they come from (dialect ) and their relationship with the hearer/reader (status /intimacy).

In the lowest row of Figure 4.1 (p. 78) I suggested the existence of synonyms: lexical items with identical meanings represented by two different forms. It is probably the case that synonyms only exist if one confines oneself to conceptual meaning. Lexical items are seldom synonymous on all dimensions of meaning. For instance, ‘grandfather’ and ‘grandad’ obviously differ on the interpersonal dimension of formality.

REFLECTED MEANING

Reflected meaning can be detected when a word’s meaning is affected by lexical items with the same form but different meaning, e.g. intercourse meaning ‘two-way communication’ disappeared from English to be replaced by discourse, because of the unwanted meaning ‘sexual intercourse’. Or titbit changes its form to tidbit in US English to avoid the reflection from tit, slang for ‘nipple’. Historically in the US, a sextet has been misleadingly called a quintet (Blake 2007: 43). And Chinese often avoid the word-form /seɪ/, meaning ‘four’, since it is a homophone for ‘death’. So, if you live on the “fiftieth” floor of a condominium in Hong Kong you may well actually live on the thirty-sixth floor. Reflected meaning, as in these examples, drives the use of euphemism, which can even work cross-linguistically with less than competent translations. Chiaro (1992: 23) gives this example from a butcher’s shop window, probably owned by an Italian: “Sausages made without conservatives”. The correct word would be preservatives, but the equivalent Italian word-form preservative means ‘contraceptive’. (Any avoidance of the similarity between a condom and sausage skin may be accidental.) The converse tendency is comedians’ stock recourse to puns involving sexual innuendo.