3 - Semantics and conceptual meaning of grammar

Summary

Geoffrey Leech (1981) categorised meanings in a taxonomy, which, though somewhat dated, is still extremely useful. He distinguished conceptual, connotative, social, affective, reflected, collocative and thematic meanings. This chapter is about the conceptual meaning of grammar, Chapter 4 about the conceptual meaning of lexis, and Chapters 5 and 6 about the other kinds of semantic meaning. Conceptual meaning may be defined as logical meaning, the meaning used to convey ideas in order to describe the world.

In mainstream North American generative linguistics, which has followed Noam Chomsky, syntax was regarded as autonomous, and semantics was modelled as a separate component. Partly as a result, perhaps, semantics, at least in its infancy in modern linguistics, tended to concentrate on lexical meaning. However, in other models of grammar, such as Construction Grammar (Goldberg 1995, Croft 2001), Case Grammar (Fillmore 1968, 1982) and (Systemic) Functional Grammar (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004), insights have been developed about the meaning of grammar. This book is too short to explore all aspects of grammatical meaning, but confines itself to the meanings of noun modifiers (Ferris 1993) and clausal elements (Halliday 1985/1994).