We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
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).
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
