6 - Textual meaning and genre

Summary

Chapters 3 and 4 examined conceptual or ideational meanings, and Chapter 5 interpersonal, social and affective meanings. This chapter considers the meanings words and larger stretches of language acquire through their positioning and occurrence in texts. And it uses this as a springboard to discuss larger textual structures above the level of the sentence in various genres. By ending our survey of semantic meaning with genre we can appreciate how all these different kinds of meanings might coalesce under the umbrella of register, which spells out the relationship between social context and ideational (Chapters 3 and 4), interpersonal (Chapter 5) and textual (Chapter 6) meanings.

The chapter ends with a critique of the traditional approaches to semantics illustrated so far in this book, summarising some of the problems and objections that have already emerged. The elusiveness and instability of meanings is illustrated through a brief discussion of meaning change.

COLLOCATIVE MEANING

Part of the meaning of a word is the words and meanings which frequently occur in its textual environment, its normal collocations. “You may know a word by the company it keeps.” Since collocations can now be computed by concordancing programs, this kind of meaning has received a great deal of attention recently, and Hoey’s theory of lexical priming, discussed at length in my final chapter, exalts collocation to an overriding principle of lexical acquisition. As already noted, collocation is very important when storing words in the mind (Aitchison 2002).