Introductory models & basic concepts: meaning

Meaning

The meaning of meaning

In everyday speech we bandy the term 'meaning' around quite happily without giving it a lot of thought:

'...if you see what I mean.'
'...if you take my meaning.'
'What's that supposed to mean?'
'I always say what I mean.'
'"Cochon" means "pig".'
'I didn't really mean it.'
'I meant to write.'
'A green light means "go"'
'What is the meaning of life?'
'Health means everything.'
'His look was full of meaning
'What's the dictionary meaning of "meaning"?'

That's fairly typical of the sort of things we might say. You can see from those that we don't even use the word 'meaning' with the same meaning every time. Some of the examples are taken from The Meaning of Meaning by Ogden and Richards (1923), in which they identified 16 different meanings of the word!

The last example, with its reference to 'dictionary meaning' suggests that there is some kind of 'correct' meaning of words. If two people disagree about what a word means, they might well settle their argument by referring to the dictionary.

However, when we stop for a while to consider just what we mean by meaning, things get pretty complicated pretty fast. A number of thought-provoking statements about the nature of meaning were made by the communication theorist David Berlo Berlo (1960):

	Meanings are in people
	Communication does not consist of the transmission of meanings, but of the transmission of messages
	Meanings are not in the message; they are in the message-users
	Words do not mean at all; only people mean
	People can have similar meanings only to the extent that they have had, or can anticipate having, similar experiences
	Meanings are never fixed; as experience changes, so meanings change
	No two people can have exactly the same meaning for anything

Click on any of them for a discussion of what he 'means'.

Berlo was working rather within 'Communication Science' than within 'Semiotics'. However, much of what he has to say about meaning is close to what semioticians have to say. What is missing from his work, though, are the questions of the 'politics of signification', which are paramount for semioticians and the cultural studies which built upon their work. Nevertheless, Berlo's work is a thought-provoking introduction to the whole question of what it means to mean.

Dimensions of meaning

If you have already looked through the comments on Berlo's statements about meaning, you should find this section fairly straightforward.

Denotative Meaning

We can probably reasonably say that certain signs refer fairly unequivocally to things in the world 'out there'. We can also say that they denote the things 'out there' (which is another way of saying that they 'refer to' them). So, for example, the word Bill refers to, or denotes, this bloke here, London refers to this town here and so on.

Hence, this dimension of meaning is known as the denotative or referential meaning of a sign.

At first, that seems fairly obvious, but a moment's thought suggests it's perhaps not quite that obvious. Do words normally work like names (Bill, London)? What about dog? That's a bit different from Rover, which denotes 'this dog here'. Just what are we referring to when we use the word dog? We might be referring to one specific dog: 'My dog's name is Rover', but what's going on when we say 'Rover is a dog'? Presumably, in that case we are referring to some kind of mental concept of a kind of generalized dog.

The idea of words having some kind of denotative dimension gets even more difficult when we ask ourselves what thing is denoted by ask, find, difficult, popular, tradition etc.

We'll leave this discussion of denotation by saying that some words clearly have a denotative content, but the number of words where there is this simple and clear sign ----> thing relationship is probably very limited.

Structure

If you are familiar with the idea of a code, then you'll know that a code consists of an agreed vocabulary and an agreed set of rules, known as a grammar.

The grammatical rules, which prescribe how the signs can be combined, set out the structure of the code. We get some meaning from the structure itself. Berlo uses the example:

We don't know what smoogles and comcom are, but we still know something about them: we know that a smoogle is something countable and can be referred to in the plural, unlike, say, water or milk. We know that smoogles is a noun and not a verb. We know that more than one smoogle is referred to in this sentence. We know that comcom is a noun and that it is a quality or thing which most smoogles are claimed to have. We still don't know what is referred to, but the formal properties of English grammar have already provided us with a lot of information.

Context

From the structure of the language you know that gyxpyx is a noun. You know that it's something that it makes sense to refer to as broken (unless it transpires that this person is talking rubbish).

Now we're getting a bit closer - a gyxpyx is maybe a typewriter, calculator, musical instrument; at any rate it's something that has keys.

Well, that pretty well clinches it. We're still left with the question of just what the difference is between a typewriter and a gyxpyx or why this person has the odd habit of referring to typewriters as gyxpyxes, but we can be reasonably sure already that a gyxpyx is something typewriter-like.

The meaning we have for gyxpyx has come partly from the structure, because we know it's a noun and we know it can be broken, have keys and a ribbon. But the meaning has also come from the context. You come across a sign for which you don't have a meaning within the context of signs for which you do have meanings. These meanings generate other meanings because of the formal relations between them and the unknown signs.

We should never overlook the usefulness, as well as the pitfalls, of context when we formulate messages, in whatever medium. The context can introduce unknown signs to the receiver and give her clues to the meanings we want her to get for them. Typically, for example, a language teacher will introduce new words within the context of known words. But it's not only language teachers who do that; any good teacher will introduce new concepts within the context of familiar concepts. In that way, semantic noise can be reduced.

Connotation

The denotative meaning of 'cabbage' when I say to the greengrocer 'I'll have a cabbage, please' is 'a green leafy vegetable etc.' Whenever I hear or use the word 'cabbage', I feel slightly nauseous because it reminds me of my revolting school dinners, which nearly always included cabbage. That association of 'cabbage' with my school dinners is what we refer to as connotation. It is the connotative dimension of meaning, which varies more or less greatly from one user of the sign to another. When we speak of 'The Queen of England' and 'The wrinkly old woman who owns the house at the end of the Mall' we are referring to, or denoting, the same person, but the connotations are quite different.

Consider words such as good, desirable, unpleasant, beautiful. They are closely tied to the person who uses them; the meanings we have for them therefore vary greatly in communication. They often cause us trouble, particularly if we don't allow for the possibility that other people's connotations for them may well be radically different from ours.

Osgood (1957) has attempted to develop a method of measuring connotations, known as the semantic differential, which you could find useful for your project work.

Summary

Following Berlo, we have said that meaning has the following dimensions:

 

	denotative or referential: the sign ----> thing relationship
	structural: the meanings given by the formal grammatical structure of the code
	contextual: the meanings we get from the context surrounding the sign
	connotative: the meanings (often highly personal) which individuals associate with a sign)

 

When we communicate we use all of these:

What is our meaning for the word mother?

We can say that it is a noun (structural meaning).

We can say that it refers to a person who bears a specific biological relationship to us (denotative meaning).

Finally, the connotative meaning is the sum total of all of our previous experiences with a) our own mothers, b) other peoples mothers, and c) all of the situations in which we have used or heard the word mother.

Related articles:

Ang on meaning

Baudrillard

Berlo on meaning

Fish on anti-formalism

Fish on interpretive communities

Interpersonal Communication: Language

Semantic differential

semiotics