Lucrare limbi si literaturi straine - semantic theories

UNIVERSITATEA CRESTINA "DIMITRIE CANTEMIR"

FACULTATEA DE LIMBI SI LITERATURI STRAINE

ENGLEZA - ARABA

SEMANTIC THEORIES

I. INTRODUCTION

The appearance of linguistics' studies has brought with it new branches which are included in this complex domain. Semantics and Translation are only two studies of language that can be embodied in Linguistics' analysis. The analysis of those two studies of Linguistics supposes the answer to a series of questions:

What is Linguistics?

What is Semantics?

What is translation?

Which is the relation between Linguistics and Semantics or translation?

Is meaning an important aspect of Linguistics which can influence semantics or translation?

Does knowing a language imply a particular knowledge about semantics or translation?

Which is the role of the-paradigmatic relations in the field of Semantics?

The present study approaches the subject from a linguistic point of view. The answers to those questions are captured in the chapters of the present work. This work is based upon a series of lectures on Linguistics, Semantics, meaning and translation.

This paper is structured, excepting introduction and conclusion, in three major chapters and every chapter is also divided in three sections. The first chapter is called 'General linguistics and semantic theories' in which I have tried to define the terms of Linguistics, Semantics, and paradigmatic relations. The second chapter is named 'Different aspects of meaning' and the debate is on the notion of meaning and different aspects of it. The last chapter of the paper named 'Translation as theory and practice' it is a discussion about translation studies as theory and practice.

I have attempted to illustrate different aspects of semantic theories and translation after reading particular books like "Introduction to the Theoretical Linguists', written by John Lyons, 'Semantics', by Frank Robert Palmer, 'A linguistic theory of translation', by Catford and 'Elements of English Structural Semantics' written by Dumitru Chitoran.

Starting from the reading of these books, I have tried to answer these questions about tile analysis of Semantics and translation. The answer to the question 'What is Linguistics?' has a compound response. First of all, Linguistics is the name given to the science which studies the human language and it may be defined as the scientific study of language. The purpose of linguists is to explain language and the human life as an experience which is not easy to be depicted. As a means of interaction between people, language proved to be a social phenomenon. The use of linguistics consists in analyzing the natural process of developing and function of a language. The rise of linguistic knowledge was possible because of the communicative need and this is why the social context demands the use of the language. Language is not only a static and well-defined cognitive construction, but also a way of dynamic communication.

Secondly, Linguistics is a science which is comprised both in social and thinking sciences. Nowadays, the evolution of linguistics is a theme of interest. Linguistics has challenged traditional doctrines but it has also reformulated them. hi order to understand the principles and assumptions that govern the modem linguistics, an incursion in the past must be done. The traditional grammar goes back to Greece of the 5^th century before Christ. For the Greeks grammar was from the beginning a part of philosophy. The Greek philosophers questioned if language was governed by nature or convention. This opposition of nature and convention was a frequent debate issue for those ancient philosophers. The distinction between nature and convention was made to see if there was any connection between the meaning of a word and its form. According to Lyons, Plato considered that all the words were naturally and appropriated to the things they signified. Plato was the first who made the distinction nouns and verbs. Aristotle kept the platonic distinction between nouns and verbs but added another distinct class. This distinct class was formed by conjunctions. A great discovery was made by Aristotle with the recognition of the category of tense in the Greek verb and he noted certain variations in the forms of the verbs.

Moreover, the founder of modem linguistics is the Swiss scholar, Ferdinand de Saussure whose lectures were published in 1915 under the name of 'Cours de linguistique g n rale'. Saussure considered that languages are composed of two essential and independent systems, speech and science, which must be studied for a better understanding of a language.

'What is Semantics?' is a question which demands a comprehensive answer. Semantics is the technical term used to refer to the study of meaning, and since meaning is a part of language, semantics is a part of linguistics. Semantics is the youngest branch of linguistics and derives from the Greek word 'semantikos' and it represents the study of meaning. Semantics is the study of the relationships between linguistics forms and entities in the world. The word semantics is used to name the science of word-meaning. The scope of general semantics is to correct the incompatibilities of natural language but also their trend to modify the complex nature of reality.

The answer to the question 'What is translation?' can be founded in the 3^rd chapter of the present work. Translation is an operation performed on languages: a process of substituting a text in one language for a text in another. The most accurate definition of translation belongs to Roman Jakobson who believes that there are three different kinds of translation. The first one is the intra-lingual translation or rewording which interprets linguistic signs by means of other signs of the same language. The second type is represented by the proper translation which interprets linguistic signs by means of some other language. The third aspect is represented by the inter-semiotic translation or transmutation which interprets linguistic signs by means of systems of non-linguistic signs. According to Jakobson the first and the third types are interpretive operations of signs within signs, while the second type is the proper translation. Translation is viewed as an end-product and as a theoretical approach to text analysis. The aim of any translation is to ensure a transfer of meaning.

Translation becomes a universal spirit for the existence of a peaceful human community. The technique of translation requires knowledge of the Source and Target Language and renders the meaning from one language into another. The translator's task in to find in the Target Language the appropriate form to serve the function of the Source Language meaning. The appropriate form is related not only to the macro-structure or textual structure but also implies the choice of best solution at the micro-level which is represented by the syntactic, lexical and lexical-semantic choices in the Target Language.

Semantics and translation are both in relation with Linguistics. Linguistics is the name given to the discipline which studies human language and since Semantics is the study of meaning in natural language and die aim of any translation is to ensure a transfer of meaning, the answer to the question 'Which is the relation between Linguistics and Semantics or translation?' is conspicuous. Semantics and translation are two different domains which are embodied by the sphere of Linguistics.

Meaning is an important aspect of Linguistics and can influence a translation. A real progress in the field of semantics is represented by a clear understanding of meaning. It is difficult to give a complete definition of meaning without making reference to psychology, logic, epistemology and other sciences in addition to linguistics.

Meaning is the most important element in the study of a language for understanding details or different words. Linguists have tried to make an important issue from the study of language as being a human nature. A unique definition of meaning proved to be too wide for the particular needs of a specific science and too small to cover the complexity of meaning. Bar-Hillel showed that practical application of linguistic theory in the field of a translation is not very efficient without an account of meaning.

Meaning is the central universe to the human nature. If someone is not prepared to deal with at least language, intelligence, consciousness and socio-cultural interactions, one cannot be able to understand the sense of the meaning. It is important for a theory of conceptual semantics to be recognized owing to the messages, thoughts and concepts that serve to the purposes of a language. Language serves the purpose of transmitting messages and sentences which have meaning and they are building due to the words. The combinatorial system of meaning and its interfaces to linguistic expressions are closely related to the linguistic semantics. Meaning is a property of a language because a source language text has a source language meaning and also the target language text has a target language meaning. The contextual meaning of an item is the group of relevant situational features with which it is related. This group varies from one language to another.

The response to the problem 'Does knowing a language imply a particular knowledge about Semantics or translation? ' is in one way also related to the dilemma about meaning and language. Language seems to be a future of our essential humanity and this makes us evaluate from the stadium of animal to that of 'homo sapiens'. Human language operates with two levels of structure: the former in which elements have a meaning and the latter in which elements have no meaning. Knowing a language requires a familiar knowledge about sound system, about its lexicon and the correct use of its structure. These factors allow us to communicate with other people who know the same language.

Languages are changing constantly; these languages are in fact some dynamic systems of communication which serve for a better statement for the social communities. Languages tend to change because it is a great interaction between them and new terms have to be assimilated in theirs vocabulary. The new elements adopted by vocabulary produce resources for a language and also forming new borrowings between languages. Every language no matter how old it is has a complex and highly developed system of communication.

To learn a language demands more than specialized vocabulary and an accurate grammatical structure. All languages derive from a scientific theory of the structure of human language. Saussure makes the distinction between the diachronic and the synchronic study of language. By the diachronic study of a particular language is meant the description of its historical development during ages. By the synchronic study of a language is meant the depiction of a particular state of a language at one moment in time. Linguistics focused in the 19th century on the diachronic study of a language. Trier considered that every language articulates reality in its own way, thereby creating its own particular view of reality and establishing its own unique concepts.

Each language imposes a specific form. The language of a particular society is an integral part of its culture, and that the lexical distinctions drawn by each language will tend to reflect the culturally-important features of objects, institutions and activities in the society in which the language operates. The natural environments in which different societies live are so varied. Knowing a language implies a particular knowledge about Semantics and translation. Language provides whole categories of words for which no corresponding notions can be said to exist. Languages can have different sets of lexical items which depict different cultural systems. Semantics cannot be universal as there is a direct translation between languages. Diverse paradigms of lexicalization can be seen m the study of a language.

Trying to answer the question 'Which is the role of the paradigmatic relations in the field of Semantics?' involves the statement that semantic relations should be signification relations, rather than relations between signs. Paradigmatic relations in the field of semantics correspond to the relations revealed by traditional lexicology. Reversibility, complementary, incompatibility, antonymy, synonymy, hyponymy is relevant to the structure of lexical information.

For a better perception of these questions and for a better understanding of the semantic theories and translation with all that includes in the field of Linguistic, Semantic and translation I will start the present work by detailing this aspect in the following chapters of the paper.

II GENERAL LINGUISTICS AND SEMANTIC THEORIES

II.1. THE ASSUMPTIONS AND PRINCIPLES OF LINGUISTICS

Linguistics is the name given to the science which studies the human language or more simply, it may be denned as the scientific study of language. Language is the core of our lives. We discover language along with our identity as individuals and also social beings when we acquire it during childhood. Language serves as a mode of cognition and communication. It helps us to think for ourselves and also to cooperate with other human beings belonging to a certain community.

Language seems to be a future of our essential humanity and this makes us evaluate from the stadium of animal to that of 'homo sapiens'. Human language operates with two levels of structure: the former in which elements have a meaning and the latter in which elements have no meaning.

The purpose of linguists is to explain language and the human life as an experience which is not easy to be depicted. As a means of interaction between people, language proved to be a social phenomenon. Knowing a language means more than knowing what form it takes and moreover, it takes knowing how language functions. This knowledge of a language involve the knowledge about words, not just like simple items but as units of meaning which deals with a complex syntactic way. The use of linguistics consists in analyzing the natural process of developing and function of a language. One of the main characteristics of a language is its productivity. The language would allow any speaker to build a huge number of signs. The language is a functional system which is produced by the human activity which has a teleological scope.

'One of the main problems of linguistics is the nature of language, like a social event. Linguistics has to explain the essence of language related to its own specific. Linguistics studies the system of the language and the relations between its different levels (phonological, lexical, morphological and syntactic)'. Language does not represent a sum of sounds, words, sentences, but an organized system of elements which are associated between them and which influence themselves in the same time. Linguistics deals with the depiction of the language system and also with the interpretation of the laws that provides the internal function of every language.

The origin and the evolution of the different systems of writing is also a main aim for linguistics. Every science has its own technical vocabulary. When one sends a message, the individual is not free to choose the word's form and construction as he depends on the collectivity in which he lives and also on the structure of the language one belongs to. The connection between language and society is the object of social linguistics.

The comprehension and the precise role of a language is a compound phenomenon. For a better understanding of a language we shall examine different aspects, such as how it is organized, which are the relations between the elements of its system or how the social context does influences a language.

The rise of linguistic knowledge was possible because of the communicative need and -this is why the social context demands the use of the language. Language is not only a static and well-defined cognitive construction, but also a way of dynamic communication.

An important area of the field of a language teaching and learning is pragmatics. Pragmatics makes use of language in conducting speech acts such as apologizing, requesting, complimenting, refusing and thanking. Pragmatics is the third general area of language description, referring to practical aspects of how features of a language may be used to achieve various objectives. Pragmatics is the area of language function that embraces the use of language in social contexts. Pragmatics is concern with the study of meaning as communicated by a speaker and interpreted by a listener. Learners of all languages tend to have difficulty understanding the intended meaning communicated by a speech act, or producing a speech act using appropriate language and manner in the language being learned. Research has found that classroom instruction on speech acts can help learners to improve their performance of speech acts and their interactions with native speakers.

The traditional theory 'of the parts of speech and the standard definitions of classical grammar, reflects the ancient and medieval attempts to force together the categories of grammar logic and metaphysics.' Linguistics is a science which is comprised both in social and thinking sciences. Nowadays, the evolution of linguistics is a theme of interest. Linguistics has challenged traditional doctrines but it has also reformulated them. In order to understand the principles and assumptions that govern the modern linguistics, an incursion in the past must be done. The traditional grammar goes back to Greece of the 5^th century before Christ. For the Greeks grammar was from the beginning a part of philosophy. The Greek philosophers questioned if language was governed by nature or convention. This opposition of nature and convention was a frequent debate issue for those ancient philosophers. The distinction between nature and convention was made to see if there was any connection between the meaning of a word and its form. Lyons reminds us that Plato 'considered that all the words were naturally and appropriated to the things they signified.' Naturalists and conventionalists have argued about the origin of language and the connection between words and their meaning. This controversy developed later into a dispute. In Greek and in English, even though there are many regular methods in the language, there are also many exceptions. As an example of a regular method in English is the plural of the nouns - for example the singular noun 'flower' is plural noun as 'flowers'', or the singular noun 'wall' is the plural noun 'walk'. This is a typical case of regularity in language which was disputed by the founders of traditional grammar.

When the great library in the Greek colony of Alexandria at the beginning of the 3^rd century B.C. was established, the city became the centre of intense library and linguistic research. The library comprised manuscripts of the authors of the past and particularly those containing the texts of the Homer's poems. From the beginning, Greek linguists had been concerned about the written language. Plato (429 - 347 B.C.) was the first who made the distinction nouns and verbs. He 'defined nouns as terms that could function in sentences as the subjects of a predication, and verbs were the terms which could express the action or quality predicated. '

Aristotle kept the Platonic distinction between nouns and verbs but added another distinct class. This distinct class was formed by conjunctions. He observed that the names of many things were grammatically masculine or feminine in Greek language, and he introduced the term 'intermediate' to refer to a third gender. Later this term became the neuter gender. A great discovery was made by Aristotle with the recognition of the category of tense in the Greek verb and he noted certain variations in the forms of the verbs. The Stoics gave a huge attention to language and they were interested in language as a tool for analyzing the structure of the reality. They made an important distinction between form and meaning, but they did not take language as a direct representation of nature. The Stoics distinguished four parts of speech: the noun, the verb, conjunction and the article. They also classified adjectives together with the noun. A great discovery for the Stoics was the inflection and also the distinction between active and passive, transitive and intransitive verbs.

The Alexandrian scholars took further the work of the Stoic grammarians and set up cannons of inflection. Dionysius Thrax's work Tekhne grammatike was the first ample and systematic grammatical description published in the Western world. Furthermore, to the four stoic parts of speech, Dionysius recognized the adverb, the participle, the pronoun and the preposition. All the ancient works were classified in terms of case, gender, number, tense, voice and mood. Dionysius Thrax did not focused on syntax. This part of the grammatical description of Greek was accomplished three centuries later by the Greek philosopher Apollonius Dyscolus. Apollonius' interests extend from morphology to syntax, from prosody to semantics, from orthography to dialectology. Fortunately four out of his over twenty treatises are preserved: we still have a Syntax in four books, and three one-book monographs dedicated, respectively, to pronouns, adverbs and connectors. The three shorter treatises survive thanks to a single manuscript, the Parisinus Graecus from the tenth century. Apollonius has had a prodigious influence on all later linguistic thought and he stands as one of the founding fathers of the European reflection on language.

As concerning the medieval period, in Europe an important place was occupied be Latin in the educational system. The Latin language was not only the language of the liturgy and scriptures, but also the universal language of diplomacy, scholarship and culture.

The 13^th century was the period when the great European scholars who were influenced by the discovery of the ancient works of Aristotle and other Greek philosophers define the most majority of the sciences including grammar. The Renaissance period brought an essential break with the scholastic tradition. Petrarch and his disciples ridiculed the language as being barbaric and used the modal of Cicero like a good Latin style. They considered that the literature of antiquity was the reason which brought us with the civilized values and they studied the collections and publications of the texts of the classical authors. After the appearance in the 14th century of the printing press the distribution of these ancient texts was possible.

Once again grammar became a support for understanding the literature written in Latin. In 1513 Erasmus published a Latin syntax based on Donatus' work. In the 7^th century we have a variety of native languages in Europe in the area of Irish, Icelandic, Provencal and also the Anglo-Saxon's area. These variety of languages lasted until the 17^th century when in France the teachers of Port Royal published the work 'Grammaire generate et raisonnee' which aim was to prove that the structure of language is a product of reason and that the different languages of people were only varieties of the rational system. This work had a huge influence in France and abroad in the age of the Enlightenment. All these books which appeared until the 18^th century represented the classical idea of linguistics and produced no new theories on linguistics. Richelieu said in 1637 'that grammar is defined as the art of speaking and writing correctly and its object is to discover and to describe the relations holding between the elements of language '.

As well as the Greco-roman tradition linguists have analysed theories which dated from ancient Greece and developed later in Rome and in the medieval Europe. The study of linguistics of the native languages continued also in the period of the Renaissance and after this age. The Greco-Roman tradition of linguistic analysis determined the appearance of certain non-European languages even before the Renaissance epoch. In the 15^th century Dionysius Tharx's main work was translated into Armenian, Syrian and Arabs also.

Later in the development of the history the tradition of grammatical analysis showed a great influence upon the evolution of modern linguistics. This grammar tradition is the Indian and Hindu tradition. The Indian grammatical tradition is independent of the Greco-Roman grammar both in origin and in its development of the language. The Indian tradition acknowledged a great number of grammarians which have worked in the domain of linguistics some centuries before the Renaissance period.

The Indian classification of speech sounds was more detailed, accurate and more softly, but also different of the European categorization. The main part of the grammar represents a technical work which can be interpreted with the help of the commentaries, which consist in about 4000 rules. These rules are ordered in sequence and their intention is to define or restrict the basic form of the grammar. The discovery of the Sanskrit language was the main factor in the evolution of the comparative philology in the 19^th century.

The Renaissance period brings a large interest in the contemporary languages of Europe in addition to promote the intense study of Greek, Latin and Indian languages. A particular significance in the study of language was the new spirit of romanticism which developed as a reaction against classicism in Germany at the end of the 18^th century. The leaders of the Romantic Movement rejected the classical tradition of language and they paid attention to the German antiquities and studies of the Germanic languages-Gothic, Old High German, and Old Norse.

The different languages are similar one another, excepting their vocabulary and grammatical structure. Taking an example between English and German language there are similarities in form and meaning: have - habe, can-kann, son-Sohn, brother-Bruder. The English language and the German one are more related in their grammatical structure than the Russian or Chinese language. The fact that two languages are related in vocabulary and grammatical structure shows that they have developed from one single or one family language. Throughout the world there are different types of languages families such as Indo-European (Germanic-German, English, Dutch, Swedish, Romance- French, Italian, Romanian), Indo-Iranian (Sanskrit, Persian, Celtic, Gaelic, Breton), Semitic (Hebrew, Arabic), Finno-Ugrian (Finnish, Hungarian), Bantu (Swahili, Kikuyu, Zulu), Altaic (Turkish), Sino-Tibetan (Chinese, Tibetan) and Algonquian (American-Indian languages).

Knowing a language requires a familiar knowledge about sound system, about its lexicon and the correct use of its structure. These factors allow us to communicate with other people who know the same language. Not all the languages are spoken, and one relevant example is the American Sign Language which is a full developed language in its own right. The importance of a language consists in its infinite universe. Frequently new words are being added to the lexicon of a language for describing new concepts. These words can be combined for forming phrases which also may be mingled to form sentences. Any sentence or phrase can be created as long as the words are integrated to the internal grammar of a language. Any user of a language even though there are all words not in their personal lexicon, may decode the meaning of a phrase by isolating them. It is difficult to memorize all possible sentences in a language though these have to be covered by the reader or listener. Sentences should also be considered as being an infinite universe.

The most important assumption of linguistics is that all languages have universal features, but this fact does not mean that all languages have the same structure and the same sound system. Each language has a natural structure and a limited set of acceptable sounds. English sentences are constructed in Subject - Verb - Object order contrary to Japanese which order is Subject - Object - Verb. Even if there are dissimilarities between languages there is a common universe. All languages have a grammar and all users of a language know this grammar both if they are vernaculars or non-native speakers.

A language's grammar includes its sounds system, its lexicon and its structure. The language's sound system comprises those sounds that can be found in the language, including their proper positions in words. 'The term sounds of speech covers a range of phenomena. It can refer, for example, to separate segments: vowels and consonants. It is the concern of phonetics to describe how the vowel organs are used to articulate them and the concern of phonology to establish the conditions of their occurrence in the relation to each other. ' Through lexicon can be understood the sounds combined to form meaningful units or words. The structure represents words which are strung together to form statements, phrases and sentences.

By the early 19^th century, linguistics as the study of language had become a science in its own right even if it was still related to philology and anthropology. This connection between linguistics, philology and anthropology rose from the interest in origin speculations.

The founder of modern linguistics is the Swiss scholar, Ferdinand de Saussure whose lectures were published in 1915 under the name of 'Cours de linguistique g n rale'. Saussure considered that languages are composed of two essential and independent systems, speech and science, which must be studied for a better understanding of a language. Phonemics, originally phonology, was born in 1928 in the Prague Linguistics Circle, representing an effort to embody Saussure analysis of sounds for a language in terms of a functional system.

The traditional grammar tended to assume that the spoken language is inferior to the written language. The principal of the priority of the spoken language over the written one implies that speech is older and better extended than writing. The relation between speech and writing is based on units of spoken language. Linguists believe that three important units must be recognized in the spoken act, and these units are sounds, syllables and words. For historical reasons certain words may be distinguished in the written language but not in the spoken one- for example: seen and scene, meet and meat, son and sun. This misunderstanding of the spoken language is the result of the sound change or of borrowings from other languages with different orthographic conventions. There are more important differences between spoken and written language than those brought by the evolution of homophony and homography. The literary language was viewed purer and more correct than all other forms of the language.

Languages are changing constantly; these languages are in fact some dynamic systems of communication which serve for a better statement for the social communities. Languages tend to change because it is a great interaction between them and new terms have to be assimilated in theirs vocabulary. The new elements adopted by vocabulary produce resources for a language and also forming new borrowings between languages. Every language no matter how old it is has a complex and highly developed system of communication.

To learn a language demands more than specialized vocabulary and an accurate grammatical structure. All languages derive from a scientific theory of the structure of human language. Saussure makes the distinction between the diachronic and the synchronic study of language. By the diachronic study of a particular language is meant the description of its historical development during ages. By the synchronic study of a language is meant the depiction of a particular state of a language at one moment in time. Linguistics focused in the 19^th century on the diachronic study of a language.

II.2. THE FUNDAMENTALS OF SEMANTIC THEORIES

'Semantics is the technical term used to refer to the study of meaning, and since meaning is a part of language, semantics is a part of linguistics' The term 'semantics' is a recent addition to the English language. Semantics is a component of level of linguistics of the same kind as phonetics or grammar. Nearly all linguists have accepted a linguistic pattern in which semantics is at one end and phonetics at the other, and having grammar as a lien between them. Semantics is the youngest branch of linguistics. Linguistics is the science of the language and deals with the problem of the nature and structure of the language. Linguistics is the name given to the discipline which studies human language.

Semantics derives from the Greek 'semantikos' and represent the study of meaning. Semantics is the study of the relationships between linguistics forms and entities in the world. The word semantics is used to name the science of word-meaning. The term has acquired large senses in contemporary science. A number of other terms have been proposed to cover the same area of study, namely the study of meaning. The term has a variety of uses in the metalanguage of several sciences such as logic, psychology, linguistics and semiotics. If language is regarded as an information system, it will associate a message with a set of science (sounds of language or symbols of the written text). The communication system carries information and the system can be judged according to the efficiency with which it transmits the information. An efficient system will have the minimum redundancy and the minimum noise as in language there is a great distribution of redundancy and lot of noise. The words of a language often reflect not so much the reality of the world, but the interest of the people who speak it.

The philosophical tradition in English-speaking world has been predominantly empiricist and Palmer considers that 'many linguists have accepted a conceptualist view of meaning.'

The term reference is used to contrast with denotation and also with sense for distinguish between two different aspects of meaning. It deals with the relationship between the linguistic elements, words, senses and the non-linguistic world of experience. Sense is related to the complex system of relationship which stands between the linguistic elements. Semantics is concerned only with the way language is related to experience and reference represents the essential element of semantics.

The word is not a clearly defined linguistic unit. For Palmer 'dictionaries appear to be concerned with stating the meanings of words and it is, therefore, reasonable to assume that the word is one of the basic units of semantics. ' For this reason, in the 19^th century Henry Sweet draw a distinction between 'full words and form words. Examples of full words are sing, blue, gently and of form words like it, the, of, end. '

The meaning of a sentence or the fact that it is ambiguous the moment the speaker of a language does not know the meaning of that sentence and he is unable to use it in any given context. The difficulties of translation are the result of the differences between languages. The description of a language could not be complete without the reference to the context of situation in which the language operates. Meaning consists in the relation between speech, practical events and that proceed which follows the act of communication.

An important aspect of context is that it provides social relations. For the speaker is important to be able to identify the person to whom e is speaking and also indicate quite easy the social relations between them. For example, in many European languages it is easy to distinguish between a polite and a familiar second person pronoun form for addressing to a single person. The French (tu/vous), Greek (esi/esis), Russian (ty/vy), and also Italian (tu/voi) people use the second person plural form for expressing politeness.

The interest in what is called today 'problems of semantics' was quite an object of interest during the ancient times. Taking Greece as an example can be reminded that philosophers spent much time debating the problem of the way in which words gained their meaning. Some of the philosophers considered that the names of things were arrived naturally, that they were somehow conditioned by the natural properties of the things, others, for instance, thought that names were given to things arbitrarily.

Plato dealt with other problems like the relation between thought, language and the outside world, whilst Aristotle's works represent the next major contribution of antiquity to language study in general and semantics in particular. He generally approached to language in the same manner as a logician. In the domain of semantics he discovers a level of language analysis, and his main aim was to study the meaning of words both in isolation and in syntactic construction. He considered thoroughly the discussion of the time on descriptive semantic matters such as polysemy, antonymy, synonymy and homonymy and the expanded theory of metaphor. The involvement of Stoic philosophy to semantics is related to their discussion of the nature of the linguistic sign.

Everything which was known until the 19^th century about meaning in languages was based on philosophical speculations and interpretation. Philosophy and logics were the two important sciences which marked the study of linguistic meaning, and only after that epoch semantics became an independent subdivision of linguistics.

The necessity of discussing the terminology used in the study of meaning and the main worry of the science was dedicated to the study of meaning. One particular meaning of the term is used to designate a new science. Under the influence of contemporary neo- positivism, Alfred Korzybsky founded the psychological and pedagogical doctrine of 'General Semantics'. The scope of general semantics is to correct the incompatibilities of natural language but also their trend to modify the complex nature of reality.

''A clear definition of the meaning of a word is said to contribute to removing the dogmatism and rigidity of language and to make up for the lack of emotional balance among people. It is, accordingly, suggested to increase the specificity of meaning by introducing for each word a multiple meaning. ' Language was concerned about different features of reality which have been excluded in the process of abstractization. Talking about general semantics implies the introduction of the terms of extensional and intensional definition. An extensional definition is more complete than an intensional one. The intensional definition consists in having a set of symbols for the same thing. Intensional definitions reduce the confusion of a particularly abstract definition. Taking as example the words couch and sofa, both of them share some common characteristics as they denotes the same class of objects.

Certain features in the relationship between linguistic signs and their users have to be analyzed for revealing the meaning of the respective signs. There is a connection between language and thought meaning that language does not fulfill to express thought. The extreme position assumed by general semanticists as evidence for formulations like 'the tyranny of words, or the power of language' has brought semantics on the verge of ridicule.

The term semantics is used in two aspects. The former is the theoretical semantics, which scope is to formulate an abstract theory of meaning in the process of cognition and belongs to logic. The latter is the empirical semantics which studies meaning in natural languages as the relationship between linguistic signs and their meaning. Empirical semantics falls within the aim of linguistics.

The most familiar definition of semantics remains the one given by Bréal who considers semantics as 'the science of the meanings of words and of the changes in their meaning' . Taking into account this definition, semantics is integrated under lexicology, the more general science of words, as being an important branch. Semantics deals with the identification definition and evolution of the meanings of words and the multiple relations set up among words. The result of research in the field of word-meaning embodies the form of dictionaries of all kinds, which is the suitable object of the study of lexicography.

The relations among words involve the polysemy of them in one language and the opposite case of synonymy when they have the same meaning. Semantics concerns the possibility of analyzing the meaning of words into component elements of meanings which are shared by large number of various combinations. This science refers to the investigation of those lexical items which are larger than just one word into meanings which are not only the sum of their meanings. The term 'semasiology' is used instead of semantics with the exact meaning. It stands for the study of meaning starting from the 'signifiant' of a sign and examining the possible 'signifi s' attached to it. Semantic interpretation will be required to explain how sentences are understood by the speakers of a language. The task of semantic is to explain the relations among sentences. Words and morphemes have meanings as defined in their internal lexicon. All words contain semantic properties. Semantics is the aspect of language function that relates to understanding the meanings of words, phrases and sentences.

There are two distinct semantic studies, one a study of the meaning of sentences and one a study of me performances of speech acts. The meaning of a sentence does not in all cases determine what speech act is performed in a given utterance of that sentence, for a speaker may mean more than what he actually says, but it is in principle possible for him to say exactly what he means. 'It is in principle possible for every speech act one performs or could perform to be uniquely determined by a given sentence [], given the assumption that the speaker is speaking literally and that the context is appropriate."

Any speech act is really the performance of several acts at once, distinguished by different aspects of the speaker's intention: there is the act of saying something, what one does in saying it, such as requesting or promising, and how one is trying to affect one's audience. Speech acts are acts of communication. To communicate is to express a certain attitude, and the type of speech act being performed corresponds to the type of attitude being expressed. For example, a statement expresses a belief, a request expresses a desire, and an apology expresses regret. As an act of communication, a speech act succeeds if the audience identifies, in accordance with the speaker's intention, the attitude being expressed. Some speech acts are not acts of communication and have the function not of communicating but of affecting institutional states of affairs.

Semantics is the study of meaning in natural language. The study of meaning in itself is much older than the study of linguistic semantics. For the greatest part, the concept of meaning was studied most extensively in philosophy especially in one field of philosophy. Although the first questions about meaning originate within philosophy, a large number of the most widely used techniques in semantics come from logic and mathematics. Significant sums of major contributions to various areas of semantics come from philosophers and mathematicians. In other words, semantics is probably the most interdisciplinary of areas in modern linguistics, which is also one of the reasons why it is one of the most moving areas.

This increased interdisciplinarity makes it necessary for approaching semantics for the purposes of the analysis of natural language. Each one of the philosopher, the linguist and the mathematician chases semantics with a different view and different aims. Meaning is an exclusive property of linguistic expressions, but other meaningful entities do not fall within the scope of linguistic semantics.

Ferdinand de Saussure is viewed as the founder of modem structural linguistics. His earliest work in linguistics about the revolutionary interpretation and reconstruction of the Indo-European. vowel-system was impregnated with structuralist principles. Starting with his 'Cours de linguistique g n rale' the movement known as structural linguistics developed during the 20^th century. Every language is a unique relations structure or system and the units existing like sounds, words or meaning derive from their relationships with other units in the same language-system. Linguistic units are points or network relations in a system. According to linguists, the phonemes of a language are not the minimal units of the sound system.

Every pronunciation of a word-form is different from every other pronunciation of the same word-form by different speakers and by the same speaker on different occasions. Every language has a unique principle of distinctions of sound which makes them functional in the moment of the speech act. Each phoneme is associated with a various range of each phonetic variant. The relations of contrast and equivalence in language-behaviour represent methodological principles of structuralism.

The term 'structuralism' has acquired a different sense in the United States where it now tends to be employed with reference to the theoretical and methodological principles of the so named post-Bloomfieldian School, which dominated the American linguistics in the period which followed after the Second War World. Many of the principles of the Bloomfieldian structuralism's School were unknown to the principles of Saussure. It should be noted that Saussurean structuralists, unlike many of the Bloomfieldians never held the vision that semantics should be excluded from linguistics.

When the structuralist considers that each language has a unique set of distinctions, this does not imply that sounds are general of even universal, but this selection represents the principle that governs the phonological structure of a language. Many structuralists have shown that the selection of a particular set of phonological distinctions is absolutely arbitrary. Certain phonetic distinctions are made functional m the languages of the world than others because of the grammatical and semantic distinctions. The principles of structural linguistics are compatible with universalism.

The phonological system of a language as well as its grammatical structure and each term in a grammatical category is in contrast with other terms of the same category. Languages make a selection from the possible distinctions in terms of grammatical categories as tense, number, gender, case, person and group words. These categories and parts of speech are combined to form sentences according to rules and principles which can vary from one language to another.

'The naive monolingual speaker of English might be tempted to think that the meanings of lexemes are independent of the language that he happens to speak and that translation from one language to another is simply a matter of finding the same meaning in the other language, selecting the grammatically appropriate forms.' There is a problem when we have two or more meanings of a word which can be associated with homonymous lexemes in a language. There can be an intricate dilemma when someone does not know the genuine meaning of a sentence in his attempt to translate it from one language to another. For example, the French sentence 'Je vais prendre ma serviette' can be translated in English like 'I will go and get my towel, or I will go and get my brief-case, or I will go and get my napkin'. This problem of translation arises as the result of homonymy or polysemy.

One language may provide a word that cannot be found it in other. The language which lacks a word for a particular meaning in a part of the world does not exist. For example one should not be surprised to discover that in an Equatorial language from Africa the word 'snow^ does not exist. One language can be characterized by its lexical recognition but also the social institution and the culturally reasons may define it. 'There are many languages in which one would be hard put to translate words like piano, sacrament, justice, or even family ' . This lack of translated words for a particular meaning is possible because the language in which we want to translate those words has no equivalent for them.

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There is a reason why the word-for-word translation is unsatisfactory and also almost impossible. This inconvenient appeared due to the frequent change of a language and because languages are complex and deals with cultural items. The speakers of two or more languages who are familiar with these cultural contexts in which languages operate can get close to a better translation. Their judgments on semantic equivalence also for these bilingual speakers in the case of a translation are purely intuitive. The problems which appear the moment the translation from one language from another begins suppose a good knowledge about languages in which the process of translation produces. The meanings of words in tile sense of denotation are internal to the language to which they belong. This means that each language has its own semantic, grammatical and phonological structure.

Saussure in his development of structuralist thesis introduces four distinctions for sustaining his theory. First of all he makes the distinction between langue and parole. This dissimilarity has been made in terms of language-behaviour which characterizes the part that speaks about parole and the language-system which refers to langue that underlines the language-behaviour of a particular language-community. Saussure does not accept any equivalence for this difference between langue and parole.

The second separation that Saussure made was between substance and form. The Saussurean concept of substance relied to the Aristotelian concept of matter. In the modem era the term matter signifies a spatiotemporal meaning, an abstract implication of the concept of substance. Languages are the result of two substances sound and thought. The phonological composition of a word-form derives its essence and existence from the structure imposed by the language system of a sound. The distinction of substance and structure is decisive for Saussurean structuralism.

The third issue in the vision of Saussure is the relationship between units in the language system. There are two types of relationships: syntagmatic and paradigmatic. The syntagmatic relation refers to the combination of a unit with other units of the same level. For example the lexeme old is syntagmatically related with the definite article 'the' and the noun 'man' in expressions like 'the old man'. The paradigmatic relation deals with units which hold a particular unit in a given syntagm and other units which are replaced for it in the syntagm. To describe a language system the combination between paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations is necessary.

The last distinction that Saussure makes is between the synchronic and the diachronic investigation of languages. The synchronic analysis of a language deals with the investigations of a language at a certain time and on the other aspect the diachronic analysis of a language represents the study of changes in a language between two given points in time. The fact that language has changed during history is owes to the variation of that language and also the geographical and social dimensions. The synchronic language system is a theoretical form of the linguist. The distinction between the synchronic and the diachronic dimensions of a language variation can be applied for certain periods in time. Grammarians and lexicographers have separated periods and treated these diachronic and synchronic dimensions as paradigms of the same language. The meaning of a word can be determined by investigating its origin.

The doctrine of linguistic relativism has been a subject of controversy over the last twenty years. It is a well-known fact that a word-for-word translation across the language is an impossible act as some languages have words which are not founded in the other ones. Every language is integrated with the culture in which it operates and its lexical structure shows those distinctions which are important for that culture. The influence of biological and cultural universals determines the structure of a language.

Structuralism has been associated with functionalism in the 20^th century linguistics, especially at the Prague School. Functionalism represents the view that the structure of every language-system is determined by the particular functions that it has to perform. Since certain human and social needs are universal there are certain functions that all languages tend to reflect their grammatical and lexical structure. All languages must provide a certain meaning and reference to its objects and persons.

The semantic field theory was first debated by a large number of German and Swiss scholars in the 1920's and 1930's, but its origins are marked at least to the middle of the 19th century. The idea of organizing the entire lexicon of a language into a unique system was formulated by J. Trier, who was influenced by W. von Humboldt on his ideas about linguistic relativism.

Each language depicts reality in different ways so that the speakers can have a direct observation and perception of it. The principle of relativism says that the vocabularies of any two languages are an isomorphic, which means that there is no link between two words belonging to two different languages. Trier's semantic field integrates the lexical system in a dynamic state of evolution. Trier continues the idea of Saussure's structuralism about the distinction between the signification and the value of lexical items. Saussure considered that words have signification but they also have a certain value. The linguistic value is the result of the structural relationships of a term in the system to which it belongs. For two speakers of the same language the colour red will never have other significance. Red is red and it is not green.

Trier advanced the idea that vocabulary as a whole forms a complex system of terms and he pointed out that the slightest change in meaning of a term brings changes for all meanings. His semantic field acts as a link between individual lexical and entries and the vocabulary as a whole. Trier's theory does not seem to be related to any given grammatical theory even if there were attempts to develop this semantic field theory. The morpho-semantic field includes all the sounds and sense associations for a word, its homonyms and synonyms words which may be related to it.

According to Trier the traditional diachronic semantics sets the changes in meaning. Trier considers that there was a change in the conceptual field of knowledge and understanding the vocabulary of Middle High German between the beginning and the end of the thirteenth century. His work on the vocabulary of the early stages of German is based on the analysis of the language-system as whole. The section of German lexemes may have been determined by a slavish attempt to represent the distinctions of sense associated with particular Latin lexemes.

Trier considered that 'every language articulates reality in its own way, thereby creating its own particular view of reality and establishing its own unique concepts. ' He was criticized for his concentration upon paradigmatic relations of sense to the exclusion of syntagmatic relations.

Semantics may be defined as the study of meaning, and this term is of recent origin, being created in the late 19th century from a Greek verb meaning 'to signify'. Grammarians showed interest in the meaning of words and insisted in words mean and their syntactic function. A large number of books on linguistics that appeared in the last thirty years paid little or no attention on semantics. The reason is that they considered that meaning can be studied as strictly as grammar and phonology.

Philosophers take words and sentences for granted but the linguist cannot do this. Words and sentences are the first units of grammatical description. For defining meaning, there have to be made some distinctions between emotive and cognitive meaning, significance and signification, between sense and reference, denotation and connotation, between signs and symbols and so on.

Traditional grammar was based on the theory that the word was the basic unit of syntax and semantics. The word was a sign composed of two parts: as the form of the word and its meaning. In their efforts to reveal the normal origin of language, the Greeks launched a number of doctrines to report the extension of a word's range of meaning. The most significant of these principles was the 'metaphor', based on the natural liaison between the primary and the secondary referent to which the word was applied.

The distinction between homonymy and multiple meaning is indeterminate and arbitrary. The arbitrariness of the distinction between them is reflected in the divergences in classification       between different dictionaries and has been increased by the development of sounds methods of etymology in the nineteenth century.

Lyons said that 'any historical knowledge we between different dictionaries and has been increased by the development of sounds methods of might have about the development of the meaning of words is in principle irrelevant to their synchronic use and interpretation. The distinction of the synchronic and diachronic in semantics is subject to the same general limitations as it is in phonology and grammar. '

Lexical resources include dictionaries, thesauruses, grammars, sets of examples of a word's use, specially constructed databases of information about words, and linguistic analyses of words; they provide information about words; they are used to develop lexicons and systematic representations of characteristics of words. Lexical items have a lexical meaning and a grammatical one. Grammatical items have only grammatical meaning. The 1960s saw the rapid development of formalisms for representing the syntactic structures of phrases, clauses, and sentences, but there was little research toward integrating semantics into the representations. Fillmore (1968) began a process of characterizing the semantic roles of noun phrases in a sentence, particularly as related to the main verb. In addition to identifying the subject and object of a verb and the object of a preposition, it was possible to characterize the role of these syntactic items, by referring to the agent, patient, theme, instrument, and location.

In the traditional semantic classification the nature of a word is render in terms of synonymy and homonymy. The ideal language has one meaning and that meaning is associated with only one form. This ideal language can be duelled by the fact that two or more forms may be associated with the same meaning. If these words have the same meaning this reality prove that those words are synonyms. For example, the words outmoded, old-fashioned, old or antique have the same meaning as obsolete. Semanticists consider that synonymy is a relation of identify between two or more independent elements. If two words are synonymous this means that they denote the same thing.

The recognition of a distinction between similarity and difference of meaning is not of antique interest for semantics. This distinction is simply the opposition between synonyms and homonyms. Traditional semantics makes from the existence of the concept the base of its whole theoretical structure and encourage the analysis of meaning.

Traditional semantics confuses the distinction between having meaning and significance. The notion of having meaning is applicable at all levels in the analysis of utterance, including tile phonological. The phonemes /l/ and /r/ not only have meaning, but have a different meaning in these utterances. The phonological structure of particular languages rests upon this different property of phonemes within certain limits imposed by the complementary principle of phonetic similarity.

The semanticist must give theoretical recognition to the principle of having meaning at die phonological level. The phonological units never have reference and do not contract any semantic relationship other than sameness and different of meaning. 'The meaning of a given phonological unit is simply its difference from every other phonological unit that might have occurred in the same context. '

Semantics is a practical science which stay away from the philosophical and psychological argues over body and mind and the position of concept. 'Bloomfield definition of meaning of a word as a full scientific description of its referent is more detrimental to the progress in semantics than the traditional definition in terms of concepts. ' His point of view relies on a realistic relation between language and the world.

The meaning of a word depends on the context. It is frequently hard to give the correct meaning of a word without putting it in a context. Dictionaries explain the meaning of the word by giving a synonym. About the meaning of a word Wittgenstein affirms: 'Don't look for the meaning of a word, look for its use.' The only empirical control about the study of language is the use of language statements in the communication of every day language. Semantics is worried for the level of uniformity in the use of language which makes normal statement possible. The meaning of a word is what it signifies, and this meaning is transferred from speaker to hearer in the progress of communication. Words are the minimal important units of a language. The sense of a word implies that its place in a system of relationships which it contracts with other words in the vocabulary.

One part of the meaning of a certain element may be described in terms of its reference. Since sameness of meaning, synonymy is a relation which holds between two vocabulary items, it is a matter of sense, not reference. Two elements cannot be absolute synonymous in one context unless they are synonymous in all contexts.

The context of an utterance must be included in the spatiotemporal situation in which it occurs. An utterance has meaning if the occurrence is not determined by its context. Lyons says that the hearer knows in advance that the speaker will produce a particular utterance in a particular context. This means that it is conspicuous that the utterance gives him no information when it occurs.

The principle of choice determines if an utterance has meaning or not. An utterance can be described as conditioned responses to the situations in which they occur. The notion of having meaning is validated by its reflection of the intuitive principle that implies choice in particular contexts. Since an utterance consists of a certain cycle or phrase with a certain syntactic structure and made up of words with certain meanings, its interpretation will depend on the hearer's linguistic knowledge. 'However, since it is produced by a particular speaker on a particular occasion and the hearer 's task is to discover what that speaker meant on that occasion, its interpretation will also depend on the non-linguistic knowledge that she brings to bear. '

Knowledge of language is one of a system of interacting components which made up the mind. Knowledge of language cannot be regarded as the result of general intelligence. It also implies that actual linguistic performance is a result of the interaction of a number of different systems and the acceptability of an utterance may be affected by other factors than the grammatical ones. An utterance may consist of a perfectly grammatical sentence and still be unacceptable.

When someone uses a language to communicate with one another, sentences are not produced, but utterances. Those utterances are produced in particular contexts and cannot be understood without knowledge of relevant contextual features. Utterances are produced by speakers and understood by hearers on the basis of the regularities of formation and transformation determined for sentences by the rules of the grammar. The production of utterances is in a position to make any definite statements about the way in which a knowledge

of an abstract relationships between grammatical elements and the understanding of the utterance.

Grammatically is part of the acceptability of utterances which can be accounted for in terms of the rules of formation and transformation specifying the permissible combinations of the distributional classes of elements.

Each language imposes a specific form. The language of a particular society is an integral part of its culture, and that the lexical distinctions drawn by each language will tend to reflect the culturally-important features of objects, institutions and activities in the society in which the language operates. The natural environments in which different societies live are so varied. Sapir said that 'the worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds. ' It is possible to achieve knowledge of the structure of the lexical systems in languages other than our own, whether in learning them for practical purposes or for the investigation of their vocabulary. The relationship between language and culture is complex than this simplified statement would suggest. Practical experience of learning foreign languages suggests that certain objects, situations or other features are easier identified in the area of cultural and me words and the expressions are learnt without difficulties.

II. 3. THE PARADIGMATIC RELATIONS IN THE FIELD OF SEMANTICS

The linguistic meaning as a relation brings the problem of the nature of semantic relations. In the ancient times scholars in the field of language were attentive of the diverse ties existing among the words of a given language. Due to Saussure the attention was directed to the study of the relationships in a systematic nature. Saussure has spoken about the existence of a network of associative fields covering the entire vocabulary. For Saussure the lexicon was structured by means of a series of possible associations which are establish among the vocabulary items of a language. 'Each word is the centre of a constellation or a series of constellations, the point towards which other terms associated with it converge. with it converge"

The paradigmatic semantic relations among words like antonymy, synonymy, hyponymy, are somehow relevant to the structure of lexical information. The semantic relations among words have captured the interest of various brands of philosophers, cognitive psychologists, linguists, computer scientists, literary theorists, cognitive neuroscientists. Psychoanalysis are interested about the field whose interests involve words, meaning, or the mind. These types of relations can be interpreted in terms of distinctions between expression and content. Semantic relations should be signification relations, rather than relations between signs. Semantic structures can be distinguished from simple associative fields, which are based on similarity or contiguity between linguistic sings in terms of the significant and the signifie. Paradigmatic relations in the field of semantics correspond to the relations revealed by traditional lexicology. One of their basic characteristics is the fact that they are established among members of the same class of distribution.

The primary semantic relation on the paradigmatic axis is that of incompatibility, a relation which is characteristic of all lexical elements. Two units linked by a relation of incompatibility are closer in meaning than two units between which the only relation is that of difference. The relation of incompatibility can be established on the basis of substitution of items in a given utterance. If one utterance including a given term negates another utterance in which that term has been substituted, the two substitutable terms as well as other terms belonging to the same substitution class are said to find themselves in a relation of incompatibility. Incompatibility can be defined on the basis of the link of contradictoriness between sentences.

For example, the sentence 'I had milk at breakfast' refers to the fact that somebody had milk at breakfast and not other drink. Referring to the syntagmatic axis, J.R. Firth wrote that 'part of the meaning of the word dark is its collocability with night.' The same may be the example with milk and tea. The word milk is incompatible with the word tea- The incompatibility relation is highly important to establish lexical sets in the semantic fields. In the analyses of incompatibility relations it is necessary to complete the substitution and distribution factors by other formal operations which could lead to the delimitation of a lexical set.

The wider concept of meaning incompatibility includes several types of meaning relations which are based on more intimate relations of oppositeness. In traditional lexicology these relations dealt under the term of antonymy. Linguistic terms are said to be antonyms if a relation of oppositeness in meaning can be established between them.

Compared to incompatibility, relations are based on oppositeness of meaning are of much closer nature. The represent on the semantic level of language what phonological and grammatical oppositions do on the other levels. Such pairs of word which are opposite in meaning are; long - short, happy - sad, man - woman, and so on.

Complementary is the type of antonymic relation based on binary oppositions which do not allow for gradations between the extreme poles of semantic axis. The words like: single - married, male - female, begin - end, are complementary since their meaning contradict each other. In this sense the validity of one term implies the denial of the other. The sentence 'John is present' implies the denial of the sentence that 'John is not absent.'

The term antonymy will be used to designate those meaning oppositions which admit certain gradations with regard to the meaning expressed. For example, the words complicate and easy, possible and impossible, poverty and wealth, good and bad are antonymous. There is a clear distinction between complementary and antonymy. In the case of complementary two words are complementary if the assertion of one implies the negation of the other. Traditional lexicology usually confines itself to the study of absolute antonyms. Antonyms are characteristic of two grammatical classes' adjectives and adverbs. Antonymy or oppositeness of meaning has been recognized as one of the most important semantic relations. The term antonymy is used for oppositeness of meaning and the words that are opposite are antonyms. Antonymy is a regular and very natural feature of language and can be defined fairly precisely. A word that is polysemic will have a variety of synonyms each corresponding to one of its meanings. It will also have a set of antonyms. Each language may have its own world and so its semantics.

The words, which design concrete objects like nouns, are not antonyms. The lexicon of any given language comprises a vast number of antonyms. There is a possibility to use any lexical item with an antonymic value in a given context. The possibility of analyzing meaning in distinctive semantic feature indicates that the entire vocabulary seems to be created on the basis of such oppositions.

Reversibility is the third type of oppositeness of meaning. The dimension of reversibility is established between two terms which supposes one another. For example the verb 'give' supposes the verb 'to take' or 'to borrow' supposes the verb to 'to lend'. There is a small difference between antonyms and reversible terms, such as the couple of words 'offer' and 'accept' and 'offer-refuse'.

The semantic relation of hyponymy is similar to the notion of class involvement in the logic of the words. There is a correlation established between genus and species. Such relations can be exemplified as followed: house-chalet, vegetable-eggplant, room-kitchen. The relation of hyponymy can be identified in terms of unilateral implication. The hyponyrnic structure of the lexicon is comprehensive and exhaustive. The semantic theory ofFodor and Katz proposes as a semantic component of the generative theory of language the use of inclusion relationships within its lexicon level of semantic markers. Hyponymy is one of the main paradigmatic relations in semantics and represents the constitutive principle in the organization of the lexicon of all languages.

The vocabulary of a language contains a number of lexical systems in which the semantic structure can be described in terms of paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations. These relations are defined as being the link between lexical items and the independent ones. This is one of the major principles of structuralism developed by Saussure. He considered that every linguistic item has its place in a system and its function comes from the connection which contracts the units of the system.

It has been suggested that English is rich in synonyms for its historical reason that its vocabulary has come from two different sources: from Anglo-Saxon on the one hand and from French/Latin/Greek on the other. Since English is considered to be a Germanic language from the historical point of view the Anglo-Saxon words are considered to be native while those from Latin, French or Greek are borrowed- For example, the pair of native or foreign words like 'buy' and 'purchase' or 'world' or 'universe' is only some examples of the synonymy between a native and a foreign word. Some sets of synonyms belong to different dialects of the language. For example, the Britannic word 'autumn' is used in the United States and in some western countries of Britain as 'fall'.

Two items are synonymous if they have the same meaning. Synonymy is a matter of degree and establishes a set of lexical items which can be presented as a range of similarity and difference of meaning. There are four types of synonymy: the complete and total synonymy, the complete but not total synonymy, the incomplete but not total one and the incomplete but total synonymy. In the discussions about synonymy semanticists make the distinction between cognitive and emotive meaning. In traditional semantics, synonymy has been viewed as a relationship between lexical items. Even if synonymy is not essential to the semantic structure of a language, there may emerge situations by which the synonymy becomes a fundamental consequence of the others structural relations of hyponymy and incompatibility. Synonymy is a parti culary problem because it involves a total inclusion and exclusion and it asssumes that, principally, any item may be selected from any context

The absolute synonymy is very rare and impossible since it would require each item to be totally interchangeable and collocate not only with the same sets as the other but with all member of all those sets. For example, the Italian word "canale' has two different concepts meaning in English language. The two concepts which are distinguished in English are: 'canal" and 'channel".

Hyponymy and incompatibility are the most important paradigmatic relations of meaning in terms of which the vocabulary is based, even though they are very independent. 'The term hyponymy is not part of the traditional stock-in-trade of the semanticists; it is of recent creation, by analogy with synonymy and antonymy. Although the term may be new, the notion of hyponymy is traditional enough and it has long been recognized as one of the constitutive principles in the organization of the vocabulary of all languages. '

Hyponymy involves the notion of inclusion in the sense that 'tulip and rose' are included in the group of flower notion, or, as well as 'lion and elephant' belong to the group of mammal animals category. Synonymy in Palmer's opinion is 'used to mean sameness of meaning. It is obvious that for dictionary-marker many sets of words have the same meaning; they are synonymous in fact dictionaries define synonymy as symmetric hyponymy. '

It is important to realize that hyponymy applies to the non-referring terms in precisely the same way as it applies to terms that have reference. Hyponymy may be defined also in terms of unilateral implication. The main point about the relations of hyponymy is found in natural languages. The vocabulary of natural languages tends to have many gaps, asymmetries and some sorts of indeterminacies. Many linguists have been attracted by the possibility of describing the vocabulary of a language in terms of hierarchical classification from general to particular. The most important factor in this hierarchical classification of the vocabulary is the structure of the culture in which the language operates and in which it serves as principles of communication. It is possible to identify the hyponyms of a certain word in one language, whilst the same word may not have any equivalent in another language.

III DIFFERENT ASPECTS OF MEANING

III.l. DEFINITIONS AND FEATURES OF MEANING

A real progress in the field of semantics is represented by a clear understanding of meaning. The definitions of meaning have been suggested by Ogden and Richards. Given its complex nature, it is difficult to give a complete definition of meaning without making reference to psychology, logic, epistemology and other sciences in addition to linguistics. Concepts which for a given science are highly tentative are taken for granted by another science which builds its theoretical structure on them. This situation is characteristic for a number of related sciences which aim is to describe the human linguistic activity. Linguistics is opposite to other related sciences because even from the beginning it was concerned with matters which would seem to fall beyond its field. The concern of modem linguists has limited the matters of the science of linguistics.

For linguists and for philosophers and psychologists also, meaning represents the 'holy grail'. Meaning is the most important element in the study of a language for understanding details or different words. Linguists have tried to make an important issue from the study of language as being a human nature. A unique definition of meaning proved to be too wide for the particular needs of a specific science and too small to cover the complexity of meaning. Bar-Hillel showed that practical application of linguistic theory in the field of a translation is not very efficient without an account of meaning. The development in the field of meaning in the last 40 years has recorded a real progress.

A linguistic account of meaning would be difficult to give due to the plurality of levels at which meaning can be discussed. The morpheme represents the minimal unit language donated meaning, and the word is the next higher unit that traditionally lexicology has selected for its object of study. Ogden and Richards have pointed three factors which are involved in any symbolic act. These aspects are the symbol, the thought or reference and the object or the referent. This triadic concept of meaning was represented by the two linguists in the form of a triangle. Ullmann has also a kind of triangle but its form derives from the form offered by Ogden and Richards and from Ferdinand de Saussure, whose theories represent the modem science of language. Traditional linguistics is based on those theories.

Thougt or Reference

Word or Symbol Object of Referent

Diagram 1

The triangle laid to the foundations of modem linguistics theories. Saussure distinguished two parts within the word: an expression and a content, signifiant and signifie.

Presentation of the triangle

Signifi