Associative meaning
Encyclopedia
According to the semantic analysis
of Geoffrey Leech
, the associative meaning of an expression has to do with individual mental understandings of the speaker. They, in turn, can be broken up into six sub-types: connotative, collocative, social, affective, reflected and thematic (Mwihaki 2004).
Semantic analysis
Semantic analysis may refer to:*Semantic analysis *Semantic analysis *Semantic analysis *Semantic analysis *Semantic Analysis a 1960 book by philosopher Paul Ziff....
of Geoffrey Leech
Geoffrey Leech
Geoffrey Leech was Professor of Linguistics and Modern English Language at Lancaster University from 1974 to 2002. He then became Research Professor in English Linguistics...
, the associative meaning of an expression has to do with individual mental understandings of the speaker. They, in turn, can be broken up into six sub-types: connotative, collocative, social, affective, reflected and thematic (Mwihaki 2004).
- The connotative meanings of an expression are the thoughts provoked by a term when in reference to certain entities. Though these meanings may not be strictly implied by relevant definitions, they show up in common or preferred usage regardless. This is not to be confused with what is historically referred to as connotationConnotationA connotation is a commonly understood subjective cultural or emotional association that some word or phrase carries, in addition to the word's or phrase's explicit or literal meaning, which is its denotation....
, which more closely describes rigid definitions of words. - Collocative meaningCollocationIn corpus linguistics, collocation defines a sequence of words or terms that co-occur more often than would be expected by chance. In phraseology, collocation is a sub-type of phraseme. An example of a phraseological collocation is the expression strong tea...
, or "collocation", describes words that regularly appear together in common use (within certain contexts). - Social meaning, where words are used to establish relationships between people and to delineate social roles. For example, in Japanese, the suffix "-san" when added to a proper name denotes respect, sometimes indicating that the speaker is subordinate to the listener; while the suffix "-chan" denotes that the speaker thinks the listener is a child or childlike (either for purposes of affection or derision).
- Affective meaning has to do with the personal feelings or attitudes of the speaker.
- Reflected meaning has to do with when one sense of a particular word affects the understanding and usage of all the other senses of the word.
- Thematic meaning concerns itself with how the order of words spoken affects the meaning that is entailed.