The meaning of the concept "lexical meaning of the word"

The meaning of the concept "lexical meaning of the word"
The meaning of the concept "lexical meaning of the word"
Anonim

The lexical meaning of a word is, despite its apparent simplicity, a rather serious and difficult to understand term. The adjective "lexical" has many single-rooted and very understandable words: vocabulary, lexicon, lexicographer, lexeme. But it is rather difficult to give a full definition of the concept of "lexical meaning of a word" if one does not understand some linguistic and even philosophical ideas.

lexical meaning of the word
lexical meaning of the word

A bit of semiotics

Each word in a language is first of all a sign, a designation of something or someone, it is a conventional designation of some object of the outside world. Sometimes a word becomes a symbol, that is, a sign with different, sometimes opposite, meanings. At the same time, the lexical meaning of the word also expands. In addition to it, the word also has grammatical and phonetic meanings, but these are already its characteristics as a signifier - as a sign.

The word and its lexical meaning

The lexical meanings of words can change and expand in several ways:

A) Getting new ones over time. Words that have fallen out of use (historicisms and archaisms) sometimes acquire new connotations. For example, they receive the designation of the same word, but in a high style (eyes, cheeks) or some term that is outdated along with the object that denoted it, receives a designation for a new phenomenon (minion).

word and its lexical meaning
word and its lexical meaning

B) With someone's light hand. This happens more often not even with words, but with phraseological units and expressions. More precisely, there was a set of words, and some famous person used it with a certain meaning or acted in a certain way (“Potemkin villages”) - and here you are - this is already a saying. Often people act as a famous person, creating folklore.

B) Rethinking attitude. So usually words do not get their main meaning, but coloring - positive or negative. It also changes over time. But, unlike historicisms and archaisms, such words do not leave the active vocabulary of the people for a while. Example - the word "stink" used to mean a pleasant smell, or "pop" used to just mean "priest" without any negative connotations. In especially extreme situations (for example, during the revolution and for the entire period of the USSR, the words "bourgeoisie" and "capitalism" received a negative connotation).

lexical meaning of words
lexical meaning of words

Lost in translation

Sometimes the lexical meaning of words with the same roots differs in languages. For example, the word "intelligent" in English is simply a smart, well-read person, while in Russian its meaning is much deeper - it is a person with a certain cultural level, rotating in a circle of educated people, engaged in intellectual work. Sometimes the lexical meaning of a word, exactly in the form in which it is presented in some language, is not available anywhere else. For example, the exact translation of the word "vulgar" cannot be carried out into any other language of the world - this is a concept inherent exclusively in Russian culture. A. Vezhbitskaya wrote about the subtleties of the lexical meanings of words in different languages, the book "Understanding cultures through keywords" - there, using the example of the expanded lexical meaning "friend", the difference between cultures is described in detail and understandably for any amateur.

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