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Meaning, studied in philosophy and linguistics, as well as being central to the fields of literary theory and critical theory, the philosophical field of epistemology, and some branches of psychoanalysis, is a difficult concept to pin down. Questions about how words and other signifiers mean and what it means to say a word or phrase is meaningful or nonsense are important to an understanding of language and human experience, but the answers to such questions are elusive at best.
The branches of philosophy most concerned with meanings are philosophy of language and, to a lesser degree, philosophical logic and philosophy of mind.
Linguistics is sometimes divided into three aspects: pragmatics, syntactics, and semantics, which study, respectively, the use, construction, and meanings of linguistic expressions.
Modern philosophy of language began with Gottlob Frege's essay Ueber Sinn und Bedeutung (now usually translated as On Sense and Reference). Frege noted that names present several problems with respect to meaning. Suppose, as one might casually say, the meaning of a name is the thing it refers to. Sam, then, means Sam. But what if the objects referred to by the name does not exist? Is Pegasus, then, meaningless? Clearly not. There may also be two different names that refer to the same object: Hesperus and Phosphorus, for example, which were both once used to refer to the planet Venus. If the words mean the same, then presumably any sentence containing one means the same as a sentence containing the other. But in that case "Hesperus is Phosphorus" means the same as "Hesperus is Hesperus." This is clearly absurd, since you might learn something new by the former, but not by the latter.
Frege argued that it was therefore a mistake to think that the meaning of a name is the thing it refers to. Instead, the meaning must be something else - the "sense" of the word. Two names for the same person, then, can have different senses. Alternatively, the meaning of a name has two components: the sense and the reference. Each sense will pick out a unique referent, but one referent might be picked out by more than one sense. Frege argued that, ultimately, the same bifurcation of meaning must apply to most or all linguistic categories. Ironically enough, it is now accepted by many philosophers as applying to all expressions but proper names.
In linguistics the fields most closely associated with meaning are semantics and pragmatics. Semantics deals most directly with what words or phrases mean, and pragmatics deals with how the environment changes the meanings of words. Syntax and morphology also have a profound effect on meaning. The syntax of a language allows a good deal of information to be conveyed even when the specific words used are not known to the listener, and a language's morphology can allow a listener to uncover the meaning of a word by examining the morphemes that make it up.
The field of semantics examines the ways in which words, phrases, and sentences can have meaning. Semantics usually divides words into their sense and referenceThe distinction between sense and reference was an innovation of the German philosopher and mathematician Gottlob Frege in 1892, reflecting the two ways he believed a singular term (a proper name or a definite description) may have meaning, but supposed i. The reference of a word is the thing it refers to: in the sentence "Give the guy sitting next to you a turn", guy refers to a specific person, in this case the male one sitting next to you. This person is the word's reference. The sense, on the other hand, is that part of the expression that helps us to determine the thing it refers to. In the example above, the sense is every piece of information that helps to determine that the expression is referring to the male human sitting next to you and not any other object. This includes any linguistic information as well as situational context, environmental details, and so on. This, however, only works for nouns and noun phraseIn linguistics, a noun phrase is a phrase whose Head is a noun. For example, in the sentence Most young people in England have been to school the phrase most young people in England is a noun phrase. A noun phrase can be a single word: in See Jane run Jans.
When dealing with verb phraseA verb phrase is a phrase whose head is a verb. A verb phrase consists of a verb, often one or two complements, and any number of adjuncts. Examples: saw the man through the window gave Mary a book See also: linguistics, syntax, X-bar theory Syntax.s, one approach to discovering the way the phrase means is by looking at the thematic roleThematic role is the semantic relationship between a predicate (e. a verb) and an argument (e. the noun phrases) of a sentence. Thematic roles include: Agent: deliberately performs the action eg. Bill ate his soup quietly. Experiencer: receives sensory ors the child noun phrases take on. Verbs do not point to things, but rather to the relationship between one or more nouns and some configuration or reconfiguration therein, so the meaning of a verb phrase can be derived from the meaning of its child noun phrases and the relationship between them and the verb.
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