General and Particular

General and Particular

         

          Language is a social cultural geographical phenomenon. There is a deep relationship between language and society. Man acquires and uses language in society. A language is an abstraction of abstractions, a system of systems. It has its further abstractions such as, dialects, sociolects, idiolects etc. That is why we have to keep in mind the geographical are in which this language is spoken, the culture and the society in which it is used. Only then our study of a language can be completed and comprehensive. So we should took at a language not only from within but also from without. We should study it from the points of view of form and functions.

          The nature of linguistic abstractions as we discussed above may be of different degrees. Whatever abstractions a linguist makes must be a part of the one living language. Some abstractions are of general nature while other are of particular nature the categories of phonetics, phonology and grammar are general, while the components of the lexicon of language are of particular. For example a dictionary or lexicon of a language explains each and every word separately and makes statements for each of them. They explain different shades of meaning of every word separately. Thus they make particular study of each and every word. While on the other hand, grammar, phonology and phonetics deals with general rules, classes and categories such as rules, details of pronunciation, transcription and orthography. Here word are stated in terms of their relations with other words in the sentences. In a dictionary we find description of classes, categories and structural rules of every word. The examples and illustrations are also given as per rules of grammar. That way a dictionary gives the individual information of each word. The Oxford English Dictionary gives such particular information with explanations of each and every word in particular.

          For example, it explains physical abstract the meaning of different words such as, ‘summit of a mountain’, and ‘summit meeting’, ‘depth of water’ and ‘depth of despair’. It also explains personal and impersonal meaning of different words such as ‘Prince Edward’ and ‘Cox’s Orange is a prince of apples.’ This dictionary also gives historical facts about different words. We also learn hoe certain nouns are sued as verbs and verbs as nouns. It also gives us an idea about homophonoes (words pronounced alike) such as ‘bear’ (an animal) and ‘bear’ (endure)

          Thus general and particular studies of a language are very useful in our study of a language.

The structural Treatment of Lexical Meaning

         

          Some Structuralists have tries to study language without meaning. But the study of a language without meaning is quite incomplete. In the ‘Vedas’ its meaning is treated as the essence of language and the speech without meaning has been called as the tree without fruit and flowers. Ancient Indian linguistics such as Patanjali and Vyas remarks that there is an eternal relationship between word and meaning. Patanjali points out those words naturally express meaning. There is a large variety of words in different languages of the world. There will be nothing like semantics if a word means the same thing in all languages. Some western scholars today have started talking about semantic universals and there is a wide agreement that  meaning is the soul of word.

          When we talk about meaning we talk about the ability of human being to understand one another when they speak. This ability to some extent is connected with grammar. There are many sentences which are perfectly grammatical, but meaningless. The most famous example is Chomsky’s sentence,

‘colourless green ideas sleep furiously’ – other similar example are

‘the tree ate the elephant’,

‘the pregnant bachelor gave birth to six girls tomorrow’ and

‘the table sneezed.”

In a sentences such as ‘Did you understand the fundamentals of linguistics? A linguist has to take into account two different types of meaning, lexical meaning and  grammatical meaning. They refer to objects, actions and qualities which can be identified in the external world. Such as, table, banana, sleep, eat, and red. These words have lexical meaning. Empty words have little or meaning. They exist because of their grammatical function in the sentence. For examples, ‘and’ is used to join items or indicate alternatives. These words have grammatical meaning. Grammatical meaning refers to the meaning of grammatical items such as ‘did’, ‘which’, ‘ed’ etc. Grammatical meaning may also cover notion such as ‘subject and ‘object’ sentences type such as interrogative or imperative. But the study or lexical items is more meaningful.

Collocation

          Collocation can be defined as the association of a lexical item with other lexical items. This word comes from the Latin word ‘Colloco’ which means ‘to be in the same place with’. This theory of collocation is very useful in the study of the structure of the vocabulary. For example the word, ‘ink’ collocates with words such as pen, paper, letter, notebook etc. ‘Red’ collocates with roses, blood, apple, tomato etc. ‘sea’ collocates with rough, cruel, blue etc. and ‘climb’ with mountain, hill, tree, peak, stairs etc.

          “The mountaineer climbed to the top of the mountain peak”. But we should be very careful while studying idioms and compound words because ehre we may not fin such collcoative relationship. For example, the word ‘maiden’ in modern English is scarcely used as a synonym for ‘girl’, but it is idiomatically used with ‘voyage’, ‘speech’, ‘over’ (in cricket) etc