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Semantics Variety of Meaning Semantics is the study of meaning. The first problem that we face while trying to study meaning is that it is hard to define precisely what meaning means. The term can be defined in many different ways. Therefore, it is important to differentiate between different types of meaning. 1. Denotational theory of Meaning – According to the denotational theory, the meaning of a linguistic expression is the object that it refers to or denotes. For example, the meaning of ‘horse’ is a four legged animal of a certain type and the meaning of ‘table’ is a particular item of furniture. This theory implies that all expressions have a denotation and if the denotation of two expressions is the same, their meaning must be the same. The problems with this theory are that   i. All expressions do not have a denotation. There are some expressions like hello, and, empty, very, the etc. which do not refer to any object. So they have no denotati...

Grice’s Maxims of Conversation:                                            or The Principles of Effective Communication   When you write or talk, you generally do so with the purpose of conveying information. The better you are at conveying information, the more likely people are to understand and accept what you have to say. However, despite the importance of the ability to communicate effectively, we often make mistakes when we try to convey information to others. Some of these mistakes are relatively minor, and only make our communication slightly less effective than it could be. Others are relatively major, and lead to serious misunderstandings. Paul Grice has laid down four types of maxims to make our communication most effective. These maxims are given below.  Maxims of Quantity There are two main maxims of quantity: I. Give all the infor...

Structural Analysis and Tree Diagrams                  Tree Diagram showing the Morphological Structure of a Poly-morphemic Word We can use tree diagrams to show the internal structure of words, phrases or sentences. At the level of morphology, we can show the structure of a poly-morphemic word by dividing it into its hierarchical components. Let us take the word ‘unfriendliness’ and illustrate its structure by means of a tree diagram.                                                                              ...