Сторінка
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The semantic structure of the word ‘man’ in english and ukrainian languages

TABLE OF CONTENTS

I. Introduction. 3

II. Theoretical part: 6

2. Meaning and semantic structure of the word. 6

2.1 Meaning. 6

2.2. Typology of meanings. 8

2.2 Lexical meaning – notion. 11

III. Contrastive analysis of the semantic structure of the word

‘man’ in English and Ukrainian languages. 19

IV. Conclusions. 25

V. References. 26

I. Introduction

Since translation is, above all, an activity that aims at conveying meaning or meanings of a given-linguistic discourse from one language to another, rather than the words or grammatical structures of the original, we should look briefly at the most significant and recent developments in the field of study of "meaning", or semantics. Our interest here lies in the change of emphasis from referential or dictionary meaning to contextual and pragmatic meaning. Such a change represents a significant development, particularly relevant to translation, and to communicative register-based approach to translation.

The meaning of a given word or set of words is best understood as the contribution that word or phrase can make to the meaning or function of the whole sentence or linguistic utterance where that word or phrase occurs. The meaning of a given word is governed not only by the external object or idea that particular word is supposed to refer to, but also by the use of that particular word or phrase in a particular way, in a particular context, and to a particular effect.

Special interest is in how words and their meanings combine to form meaningful texts. What makes this task so difficult is the problem of lexical ambiguity. All words are ambiguous to some extent. Even words that appear to have one fixed sense can reveal multiple meanings in different contexts.

Objectives of this course paper is the word ‘man’ and it semantic structure, i.e. the combination of all meanings of this word in English and Ukrainian languages. Due to big variety of meanings such common used words in English like ‘man’, ‘hand’, ‘house’, ‘room’ cause some problem in translation into Ukrainian. 'Room', for example, can mean the physical object (e.g., "John painted the room") or the spatial enclosure defined by this object (e.g., "Smoke filled the room"). The space is just as much a part of the concept of 'room' as is the physical object. This logical polysemy has to be taken into consideration at the time of choosing the Ukrainian corresponding word.

The practical investigation is based mostly on the work with different dictionaries: monolingual, bilingual, encyclopedias, etymological, dictionary of synonyms. All these sources examine different meanings of word with the means of componential analysis. Componential analysis – linguistic analysis of the semantic structure of the word (a monosemantic word or a lexico-semanic variant of a polysemantic unit) as constituted by a set f minimal elements of sense – semes. A seme is a minimal unit of sense, an atom of lexical semantics distinguished on the basis of oppositions by the method of componential analysis. A seme is not expressed in a word in any material unit but it’s revealed and singled out through interrelations of the word with other words on a paradigmatic and syntagmatic levels.

There is a distinction between conceptual meaning, on the hand, and connotative, stylistic, affective, reflected, and collocative types of meaning on the other hand. Therefore we classify the last five types of meaning under one general category of associated meaning. There is a clear distinction between the logical meaning or the lexical reference of a particular word, and between the types of associated meaning. Such a distinction in the field of semantics between the lexical and the associated may remind us of the distinction between the semantic and the communicative approach as far as the literature on translation is concerned. The reason why there is a distinction, however, is that the conceptual meaning of a word is the type of meaning which could be mainly deduced in isolation from any other linguistic or even non-linguistic context, while the other types of meaning, whether associative or theoretical, are broadly speaking to be derived from the context of the utterance. So, this is relevant to translation and translation theories. It is usually easier to find the conceptual or the logical meaning of a given word, but that type of meaning is not always telling in the case of translation. However, it is often difficult to obtain even the lexical equivalent of a given item in translation, when the translation is taking place across two different languages that do not have a culture in common, such as translation from Ukrainian into English and vice versa. Yet, we should not indulge in a boring and rather worthless search for the lexical equivalent, since, even if such lexical items are easy to come by, they might not be helpful in translation.

II. 2. Meaning and semantic structure of the word

The branch of the linguistic studies concerned with the meaning of words is called semantics. The synonym to the word “semantics” is semasiology, but logists insist positively, that the field of studies of semasiology is all codes, not only language. 2.1. Meaning

Meaning – the reverberation in the human consciousness of an object, a quality of extralinguistic reality (a phenomenon, a relation, a quality, a process), which becomes a fact of language because of its constant indissoluble association with the definite linguistic expression. Meaning conveyed by a speaker is the speaker’s communicative intent in using an expression, even if that use departs from the expression’s meaning. Accordingly, any discussion of meaning should distinguish speaker’s meaning for linguistic meaning.

There exist a number of definitions of meaning:

- a reciprocal relation between name and sense, which enables them to call up one another (St. Ullmann);