The Future of Education

Meaning is one of the most controversial and complex terms in the theory of a language. Without meaning there is no interaction of thought. Though ‘meaning’ can be provided through other means like body kinesthetic, pictures, signals, etc., language is the main mean of communication of thoughts and feelings among human beings. Semantics as a branch of linguistics is mainly concerned with how the ‘meaning’ is conveyed by the linguistic system consisting of structures like sentences, phrases, words, morphemes etc. Semantics studies all that is communicated through  language. Geoffrey Leech in his book semantics breaks down “meaning” into seven different types giving primary importance to logical or conceptual one. The five other types included in the associative meaning are Connotative meaning, Social meaning, Affective meaning, Reflected meaning, Collocative meaning as well as the last type thematic meaning. Meaning in a wider sense embraces all types with the alternative term' communicative value', which is the crucial importance of meaning. The aim of this paper is to review Leech's seven types of meanings and to observe how they are reflected in bilingual dictionaries. Examples of words, phrases and expressions from dictionaries have been extracted in order to investigate the use of all types in bilingual dictionaries. Meaning and its importance in expressing thought in different contexts from the source language to the target one, its translation and analysis when teaching and learning English lexicology and Semantics as well English as a second language, has been emphasized. Based on the lexicographic reflection the types of meanings which take a significant part in bilingual dictionaries are the social meaning and the affective one in both languages.

Keywords: linguistics, semantics, meaning, bilingual dictionaries, language.

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