Theory Geoffrey Leech Of Semantic - How language work
Geoffrey Leech in his book semantics breaks
down “meaning” in widest sense into seven different types
giving primary importance to logical or conceptual meaning.
The six other types are Connotative meaning, Social meaning,
Affective meaning, Reflected meaning, Collocative meaning
and thematic meaning. These seven types of meaning are
compared with the three types of lexical meaning.
The term semantics was used broadly to refer to the study of
meaning. It was also central to the study of communication.
Though the ‘meaning’ or the information one wants to
communicate can be conveyed through a number of means
like gesture, picture, signals, etc. language was the main tool
of communication of the human beings. Semantics as a branch
of linguistics was mainly concerned with how the ‘meaning’
was conveyed by the linguistics system consisting of different
unit structures like sentence, phrases, words, morphemes etc.
semantics as a study of meaning, which relates language to the
various aspects of non-linguistics reality, was also of interest
to various disciplines such as philosophy, anthropology,
psychology, communication theory etc.,
Semantics in the broad sense of the term can be considered to
study all that was communication by language, but some
scholars would like to restrict semantics to the study of logical
or conceptual meaning i.e. only those aspects of meaning
which are logically acceptable leaving out deviation and
abnormalities.
