ABSTRACT
This chapter begins the presentation of senses – a sense being a unit of the structure described in Chapter 2, roughly equivalent to what dictionaries give as the meaning of one word. It first introduces concepts that will be important in the rest of the chapter and the book: functions of language; “aspects” of meaning (namely, the speaker’s aspect, the hearer’s aspect, and the system aspect that mediates between them); the strata or “levels” of language; and linguistic and cognitive “areas” of meaning. Mainly, however, the chapter outlines and then develops the types of meaning, such as descriptive or “conceptual” meaning, and emotive meaning. The old conceptions of “function items” or “grammatical words” are reconstrued as a type of meaning – grammatical meaning. (Compare mathematics: in (3 + 2) × (6 − 1), the numbers have content, i.e. conceptual meaning, and the “+” and “×” signs have operational or “grammatical” meaning.) Type of meaning is the first main explanatory concept to be presented. Functions, aspects, strata, and areas of meaning are four secondary explanatory concepts
