意味生成에 關한 硏究 = A Study of the Generation of Meaning

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This study attempts to characterize how the meaning of a word may undergo change or generate various meamings in contexts, but still retain some features or vestige of its original meaning. For instance, man, which means a general person in the lexicon, has become specialized as paraphrased in the following classical examples: My man (=husband) is not at home. They are the King's men (=servants), He is an Oxfordman(=student). Or a word may acquire a figurative meaning as man in She is a man (=manly), eye in the eye of a needle, or hand in the hands of a clock. Thus primary meaning is taken here as the material with which the various peripheral meanings are generated, either connotatively or denotatively. For example, deer, whose meaning has been tremendously specialized, since Old English times, still retains the meaning 'animateness', the various tables in the contexts such as the table for breakfast, the time table, and the table of contents have the meaning 'flatness'.
The polysemical use of a word comes from association; we associate cattle with cow, bull, horn, rumination, slow, dull, etc., as exemplified in Tom's cattle are bullfighters, My reminiscence of her is always of cattle, or You are cattle! The field of association is a device for generating meaning. Compounding or making phrases or wordgroups, is another device for it, e. g., lion-hunting, blood-let, kill-joy, dark-blue, whitewash, noble man, take part in, a very pretty girl, his safe arrival. These devices make it possible for us to generate countless meanings with a small number of symbols(words).
Therefore, it is assumed here that some words have a more powerful generative capacity than others, because they are basic in terms of structural importance, i. e., semantic field and frequency. C. K. Ogden's Basic English, which is widely regarded as basic in this sense, is used as the source materials for this study. And in redefining or rephrasing, I selected 142 words as sememes from his 850 vocabulary items, and then tested their reproductive (generative) capacity by using the 142 words.

목차 (Table of Contents)

• Ⅰ. 序論
• Ⅱ. 意味의 定義
• Ⅲ. 意味의 두 類型
• Ⅳ. 意味의 生成
• Ⅴ. 意味生成의 實際
• Ⅵ. 結論