The three major theories that informed the present study are reference theory, idea theory and use theory. These seek to explain what knowledge of a word’s meaning is. In this study, they were seen, not as exclusive one from the other, but as representing degrees or levels of word knowledge. To the three are added other theories namely; feature theory, prototype theory, definitional theory and stimulus-response theory which are given brief attention in this section. The discussion of these theories provides insights which informed how word meanings were tested in the present study.
Reference Theory
The reference theory of word meaning dates back to Aristotelian times where word meaning was what a word referred to (its referent). A dog is a word and what it means is the animal it makes reference to. A picture of a dog or a real dog would be the meaning of the combination of letters d.o.g. What a word or phrase refers to in the world is that word or phrase’s meaning (Lyons, 1981). Meaning = Reference. The word ‘doll’ would refer to all the dolls in the world and this is referred to as the semantic extension of a word. Using a referential theory of meaning, we can point to the things that words denote. We can teach a child the meaning of ‘dog’ by saying the word and pointing to its referent, the animal. In referential theories of meaning, words and phrases can be defined in terms of the things that they denote be they objects, actions, qualities, relations, and so forth. Nouns designate objects, verbs denote activities or actions, adjectives make reference to properties and so forth. Words are nothing but labels for what exists in the real world and sentences being made up of words merely mirror that reality. Reference is ‘aboutness’ of a word.
Such a theory of word meaning, while valid, is an inadequate explanation of word meanings and their knowledge. Waxman and Gelman (2009) posit that the view that a word’s meaning is its direct association to a portion of sensory/perceptual experience reduces words to nothing more than a feature of the experience(s) with which they are associated. Some words especially those referring to abstract concepts do not have perceptible referents and some word meanings can be understood without knowledge of their referents. First, the reference value is dependent on context not just on the word as in a small dog being bigger than a large
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mouse or a warm beer and a cold coffee being the same temperature. The antonym of ‘old’ could be ‘young’ or ‘new’ depending on whether the referent is animate or inanimate and we can talk about the length or height of a pole depending on its positioning. Second, languages have non-referential terms which have meaning and the referential theory is hard-pressed to explain how this is so. Abstract notions like love still encode meaning although they cannot be attached to a perceptible referent. Function words like ‘is, was, the, and’ do not have a reference class but they are still words.
There is also the challenge of explaining how co-reference terms come to have different meanings. The most used example of such are the phrases ‘morning star’ and ‘evening star’ both referring to Venus used by the philosopher Frege to demonstrate the critical flaw of the referential theory. From this example Frege distinguishes between a word’s semantic extension and its semantic intension with the former referring to all that a word denotes and the latter to the concept or meaning it evokes. Words produce meaning through both extension and intension. Extension is all the entities a word makes reference to whereas intension is the inherent sense a word evokes. The semantic extension of the word ‘dog’ refers to all the dogs in the world but the semantic intension may include things like animal, domestic and related senses.
The fact that the things words refer to are constantly changing adds a further limitation to the theory as an explanation of word meaning. Implicit in the referential theory is the assumption that one would know the differences between two referents once the words are known which, is not always the case. The theory cannot explain how it is possible for us to know that a car which we never saw is a car. It does not explain how we can understand the meaning of a word referent with only a partial experience of the object and its kinds. Why we understand the meaning of some words in the absence of their referents is largely unaccounted for by the referent theory. The theory favours an association between a word (mostly nouns) and the object it represents. Such a theory can only accommodate concrete vocabulary which can be associated to visually perceptible objects. Figure 3 shows the referent theory model and the relations between and among thought or reference, referent, and symbol.
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The dotted lines in Figure 3 represent the reference theory of word where symbols or words denote particular referents in an imputed relation. An alternative theory, hinted at in some of the limitations of the referent theory is the idea theory. On Figure 3, this would denote a causal relation where the symbol or word conjures a thought and vice versa.
Idea Theory
Idea theory credited to John Locke links a word to an idea rather than a referent. A word’s meaning is the idea the word evokes in the mind rather than the object it signifies. The idea or mental image one associates with a word is the word’s meaning. Booth and Waxman (2008) view words as ‘quintessentially symbolic’; and embodying meaning that transcends what is perceptible. The idea or ideational theory can also be referred to as the mental image theory where mental images constitute word meanings. The hypothesis is that one utilises one’s mental pictures to select word referents. Words merely mark or express that which is in the language user’s mind. “Words, in their primary and immediate signification, stand for nothing but the ideas in the mind of him that uses them” (John Locke, 1690, p. 225 in Locke, 1975). A word is nothing but the idea all language users who know it associate with it (Lyons, 1981). Within an idea or a mental image are common features for items related to the word. These common features give us the idea of what constitutes the word’s referent. Our idea of a car can embody components like wheels, engine, and body. It can also include functions like to carry, to move and so forth. When anything fits the description of a car we hold in our minds, then we call it a car. The idea then precedes the referent and exists independent of the referent. Holm and Karlgren (1995) see the ideational theory as shifting
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focus from the word and object as creators of meaning to the language users themselves. Waxman and Gelman (2009, p. 3) capture the essence of idea theory when they say “…“a dog” refers to an instance of the abstract concept “dog”, a concept that extends beyond the individual dogs that any of us will observe in our lifetimes.” It is this that enables one to recognize dogs one has never seen, as dogs. The theory also explains how words can refer to absent things which are not accessible to the senses.
John Locke (1690) however, acknowledges that despite the idea theory being more accommodative than referent theory, it falls short in accounting for some structural words which do not conjure up any ideas on their own. Such structural words like ‘if’ do not bring up any ideas independent of other words and so cannot be defined. Not every linguistic unit brings up an idea in the hearer’s or reader’s mind. A further challenge to the theory is that sometimes we come across a dog which does not conform to some of the characteristics of a dog we hold in our minds but we still are able to classify it as a dog. Conversely, we may encounter an animal conforming to the characteristics of a dog which we hold but we automatically can tell that it is not a dog. Many non-dogs (e.g. fake dogs) confirm ‘dog’ more than some dogs do (e.g. abnormal dogs). Could it be possible for one to have defining features of a dog which sufficiently fit all the dogs there are and is tight enough to exclude all the non-dogs.
Individuals do not hold uniform ideas about things and sometimes hold conflicting ideas about the same thing. If ideas constituted meaning, and we held ideas diverse one from the other, even as speakers of the same language, one wonders how communication would be possible. People do not agree on the simple properties of things like colour, taste, beauty, smell and so forth. The question one could pose is what then makes it possible for speakers of the same language, holding diverse mental images, to communicate intelligibly through language. Could there be basic acceptance properties of words and if there are, how does one explain the public consensus there is for those properties. The theory seems to suggest that individuals each have their own private languages. One could then only be certain that one’s words mean the same as other people’s words if they refer to things in the world and not just to ideas. Word meanings, it would appear, are more general and of too abstract a nature for any mental image to accommodate. Like the referent theory, the idea theory is untenable on its own as an explanation of words and their meanings. Such limitations in the idea theory also necessitate other alternative explanations to complement it as well as the reference
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theory. The use theory is one theory that complements the reference theory and the idea theory by proposing a different locus of word meaning from that of the other two.
Use Theory
Leading luminaries credited with the development of Use theory are Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Austin. The theory transfers the semantic burden from words to sentences by asserting that words only encode definite meanings within particular contexts. The meaning of a word resides in its use. Kintsch and Mangalath (2011, p. 349) assert that “[O]ne way to define the meaning of a word is through its use, that is, the company it keeps with other words in the language.” How words and sentences function in particular contexts is what assigns meaning to communication. Holm and Karlgren (1995) posit that meaning of words should not be sought in some realm as it depends on the whole context of use. The definite meaning of words is that assigned them by the context of a sentence. To use theorists, the fact that one word like ‘bank’ can have several meanings is testimony to the pivotal role of context in encoding the meaning of an utterance.
The challenge with the use theory is whether it is the actual uses of a word by speakers which give it meaning or possible uses of the word. The former would be too narrow to regard as the meaning of a word and the latter would be too broad to capture. Grice (1968) distinguishes between what words mean and what language users use them to mean. This then represents a serious challenge for an attempt to derive meaning from use.
Instead of relying on a single theory to explain how meaning can be extrapolated from words, this study combines aspects of each of the theories. The present study amalgamated these three theories in its three conceptions of word knowledge: word/concept recognition (reference theory), passive word knowledge (idea theory), and active word knowledge (use theory). Booth and Waxman (2008) posit that word learning operates at the perceptual and linguistic level initially and later at the conceptual level. The reference theory in this regard represents a lower level of word meaning knowledge with the idea theory and use theory representing higher levels of word knowledge. Some words also lend themselves to explanations based on one theory and other words are best understood from another theory’s perspective. In this study the theories are not treated as mutually exclusive. Earlier views of word meanings see words as having static meanings regarded as lexical entries which grammatically combine with sentence structures to give sentence meaning whereas the
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current conception is that “… word meaning is protean, its semantic contribution sensitive to and dependent on the context which it, in part, gives rise to” (Evans, 2006, p. 492). The earlier conceptions confined word meaning to denotational meanings relating words to a token whereas more current conceptions emphasise functional meanings.
These three dimensions; morphosyntax (form), semantics (meaning) and pragmatics (use) are represented by the three theories above. Further attempts have been made to explain how words encode meaning. What follows is a brief description of the feature theory, prototype theory, definitional theory, and stimulus-response theory; all of which broaden the understanding of words and how meanings are assigned to them.
Feature Theory
Feature theory posits that particular features which set a word apart from the others represent the meaning of a word. In componential analysis, minimal pairs like boy-girl which have similar features, are contrasted and differences generalized as features or parameters dictating the meaning of the word. Words sharing the same features would be considered different to the extent that they possess contrasting features. It is however, impossible to exhaustively decompose a word’s senses. An incomplete account of word senses or features generally suffices to assign meaning. Some features are more defining and central than others. There is the problem, however, that some word meanings are not easy to reduce to features, and that some features are infinite.
Prototype Theory
The prototype theory can be attributed to Rosch (1973) and Rosch and Mervis (1975). The theory posits that word meanings are described by a whole set of features. Of these, none is sufficient to carry meaning on its own and none is necessary as an individual feature. The meaning is assigned by the total number of features that denote the word. Wittgenstein’s (1953) mental image theory has its basis in prototypical images where objects are considered the same to the extent that they have a resemblance to other objects within a family. An apt example is that of the word ‘game’ which Wittgenstein uses. There are diverse kinds of contests which do not necessarily embody common features which we still recognize and label as games. A game may involve cooperating or competing parties, multiple players or a single player and so forth. Prototypical games would conform to most of what we think of as game features.
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Experiments have revealed that the recognition and recall of a category’s prototypical members is faster than that of non-prototypical members. The theory only identifies typical members of a category but does not delimit between concepts. The prototype itself is defined using prototypical features which themselves rely on the prototype. This is a chicken and egg challenge. The prediction of how individual words combine to encode phrasal meaning is not possible with the theory. The meaning of some phrases may not be the sum of the two forms of words making it up.
Definitional Theory
Definitional theory sees meanings as essentially definitional. Semantic features include those properties necessary and sufficient for membership of words in a category. Definitions of a fish should include all that every kind of fish is. It should not be possible to see a kind of fish which does not conform to the definition. In fact that would not be a fish. The definition should also exclude properties peculiar to some but not all kinds of fish. From a definition, new members to a category should easily be identified. It would however, appear that some words like ‘red’ defy definition without complicating them more. In this theory word, learning is based on perceptual experience. The challenge however, is in drawing up all the necessary and sufficient defining features of a word. The example of the word ‘game,’ made reference to earlier, is an apt one for this case as well.
The theories on word meaning discussed in this section dichotomise word meaning as either a perceptual or conceptual phenomenon, a dichotomy which cannot be sustained. Waxman and Gelman (2009, p. 2) identify four critical points concerning words, concepts, and development that have relevance to the way this study conceives word meaning, thus:
[W]ords do not merely associate; they refer. Words are quintessentially symbolic elements. Words and concepts are more than a collection of sensory/perceptual features. As children build their lexical and conceptual repertoires, they are also guided by abstract conceptual knowledge (e.g., animacy, intention, cause).
Words and concepts are not unitary constructs. There are different kinds of words and different kinds of concepts, and sensitivity to this variety emerges within the first years of life. Words are located within intricate linguistic and social systems. Thus, a word takes its meaning not merely from its history of co-occurrence with entities in the world, but also and importantly, from the linguistic and social systems in which it is embedded.
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4.4 Chapter Summary
The complexity of what word meaning entails is captured in that no single hypothesis can capture the realities of words’ encoding of meaning. Rather than using one theory, this study combines aspects of each theory to gain a comprehensive view of how words communicate meaning. Each hypothesis, at best, explains a subset of words whose meanings can be learnt in a particular way, and the learning contexts that are supportive of particular word-learning. The present study has considered the diversity characterising words’ encoding of meaning in the testing of learners’ word knowledge. The hypotheses have implications for how particular word meaning knowledge can be demonstrated in word knowledge measurements. The construction, form and administration of word knowledge tests, was as much informed by theoretical ideas about word knowledge in Chapter 3 as by those on word meaning in this chapter. Both Chapter 3 which theorises the notion of ‘word’ and ‘word knowledge’ as well as Chapter 4 which discusses how words communicate meaning significantly inform the present study’s research methodology, particularly the phase of determining the vocabulary knowledge of the learners.
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