grammatical meaning
Definition
- Noun:
- The meaning contributed by a word's grammatical role or form: The component of a word's total meaning that arises from its grammatical function, its relationship to other words in a sentence, or its inflectional form (such as tense, number, case, or gender), rather than from its lexical or dictionary definition.
Usage
- The term "grammatical meaning" is used in linguistics to analyze and describe how syntax, morphology, and word function create meaning. It contrasts with "lexical meaning."
- It is often discussed in the context of analyzing sentences, teaching grammar, or studying language structure.
Examples
- In the word "books," the "-s" carries the grammatical meaning of plural number.
- The difference in grammatical meaning between "he walks" (present tense) and "he walked" (past tense) is signaled by the inflection "-ed."
- The word "their" has the lexical meaning of possession and the grammatical meaning of being a third-person plural possessive determiner.
Advanced Usage
- In linguistic analysis: Grammatical meaning is a fundamental concept in distinguishing between content words (which carry strong lexical meaning) and function words (which primarily carry grammatical meaning).
- Relationship to morphemes: Bound grammatical morphemes (like prefixes, suffixes, and inflections) are primary carriers of grammatical meaning.
Variants and Related Words
- Grammatical function (n): The syntactic role a word or phrase plays in a sentence (e.g., subject, object). This is closely related to grammatical meaning.
- Morphosyntactic features (n): Features like tense, aspect, mood, number, and case, which are central to grammatical meaning.
Synonyms
- Structural meaning
- Functional meaning
- Syntactic meaning (though this may emphasize sentence role over morphological form)
Related Concepts (Not Phrasal Verbs or Idioms)
- Lexical meaning: The core, dictionary definition of a word, independent of its grammatical role.
- Inflection: The modification of a word to express different grammatical meanings such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, and mood.
- Syntax: The arrangement of words and phrases to create well-formed sentences, which governs grammatical meaning at the clause and sentence level.
Noun
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the meaning of a word that depends on its role in a sentence; varies with inflectional form
