The Exploration Of Word Meaning

Language meaning is always the common concern between philosophers and linguists. For one thing, it reveals the relationship between language and reality; for another, it clings to the issue of natural understanding. In this paper, I shall explore the issue of word meaning together with its acquisition. As for the relationship between word meaning and its reference, I take the view that they are totally different things. Word reference is the actualization or articulation of word meaning. The former has its individuality and uniqueness while the latter has the characteristic of being general. However closely word meaning and sentence meaning intertwine, I shall maintain that word meaning is independent of sentence meaning and they belong to different categories. The sentence meaning is its usage, which plays a vital role in what Mr. Wittgenstein calls "language game". Although word usages strongly support the variety of sentence use, word meaning still retain its own identification because word usage is just the form of word meaning, its possibility. The acquisition of word meaning is significant to human cognition because words dissect the reality and clarify the cognition. And words can do so just because word meanings only exist as elements of a system instead of separately referring to things or standing for pre-existing ideas. From this systematic perspective, I shall discuss the vagueness of word meaning. I then shall come to the dilemma of polysemy and raise a so-called trunk theory of word meaning. Finally, I shall focus on the issue of children's acquisition of word meaning as a totality.Needless to say, the author of this paper is fully aware of the limitations of this paper. He knows that he has ventured into an area in which any theory that has been proposed is controversial. He therefore believes that what he has proposed in the paper will only raise more issues or invite criticisms. The author will be only too glad to take criticisms from the reader because such criticisms will inspire him to continue his exploration in this obstacle-charged area.