Lexical and Grammatical Meaning

Lexical and grammatical meanings are two types of meanings in semantic analysis.
A. Lexical meaning
Based on the Oxford Advance Learner’s Dictionary, lexical meaning is “the meaning of a
word considered in isolation from the sentence containing it, and regardless of its
grammatical context, e.g. of love in or as represented by loves, loved, loving, etc”. The lexical
meaning of a word is considered in isolation from its grammatical form. In the word ‘loved’,
the lexical meaning refers to the emotion of affection without considering its past form.
According to the free dictionary, lexical is “the meaning of a word in relation to the physical
world or to abstract concepts, without reference to any sentence in which the word may
occur”. It means that the lexical meaning of a word is a referring expression (that which
refers to some object, concept, or idea).
Lexical or word meaning is the meaning of individual lexical item. Lexical items are of two
types: the open class lexical items, such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs; and close
class lexical items such as prepositions, conjunctions and determiners. The open class items
have concrete meaning and they are referring expressions which are defined in the dictionary.
These items follow the semiotic triangle and refer to objects, concepts, or ideas in the real
world. These are also known as content words and their meaning may be understood in
isolation. For example, nouns are naming words which refer to people, places, things, ideas
or concepts, like Simon, Lucknow, happiness, table and so on. However, the closed class
items have meaning only in relation to other words in the sentence. When meaning can only
be determined in relation to other words in the sentence, it is called grammatical meaning.
B. Grammatical Meaning
Grammatical meaning is that type of meaning which can be understood only by considering
the structure of the sentence, or the word’s relation to other words in the sentence. For
example, in the sentence “I am going to the University”, there are three open class items: I,
going, and University; and there are three closed class items: am, to, and the. Open class
items have meaning of their own. However, closed class items produce meaning only in
relation to other words: ‘the’ has no meaning of its own. Moreover, the word ‘going’ consists
of go+ing, where go generates lexical meaning whereas ‘ing’ is the suffix which is used to
denote the continuity in action but it cannot stand alone.
According to Lyons (1995: 52) a lexeme may have different word-forms and these
word-forms will generally differ in meaning: their grammatical meaning – the meaning in
terms of grammar. For example, the forms of student and students differ in respect of their
grammatical meaning, in that one is the singular form (of a noun of a particular class) and the
other is plural form (of a noun of a particular class); and the difference between singular
forms and plural forms is semantically relevant: it affects sentence-meaning. The meaning of
a sentence is determined partly by the meaning of the words (i.e. lexemes) of which it
consists and partly by its grammatical meaning. For examples,
a. The postman bit the dog.
b. The dog bit the postman.
In the above sentences, just by reorganising the lexical items meaning completely changes.
This change of meaning occurs because of differing grammatical relationships.
Lyons introduces the term “categorial meaning” which is part of grammatical
meaning: it is that part of the meaning of lexemes which derives from their being members of
one category of major parts of speech rather than another (nouns rather than verbs, verbs
rather than adjectives, and so on). Thus, all lexemes with full word-forms have a
grammatical, more particularly, a categorical, meaning.
For example, the lexemes ‘easy’ and ‘difficult’ have the same categorial meaning: they are
both adjectives. Each lexeme, however, has certain semantically relevant grammatical
properties. The two word-forms easy and easier of the lexeme ‘easy’, though sharing some
part of their categorical meaning, differ grammatically in that: one is the absolute form and
the other the comparative form. This difference does not occur to the lexeme ‘difficult’ for
this lexeme has only one form difficult, which does not accept any inflection.
Though ‘easy’ and ‘difficult’ belong to the same category of adjectives, having the same
categorial meaning, they do not share all the grammatical features each has in terms of
morphology and syntax. Likewise, all the lexemes sharing categorial meaning do not have all
the grammatical meanings in common.
Grammatical words, also known as function words, have little definite meaning on their own
and are ambiguous without context. Some also function to impart the speaker's attitude or
perspective onto other words. These kinds of words define the structure of a sentence and
relate lexical words to each other.
Grammatical words include prepositions, modals and auxiliary verbs, pronouns, articles,
conjunctions, and some adverbs.
· Prepositions are used in a variety of ways, and often have ambiguous meanings
dependent on the context.
· Auxiliary verbs like "be" and "have" are used to shift a verb's time, while modals like
"should" or "will" also impact the sense of verb in various ways related to time or attitude.
· Pronouns have little meaning except as placeholders for general nouns.
· Articles also simply qualify nouns.
· Question words, like "why," alter the function of a sentence or replace a noun. Other
adverbs can shift the time or other senses of the lexical words they are connected to.
· Conjunctions link parts of a sentence together by establishing logical relationships
between lexical words.

Grammatical meaning consists of word-class and inflectional paradigm.

1. Word-class
When a dictionary lists the function of a word, the definition does at least two things: it
describes the word’s lexical meaning and also gives what is traditionally known as the part of
speech of the word, which modern linguists call the word-class; e.g. modern will be marked
as a n adjective, modernize as a verb, and modernization as a noun. The word-class is
essential, for when we use a word in a sentence, we have to take into consideration two
factors: its specific lexical meaning and the position it normally occupies in a sentence, which
is determined by the word class to which the word belongs.
2. Inflectional paradigm
When used in actual speech, words (mainly nouns and verbs) appear in different forms; e.g.
cat –cats, mouse – mice, to walk, walks, walked, to write, writes, wrote, written, etc. The set
of grammatical forms of a word is called its paradigm. Nouns are declined, verbs are
conjugated, and gradable adjectives have degrees of comparison. The lexical meaning of a
word is the same throughout the paradigm; that is, all the word-forms of one and the same
word have the same lexical meaning, yet the grammatical meaning varies from one word-
form to another, e.g. cat is grammatically singular in meaning while cats is
plural; writes denotes third person, singular, present tense, whereas wrote denotes past tense.
On the other hand the grammatical meaning is the same in identical sets of individual forms
of different words, for example, the past-tense meaning in the word-forms of different verbs
(played, sang, worked, etc.), or the grammatical meaning of plurality in the word-forms of
various nouns (desks, data, boxes, etc.).
C. The Difference Between Lexical Words and Grammatical Words
Lexical words supply meaning to a sentence, whereas grammatical words relate the lexical
words to one another. Look at the following sentence that only shows the lexical words: " ___
cat jumped ___ ___ tree ___ ___ dog ran ___." This looks like nonsense. All you know is
that it is about jumping cats, running dogs, and trees. It may be possible to guess the complete
meaning of the sentence, but you can't know for certain because cats, dogs, and trees can be
related in different ways. Now look at the sentence with the grammatical words re-inserted:
"The cat jumped into the tree as the dog ran forward." The sentence makes sense. Notice,
however, that if you put a different set of grammatical words in, you get a completely
different meaning: "The cat jumped from the tree after the dog ran away." You can see that
the grammatical words clarify the logical relations between the lexical words and define their
function in the sentence.
Although it's technical, the difference between lexical words and grammatical words is
straightforward. It is an important concept for linguists because the distinction seems to exist
in all languages, not just English. Understanding these differences helps scholars figure out
the relationship between the different languages, as well as the history of the English
language. It may even give some insight into how human minds work. Understanding these
types of words will help increase your comprehension of English.
Ambiguity
The ambiguity in a sentence may be lexical ambiguity or grammatical ambiguity. For
example,
a. I saw him near the bank.
b. The parents of the bride and the groom were waiting outside.
In sentence a the ambiguity is lexical because the readers are confused over the meaning of
‘bank’. The word ‘bank’ may mean (a) financial institution, or (b) the bank of a river.
However, in sentence b, the ambiguity is grammatical because the readers are unable to
identify whether it is (a) two separate noun phrase being ‘the parents of the bride’, and ‘the
groom’; or (b) the single noun phrase ‘the parents’ within which there is the prepositional
phrase ‘of the bride and the groom himself. The second structure means that both the parents
of the bride and the parents of the groom.
CONCLUSION
Lexical meaning is “the most outstanding individual of the word that makes it different from
any other word”. The lexical meaning of a word may be thought of as the specific value it has
in a particular language system, and the ‘personality’ it acquires through usage within that
system.
The categories of English words that are lexical include nouns, adjectives, most verbs, and
many adverbs.
Lexical meaning is dominant in content words, whereas grammatical meaning is dominant in
function words, but in neither is grammatical meaning absent.
Grammatical words include prepositions, modals and auxiliary verbs, pronouns, articles,
conjunctions, and some adverbs.
The difference between lexical words and grammatical words is straightforward. It is an
important concept for linguists because the distinction seems to exist in all languages, not just
English. Understanding these differences helps scholars figure out the relationship between
the different languages, as well as the history of the English language. It may even give some
insight into how human minds work. Understanding these types of words will help increase
your comprehension of English.
References:
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