Английский язык. Ч. 1. Гималетдинова Г.К - 38 стр.

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desirable to deal with meaning by a more comprehensive treatment.
       At the outset it must be realized that the meaningful activity of speaking con-
sists immediately not of words as such, but of utterances or stretches of speech
consisting of sentences and delimited by pauses, silence, or the speech of other
people. Words are part of the material into which utterances may be analyzed,
and the stock from which speakers may be said to put their utterances together;
but they are not themselves actual discrete stretches of utterance, except in the
case of the limited number of utterances consisting of one word only. And, of
course, they are not all separated in speech by pauses in the way that in texts
printed on roman alphabets words are separated by spaces.
       Utterances are meaningful, and a child learns the meaning of many words
by hearing them in other people’s utterances and practicing them himself. This
process goes on all our lives, and we learn new words and extend and increase
our knowledge of the words we already know, as we hear and see them in fresh
utterances and used slightly differently from the ways which we are accustomed
to. The meaning of a word, therefore, may be considered as the way it is used as
a part of different sentences. What the dictionary does is to try and summarize for
each word the way or ways it is used in the sort of sentences in which it is found
in the language.
       The potential sentences of any language that may be uttered and under-
stood by a speaker of it are infinite in number, but they are formed from the total
stock of words known to the speaker at any time. A speaker’s word stock is al-
ways variable, but it may be regarded as fixed at any given point of time. Words,
therefore, are, in general, convenient units about which to state meanings, and no
harm is done provided it is borne in mind that words have meanings by virtue of
their employment in sentences, most of which contain more than one word. The
meaning of a sentence is not to be thought of as a sort of summation of the
meanings of its component words taken individually. With many words particular
meanings or uses are only found when they are used in conjunction with other
words, and these are often scarcely deducible from their other uses apart from
such combinations. The following phrases may be given as good examples: cold
war, feather-weight (boxing), wildcat strike (unofficial strike), white noise (acoustic
engineering).
       Reference and denotation are clearly a part of the meaning of many words in
all languages. The many problems arising about the nature of these relations
have been the subject of much philosophical discussion and cannot and need not
be treated at length here. It suffices to point out that by the use in sentences of
certain words one is able to pick out from the environment of speaker and hearer
particular items, features, processes, and qualities, draw attention to them, give or
elicit further information about them. All these things can be made the objects of
action and speculation, and, most importantly, recalled from past experience and
anticipated in the future provided only that the words used have had such asso-
ciations in the previous experience of speaker and hearer.
       But the relationship between the word and that to which it may be said to re-
fer is not a simple one. Proper names (John, Mary, etc.) refer to individuals as
single individuals, however there may be many people referred to like that. Words
like boy, girl, etc. refer to an indefinitely large class of individuals by virtue of their
being grouped together in some respect. In the same way, climb, fly, swim, and