Word Meaning (Communications)

How do we derive the meaning of words that we use in any form of communication

Well generally we have rules through which we interpret the combination of words to understand the message being conveyed

The first set of rules is known as syntactic rules and this concerns the order in which the words appear in a sentence

And the order of those words can actually change the meaning and how we perceive that language

Now, we've all probably seen the character of Yoda in Star Wars, who talks with a strange syntactic word combination or order of words

So, obviously, we have to work a little harder to understand exactly what he's saying, because oftentimes the very last word of the sentence will change the meaning

Well, this is uncommon to us, and it makes us work diligently to understand what's being said

Whereas generally we speak with a given word order so we can understand the context of what being said just by the order of what being said and how early words like no or positive words such as very or extremely that is accentuating words appear in the sentence

So, syntactic rules help us to interpret meaning. Next is semantic rules

And this applies to the meaning that we attribute to words beyond how they're spelled or how they grammatically appear in formal language

Generally, it means that we understand the meaning of the words beyond how they sound, how they're spelled, or the grammar that they appear

if you've ever seen children write words and they write it phonetically as it sounds

we understand exactly what they're saying even though the words are being said incorrectly

Or if you have someone with a stronger accent like I have, oftentimes we mispronounce words but those words still have the same meaning in the context as if I pronounced them correctly or had not tailed off in my R or used a very high A sound rather than a more

muted A sound that you might hear with a different accent. So these are semantic rules. And then

contextual rules concerns the context in which the communication takes place. Generally it

implicates social norms or social practices or just the immediate context of the situation

to attribute meaning to the words because the words you use will have a different interpretation

in that given context so they have a different meaning. So syntactic, semantic, and contextual rules

Now despite these rules oftentimes we still misinterpret the meaning of messages and communications

in a given context largely based upon our personal biases or our tendencies to

perceive or interpret something in a given manner So with that being said another categorization of how we give meaning to words is denotative and connotative A denotative meaning is simply the meaning as it appears in the dictionary

If the word is used, it has that meaning attributed to it and nothing different

A connotative meaning or the connotation of a word means that the meaning of the word is not as closely related to the formal definition of the word

but more related to the meaning attributed to the word based upon normal practices, social norms, or community norms

Slang is a very common example of connotative meaning. That is, oftentimes we use words in a particular way in a given situation that is outside of their normal denotative meaning

but it comes to mean something socially in society or it becomes a communal norm to use the word in that way

So with that being said, these are the common rules and ways we derive meaning from words in a communication