Words relate to perceptions and actions, how inference rules use them, how they relate to other words, and how grammar uses them {meaning}. Words have linked conceptual, phonological, syntactic, perceptual, and motor structures.
behavior
Meaning can be listener behaviors or reactions, including linguistic reactions. People have behavior patterns {gesture, meaning}, which cause behavior patterns that modify original behavior patterns. Meaning happens in social contexts. Objects do not have intrinsic meaning but only cause behavioral responses.
natural relation
Meaning can depend on natural and physical relations, independent of mind.
causes
Meaning can derive from causes and effects {causal theory of meaning}.
context
Meaningful messages carry context, which receivers use to decipher messages. Meaning can be only useful relative to systems of meanings or relationships. Meaning can be about effects on hearers or readers {tone, speech} {speech tone}, by context or intonation, to arouse, quiet, confuse, or understand. Meaning can be reference and sense understanding.
conventions
Cause-and-effect, similarity, and other relation concepts are social conventions {nomos}. Signs depend on social conventions and minds.
factors
Meaning can involve special factors or features. Factors can interact. Words, sentences, or paragraphs can have or not have factors or have them in different degrees.
mental states
Meaning can involve similarities and differences among mental states.
pattern recognition
Meaning can be pattern recognition. Objects have associated actions and attributes, which are necessary or sufficient conditions. Meaning is not perception, idea, description, or intention.
indexing
Meaning can involve indexing or labeling.
representation and movement correlation
Meaning can be relations that correlate changes or body movements with brain-representation changes. Perception and action always correlate. Motor behaviors and sense generalizations and distinctions evolved in tandem. Decisions depend on meaning.
association
Meaning can be relations among situations, events, or objects and so are classifications or associations. Distinguishing signs can carry meaning about something else, such as act of fleeing. Distinguishing marks can have meaning by convention, such as the word "flee". Meaning can be all words or object associations.
sense qualities
Sense qualities provide symbol references and meaning. Feelings and perceptions have meaning based on sense qualities. Concepts have meaning derived from feelings and perceptions.
shapes
Meaning can derive from similarities of written shapes to natural shapes {picture theory of meaning}.
sounds
Meaning can derive from speech-sound and natural-sound similarities {onomatopoeic theory of meaning}.
symbol
Symbol meaning can be relations to other symbols, which include perceptual, behavioral, and logical information. On the other hand, because symbols themselves have no meaning, relations among symbols have no meaning. Perhaps, semantic data is only syntax and representation, because everything follows laws.
sentence meaning
Sentence meaning is new information about environment. Sentence context, including grammar, determines information and changes with new sentences or words.
statement meaning
Statements are either true or false, must not be vague or ambivalent, must not be paradoxes, and must refer to existing things and events. However, most seeming statements are not statements, because they use words with different meanings in different contexts.
propositions
Meaning can be propositional statements about objects. Meaning can be about sentence types: command, statement, or question.
Social Sciences>Linguistics>Semantics>Meaning
6-Linguistics-Semantics-Meaning
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Date Modified: 2022.0224