THE LINGUISTIC SIGN

1. The linguistic sign

Any unit of language (morpheme, word, phrase, or sentence) used to designate objects or phenomena of reality. Linguistic signs are bilateral; they consist of a signifier, made up of speech sounds (more precisely, phonemes), and a signified, created by the linguistic sign’s sense content. The relationship between the aspects of a sign is an arbitrary one, since the selection of a sound form does not usually depend on the properties of the designated object. The peculiarity of the linguistic sign is its asymmetricality, that is, the capacity of one signifier to convey various meanings (polysemy or homonymy) and the tendency of the signified to be expressed by various signifiers (heterophony or homosemy). The asymmetry of the structure of the linguistic sign determines the language’s capacity for development.

MEANING IN NATURAL LANGUAGE

1. Meaning in natural language

A. Definition of natural language - in neuropsychology, linguistics and the philosophy of language, a natural language or ordinary language is any language that has evolved naturally in humans through use and repetition without conscious planning or premeditation. Natural languages can take different forums, such as speech, signing, or writing. They are distinguished from constructed and formal languages such as those used to program computers or to study logic

LEXICAL RELATIONS

1. Lexical relations

Lexical semantics (also known as lexicosemantics), is a subfield of linguisticsemantics. The units of analysis in lexical semantics are lexical units which include not only words but also sub-words or sub-units such as affixes and even compound words and phrases. Lexical units make up the catalogue of words in a language, the lexicon. Lexical semantics looks at how the meaning of the lexical units correlates with the structure of the language or syntax. This is referred to as syntax-semantic interface.