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标题：On the Description of Meaning
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作者：Shirô HATTORI
期刊名称：言語研究
印刷版ISSN：0024-3914
电子版ISSN：2185-6710
出版年度：1953
卷号：1953
期号：22-23
页码：21-40,131
DOI：10.11435/gengo1939.1953.21
出版社：Japan Science and Technology Information Aggregator, Electronic
摘要：In the study of language, the author distinguishes three levels: 1) utterance, 2) sentence, and 3) form.“Utterance” is an actual event of speech, and according to him, “sentence” is an abstraction of the first degree, and “form” is an abstraction of the second degree. For instance, we think that various utterances: “Is this your book?” of various speakers correspond to the same sentence ‘ Is this our book ’ The meaning of the utterances differ according to the situations in which they are uttered. We assume, however, that the meaning of the corresponding sentence remain the same. Next, we assume that this sentence is composed of four words (i. e. minimal free forms): is, tbis, your, book . Words are abstractions from sentences. The meaning of words is more abstract than that of the sentence which they compose. The meaning of a sentence is not a mere sum of the meanings of the constituent words. Thus, in the above sentence, is and this , your and book are connected in meaning and then is this and your book are connected. The “interrogative” meaning which the word-order and the intonation denote does not belong to any of these words. Let us call the meaning of words or morphemes as “sememe.” In the study of sememe, we have to be careful of the following two points. It is extremely important to discriminate the sememe from the meaning of a fraction of utterance. On the other hand, we have to strive to get rid of view-points of the other languages, not only in the observations of a foreign language but also in the study of our own native tongue. As an illustration, the author tries to describe the sememes of some of the conjugational endings of Khalkha-Mongol verbs, commenting on Prof. Poppe's description. For example, while Prof. Poppe describes four meanings of the Mongol - na(--ne--no--nö ), the author sets up only one assumption of sememe: “the action which is grasped as momentary will surely be performed after the moment of utterance.” He also refers to the Tatar and Japanese languages. According to him, Anton Marty's analyses of meaning are deeply influenced by the German language. Marty deals with the German way of thinking rather than general laws of human thought.