The Form and Meaning of Words: A Linguistic Discourse

Abstract

This paper is all about the fundamental facts and features of the form and meaning of words. It is a very intricate area of linguistics because even the native speakers often face a lot of difficulties and confusions when a word is in isolation. The term ‘form’ is the set order of words which may have various meanings depending on the context. However, ‘meaning’ refers to the semantic character of words that may have different forms such as synonyms. For example, a cat denotes both a male and a female creature (unless mentioned) and in Bangla, the same is applicable, e.g., ‘� ’ /biɽal/ is neutral of gender. The English word deer is both singular and plural (if not any numerical determiners are added to it, e.g., a deer, or three deer), the word red is either a noun or an adjective (without specification of whether it refers to a name of a colour or working as a modifier of a noun), and the verb read may be a present /ri:d/ and past /red/ form of the verb (as it differs only in pronunciation). Moreover, the same word has different grammatical identity across some major languages of the globe. For instance, the Hindi adjective ‘� ’ /ʃundɔr/ is used for both male and female. In Romance, ‘the sun’ is masculine and ‘the moon’ feminine whereas in German, ‘the sun’ is feminine and ‘the moon’ is masculine. To be more specific, English doesn’t have any grammatical genders like some other languages, such as Spanish, French, or German as English nouns do not need to agree with adjectives and/or determiners. However, English does use gender-specific pronouns like ‘he’ and ‘she’ when referring to people or animals, this is based on sex which is not a grammatical gender, rather a biological gender. So, this study would assist the readers as well as speakers of English, in particular, and also some other major languages understand the difficulties and possible solutions wherever needed for this very field of language.