(Figure 2)
To
sum up, the arbitrary nature of sign gives freedom to choose any form for
any meaning or conversely any meaning for any form. But this freedom does
not cause anarchy in the system of communication because this freedom is under
the control of social convention. It insists us to associate which concept
with which sound image. This explains by Saussure as in the following:
But to say that language is a product of social
forces does not suffice to show clearly that it is unfree; remembering that
it is always the heritage of the preceding period, we must add that these
social forces are linked with time. Language is checked not only by the
weight of the collectivity but also by time. These two are inseparable.
At every moment solidarity with the past checks freedom of choice. We say
man and dog.
This does not prevent the existence in the total phenomenon of a bond between
the two antithetical forces - arbitrary convention by virtue of which choice
is free and time, which causes choice to be fixed. Because the sign is arbitrary,
it follows no law other than that of tradition, and because it is based
on tradition, it is arbitrary (deSaussure, 74).
So, we can shortly say that, the arbitrary
relation between the signifier and the signified
is checked by the social conscious. As a concrete example
of this situation, the word of bonnet
just means 'a type of hat' in American English whereas it means 'the hood
of a car' in British English. That is, in the dialects of a single language
one signifier may associate with many other different signifieds. But apart
from this different dialectal meanings (signifieds) of a form (signifier),
any word may have the idiolectal
meanings, which is the result of 'the language of a particular individual'
the 'idiolect'. For instance, the word of infer
may not have the same meaning for different speakers as in (1) 'I infer from what you say that you are sick'
and (2) 'He inferred that he was fed
up with us'. In the first one the word has the same meaning with surmise or conclude whereas in the second it has a meaning as imply (Akmajian at.al., 216).
As it is seen above, as the arbitrary
nature of sign lets one signifier to associate with any signified under
the control of the social conscious, it may also let to happen the same
case in the individual conscious. Saussure explains this in his Course in
General Linguistics as the following: ''As it is a product of both the social
force and time, no one can change anything in it [language], on the other
hand, the arbitrariness of its signs theoretically entails the freedom of
establishing just any relationship between phonetic substances and ideas''
(76). As a consequence of this situation, it may not be a big problem when
a single form carries multiple meanings in a dialect but it is a serious
problem that, for an individual if a form associates with meanings different
from the social convention that it causes a kind of inaccuracy problem as
a result of the arbitrary nature of the sign. However, the arbitrary relation
between the components of sign does not present in the same level for every
kind of sign.
As it is recognized by the philosopher
Charles Sanders Peirce, there are three kinds of sign according to the levels
of the relationships between its signifier and signified. An icon
is the first kind in which the signified has the actual characteristics
of the signifier, as the second kind the index whose signifier has its characteristics
that naturally associated with its signified and lastly the symbol
is the third kind of sign in which the relation between its signifier
and signified is arbitrary or conventional (Hudson, 2-4). According to these
definitions, the picture of a horse is an icon, its neighing is the index
and the word of 'horse' is the symbol.
When we consider language as the most
common human communication way it seems that the kind of the sign which
are the components of the system is mostly the symbol and hence, its form
and meaning bind together with the arbitrary relation. At the point that
we analyze the nature of the sign as a reason of the inaccuracy problem
in the system, we should examine the meaning of the linguistic sign through
the semantic view. So, it needs to answer the question of 'what is the meaning
of the meaning'.
As it is stated in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language,
it is distinguished several different meanings of meaning in the book of Ogden
&Richards and some of them are quoted in the following:
John means to write. 'Intends’
A green light means go. 'indicates'
Healt means everything. 'has importance'
His look was full of
meaning. 'special
import'
What is the meaning of
life? 'point,
purpose'
What does 'capitalist'
mean to you? 'convey'
What does 'cornea' mean?
'refer to in the world'
Among the others the last one is 'the
closest to the focus of linguistic semantics' and even though this answer
is very narrow. The thing that we need is a definition, which can be found in dictionaries (Crystal, 100). But
if we say that the meaning of the meaning is definition so we should make
the definition of the definition in order to understand it. ''A definition
is an attempt to show the meaning of one word (or other linguistic expression)
by means of some other words which 'say the same thing'. That is, definitions
depend on the relation of paraphrase'' (Goddard, 26). In this respect, in
order to be a definition proper we should make the definitions of all the
other words that the definition consists of. Furthermore, as Cliff Goddard
writes in his book of Semantic Analysis,
a definition can be too broad or too narrow or it can have false components
(31-3). On the other hand, the dictionaries of almost all languages ''drive
from a tradition of prescriptive grammar and almost invariably have focused
on the written language. You can probably think of numerous words and uses
of words in current spoken, informal English that do not appear in dictionaries''
(Akmajian at.al, 216-7). Besides, as Saussure states, since the language is
not complete in any individual, the one who makes the dictionary does not
know the language perfectly. Because if anyone uses a words polysemously in
a different way he adds one more meaning to the word and this meaning should
also be listed in the dictionary. Considering all of these we can come to
the conclusion that the meaning of the linguistic sign is not just its definition
in a dictionary. So, what, then, the meaning of a linguistic sign can be?
If we cannot trust on definition as
the complete meaning of a sign, maybe we should consider the thing it refers
to in real world. When we focus on the concrete nouns such as 'tree', 'Kemal
Atatürk', or 'New York' we can come to the conclusion that their meanings
are the things they refer to. But when considering the words such as 'goodbye',
'freedom', or 'nothing', this is invalid. Hence, we come to the conclusion
that;
''Nor,..., is semantics easily able to cope with the study of how
language refers to this external
world - the notion of 'reference'. Rather, the primary focus of the modern
subject is on the way people relates words to each other within the framework
of their language - on their 'sense', rather than their reference'' (Crystal,
102).
In order to understand this more clearly,
it is enough to look to the words like 'nothing'. This word is not meaningless
but it does not refer anything. Even in concrete nouns the reference may not
be clear as in the word 'vehicle'. When we hear this word we can imagine a
truck, a bus, or a car. Even if we narrow the meaning of the word by saying
truck the reference is not clear either. Because, the truck can be big or
small, Chevrolet or Ford, red or black etc. At this point it would be better
to analyze the concept of reference together with 'signification'.
As it is seen in figure 3, reference and signification are the two different 'linguistic dimensions' of a linguistic
sign and all the words have not the equal value of them. Some of the words
like truth, sincerity, virtue do not refer anything in the real world but their sense is
rich. To put it another way their signification is more complex than the words
like Gloria and London. Because we would not easily answer the question of 'what is
the meaning of Gloria?' (Finch, 130-40). Furthermore, the reference of abstract
nouns can change individual to individual. For example, the word of 'love'
my associate with the case of sharing the both good and bag times for an individual
whereas it associates with the case of thinking about all the times passionly
for the other one. Conversely, the signification of concrete nouns can also
be different for people. A red rose, for instance, may have different significations
for different lovers through the concept of love. Because, during the speech
''both terms [signifier and signified] involved in the linguistic sign are
psychological and are united in the brain by an associative bond'' (deSaussure,
65-6). So, it is clear that neither the reference nor the signification can
be the equivalence of meaning.
During the communication
the words that we utter may have common features concerning to their reference
and signification. In these cases, inaccuracy is inevitable. At this point,
we should consider the differences and the similarities of linguistic signs,
in other words, their semantic features. For example, the word human may
refer both man and woman. Both of them are similar in being 'human' and 'adult' but woman distinguishes from man being 'female' and the difference of
man is the feature of being 'male'.
Like this example, man is different from bull
by being 'human' and from boy
by being 'adult'. These semantic features of the words called as conceptual sense. Although the semantic
features are about to be the explanation of the conceptual sense of the
linguistic sign according to the differences and similarities of it, it
should not be forgotten that ''a word may have more than one conceptual
sense'' (Finch, 140-1).
As we have seen above, the linguistic
sign consist of two units named signifier (sound-image/form) and signified
(mental concept/meaning) and the arbitrary relation between these units gives
us the freedom to choose any form for any meaning under the control of social
convention. In language the basic unit of the system is symbol whose form
and meaning bind together with the arbitrary relationship and hence, it is
necessary to examine its meaning. As we state above, the definition cannot
be the complete meaning because the definition can be too broad, too narrow
or it can have false components and the one who prepare the dictionary is
not able to know the all uses of the word. We neither cannot say that the
reference and the signification cover the concept of meaning for the reason
that both of them are not equal in each word and they can change from individual
to individual. Lastly, a conceptual sense of the word cannot be the complete
and the only meaning of a word since a word may have more than one conceptual
sense. Thus, in order to analyze the linguistic sign as a factor of the inaccuracy
in communication, we need to examine the meaning relations in sign.
2.2.1.2. Meaning Relations in Sign
After analyzing the meaning of a sign
we should also organize them considering their meaning relations. Words are
related with each other semantically ''by virtue of meaning form subgroups
within the lexicon of a language'' (Akmajian et.al, 225).
Synonymy, is
the semantic relationship which means the sameness of meaning it should
be remembered that it is very hard to find two words having exactly the
same meaning. As an example, the words of range
and selection are synonymous
it the sentence of What a nice __
of furnishings, but they are not in There
is the mountain __(Crystal, 105). Hyponymy,
on the other hand, ''where the meaning of one word is included in another;
for instance, the meaning of the word human
is included in woman and man; the meaning of say is included in tell,
promise, and denounce'' (Goddard, 16). Another semantic relationship is homonymy which is the state of being the
two words in the same form but different meaning as in the words mail (armour) and mail (post). And polysemy means
having a word more than one meaning. For example, the word mad refers to both the mentally disordered person and a very angry
person. The important point here is that, polysemy distinguishes from homonymy
in the way that the meanings in polysemy are related with each other but
in homonymy the meanings are completely different. In antonymy, a word has
opposite meaning to another as in black
and white. As Goddard states
words like up and down which are in complementary relation and words like hot and cold which are in gradable relation and some words are opposites in
relation like buy and sell are in incompatibility (Goddard, 16).
As we can see in our daily discourse,
the semantic relationships, stated above, may influence the accuracy in communication
in a negative way. With the combination of meaning problems in sign, these
relationships should be considered as a reason of this inaccuracy. But it
needs to be analyzed the source and the destination in the communication process
as the external (subjective) reasons.
2.2.2. Internal/Subjective Reasons
In order to see the roles of the participants
of communication through the process we have to be closer to them. Because,
both the sender and the receiver construct their own meanings in an inner
and subjective way and the process operates based of these meanings. For
the accuracy of communication these should be 'relatively similar'. Although
the system works properly in general, the inaccuracy during the process
is always possible because of the reason that ''the meanings constructed
by senders and receivers are seldom completely identical because individuals
differ in (1) the ways they originally store meanings in their memory systems,
or (2) the ways they recover meanings at the time of communication'' (DeFleur
& Dennis, 7). Another point on how meanings is not objective for people
is explained by Geoffrey Finch as in the following:
...words don't always have the same
meaning for everyone. Leaving aside those speakers whose knowledge of the
language is imperfect, it is still the case that many words do not convey
a uniform meaning because our understanding of them is not uniform. The
linguist Nelson Francis has said, 'words do not have meanings, people have
meanings for words' (1967, p.119). If this is the case it raises very real
problems for successful communication. .......... The speaker encodes the
meaning and the listener decodes it. But this is an unreal view of communication.
It is very rarely that we understand an idea exactly the same way as the
speaker intends us to. Words aren't sufficient to achieve that. .......
there is a tendency to think that abstract nouns such as beauty
and love have the same precise reference as
concrete nouns like table or chair. But this is really a trick of the mind.
In reality we are surrounded my mysteries, kept convenient at bay for us
by the conventional categories of language (134).
As an addition to this, Finch also
tells about the four separate interpretations of any discourse in his book
of How to Study Linguistics. These are (1)
the 'surface or open' meaning of which both the sender and the receiver are
aware of and (2) the 'speaker's or concealed' meaning which is not completely
clear for the hearer as (3) the 'hearer's or blind' meaning which is not completely
clear for the speaker and lastly (4) the 'listener's of hidden' meaning of
which any third person is aware of but is not known by the participants of
the discourse (136). When we consider these all, the question of 'How
we interpret the sign?' arises. In this part of the essay, we examine
the individual features of the parts to see how they affect the procedure
and how they cause to interpret the sign. In this respect, we analyze the
psychological side of communication process.
2.2.2.1. Perception of World
Language is a means that we use to
externalize the outer world which we perceive and interpret. It is a fact
that the development of language is coming with the development of cognition.
As it is stated by Finch, ''before you can identify something called /tri:/
you must already know what one is: in other words, you must possess the
concept 'tree' '' (138-9). The psychological side of the individual's knowing
his own environment is also a fact that everyone perceive the world in a
different way, or else we could not talk about world view. By this way,
not only to the abstract words but also to concrete words we give different
associations and feelings and we remember them with different memories.
As a consequence of this, how we think is closely related with how the nature
of our language is (Gee, 305). But, the total of the thinking patterns of
the individuals' determining the world view of the people living in a social
environment that how we perceive the world is in relationship with the fact
that what kind of society we are living in. There are various social group
talking the same language on the Earth and because of this the people of
these societies give different reactions to the words though they have the
same meanings. To understand this clearly it is enough to look at the example
quoted above:
WIFE
: Do you want to go my sister's?
HUSBAND : Okay
WIFE :
Do you really want to go?
HUSBAND (angry) : You are driving me crazy! Why don't you make up your mind what you want?
In this example, the wife, who is 'a
native New Yorker of east European Jewish extraction', is willing to do
what her husband want and says clearly what she want and asks her husband
who is Greek, to say what he wants. And the husband says his idea in a short way as 'okay'. And since this short reply
is not enough for her she asks a second question (Do you really want to
go?) in order to understand if he really want to go. However, the husband
thinks that se change her mind and he finds her 'irrational'. Then he explodes
as (You are deriving me crazy! Why ....) and this time the wife finds him
'totally irrational' In this example both the husband and the wife have
a language problem because of their cultural backgrounds (Gee, 350).
It can be understood from
the example that the perceptions and the cultural backgrounds of people
influence the way in which they communicate and determines which word they
use by which intention.
Another case of the cultural influences
on words is the connotations. When we say man, the conceptual sense of this
words is clear. It is being adult,
human and male. But 'being a real man' is different from culture to culture
(Finch, 141-2).
So, we can shortly say that,
as individuals, we perceive the world in different ways and we give meanings
to words according to this perception. Then, we store these signs in our
mind again in a different way.
2.2.2.2. Storing the Sign in Mind
As it has already mentioned, language
develops in accordance with the cognition. Thus, we load the information
that we pick up from the world to the language and by this way we give meanings
to words. To answer the question of how people learn words' form and meaning
it is enough the take a look at child as he is in the case of starting to
know the world and language.
They [children] invent nonsense words
in which the sound are randomly connected to each other and take great delight
in playing at talking. In a sense they are imitating their first encounter
with words, before they could assign any meaning to them. Then, the language
they heard around them was a form of babble. Once the sounds acquire meaning,
however, they become transformed; they acquire what Ferdinand de Saussure
calls value, just as mental coin
does when stamped with the appropriate royal seal (Finch, 137-8).
If we examine this subject in a more
detailed way, it would be better to analyze the child's acquiring language
in terms of storing words in mind. It is the prototype theory, a very current
approach on to be the example of how the forms and meanings are stored in
mind. In this respect, for any kind of sense, for the word 'bird' for instance,
we think not about a turkey or a penguin but a robin or a canary as the usual
kind of bird. However, as long as our knowledge of world develops we identify
the other kinds as birds (Finch, 159).
We can see the clear examples of prototype
theory in another way. In their second year, children use words to name
the things in the way that the adults don’t. This is called as overextensions.
To give an example, a child may use the word 'uncle' not only for his father's
brother but also for the all friends of his father. ''It looks as if the
child has a smaller set of critical attributes for a word ....... than the
adult'' (Gee, 321).
To understand the prototype theory
better, we should look at the further explanations. In his An Introduction to Human Language, James Paul Gee resembles the child's
mind with videotape recordings. In the child's mind, the word 'shoe' for example,
associated with 'one or more shoe-involving episodes'. And the other things
have their own 'episodic recordings' in his mind. Depending on these recordings,
when the child is looking for a name for something like shoe, for the 'sock'
for example, he searches his recordings and found that the received object
is 'closer to something in the 'shoe' collection than anything else'. But
when he learn the true word for a 'sock' he does not overextend anymore (322).
This occurs not only for children, but the adults also name things in almost
the same way. Gee explains this as, ''There is no reason to believe that meaning
works differently for adults. Adults just have more and more sophisticated
tapes and match objects and actions to them in a perhaps more sophisticated
fashion'' (323).
Furthermore, whether the sign is linguistic
or non-linguistic, during the storing process it is inevitable that we associate
the signs with feelings and memories. So, it needs to analyze the associations
of words.
2.2.2.3. Associations
Depending on the unique nature of the
individual for both the abstract and the concrete words, people load different
associations and feelings to words. That is, signs have individual associations
on people. Even when we think about the proper nouns we realize that 'they
are laden with associations' and these associations are the including of meanings.
''To some people a word like beach might conjure up happy childhood memories of playing on the
sand: the word acts as a key to unlocking an inner world''. Because of this
reason even though some words have some general associations we can clearly
talk about a 'private vocabulary, unique to ourselves (Finch, 134-5). As the
associative meanings of signs depends on the cultural context (Finch, 141),
these associative meanings influence words through the different contexts
in different way. As an example of this fact we can consider 'smiling' which
have the meaning of being pleased in one case and the meaning of ridicule
in another way.
According to the associations, feelings
and memories assigning to words as well as meanings, people have different
attitudes for signs and by this way the sender's and the receiver's message
would also be different. Furthermore, these attitudes also construct our psychology
and by different moods we perceive the sign differently in each case.
2.2.2.4. Perception of Sign
The answer of the question of 'how
people perceive the signs' is explained by James Paul Gee within the psycholinguistic
perspective as in the following:
For example, psycholinguists have found
that if they artificially manipulate a word and excise one of its sounds
(phonemes), replacing the excised sound with a buzz, listeners frequently
fail to detect the distortion and 'hear' the sound that is missing. Thus,
if subjects are presented with /fotogr#f/ ('photograph' with the vowel of
'graph' replaced with buzz which I symbolize as '#') they often say they
have heard /fotogræf/ (photograph). They restore the missing sound, which
is not actually in the speech stream.
From this sort of evidence, the psycholinguists
can conclude that what people hear when they comprehend speech is not just
due to what they actually hear (the 'physical' evidence, so to speak, in the
speech stream), but also what their minds expect to hear (251).
In order to explain the
fact that 'people also hear what their minds expect to hear' in another
way we can give this interesting and funny imaginary example: Suppose that
three politicians of England, France and Turkey visit the president of US.
When they are walking the US president stumbles and the politician of England
says 'I am sorry' to state his apologies because he causes the stumbling.
The politician of France hears that and perceive the utterance as expressing
sadness. And he says 'I am sorry too'. But the Turkish politician interpret
this discourse in a very different way and as he perceive the 'too' as 'two'
(because the French politician says it as second and 'too' and 'two' are
homophonous) her says 'I am sorry three'.
This example shows us we perceive the
sign according to our mood. But the perception of signs also differs according
to the context. As an example of this case we can think the minimal pairs.
Let's say that I am making my monthly budget and suddenly I felt a headache
and request my friend to give the 'pill' on the table. As she knows that I
am dealing with accounting she perceive the sign of 'pill' in a different
way and gives me the shopping 'bill'. In this example we can clearly see that
the context affects the perception of signs.
It is also a fact that like our psychology
and context, our point of view also effect the interpreting way of us. For
instance, when we see the letters THEGODISNOWHERE
we can read the sentence either as 'the god is no where' or as 'the god
is now here'. To put it another way, with the same signs we can make opposite
meanings. This shows us that, how our perspective is also determines the
meaning of sign.
To sum up, we can say that during the
communication process the importance of perception and interpretation of sign
is as important as the sign's meaning. Because of the fact that the speech
is an interaction to which both the two parties participate, the case in which
the receiver interprets the message of sender in a wrong way is inaccuracy.
The inaccuracy problems of communication
is classified such as indirect speaking and non-literally speaking but the
most evident one of them is lexical ambiguity in the dimension of sign. Under
the last title of this essay we will analyze this problem according to the
facts that we explain so far.
3. LEXICAL AMBIGUITY
As we stated before, the case of not
being the sender's and hearer's message identical is the state of inaccuracy
in communication. When we consider this, it is clear that having the words
more than one meaning, to put it another way, being the words ambiguous is
a kind of inaccuracy in communication. In this part of the essay, we will
analyze the lexical ambiguity as a very concrete example of inaccuracy.
3.1. What is Lexical Ambiguity
''Lexical ambiguity is ambiguity in the form of a morpheme or word.
Lexical ambiguity results from the existence of homonyms, cases in which a
single form has two or more meanings, as in English [tu] (to, too, and two), and tear ([tır] and [t3r])'' (Hudson, 313). As we see in the examples
the italicized words are ambiguous, because they have more than one meaning.
In our daily discourse, in order to be our communication accurate it needs
that both the speaker and the hearer understand the same meaning for a word
which is ambiguous (Akmajian at.al, 224).
3.2. Types of Lexical Ambiguity
The ambiguity in lexemes is in two
kinds. The homophones and the homographs. If the pronunciation of a
word has two or more meanings it is homophone and if its spelling has more
than one meaning it is homograph (Hudson, 313). The pronunciation of /tu/
(to, too, and two) and the spelling of bat
(baseball bat and mouse-like flying animal) are the examples for homophones
and homographs.
3.3. Ambiguity in Perception
When we consider the arguments about
psychological features of sign which we analyze above, ambiguity can be related
with the perception of sign in terms of being homophonous and homographs.
The example of this case may be the minimal pairs (see pp [perception of sign]).
If we think about the case of perceiving the signs as in the example of nodding,
we recognize that its meanings of 'yes' and 'no' can change culture to culture.
Besides, even the sign with a single meaning can be ambiguous. Imagine that,
you are a hostess in a plane and you ask to a passenger that 'Would you like
to drink a cup of tea?' and he says only 'Thank you'. How do you perceive
this sign? Is it means 'Yes, thank you' or 'No, Thank you'? It can be both
of them.
During the speech, it is clear that
the form of the words is their sounds. This case of ambiguity is named as
homophones. During the speech circuit, what if we perceive the sign in a
such different way that a word of speaker have a different meaning for the
hearer? We can give an example of this in Turkish as in the following: A
man goes to a doctor who is always busy and confused, and says 'Doktor,
my heart is pounding abnormally' (pounding is 'atmak' in Turkish 'to-pound'='at-mak',
the Turkish morpheme of 'at' also means 'horse' in English). The doctor
answers as 'It shouldn't pound' ('it shouldn't pound' = 'atmaması lazım'
and 'atmaması'='shouldn't pound' and 'at-maması' also means 'horse food'
and more of this 'atmaması lazım' also means 'it needs horse food'). Since
the patient expect a drug or something like it, he goes to a chemistry and
asks 'I want to buy horse food please?' and the chemist says 'We won't sell
horse food, may be you can find it from a veterinarian'. Then the patient
goes to the veterinarian and asks for the horse food but the veterinarian
reply is 'Sorry, but it is used up'. ('to be used up'='bitmek' and the Turkish
morpheme of 'bit' also means 'louse'.) The patient, then, panicky goes to
the doctor again and says 'It is used up doctor.' and the doctor says unconsciously
'It shouldn't be used up' ('shouldn't be used up'='bitmemesi lazım' and
'bit-memesi' means 'teat of louse' and on the other hand 'bitmemesi lazım'
means 'it needs teat of louse') Although this kind of example is really
comic, these kinds of situations in which there exist ambiguity.
3.3. Semantic Degrees of Ambiguous Meanings
The problem of defining the ambiguity
properly and distinguishing it from other meaning relations including the
words which have multiple meanings depends on the existence of polysemy.
In polysemy, words have more than one meanings but the meanings are related
with each other. But there is such complicated cases that it is really hard
to make a proper distinction. For example, the word of table has two meanings which is as both 'a certain kind of furniture'
and 'the act of putting an item at a meeting on hold'. The arguments about
this is being the two words different for the reason of being the first
one a noun and the second one a verb. according to this argument there is
no relation between the two words (Akmajian at.al, 224). Thus, we can say
that the word of ambiguous is
also ambiguous.
3.4. Reasons of Lexical Ambiguity
As we analyzed it, the reasons of ambiguity
is based on both the mood, expectations, and the cultural backgrounds of
the participants of communication during the perception of sign and the
semantic properties of the sign itself. The reason is about the nature of
the sign, to put in another way, it is about the arbitrary nature of the
sign in general and it is also about the perception of sign in the speech
stream in specific. Because, as Saussure states, the arbitrary nature of
sign gives us the freedom of associating a signifier with a signified but
the social convention checks this freedom and this kind of nature of sign
does not cause any inaccuracy problem. Besides, during the act of perception
this freedom of assigning meaning to any signifier goes out of the social
control. Shortly, the reason of lexical ambiguity is based on the arbitrary
nature of sign and the communication part's perceiving act.
CONCLUSION
The function of the communication, which is the
most important feature of the human kind, is to make him sharing the thoughts,
information, and feelings with others. To put in another way, it is being
the message of both sender and receiver compatible. When this is not so,
the inaccuracy in communication occurs. On the other hand, the inaccuracy
in communication can be defined as any of the case in which we cannot explain
ourselves or we cannot understand the person talking to us, this is the
case of inaccuracy because in these cases the function of communication
is not accomplished.
In the first part of this essay, under the title
of Communication, we have made the definition of the process, we analyzed
the components of the process, and we explained the operation of the system.
After understanding communication in a technical way, we defined the case
of inaccuracy in the second part, and we divided
the reasons into two groups as (1) the ones about the sign itself,
the nature of the sign and its semantic features and (2) the others about
the participants of the process or the psychological side of the communication.
In this part, we recognized that, because of the arbitrary nature of the sign,
it is possible to establish any kind of link between the form and the meaning
and because of the psychological nature of the communication parts (sender-receiver
or speaker-listener), it is possible to change the meanings of the sign under
the social control. At last, in the third part of our essay, we analyzed the
reasons of lexical ambiguity which is a very concrete example of communication
inaccuracy, according to the facts stated in the second part. Then, we came
to the conclusion that, lexical ambiguity is the result of both the nature,
semantic features of sign and the psychological state of the participants.
About the general topic of our essay,
about the inaccuracy in other words, the most important factor is the psychological
nature of the participants of communication in our opinion. We believe that
it would be useful to analyze the thinking patterns of the people during
their interaction in a more detailed way.
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Finch, Geoffrey. 1998. How to Study Linguistics. London: McMillian Press
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Goddard, Cliff. 1997. Semantic Analysis, A Practical Introduction. New York:
Oxford University Press
Grover, Hudson. 2000. Essential Introductory Linguistics. Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers
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