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result of abstraction and generalisation all “concepts are thus
intrinsically almost the same for the whole of humanity in one and
the same period of its historical development. The meanings of
words however are different in different languages. That is to say,
words expressing identical concepts may have different meanings
and different semantic structures in different languages. The
concept of ‘a building for human habitation’ is expressed in
English by the word house, in Russian by the word дом, but the
meaning of the English word is not identical with that of the
Russian as house does not possess the meaning of ‘fixed residence
of family or household’ which is one of the meanings of the
Russian word дом; it is expressed by another English
polysemantic word, namely home which possesses a number of
other meanings not to be found in the Russian word дом.
The difference between meaning and concept can also be
observed by comparing synonymous words and word-groups
expressing essentially the same concepts but possessing linguistic
meaning which is felt as different in each of the units under
consideration, e.g. big, large; to, die, to pass away, to kick the
bucket, to join the majority; child, baby, babe, infant.
The precise definition of the content of a concept comes
within the sphere of logic but it can be easily observed that the
word-meaning is not identical with it. For instance, the content of
the concept six can be expressed by ‘three plus three’, ‘five plus
one’, or ‘ten minus four’, etc. Obviously, the meaning of the word
six cannot be identified with the meaning of these word-groups.
To distinguish meaning from the referent, i.e. from the thing
denoted by the linguistic sign is of the utmost importance, and at
first sight does not seem to present difficulties. To begin with,
meaning is linguistic whereas the denoted object or the referent is
beyond the scope of language. We can denote one and the same
object by more than one word of a different meaning. For instance,
in a speech situation an apple can be denoted by the words apple,
fruit, something, this, etc. as all of these words may have the same

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