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combination and the interrelation of which determine to a great
extent the inner facet of the word. These components are usually
described as types of meaning. The two main types of meaning
that are readily observed are the grammatical and the lexical
meanings to be found in words and word-forms.
We notice, e.g., that word-forms, such as girls, winters, joys,
tables, etc. though denoting widely different objects of reality have
something in common. This common element is the grammatical
meaning of plurality which can be found in all of them.
Thus grammatical meaning may be defined ,as the
component of meaning recurrent in identical sets of individual
forms of different words, as, e.g., the tense meaning in the word-
forms of verbs (asked, thought, walked, etc.) or the case meaning
in the word-forms of various nouns (girl’s, boy’s, night’s, etc.).
Comparing word-forms of one and the same word we
observe that besides grammatical meaning, there is another
component of meaning to be found in them. Unlike the
grammatical meaning this component is identical in all the forms
of the word. Thus, e.g. the word-forms go, goes, went, going, gone
possess different grammatical meanings of tense, person and so on,
but in each of these forms we find one and the same semantic
component denoting the process of movement. This is the lexical
meaning of the word which may be described as the component of
meaning proper to the word as a linguistic unit, i.e. recurrent in all
the forms of this word.
Proceeding with the semantic analysis we observe that
lexical meaning is not homogenous either and may be analysed as
including denotational and connotational components.
As was mentioned above one of the functions of words is to
denote things, concepts and so on. Users of a language cannot have
any knowledge or thought of the objects or phenomena of the real
world around them unless this knowledge is ultimately embodied
in words which have essentially the same meaning for all speakers
of that language. This is the denotational meaning, i.e. that

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