Chapters 3 and 4 discussed ideational or conceptual meanings of grammar andlexis, respectively. The other categories of meaning in Leech's taxonomy arecollocative and thematic, which are textual and discussed in Chapter 6, andreflected, connotative, affective and social which are (inter-)personal and thetopic of this chapter. The latter, social meaning, will be elaborated byreference to Crystal and Davy (1969), who point out that utterances might tellyou who the speaker writer is (idiosyncrasy), their age or when they werespeaking (age), where they come from (dialect ) and their relationship with thehearer/reader (status /intimacy).

In the lowest row of Figure 4.1 (p. 78) I suggested the existence ofsynonyms: lexical items with identical meanings represented bytwo different forms. It is probably the case that synonyms only exist if oneconfines oneself to conceptual meaning. Lexical items are seldom synonymous onall dimensions of meaning. For instance, ‘grandfather’ and‘grandad’ obviously differ on the interpersonal dimension offormality.

REFLECTED MEANING

Reflected meaning can be detected when a word’s meaning is affectedby lexical items with the same form but different meaning, e.g.intercourse meaning ‘two-way communication’disappeared from English to be replaced by discourse, becauseof the unwanted meaning ‘sexual intercourse’. Ortitbit changes its form to tidbit in USEnglish to avoid the reflection from tit, slang for ‘nipple’.Historically in the US, a sextet has been misleadingly called a quintet (Blake2007: 43). And Chinese often avoid the word-form /seɪ/, meaning‘four’, since it is a homophone for ‘death’. So, ifyou live on the “fiftieth” floor of a condominium in Hong Kong youmay well actually live on the thirty-sixth floor. Reflected meaning, as in theseexamples, drives the use of euphemism, which can even work cross-linguisticallywith less than competent translations. Chiaro (1992: 23) gives this example froma butcher’s shop window, probably owned by an Italian: “Sausagesmade without conservatives”. The correct word would bepreservatives,but the equivalent Italian word-formpreservative means ‘contraceptive’. (Anyavoidance of the similarity between a condom and sausage skin may beaccidental.) The converse tendency is comedians’ stock recourse to punsinvolving sexual innuendo.