Difference Between Lexical and Grammatical Meaning

Words are one of the sign systems that human beings use to communicate. They are made up of the signifier and the signified. The signifier is the set of sounds, images or forms that are associated with a referent; while the meaning is the idea or concept that is associated with a signifier.

Various authors consider that words can be classified according to their lexical or grammatical meaning.

The lexical meaning

The lexical meaning is the one that corresponds to words that have a conceptual content and that are significant in themselves, for which reason they can be presented in isolation in the discourse as statements and have been called full words . The words that designate beings, objects, qualities, actions, states, processes and circumstances have lexical meaning.

Lexical meanings are verifiable with material referents, that is, they can be associated with aspects of reality. For example, a dog corresponds to a living being that exists, fear is evidenced through a sensation that all people experience, theory corresponds to scientific postulates that many have heard of. 

words with lexical meaning

Words that contain lexical meaning are a matter of debate among linguists. In general, two trends are evident: a traditional and a modern one.

• For the traditional tendency, nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs are words of lexical content. These categories are defined below.

• For the modern tendency, nouns, adjectives, verbs (including copulatives), adverbs, prepositions and conjunctions are words of lexical content. Pronouns are also considered lexical words. The new categories mentioned are defined below.

The lack of consensus between the two tendencies lies in the fact that words with lexical content such as nouns, adjectives and some verbs also have a grammatical meaning, because they can denote gender (for example, in cow/bull nouns), number (for example , in the nouns cows/bulls and in the adjectives bonita/bonitas) and verbal form (for example, in the verb to eat, which is in the infinitive), all these characterizations proper to grammar.

The grammatical meaning

The grammatical meaning is typical of words that are not significant by themselves and for this reason, they are known as stop words. They generally indicate the relationship between words with lexical content and denote characteristics such as gender, number, tense, mood, and aspect. These meanings are not verifiable in a material referent and therefore need context within a sentence to be understood.

words with grammatical meaning

Like words with lexical meaning, those with grammatical content are recognized according to a traditional and a modern trend.

• For the traditional trend, words of grammatical content are prepositions, conjunctions and the article, in addition to linking, auxiliary and supporting verbs. For their part, pronouns are considered to have attributes closer to those of grammatical units than to lexical words. The new categories mentioned are defined below.

• For the modern trend, basically the definite article has grammatical meaning.

Controversies regarding the distinction between lexical and grammatical meaning

Authors such as Morera affirm that delimiting the lexical and grammatical meaning is unfeasible from the point of view of the signifier. Some of their arguments are as follows.

• The semiological principle that indicates that each linguistic sign has a signifier and a signified in an interdependent relationship is fulfilled to the same extent in words with lexical content as in words with grammatical content.
• All words have a meaning, so differentiating them on this plane makes no sense. By distinguishing grammatical and lexical meanings you are not really comparing words by what they mean, but by how they are used.
• There are words with grammatical meaning that also have lexical meaning. For example, the verb to break contains lexical meaning, yet in sentences like break to cry it is used to carry out designative functions internal to language.
• Meanings are psychic reactions of the brain . This explains why, when a word is named, people associate it with a referent. In this sense, there are no reasons to sustain that lexical words have concrete or particular meaning and grammatical words have abstract or general meaning. The words with grammatical content have as much semantic load as the lexical ones since they trigger, exactly as in the case of these, psychic reactions of the brain.

Sources

Cuartero, J. «Lexical meaning» and «grammatical meaning» in the grammars of modern Spanish . Bulletin of the Spanish Society of Linguistic Historiography . 3:43-78, 2002.

Morera, M. Towards a new delimitation of the concepts of Grammar and Lexicology . Philology Magazine of the University of La Laguna . 13:277-290, 1994.