The other component of sentence meaning is word meaning, the individual meanings of the words in a sentence, as lexical items. The concept of word meaning is a familiar one. Dictionaries list words and in one way or another state their meanings. It is regarded as a sensible question to ask of any word in a language, “What does it mean?” This question, like many others about language, is easier to ask than to answer.

It is through lexical resources that languages maintain the flexibility their open-ended commitments demand. Every language has a vocabulary of many thousands of words, though not all are in active use, and some are known only to relatively few speakers. Perhaps the commonest delusion in considering vocabularies is the assumption that the words of different languages, or at least their nouns, verbs, and adjectives, label the same inventory of things, processes, and qualities in the world but unfortunately label them with different labels from language to language. If this were so, translation would be easier than it is; but the fact that translation, though often difficult, is possible indicates that people are talking about similar worlds of experience in their various languages.

Languages in part create the world in which humans live. Of course, many words do name existing bits and pieces of earth and heaven: stone, tree, dog, woman, star, cloud, and so on. Others, however, do not so much pick out what is there as classify it and organize one’s relations with it and with each other with regard to it. A range of living creatures are mammals or are vertebrates, because people classify them in these ways, among others, by applying selected criteria and so determining the denotation of the words mammal and vertebrate. Plants are vegetables or weeds according as groups of people classify them, and different plants are included and excluded by such classifications in different languages and different cultures.

Time and its associated vocabulary (year, month, day, hour, minute, yesterday, tomorrow, and so on) do not refer to discrete sections of reality but enable people to impose some sort of order, in agreement with others, on the processes of change observed in the world. Personal pronouns pick out the persons speaking, spoken to, and spoken about; but some languages make different distinctions in their pronouns from those made in English. For example, in Malay, kita, which means “we,” including the person addressed, is distinct from kami, a form for “we” that includes the speaker and a third person or persons but excludes the person addressed. In Japanese and in several other languages, a variety of words denoting the first and second persons indicate additionally the observed or intended social relationship of those involved.

Other word meanings are even more language- and culture-bound and, in consequence, harder to translate. Right and wrong, theft, inheritance, property, debt, sin, and crime are just a few of the words regulating one’s conduct and relations with one’s fellows in a particular culture. Translation becomes progressively harder as one moves to languages of more remote cultures, and it has been said that it requires “a unification of cultural context.” Insofar as a person’s understanding of the universe and of the relations between that person and other people is closely linked with the language used, it must be assumed, and the evidence confirms this assumption, that children progressively acquire such understanding along with their language.

The great majority of word shapes bear no direct relation to their lexical meanings. If they did, languages would be more alike. What are called onomatopoeic words have some similarity in shape through different languages: French coucou, English cuckoo, and German Kuckuck directly mimic the call of the bird. English dingdong and German bim-bam share several sound features in common that partially resemble the clanging of bells. More abstractly, some direct “sound symbolism” has been seen between certain sound types and visual or tactile shapes. Most people agree that the made-up word oomboolu would better designate a round, bulbous object than a spiky one. In addition, the appropriateness of the vowel sound represented by ee in English wee and i in French petit and Italian piccolo for expressing things of small size has been traced in several languages.

All this, however, is a very small part of the vocabulary of any language. For by far the largest number of words in a spoken language, there is no direct association between sound and meaning. English horse, German Pferd, French cheval, Latin equus, and Greek hippos are all unrelated to the animal so named, except that these words are so used in the languages concerned. This is what is meant by the term arbitrary in the second definition of language quoted at the beginning of this article. Vocabulary has to be largely arbitrary, because the greater part of the world and of human experience is not directly associated with any kind of noise, or even with specific gestures or hand shapes.

The relations between sentence structure and structural meanings are also largely arbitrary and tacitly conventional. The use of loudness and stress for emphasis in spoken languages as well as certain linguistic indications of anger and excitement are akin to nonlinguistic expressions of emotion and are somewhat similar across language divisions. But actual intonations and features such as word order, word inflection, and grammatical particles, used in maintaining distinctions in structural meaning, differ markedly in different languages.

General and specific designations

People can be as precise or as imprecise as they need or wish to be. In general, words are fairly imprecise, yet for particular purposes their meanings can be tightened up, usually by bringing in more words or phrases to divide up a given field in more detail. Good contrasts generally with bad, but one can, for example, grade students as first-class, excellent, very good, good, fair, poor, and failed (or bad). In this case, good now covers a restricted and relatively low place in a field of associated terms.

Colour words get their meanings from their mutual contrasts. The field of visually discriminable hues is very large and goes far beyond the resources of any vocabulary as it is normally used. Children learn the central or basic colour words of their language fairly early and at the same time; such terms as red and green are normally learned before subdivisions such as crimson and scarlet or chartreuse. It is well known that languages make their primary divisions of the spectrum of colours in different places; Japanese aoi covers many of the hues referred to in English by green and blue, while blue covers much of the range of the two Russian words goluboy and siny. While the actual colour vocabularies of languages differ, however, research by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay in the 1960s sought to show that “there exist universally for humans eleven basic perceptual color categories” that serve as reference points for the colour words of a language, whatever number may be regularly employed at any time. The claim remains controversial.

Ordinarily, considerable areas of indeterminate designation in colour vocabulary and in other fields are tolerated; between red and purple and between purple and blue, there are hues that one would hesitate to assign firmly to one or the other and on which there would be considerable personal disagreement. When greater precision than normal is required—as, for example, in listing paint or textile colours—all kinds of additional terms can be brought into service to supplement the usual vocabulary: off-white, light cream, lemon, blush pink, and so on.

The vocabulary of kinship terms varies from language to language, reflecting cultural differences. English distinguishes the nearer kinsfolk by sex: mother, father; sister, brother; aunt, uncle; and others. Other languages, such as Malay, make a lexical distinction of age the primary one, with separate words for elder brother or sister and younger brother or sister. Still other languages—for example, some American Indian ones—use different words for the sister of a man and for the sister of a woman. But beyond this any language can be as precise as the situation demands in kin designation. When it is necessary, English speakers can specify elder sister and female cousin, and within the overall category it is possible to distinguish first and second cousins and cousins once removed, distinctions that it is ordinarily pedantic to make.

The best example of infinite precision available from a strictly limited lexical stock is in the field of arithmetic. Between any two whole numbers a further fractional or decimal number may always be inserted, and this may go on indefinitely: between 10 and 11, 10 1/2 (10.5), 10 1/4 (10.25), 10 1/8 (10.125), and so on. Thus, mathematicians and physical scientists are able to achieve any desired degree of quantitative precision appropriate to their purposes, and hence the importance of quantitative statements in the sciences; any thermometric scale contains far more distinctions of temperature than are reasonably available in the vocabulary of a language (hot, warm, cool, tepid, cold, and so on). For this reason mathematics has been described as the “ideal use of language.” This characterization, however, applies to relatively few areas of expression, and for many purposes in everyday life the very imprecision of natural languages is the source of their strength and adaptability.