and baseball. The examples of general activities are playing, reading, writing, watching, and other gerunds. The examples of natural phenomena are weather,
fog, and humidity.
4. Theory of Meaning
In order to understand the language, we need to know the meaning of words. We also have to know the meanings of words when they combine into
phrase or sentence. There are two types of study of meaning in linguistics, which are
semantics and pragmatics. Fromkin, et. al 2000: 151 stated that semantics is study of linguistic meaning, such as morpheme, words, phrases, and sentences. It
means that the meaning is based what is listed on the dictionary. They also add that there are some subfields of semantics which are lexical semantics that is
concerned with the meaning of words and the meaning relationship among words; and sentential semantics which deals with the meaning of syntactic unit larger
than the word. When we read the dictionary, we will know the meaning of thousand
words. Our knowledge of the meanings will provide us to express our idea using them. The meaning of words is part of linguistic knowledge. Our mental
storehouse of information about words and morpheme is called lexicon Fromkin, et. al, 2000: 152.
There is also pragmatics, the study of how the context affects the meaning. It means that the meaning is based on the situation. Fromkin, et. al 2000: 182
gave an example on the following sentence: Amazingly, he already loves her. This
sentence cannot be interpreted as there are no referents for him and her. But if the sentence before it is John met Mary yesterday, the interpretation will be clearer.
5. Theory of Word Borrowing
Fasold and Connor-Linton 2006: 294 stated that linguistic borrowing is the adoption of elements from another language or dialect. The borrowed
elements are usually lexical items, known as borrowing words. It means that the morphological and syntactic patterns can also be borrowed. Fasold and Connor-
Linton 2006: 294 explained further that borrowed items are often changed to conform to native linguistic rules, a process known as adaptation in which foreign
sounds occurring in loan words are replaced by their nearest phonetic equivalents in the borrowing language. For example, English words like touring, team, tube,
and tank have been adapted in Japanese as tsuringu, tiimu, tyuubu, and tanku Fasold and Connor-Linton 2006: 294.
6. Theory of the Nature of Words
