17 requests that is provided by Leech 1981, p. 15 might help to understand the
explanation better: iv.
I’m terribly sorry to interrupt, but I wonder if you would be so kind as to lower your voices a little’
v. Will you belt up?
By using different scale of politeness, people can see the speaker’s feeling toward the hearer or the situation shehe is facing. In this case, the tone of the speaker will
also affect the meaning.
e. Reflected Meaning
Reflected meaning deals with multiple conceptual meaning. The example of sentences or words that use this type of meaning can be easily found in the
poetry. In order to say death, a poet prefers to use ring of the bells of quittance,
journey to the immortal¸ and sleep in eternal peace. Albeit conveying the same
meaning, those three poetic synonym of death have different senses.
f. Collocative Meaning
Collocative meaning considers the connection of a word acquires on account of the meanings of words which occurs in its environment. The word
pretty and handsome have the same meaning of the term good-looking. However, they share different interpretation if some nouns are attached:
girl boy
boy man
woman car
flower vessel
vi. pretty garden
vii. handsome overcoat
color airliner
village typewriter
etc. etc.
18
g. Thematic Meaning
In thematic meaning, the writer or the speaker organizes the message by ordering, focusing and emphasizing so that it can fulfil the writer or speaker’s
intention. In doing so, the writer often use active or passive sentence to emphasizing the focus. Here are the examples:
viii. My brother owns the largest retail shop in Solo.
ix. The largest retail shop in Solo is owned by my brother.
Although the two sentence have the same meaning, they attract different attention. The first example vii emphasizes the subject or the doer my brother. On the other
hand, the second example viii emphasizes the object the largest retail shop. On the other hand, Frawley 1992 also divides meaning into several parts
or categories. First, he compares between two types of meaning. They are literal and implicational meaning. He says that literal meaning has something to do with
the state of affairs the expression represents. Therefore, he also calls literal meaning as representational meaning. He continues that literal meaning can be
inferred without knowing the context of the statement, sentence, or utterance. On the contrary, implicational meaning concerns the background, history,
circumstances, and so forth p. 2. Another way, it can be said that in contrast with the literal meaning, implicational meaning is contextualized.
By seeing that explanation from Frawley 1992, what is studied by semantics is the literal
meaning. While implication meaning which pay more attention to the context of the utterance is the major study in pragmatics.
19 Frawley 1992 continues with categorizing meaning into two categories;
encoding and grammatical meaning. Encoding and grammatical meaning are placed below the term decontextualized meaning. Analyzing the example ix is
necessary in order to understand encoding and grammatical meaning easier: x.
Tom bought some rice. The example x gives meaning to certain event buying and participants Tom and
rice by putting them together grammatically. The description of the event and its participants can be seen because they have grammatical relevance. The example
gives the information about Tom carried out the event and acted on rice. It can be inferred so because the sentence is in English which usually correlates the doer of
the action, which generally continues with the verb, which usually precedes with object, which frequently but not always act as receiver. The other languages may
have difference order and forms. However, the example x does not encode the knowledge of the social
status of speaker and participants. Other languages such as Javanese and Japanese have honorifics markers of the social position of the speakers, hearers, and
participants.
3. Theories of Ambiguity
