Associative Meaning: a Summary Term

Reflected meaning and collocative meaning, affective meaning and stylistic meaning: all these have more in common with connotative meaning than with conceptual meaning; they all have the same open-ended, indeterminate character, and lend themselves to analysis in terms of scales or ranges, rather than in discrete either — this-or-that terms. They can all be brought together under the heading of associative meaning, and to explain communication on these levels, we need employ nothing more sophisticated than an elementary associationist theory of mental connections based upon contiguities of experience. We contrast them all with conceptual meaning, because conceptual meaning seems to require the postulation of intricate mental structures which are specific to language and to the human species.

Associative meaning contains so many imponderable factors that it can be studied systematically only by approximative statistical techniques. In effect, Osgood, Suci and Tannenbaum proposed a method for a partial analysis of associative meaning when they published their ambitiously titled book The Measurement of Meaning in 1957. Osgood and his co-authors devised a technique (involving a statistical measurement device, the semantic differential) for plotting meaning in terms of a multi-dimensional semantic space, using as data speakers’ judgements recorded in terms of seven-point scales. The scales are labelled by contrasting adjective pairs, such as happy — sad, hard — soft, slow — fast, so that a person may, for example, record his impression of the word bagpipe on a form in the following way:

Statistically, the investigators found that particular significance seemed to lie in three major dimensions, those of evaluation (good — bad), potency (hard — soft), and activity (active — passive). It is clear, even from this very brief sketch, that the method can provide no more than a partial and approximate account of associative meaning: partial because it entails a selection from indefinitely many possible scales, which in any case would only provide for associative meaning in so far as it is explicable in scalar terms; approximate because of the statistical sampling, and because a seven-point scale constitutes a cutting-up of a continuous scale into seven segments within which no differentiation is made — a process similar in its crudity to that of cutting up the spectrum into seven primary colours. This is not to disparage the semantic differential technique as a means of quantifying associative meaning: the lesson to be learned is, in fact, that is only by such relatively insensitive tools as this that associative meaning can be systematically studied: it does not lend itself to determinate analyses involving yes-no choices and structures of uniquely segmentable elements.

Another important observation about the semantic differential is that it has been found useful in psychological fields such as personality studies, attitude measurement, and psychotherapy, where differences in the reactions of individuals are under scrutiny, rather than the common core of reactions that they share. This upholds what I said earlier in particular reference to connotative meaning: that whereas conceptual meaning is substantially part of the common system of language shared by members of a speech community, associative meaning is less stable, and varies with the individual experience.