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Dear specialists, What are the relationships between the language and meaning?

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Question added by mohammed almujahid , Taiz province , ministry of education
Date Posted: 2013/11/18
Hamza M Babiker
by Hamza M Babiker , Senior Translator, editor, content writer and media specialist , Freelancer

The relationship between language and meaning is often difficult and unclear because the sentences we create are very rarely unique. Even speech communities do not have common grammatical rules. Language is innate, and words have both denotative and connotative meaning.

Hedi Charfi
by Hedi Charfi , Teaching Assistant , Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences, University of Sfax

The relationship between language as a combination of sounds (the signifier) and meaning (the signified) is arbitrary as DeSaussure argues. In fact, the same signified (concept) is referred to differently by each language. For instance, a tree is referred to as "tree" in English, "arbre" in French, "shajara" in Arabic, "albero" in Italian etc. which proves that there is no logical relationship between the words we use (as combinations of sounds) and what they actually refer to (meaning).

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