Minstry of higher and secondary specialized education of the republic of uzbekistan

2. The Word and its Meaning
In modern linguistics, two schools of thought are widespread, which represent the main lines of modern thinking on the problem: the referential approach, which seeks to form the essence of meaning by establishing a relationship between words and things or the concepts they denote. A functional approach studies the functions of a word in discourse and is less concerned with what the meaning is than with how it works.
All major work on semantic theory thus far has been based on referential concepts of meaning. An important feature of this approach is that it distinguishes three components that are closely related to meaning: the sound form of a linguistic sign, the concept that is the basis of this sound form, and the referent, that is, which part or other aspect of reality is a linguistic sign. points out. The most popular referential model of meaning is called the "fundamental triangle".
CONCEPT
SOUND FORM —————————— REFERENT

As can be seen from the diagram, the sound form of a linguistic sign, e.g. [teibl] , our understanding of the piece of furniture it denotes, and through it is related to the referent, the actual table. A common feature of any referential approach is that the meaning is related to the referent in one way or another.

Meaning and Sound Form
The sound form of a word is not the same as its meaning, e.g. [d v] is a sound form used to designate a pearl-gray bird. However, there is no connection between this particular sound cluster and the meaning of the word pigeon. Connections are conventional and optional. This can be easily proved by comparing the sound forms of different languages ​​that have the same meaning: stil- stol-table — tisch.
This can be proven by comparing almost identical sound forms that have different meanings in different languages. For example: [ ni:s] - brother's or sister's daughter (English); nis - part of the face (Ukrainian).
To prove more convincingly the traditional and arbitrary nature of the connection between sound form and meaning, we need only refer to homonyms. The word case means something that happened, and case also means box.
In addition, if the meaning is connected with the sound form of the linguistic unit, it follows that the change of the sound form during the historical development of the word does not affect its meaning.