Chapters 3 and 4 examined conceptual or ideational meanings, and Chapter 5interpersonal, social and affective meanings. This chapter considers themeanings words and larger stretches of language acquire through theirpositioning and occurrence in texts. And it uses this as a springboard todiscuss larger textual structures above the level of the sentence in variousgenres. By ending our survey of semantic meaning with genre we can appreciatehow all these different kinds of meanings might coalesce under the umbrella ofregister, which spells out the relationship between social context andideational (Chapters 3 and 4), interpersonal (Chapter 5) and textual (Chapter 6)meanings.

The chapter ends with a critique of the traditional approaches to semanticsillustrated so far in this book, summarising some of the problems and objectionsthat have already emerged. The elusiveness and instability of meanings isillustrated through a brief discussion of meaning change.

COLLOCATIVE MEANING

Part of the meaning of a word is the words and meanings which frequently occur inits textual environment, its normal collocations. “You may know a word bythe company it keeps.” Since collocations can now be computed byconcordancing programs, this kind of meaning has received a great deal ofattention recently, and Hoey’s theory of lexical priming, discussed atlength in my final chapter, exalts collocation to an overriding principle oflexical acquisition. As already noted, collocation is very important whenstoring words in the mind (Aitchison 2002).