59. What is conjoining? What is embedding? What is recursiveness?
“Conjoining” refers to a construction where one clause is co-ordinated or conjoined with another, e. g., “John bought a cat and his wife killed her.” “Embedding” refers to the process of construction where one clause is included in the sentence (or main clause) in syntactic subordination, e.g., “I saw the man who had killed a chimpanzee.” By “recursiveness” we mean that there is theoretically no limit to the number of the embedded clauses in a complex sentence. This is true also with nominal and adverbial clauses, e.g., “I saw the man who killed a cat who…a rat which…that…”
60. What is hypotactic relation? What is paratactic relation?
“Hypotactic relation” refers to a construction where constituents are linked by means of conjunction, e.g. “He bought eggs and milk.” “Paratactic relation” refers to constructions which are connected by juxtaposition, punctuation or intonation, e. g., “He bought tea, coffee, eggs and milk” (pay attention to the first three nouns connected without “and”).
61.What is semantics（语义学）?
“Semantics” refers to the study of the communication of meaning through language. Or simply, it is the study of meaning.
62. What is meaning?
Though it is difficult to define, “meaning” has the following meaning: (1) an intrinsic property固有特性; (2) the connotation of a word; (3) the words put after a dictionary entry; (4) the position an object occupies in a system; (5) what the symbol user actually refers to; (6) what the symbol user should refer to; (7) what the symbol user believes he is referring to; (8) what the symbol interpreter refers to; (9) what the symbol interpreter believes it refers to; (10) what the symbol interpreter believes the user refers to…linguists argued about “meaning of meaning” fiercely in the result of “realism”, “conceptualism概念论/mentalism心灵主义”, “mechanism”, “contextualism（文脉上的，前后有关系的）”, “behaviorism（行为学派，行动主义）”, “functionalism”, etc. Mention ought to be made of the “Semantic Triangle Theory” of Ogden & Richards. We use a word and the listener knows what it refers to because, according to the theory, they have acquired the same concept/reference of the word used and of the object/referent.