''Gesamtbedeutung'' (
German
German(s) may refer to:
* Germany (of or related to)
**Germania (historical use)
* Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language
** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law
**Ger ...
for "general meaning", {{IPA-de, ɡəˈzamtbəˌdɔʏtʊŋ), in
linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...
, is the general meaning of the various uses of a
morphological element. The Gesamtbedeutung of a language's
past tense
The past tense is a grammatical tense whose function is to place an action or situation in the past. Examples of verbs in the past tense include the English verbs ''sang'', ''went'' and ''washed''. Most languages have a past tense, with some hav ...
, for instance, might be conceived as "distance from the present". This meaning might later be generalized to refer to events both temporally distant (e.g. ''the box was empty'') as well as separated in terms of reality or likelihood (e.g. ''the box might be empty'', ''if the box were empty...'', ''the box could be empty'', etc.)
In
Japanese
Japanese may refer to:
* Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia
* Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan
* Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture
** Japanese diaspor ...
, for example, the tense system has been reduced to a system of "past", "non-past", and "probable", where the latter two tenses share the Gesamtbedeutung of abstraction from the real. The past tense refers to events which are complete and definite, whereas the non-past refers to virtually everything else, including present and future events. The probable tense functions in much the same way as the non-past, but with a stronger sense of separation from the present reality.
For another example, the
English
English usually refers to:
* English language
* English people
English may also refer to:
Peoples, culture, and language
* ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England
** English national ide ...
word endings "-ing" and "-er" share a Gesamtbedeutung of
agency
Agency may refer to:
Organizations
* Institution, governmental or others
** Advertising agency or marketing agency, a service business dedicated to creating, planning and handling advertising for its clients
** Employment agency, a business that ...
(as opposed to that of
patienthood, represented by such
morpheme
A morpheme is the smallest meaningful Constituent (linguistics), constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistics, linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology (linguistics), morphology.
In English, morphemes are ...
s as "-ed" and "-ee"). One who is ''driving'' is, by definition, a ''driver''. Though differing in grammatical function, these two morphemes share a common Gesamtbedeutung.
Linguistic morphology