Using Venn Diagrams to Represent Meaning

Abstract

Learning a foreign language involves, as our students painfully discover, learning to cope with the elusiveness of meaning. The student beginning German is often not aware of the broad range of meaning inherent in an English word. That meet, for example, can be rendered with treffen, kennenlernen, or begegnen comes as a surprise-indeed, as a revelation. The challenge for the instructor is to organize the presentation of word groups of this kind in a way that highlights the relationships between the meanings of the words in question. Elementary and intermediate texts offer such groups in abundance, but there is considerable variation from text to text as to what groups are treated and where a given group is introduced.1 Hence it is helpful to have a general mode of presentation that can be used wherever the textbook introduces such a group, one that reinforces the text and yet can also be used independently of it. To this end I have devised a strategy for using Venn diagrams to portray meaning relationships. These diagrams, which are discussed in some detail in virtually any introductory logic text, take their name from the English logician John Venn (1834-1923).2 They represent logical or other relationships as areas in a plane. They can be used with great effect to make graphic the kind of inclusion, exclusion, and overlapping that characterizes the relationships between the meanings of German and English words. I begin by telling students that we can think of German words and English words as points in a plane. When they come across a new word in German, they unconsciously and erroneously assume that there will be a single English point corresponding to that German point But, I explain, they should think of the two words not as single points but rather as sets of points, or domains, in the plane. When they have encountered both treffen and kennenlernen and are perhaps surprised to see that the English verb meet corresponds to more than one verb in German, I offer e following diagram.