Linguistics & Semantics

Lesson 5: Semantics

Semantic Proprieties, the Lexicon, Semantic Relations between Words

Understanding language implies three main points that are: a) Know the words and morphemes that compose them. b) Know how meanings of words combine into phrases and sentence meanings. C) Interpret the meaning of utterances in the context in which they are made. Lexicon is the part of grammar which deals with the knowledge speakers/hearers/readers possess about individual words, morphemes, including semantic properties.

Words that share the same property belong to the same semantic class ( for example the semantic class of ‘male’ words ). Semantic classes can share the same characteristics. In the case of the word ‘male’ we may see the class of words with the features ‘male’ and ‘old’. Thus, these particular features are devices for expressing the presence or the absence of them by using the sign plus and minus.

If we look at the lexical entries for words ‘man’, ‘father’, ‘girl’, ‘boy’ we shall see these words sharing or not the same features with the following sign (+ or -): ‘man’ (+ male + or –young +human ), ‘father’ (+male +human+ or –young +parent), mother (+female +parent +human + or-young ), ‘girl’ (+human + young + female), ‘boy’ (+young + human + male). Other lexical entries where some proprieties are shared are: ‘father, uncle, bachelor→ +male + human + adult (to the word ‘father’ we may also add +parent which distinguishes this word from ‘uncle and bachelor’).

The semantic proprieties also establish relationships between the words such as ‘synonymy, antonymy, polysemy, homophony’. Synonymy is the relationship between words or expressions that have the same meaning in some or all contexts while antonymy is the relationship between words that are opposite with respect to some components of their meaning: in fact antonyms are words that share all but one semantic propriety (man ~ woman, daughter ~ son).

The perfect synonym is rare, perhaps, impossible. This can be seen in the following examples: the words ‘youth’ and ‘adolescent’ refer to people of about the same age, but only adolescent is used to imply ‘immaturity’ (he always remains an adolescent man!). Antonyms normally contrast for a particular aspect of their meaning. For example ‘men and women’ are antonyms that contrast in gender while ‘arrive and leave’ contrast in direction although these verbs specify motion.

In the case of synonyms we can have words with different sounds but with same meanings such as in ‘remember/recall, car/automobile, big/large). There are also terms that have same sounds but different meanings [light (first meaning: ‘not heavy’; second meaning: ‘illumination’= one pronunciation but different in meanings)]. Other terms called polysemic are regarded as an association of lexical items with different but related meanings [to glare(first meaning: ‘to shine intensely’; second meaning: ‘to stare angrily’)].

A large proportion of a language’s vocabulary is polysemic. It is sufficient to look in a dictionary to find more examples about ‘polysemic words’, for instance, in the Roget's Thesaurus of English words and phrases.

  1  2  3  4  5  6  7