SEMANTIC
Martina Putri A.
121112160
Ismia Rahmah
121112163
Winda Perwita
121112175
SUMMARY
3.5
Lexical Relations
Lexicon can be said as a
network rather than a listing of words as in a published dictionary. Lexical
field is an important organizational principle in the lexicon. It is also a
group of lexemes which belong to a particular activity or area of specialist
knowledge. As we can see that the vocabulary used by doctors must be different
with the vocabulary chosen by the students. Dictionary recognizes the effect of
lexical fields by including in the lexical entries labels, such as medicine,
banking, etc. There are some types of lexical relations, below:
3.5.1
Homonymy
Homonyms are unrelated
senses of the same phonological word. There are two distinguish type of
homonyms, they are:
·
Homographs;
sense of the same written words
·
Homophones;
Senses of the same spoken words
In homonyms, we can
distinguish different types depending on their syntactic behavior and spelling,
such as:
1. Lexemes of the same syntactic category with the same
spelling. e.g: Bank ‘as the side of the
river’ and Bank as the financial institution.
2. Lexemes of the same category with different spelling,
e.g: Ring and wring
3. Lexemes of different categories with the same
spelling, e.g: bear (noun) à
animal, and bear (v)à carry
4. Lexemes of different categories with different
spelling, e.g: not and knot
In addition, the variations
in pronunciation have made not all speakers have the same set of homonyms.
3.5.2
Polysemy
Actually, there is a main
distinction between the homonymy and polysemy. Both of them; either homonymy or
polysemy are dealing with the multiple senses of the same phonological word,
but polysemy is invoked if the senses are judged to be related. Polysemy senses
are listed under the same lexical entry, while the homonymous senses are given
separate entries. What the best thing to identify the polysemy is the ‘relatedness’ factor.
For example which is taken
from the book about the word “Hook (n)”, there are some meanings of hook, some
of them are (1) a piece of metal of material usually metal, curved, or bent and
used to suspend or pull something or (2) short for fish hook, and many more à they are still related each other.
However, in word “hooker”,
there are two meanings of that word; the first is a commercial fishing boat
using hooks and lines instead of nets. And the second is the person or a thing
that hooks. à It is unrelated each other.
However, speakers may differ
in their intuitions and their historical fact. Their intuition may contradict
the each other.
3.5.3
Synonymy
Synonyms are different
phonological words which have the same or very similar meanings. For example:
Couch with Sofa
Lawyer with Attorney
Large
with Big
According to the Palmer
(1981), synonyms often have the different distributions along a number of
parameters. Synonyms may belong to the different dialects and become synonyms
because the speakers are familiar with the words. For example, Irish English
said ‘press’ while the British English said ‘cupboard’, those words are become
synonyms based on the different dialects.
Moreover, other words may
belong to different registers; the style of language, colloquial, formal, literacy,
etc. The synonyms also may portray the positive or negative attitude of the
speaker. For example; he naïve or gullible more critical than the ingenious.
There are some factors that
affects the synonyms, they are:
1. Region
aspect
English-Speaking said the police as the; police, officer, cop, copper,
etc, Irish English use the phrase ‘the guards’, British English ‘the old bill’,
and American ‘the heat’
2. Formality
aspect
Of course that slang term used in colloquial context instead of more
formal terms such as Police officer.
3. Speaker’s
attitude
Speaker’s
attitude is the further distinguishing factors, such as the words use, fuzz,
pigs, and many are revealing the negative speaker attitude, while the cop seems
so natural.
3.5.4
Opposites (Antonymy)
Antonyms are words which are
opposite in meaning. It is useful however to identify several different types
of relationship under a more general label of opposition.
ü
Simple antonyms
This is relation between words such that the negative
of one implies the positive of the other.
E.g.
dead/alive, pass/fail, hit/miss.
ü
Gradable antonyms
This is the relationship between opposites where the
positives of one term does not necessarily imply the negative of the other.
E.g.
Rich/Poor, Young/old, and many
ü
Reverses
This is a relation between terms describing movement,
where one term describes movement in one directionà and the other the same movement on the opposite
direction ß. Such as
come/go, ascend/descend, and many
ü
Converses
This is a relation between two entities from alternate
viewpoints
Such
as, own/belong to, above/ below, and employer/ employee
In this case, we can assume that the relations above
are part of speaker’s knowledge which is explained through the paraphrase.
ü
Taxonomic Sisters
- The term antonym sometime describes the words which
are at the same level of the taxonomy.
- Taxonomies are classification systems,
Such as:
- The colors: red orange yellow green purple blue brown;
we can assume that orange and yellow are the sister members of the same taxonomy.
3.5.5
Hyponymy
Hyponymy is the relation of
inclusion. A hyponym includes the meaning of a more general word. The more
general term is called the superordinate or the hypernym.
For example:
Aunt
and sister are hyponym of woman
Bird and elephant are hyponym of Animal
Hyponymy is a vertical
relationship in taxonomy while taxonomic sister are in horizontal relationship.
As the example below:
Women
Grand
mother
Sister aunt mother
3.5.6
Meronymy
Meronymy is a term used to
describe a part-whole relationship between lexical items.
For example:
Motorcycle
Review
mirror
Wheels engine lamp
·
Thus,
engine and wheels are meronyms of motorcycle
Meronym hierarchy are less
clear cut and regular than taxonomies, it is, as the example above, necessary
show that the part is to the whole. Meronymy also differs from the hyponymy in
its transitivy. Hyponyms are always transitive but meronym may or may not bet.
What the important thing is
that the networks to identify the meronymy are lexical. It is conceptually
possible to segment an item in countless ways but only some divisions are coded
in the vocabulary of a language.
3.5.7
Member Collections
This is a kind of
relationship between the word for a unit and the usual word for a collection of
the units, in example:
Ship
à
Fleet
Tree
à
Forest
Bird
à
Flock
3.5.8
Portion- Mass
This is a kind of relation
between a mass noun and the usual unit of measurement or division, in example:
Drop
of Liquid
Grain
of Salt
Sheet
of Paper
3.6
Derivational Relations
·
Derivational
means: The process by which words
are formed from existing words or
bases by adding affixes, as singer from sing or undo
from do, by changing the shape of
the word or base, as song from sing, or by adding an affix and changing the pronunciation of the word or base,
as electricity from electric.
·
2 examples of Derivational Relations as type
of lexical relations: a) Causative Verbs and b) Agentive Nouns
3.6.1
Causative Verbs
·
In 3 Semantic choices:
1) State: - The road is wide (adjective
describing state)
2) Change of State: The road widen (verb
describing change of state)
3) Causative: - The City Council widened the
road (verb describing the cause of this change of state)
·
In English lexicon there are number of
different ways:
a) The gates are open (adjective)
b) The gates open at nine (intransitive verb)
c)
The porters open the gates (transitive
verb)
ü Despite having the same shape but those
three words are grammatically distinct.
·
In the inchoative and causative verbs are
morphologically derived from the adjective:
a) The apples are ripe
b) The apples are ripening
c) The sun are ripening the apples
·
Another element in this relation can be
adjective describing the state which is result of the process called RESULTATIVE
·
It usually in past participle form e. g :
closed, broken, tired, lifted.
·
The full set of this relation can be seen in:
hot ( state adjective) heat (inchoative verb) heat ( causative verb) heated (resultative adjective)
3.6.2
Agentive Nouns
As we know that
Agentive Nouns means derived from verbs or actions and ends in the written
forms –er or –or. This nouns means the entity who/which performs the action of
the verbs for examples: teach (verb) – teacher. In other hand some nouns do not
obey the informal rule given such as in the example footballer is not derived
from a verb to football.
Another example
above such verb: Fly – object: pilot. A person who fly an aeroplane is not a
flyer but a pilot. This kind of convention called elsewhere condition in morphology. Other agentive nouns which have
to be listed in the lexicon are those for those there is no base verb for
example : noun = meter : instrument for making measurements which no
longer has an associated verb mete.
3.7.
Lexical
Universals
The lexicon is
one area where the differences between cultures are apparent and this raises
the question whether there are any universals of lexical semantics. Then, it
makes two notions:
-
Are there any universals of lexical
organization or principles?
-
Are there any lexemes that have
correspondence in all the languages in the world?
Those question above lead us to three important studies:
·
Berlin and Kay (1969): the study of colour
terms in different languages
·
Swadesh (1972): core vocabulary of different
languages
·
Wierzbicka (1992) : Universal Lexemes
(semantic primes)
3.7.1.
Colour Terms
Berlin and Kay (1969)
investigated the fact that languages vary in the number and range of their
basic colour terms. Though there are various ways of describing colours,
including comparison to objects, languages have some lexemes which are basic in
the following sense:
Basic colour
terms:
- The term is
monolexemic à terms like blue grey are not basic
- The term is not
a hyponym of other colour term à English red
is basic, scarlet is not.
- The term has
wide applicability.--> this excludes term like English blonde.
- The term is not
semantic extension of something manifesting that colour. à turquoise,
gold, and chestnut are not basic.
Basic Colour
term systems
Brent Berlin and Paul Kay
(1969) catalogued the color terms of 98 different languages. They presented
speakers of different languages with an array of 329 color chips.
-
Every language has at least two basic color
terms
basically: dark (“black”)
and light (“white”)
Bassa is a two-color
language ( Danià New Guinea)
-
Languages with three color terms add red (Tiv à Nigeria ; Pomo
à Hokan )
-
Languages with four color terms add green or yellow (Hanunoo à Austronesian,
phillippines)
-
Fifth
color term: either green or yellow (Tzetal à Mayan;Mexico)
-
Sixth
color term: blue (Tamilà Dravidian; India)
- Seventh color term: brown ( Nez perceà Penutian;Idaho)
-
The
rest: purple, pink, orange or gray ( Lebanese
Arabic, English)
The color term hierarchy
{white and
black}< red < {green or yellow→green and yellow}< blue < brown <
{ purple, pink, orange, gray.}
Berlin and Kay
(1969) also found evidence suggesting that there is a standard order in which
basic colour terms are added to languages. The hierarchy above shows the claim
in a relation A
In conclusion, the
perception of the colour spectrum is the same for all human beings but that
languages lexicalize different ranges of the spectrum of naming. As Berlin and
Kay’s work represents, the selection is not arbitrary and languages use the
same classificatory procedure. Berlin and Kay’s work can be interpreted to show
that there are universals in colour naming and thus forms a critique of the
hypothesis of linguistic relativity.
3.7.2. Core Vocabulary
Core vocabulary
could be used to trace lexical links between languages to establish family
relationship between them. The implication of this approach is that the
membership of the core vocabulary will be the same or similar for all
languages. Thus, comparison of the lists in different languages might show
cognates, related words descended from a common ancestor language.
i.e.: Cushitic
language Somali has “two” as “laba” and “nose” as “san”. However,
Kenyan Cushitic language has “two” as “lsama” and “nose” as “sam”.
The conclusion, the example above shows cognates.
3.7.3. Universal
Lexemes
The
only way to create definitions of things that are not biased by culture is to
use a natural semantic metalanguage consisting of words that are found,
with the same fundamental meaning, in every language in the world, and are
themselves indefinable.
Linguists of Natural Semantic Language rely on Semantic Primes for analysis (that is, simple,
indefinable, and universally lexicalized concepts) and reductive paraphrase
(that is, breaking complex concepts down into simpler concepts). Simply, the basic idea is that
we should try to describe complex meanings in terms of simpler ones.
List of
Semantic Primes
