SVEUILITE U MOSTARU

FILOZOFSKI FAKULTET
ENGLESKI JEZIK

LEXICAL RELATIONS IN ENGLISH SEMANTICS

Seminarski rad

Studentica: Anela Arai

Profesorica: doc.dr.sc. Ivana Grbavac
Mostar, lipanj, 2016.

CONTENT
Introduction .3
1. Homonymy and polysemy4

2.
3.
4.
5.

Synonymy and antonymy..6

Hyponymy and hyperonymy.8
Meronymy.10
Conclusion.10

Work cited11

Introduction
Lexical semantics (also known as lexicosemantics), is a subfield of linguistic semantics. The
units of analysis in lexical semantics are lexical units which include not only words but also
sub-words or sub-units such as affixes and even compound words and phrases. Lexical units
make up the catalogue of words in a language, the lexicon. Lexical semantics looks at how the
meaning of the lexical units correlates with the structure of the language or syntax. This is
referred to as syntax-semantic interface. Lexical items contain information about category
(lexical and syntactic), form and meaning. The semantics related to these categories then
relate to each lexical item in the lexicon. Lexical items can also be semantically classified
based on whether their meanings are derived from single lexical units or from their
surrounding environment. Lexical items participate in regular patterns of association with
each other.

In the narrow sense are semantic relations relations between concepts or

meanings.
The concept [school] should be distinguished from the word school. [School] is a kind of
[educational institution]. This indicates a hierarchical (or generic) relationship between two
concepts or meanings, which is one kind among a long range of kinds of semantic relations.
The concept [School] may, for example, be expressed by the terms or expressions school,
schoolhouse and place for teaching. The relation between school and schoolhouse is a
(synonym) relation between two words, while the relation between school and place for
teaching is a relation between a word and an expression or phrase. The relations between
words are termed lexical relations. 'School' also means [a group of people who share common
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characteristics of outlook, a school of thought]. This is a homonym relation: Two senses share
the same word or expression: school. Synonyms and homonyms are not relations between
concepts, but are about concepts expressed with identical or with different signs.

Relations between concepts, senses or meanings should not be confused with relations
between the terms, words, expressions or signs that are used to express the concepts. It is,
however, common to mix both of these kinds of relations under the heading "semantic
relations", why synonyms, homonyms etc. are considered under the label "semantic relations"
in in a broader meaning of this term.
1.

Homonymy and polysemy

The word Homonym has been derived from Greek term 'Homoios' which means identical and
'onoma' means name. So, Homonymy is a relation that holds between two lexemes that have
the same form but unrelated meanings. Homonyms are the words that have same phonetic
form (homophones) or orthographic form (homographs) but different unrelated meanings. The
ambiguous word whose different senses are far apart from each other and are not obviously
related to each other in any way is called as Homonymy. Words like tale and tail are
homonyms. There is no conceptual connection between its two meanings. For example the
word bear, as a verb means to carry and as a noun it means large animal. An example of
homonym which is both homophone and homograph is the word fluke. Fluke is a fish as
well as a flatworm. Other examples are bank, an anchor, and so on.
A clear case of homonymy 1: The word down in sentence (1-a) and the word down in
sentence (1-b). These are two words that happen to share sound and spelling. There is no
relation between them:
(1) a. Sarah climbed down the ladder.
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b. Sarah bought a down blanket.

2. A clear case of homonymy 2: The word bark in sentence (2-a) and the word Bark in
sentence (2-b).
(2) a. My dog would always bark at mailmen.
b. The trees bark was a rusty brown.
A polyseme the phenomenon of having or being open to several or many meanings. When a
word has several very closely related senses or meanings. Polysemous word is a word having
two or more meanings. For example, foot in: - He hurt his foot; - She stood at the foot of the
stairs.
A well-known problem in semantics is how to decide whether we are dealing with a single
polysemous word or with two or more homonyms. F.R.Palmer concluded saying that finally
multiplicity of meaning is a very general characteristic of language. Polysemy is used in
semantics and lexical analysis to describe the word with multiple meanings. Crystal and Dick
Hebdige (1979) also defined polysemy. Lexical ambiguity depends upon homonymy and
polysemy.
The difference between homonyms and polysemes is subtle. Lexicographers define polysemes
within a single dictionary lemma, numbering different meanings, while homonyms are treated
in separate lemmata. Semantic shift can separate a polysemous word into separate homonyms.
For example, check as in "bank check" (or Cheque), check in chess, and check meaning
"verification" are considered homonyms, while they originated as a single word derived from
chess in the 14th century.

A clear case of polysemy 1: The word Newpaper in the following sentences. The object that
got wet cannot fire people, and the company didnt get wet. Still, its obvious that the same
word is used to refer to them both.
(3) a. The newspaper got wet in the rain.
b. The newspaper fired some of its editing staff.
4. A clear case of polysemy 2: The word Good in the following two examples. In one case its
a moral judgement, in the other case its a judgement of skill.
(4) a. John was a good man. He donated a lot of money to charity.
b. Bill was a good painter. His drawings always were exciting to look at.
2. Synonymy and antonymy
The definition of synonymy as relationship between the senses of words requires a clear
separation of all the different senses of a words, even though some of these sense may be
quite closely related, as with hide, hide, and hide.
All of the examples so far have been of synonymy between predicates realized grammatically
by a word of the same part of speech, for example between adjective and adjective, as with
deep and profound. But the notion of synonymy can be extended to hold between words of
different part of speech, for example between the verb sleeping and the adjective asleep.
Example like these are not the kind usually given of synonymy, but they help to make the
point that the sense of a word does not depend entirely on its part of speech. Grammar and
meaning are separate though closely of language.
Synonym is a relation between predicates, and not between words (i.e. word forms). Recall
that a word may have many different senses, each distinct sense of a word (of the kind we are
dealing with) is a predicate. When necessary, we distinguish between predicates by giving
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them subscript number. For example, hide could be the intransitive verb, as in lets hide from
Mummy, hide could be transitive verb, as in Hide your sweeties under the pillow, hide could
be the noun, as in We watched the bird from a hide, and hide4 could be the noun, as in The
hide of an ox weighs 200 lbs. The first three senses here (the first three predicates) are clearly
related to each other in meaning, whereas the fourth is related. It is because of the ambiguity
of most words that we had formulate practice questions about synonym in terms of sentences.
The sentence - The thief tried to hide the evidence, for example, make is clear that one is
dealing with the predicate hide (the transitive verb). Hide is a synonym of conceal.
A traditional view of antonymy is that it is simply oppositeness of meaning. This view is
not adequate, as word may be opposite in meaning in different ways, and some words have no
real opposites. Hot is not the opposite of cold in the same way as borrow is the opposite of
lend. Thick is not the opposite of thin in the same way as dead is the opposite of alive.
Basic types of antonymy:
a. Binary antonymy
Binary antonyms are predicates which come in pairs and between them exhaust all the
relevant possibilities. If the one predicate is applicable, than the other cannot be, and vice
versa.
Example: true and false
If a sentence is true, it cannot be false. If it is false, it cannot be true.
Sometimes two different binary antonym can combine in a set of predicates to produce a fourway contrast.
Example: The word man, woman, girl can be placed appropriately in the following chart.
b. Converses
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If a predicates describes a relationship between two things (or people) and some other
predicate describes the relationship when the two things (or people) are mentioned in the
opposite order, then the two predicates are converses of each other.

Example: parent and child are converses, because X is the parent of Y (one order) describes
the same situation (relationship) as Y is the child of X (opposite order).
c. Gradable Antonyms
Two predicates are gradable antonyms if they are at opposite ends of a continuous scale of
values (a scale which typically varies according to the context of use).
Example: Hot and Cold are gradable antonyms.
Between hot and cold is a continuous scale of values, which may be given names such as
warm, cool, or tepid. What is called hot in one context (e.g. of even temperatures in a recipe
book) could well be classed as cold in another context (e.g. the temperatures of stars.)
d. Contradictories
A proposition is a contradictory of another proposition if it is impossible for them both to be
true at the same time and of the same circumstances. The definition can be naturally be
extended to sentences, thus a sentences expressing one proposition is a contradictory of a
sentence expressing another proposition if it is impossible for both propositions to be true at
the same time and of the same circumstances. Alternatively (and equivalently) a sentence
contradicts another sentence if it entails the negation of the other sentence.
Example: this beetle is alive is contradictory of - This beetle is dead.

3. Hyponymy and hyperonymy

In linguistics, a specific term used to designate a member of a class. For instance, oak is a
hyponym of tree, and dog is a hyponym of animal. The opposite of a hyponym is a hypernym.
n general, there are a number of hyponyms for each subordinate. For example, boar and piglet
are also hyponyms of the subordinate pig, since the meaning of each of the three words sow,
boar, and piglet 'contains' the meaning of the word pig. (Note that in defining a word like sow,
boar, or piglet, the subordinate word pig is often used as part of the definition: 'A sow is an
adult female pig.') Thus, it is not surprising that hyponymy is sometimes referred to as
inclusion. The subordinate is the included word and the hyponym is the including one."1
"Hyponymy is a less familiar term to most people than either synonymy or antonymy, but it
refers to a much more important sense relation. It describes what happens when we say 'An X
is a kind of Y'--A daffodil is a kind of flower, or simply, A daffodil is a flower."2
"House is a hyponym of the subordinate building, but building is in turn, a hyponym of the
subordinate structure, and, in its turn, structure is a hyponym of the subordinate thing. A
subordinate at a given level can itself be a hyponym at a higher level."

1 Frank Parker and Kathryn Riley, Linguistics for Non-Linguists. Allyn and Bacon,
1994
2 David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, 2nd ed.
Cambridge University Press, 2003
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4. Meronymy
Meronymy is a semantic relation used in linguistics. A meronym denotes a constituent part of,
or a member of something. That is, X is a meronym of Y if Xs are parts of Y, or X is a
meronym of Y if Xs are members of Y. For example, "finger" is a meronym of "hand"
because a finger is part of a hand. Similarly, "wheels" is a meronym of "automobile".
Meronymy is the opposite of holonymy. A closely related concept is that of mereology, which
specifically deals with part/whole relations and is used in logic. It is formally expressed in
terms of first-order logic. A meronymy can also be considered a partial order. A meronym
means part of a whole. A word denoting a subset of what another word denotes is a hyponym.
In knowledge representation languages, meronymy is often expressed as "part-of".3
5. Conclusion
There is no doubt, also - and especially - among experts, that our mental vocabulary is highly
organised. There are a lot of relations between the single words of a language and the
meanings of these words, respectively. Among linguists, these relations are called semantic
relations, sense relations or lexical relations. These semantic relations can be analysed
and described for the most part, and in the following, the most important ones of these
relations are to be presented.

Work cited

3 5.Rosario, B. & Hearst, M. (2001). Classifying the semantic relations in noun

compounds via a domain-specific lexical hierarchy. In: Proceedings of Conference
on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing; June 2001. p. 82-90.
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1. Green, R.; Bean, C. A. & Myaeng, S. H. (Eds.). (2002). The semantics of

relationships. An interdisciplinary perspective. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic
Publishers.
2. Lbner, S. (2002). A summary of Meaning relations (CH 5). IN: Understanding
Semantics. London: Arnold Publishers.

http://usuarios.lycos.es/filologica/loebner-

meaning.pdf
3. Frank Parker and Kathryn Riley, Linguistics for Non-Linguists. Allyn and Bacon,
1994
4. David Crystal, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, 2nd ed.
Cambridge University Press, 2003
5. Rosario, B. & Hearst, M. (2001). Classifying the semantic relations in noun
compounds via a domain-specific lexical hierarchy. In: Proceedings of Conference on
Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing; June 2001. p. 82-90.
http://bailando.sims.berkeley.edu/papers/emnlp01.pdf

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