Lexical Meaning (26-Feb-2004)
Lexical meaning refers to the meaning of individual words. Any word will have
semantic properties - connotations of meaning which will be understood
by someone who knows the "meaning" of the word. For example, the words
"horse" and "cat" both have the semantic property "animal". Individual
properties are sometimes referred to as semantic features and are
conventionally written using "+" or "-" to indicate whether the feature is
present or not. So for example:
| horse | +animal | +mammal | -aquatic |
| tulip | -animal | -mammal | -aquatic |
| owl | +animal | -mammal | -aquatic |
| whale | +animal | +mammal | +aquatic |
One way to test whether a word has a particular semantic feature is using a
contradiction test - forming a proposition which asserts the feature of
the word and seeing whether it makes sense. So:
- A dolphin lives in the water is OK, so dolphin is "+aquatic"
- A snapdragon is a mammal is not OK, so snapdragon is "-mammal"
Semantic features of previously unknown words can sometimes be inferred. For
example, if we hear "bloobies only grow in the Indian ocean", we can work out
that whatever bloobies are, they must be +aquatic.
In some cases, words have semantic properties which can affect the truth
value of a propostion. For example, "discover" has the feature "+factive",
meaning that it asserts the truth of the information being discovered. So
the following sentence doesn't seem right:
- She discovered that the moon was made of cheese
But because "said" doesn't share this feature, the following sentence sounds
more reasonable:
- She said that the moon was made of cheese
Lexical Relations
- homonyms are words that are "pronounced, and possibly spelled" the
same way but that have different meanings. E.g. "pair/pear", "duck/duck".
But the fact that they sound the same is no more than coincidence, and the
semantic properties of each word are distinct. Sometimes referred to as
homophones: the terms appear to be pretty much interchangeable so far as my
dictionary is concerned, but seems like "homonym" is preferred in this course
and in Fromkin
- polysemy means the existence of several related meanings in a
single word. For example, we could say "the person's heart" or "the heart of
the matter".
- synonyms are different words that have a similar meaning,
e.g. "sofa/couch".
- antonyms are pairs of words which have opposite meanings to one
another. These may be complementary, e.g. "alive/dead", "true/false",
or gradable, e.g. "hot/cold", "fast/slow"
- hyponyms are words that have more specific meaning than a more
general word. For example "cat" is a hyponym of "mammal". This is analogous
to subclasses in Java: a hyponym inherits all the semantic properties of its
parent term (called the superordinate term), and may be described using
the "kind of" relationship. Hyponomic trees are most useful for natural
classes, e.g. colours, animals, etc.. Sibling hyponyms are
co-hyponyms
Useful book readings for this lecture:
- Fromkin+al "An Introduction to Language" pp 173-187
Sounds, Grammar and Meaning page