SEMANTICS CHAPTER 3 english education.ppt

semantics

1. Semantics
Chapter 3: Word Meaning

2. The aims of lexical semantics
To represent the meaning of each
word in the language.
To show how the meaning of words in
a language are interrelated

3. Chapter 1
The meaning of word is defined by its
relationship with other word.
e.g. I saw my mother just now

4. Entailment
Entailment is a relation between one
sentence or set of sentence.
e.g. Everyone passed the examination
No one failed the examination

5. Words and Grammatical Categories
Different categories of words must be
given different semantic description
a.Names e.g Joko Widodo
b.Common Nouns e.g butterfly, car, orange
c.Pronouns e.g I, you, it, them
d.Logical Words e.g Not, or, all, any

6. Words and Lexical Items
LEXEME LEXICON
LEXICAL
ITEMS
Love, loves, loved, loving Dictionary
AFFIXES IDIOMS
PHRASAL
VERBS
COLLOCA-
TION

7. Problems with Pinning Down
Word Meaning
Ambiguity (has more than 1 meaning)
e.g. I was on my way to bank
e.g. Flying planes can be dangerous
Vagueness (single but not specific meaning)
e.g. He is a tall man

8. Ambiguity (has more than 1 meaning)
e.g. I was on my way to bank
e.g. Flying planes can be dangerous
Vagueness (single but not specific meaning)
e.g. He is a tall man

9. Lexical Relations
Homonymy
•Unrelated senses of the same phonological word
•Different with homograph(e.g. To,too,two) and
homophone (e.g. Desert, desert)
Polysemy
It deals with multiple senses of the same phonological word
but it is invoked if the senses are judged to be related.
•Sole “bottom of the foot” and sole “flatfish”
e.g. Relatedness: They are from the same Latin
word solea “sandal”
e.g. Historical development: derived via French

10. Synonymy
Different phonological words that have the same or
very similar meanings).
•They may have belonged to different dialects
e.g. press (Irish English) and cupboard (British
English)
•They may originate from different languages
e.g cloth (from Old English) and fabric (from
Latin)

11. Opposites (Antonymy)
to identify several different types of relationship under
a more general label of opposition. There are types of
Antonyms.
•Complementary antonyms, this is a relation between
words such that the negative of one implies the
positive of the other. e.g. Dead/alive (of e.g. animals),
pass/fail (a test), hit/miss (a target)
•Gradable antonyms, this is a relationship between
opposites where the positive of one term does not
necessarily imply the negative of the other. e.g
Rich/poor, fast/slow, young/old, beautiful/ugly

12. Hyponymy
includes the meaning of a more general word
e.g. dog and cat are hyponyms of animal
e.g. sister and mother are hyponyms of woman
Meronymy
Meronymy is a term used to describe a part–whole
relationship between lexical items. Thus cover and
page are meronyms of book. The whole term, here
book,is sometimes called the holonym

13. Member Collection
This is a relationship between between the word for a unit
and the usual word for a collection of the units.
e.g. Ship Fleet
e.g. Tree Forest
e.g. Fish Soal
Portion-Mass
This is the relation between a mass noun and the usual
unit of measurement or division.
e.g. Dropof liquid
e.g. Grainof salt/sand/wheat

14. Derivational Relations
Causative verbs
Causative verbs can be described as a state, change of
state (or inchoative), and causative
-an adjective describing a state
e.g. wide, as in the road is wide
-a verb describing a beginning or change of state
e.g. widen, as in The road widened
-a verb describing the cause of this change of state
e.g. widen, as in The City Council widened the road

15. Agentive Nouns
Type is derived from verbs and ends in the written
forms -er or -or. These nouns have the meaning “the
entity who/which performs the action of the verb.”
e.g. skier, walker, murderer, whaler, toaster,
commentator, director, sailor, calculator,
escalator

16. Lexical Typology
Polysemy
It seems to be a universal of human language that words
have a certain plasticity of meaning that allows speakers
to shift their meaning to fit different contexts of use.
Color Terms
is a word or phrase that refers to a specific color. The
color term may refer to human perception of that color
(which is affected by visual context).

17. Core Vocabulary
Core vocabulary refers to the small number of words
that make up > 70-90% of what we say on a daily basis.

18. Universal Lexemes
•Natural Semantic Metalanguage
It is a linguistic theory that reduces lexicons
down to a set of semantic primitives

19. •Universal semantic primes