Word Meaning

Alan Jaelani, SS, M.Hum.

 Purposes
The traditional descriptive aims of lexical
semantics have been:
(a) to represent the meaning of each word in the
language; and
(b) to show how the meanings of words in a
language are interrelated.
 Word Meaning
I saw my mother just now.

The speaker saw a woman

• This knowledge follows from the relationship

between the uttered word mother and the
related, but unspoken word woman, representing
links in the vocabulary.
• The word mother contains a semantic element
woman as part of its meaning.
a. My bank manager has just been murdered.
b. My bank manager is dead.
c. My bank will be getting a new manager.

a. Rob has failed his statistics exam.

b. Rob hasn’t passed his statistics exam.
c. Rob can’t bank on a glittering career as a statistician.

a. This bicycle belongs to Sinead.

b. Sinead owns this bicycle.
c. Sinead rides a bicycle.

*The entailments in these sentences can be seen to follow

from the semantic relations between murder and dead,
fail and pass, and belong and own.
 Words and Grammatical Categories
Different categories of words must be given different semantic
descriptions.

a. names e.g. Fred Flintstone

b. common nouns e.g. dog, banana, tarantula
c. pronouns e.g. I, you, we, them
d. logical words e.g. not, and, or, all, any

Some types may be used to refer (e.g. names), others may not
(e.g. logical words); some can only be interpreted in particular
contexts (e.g. pronouns), others are very consistent in
meaning across a whole range of contexts (e.g. logical words);
and so on.
 Words and Lexical Items
The way of listing semantic words in a lexicon.
a. He scored with his left foot.
b. They made camp at the foot of the mountain.
c. I ate a foot long hot-dog.

We have three senses of the word foot. We could

represent this by numbering the senses:

foot1: part of the leg below the ankle;

foot2: base or bottom of something; Lexical entry
foot3: unit of length, one third of a yard.
 Lexical Relations
The meaning in terms of the relationship with other
words:
1. Homonymy
2. Polysemy
3. Synonymy
4. Opposites (antonymy)
5. Meronymy
6. Member–collection
7. Portion–mass
1. Homonymy
Homonyms are unrelated senses of the same phonological word.
1. lexemes of the same syntactic category, and with the same
spelling (homograph):
– lap : ‘circuit of a course’; part of body when sitting down’;
– Bank : ‘financial institution’ ; ‘of a river’.
– Bat : ‘flying creature’ or ‘used in sports’
– Race : ‘contest of speed’ or ‘ethnic group’
2. Senses of the same spoken word (homophones), but with
different spelling:
– ring and wring;
– two, to and too.
– Flour and flower
– Meat and meet
– Right and write
2. Polysemy
A word which has multiple meanings related by extension.

hook n. 1. a piece of material, usually metal, curved or bent and used to

suspend, catch, hold, or pull something. 2. short for fish-hook. 3. a trap
or snare. 4. Chiefly U.S. something that attracts or is intended to be an
attraction. 5. something resembling a hook in design or use. 6.a. a sharp
bend or angle in a geological formation, esp. a river. b. a sharply curved
spit of land. 7. Boxing. a short swinging blow delivered from the side
with the elbow bent. 8. Cricket. a shot in which the ball is hit square on
the leg side with the bat held horizontally. 9. Golf. a shot that causes the
ball to swerve sharply from right to left. 10. Surfing. the top of a
breaking wave, etc.

foot1: part of the leg below the ankle;

foot2: base or bottom of something;
foot3: unit of length, one third of a yard.
3. Synonymy
Synonyms are different phonological words which have the
same or very similar meanings. Some examples might be the
pairs below:

couch/sofa, boy/lad, lawyer/attorney, toilet/lavatory,

answer/reply, almost/nearly, broad/wide, buy/purchase,
freedom/ liberty

die: cease living: decease, demise, depart, drop, expire, go, pass
away, pass (on), perish, succumb. Informal: pop off. Slang: check
out, croak, kick in, kick off. Idioms: bite the dust, breathe one’s
last, cash in, give up the ghost, go to one’s grave, kick the bucket,
meet one’s end (or Maker), pass on to the Great Beyond, turn up
one’s toes. (Roget 1995)

The words may belong to different registers, those styles of language,

colloquial, formal, literary, etc. that belong to different situations.
4. Opposites (antonymy)
In traditional terminology, antonyms are
words which are opposite in meaning.
1. Simple antonyms
This is a relation between words such that
the negative of one implies the positive of
the other. The pairs are also sometimes
called complementary pairs or binary pairs.
In effect, the words form a two-term
classification.

dead/alive (of e.g. animals)

pass/fail (a test)
hit/miss (a target)
2. 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.

This relation is typically associated with adjectives. There

are usually intermediate terms so that between the
gradable antonyms hot and cold we can find:

hot (warm tepid cool) cold, tall/short, clever/ stupid,

near/far, interesting/boring.
3. Reverses
The characteristic reverse relation is between terms
describing movement, where one term describes
movement in one direction → and the other the same
movement in the opposite direction ←;
push and pull on a swing door, which tell you in which
direction to apply force.
come/go, go/return, ascend/descend.
When describing motion the following can be called
reverses: (go) up/down, (go) in/out, (turn) right/left.
By extension, the term is also applied to any process
which can be reversed: so other reverses are
inflate/deflate, expand/contract, fill/empty or
knit/unravel.
4. Converses
These are terms which describe a relation between
two entities from alternative viewpoints, as in the
pairs:

own/belong to
above/below
employer/employee

Thus if we are told Alan owns this book then we

know automatically This book belongs to Alan. Or
from Helen is David’s employer we know David is
Helen’s employee.
5. Taxonomic sisters
Taxonomies are classification systems; we take as an example
the colour adjectives in English, and give a selection below:

Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, brown.

We can say that the words red and blue are sister-members of
the same taxonomy and therefore incompatible with each
other. Hence one can say:

His car isn’t red, it’s blue.

Other taxonomies might include the days of the week:

Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, etc., or any of the taxonomies we
use to describe the natural world, like types of dog: poodle,
setter, bulldog, etc.
5. Hyponymy
Hyponymy is a relation of inclusion. A hyponym includes the
meaning of a more general word.
• dog and cat are hyponyms of animal
• sister and mother are hyponyms of woman
The more general term is called the superordinate or
hypernym (alternatively hyperonym).

.
5. Meronymy
Meronymy is a term used to describe a part–whole
relationship between lexical items.
cover and page are meronyms of book. We can identify this
relationship by using sentence frames like X is part of Y, or Y
has X, as in A page is part of a book, or A book has pages.

Meronymy differs from hyponymy in transitivity. Hyponymy is

always transitive but meronymy may or may not be. A
transitive example is: nail as a meronym of finger, and finger
of hand. We can see that nail is a meronym of hand, for we
can say A hand has nails.
6. Member–collection
This is a relationship between the word for a unit
and the usual word for a collection of the units.
Examples include:
• ship fleet
• tree forest
• fish shoal
• book library
• bird flock
• sheep flock
• worshipper congregation
7. Portion–mass
This is the relation between a mass noun and the
usual unit of measurement or division. The example
below the unit, a count noun, is added to the mass
noun, making the resulting noun phrase into a
count nominal.
• drop of liquid
• grain of salt/sand/wheat
• sheet of paper
• lump of coal
• strand of hair
 Derivational Relations
It’s about the derived words when their meaning is not
predictable.
1. Causative verbs
• The road is wide  an adjective describing a state
• The road widened  a verb describing a beginning
or change of state.
• The City Council widened the road  a verb
describing the cause of this change of state.
2. Agentive nouns
One well-known 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’. Some examples are: skier, walker, murderer, whaler,
toaster, commentator, director, sailor, calculator, escalator.

In other cases, the nouns may have several senses, some of which are
quite far from the associated verb, as in the examples in below:
lounger a piece of furniture for relaxing on
undertaker mortician
muffler US a car silencer
creamer US a jug for cream
renter Slang. a male prostitute

Other agentive nouns are those for which there is no base verb.
e.g., meter ‘instrument for making measurements’ has no longer an
associated verb mete.
 Lexical Universals
Basic questions:
1. Are there universals of lexical organisation or
principles in all the languages of the world?
2. Are there some lexemes that have
correspondences in all the languages of the
world?
1. Colour terms
• Berlin and Kay’s (1969) study identified a
number of underlying similarities which argue
for universals in colour term systems.
• One claim they make is that within the range
of each colour term there is a basic focal color
that speakers agree to be the best
prototypical example of the colour.
• Thus English red is basic, scarlet is not.
2. Core vocabulary
The idea that each language has a core vocabulary.

The Cushitic The Kenyan Cushitic Meaning

language Somali language Rendille
laba lama two
san sam nose

This list has been widely used in comparative and

historical linguistics.
3. Universal lexemes
The analysis of a large range of languages to try and
establish a core set of universal lexemes.
 Conclusion
Types of lexical relations: homonymy, synonymy,
opposites, hyponymy, meronymy, etc.; and two
examples of derivational relations in the lexicon:
causative verbs and agentive nouns represent
characteristic examples of the networking of the
vocabulary that a semantic description must
reflect.
 Reference
Saeed, J. (2009). Semantics. Third Edition. Oxford:
Blackwell