MAKALAH SEMANTICS

LEXICAL SEMANTICS

DOSEN PENGAMPU : Drs. Irman Nurhapitudin, M. Hum

& Erlan Aditya Ardiansyah. S.S., M.Hum

Rifat Adi Wangsa 1195030192

Shofi Nur Asofia Rizki 1195030211

FAKULTAS ADAB DAN HUMANIORA

UNIVERSITAS ISLAM NEGERI SUNAN

GUNUNG DJATI BANDUNG

2021
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Forewords ………………………………………………..

1. Lexical Semantic …………………………………………

a. Homonymy ……………………………………………….
b. Polysemy …………………………………………………..
2. Lexical Relation ………………………………………….
3. Synonymy …………………………………………………
4. Antonymy …………………………………………………
5. Converseness ……………………………………………..
6. Reversiveness ……………………………………………
7. Hyponymy ………………………………………………..
8. Markednes ………………………………………………
9. Polarity ………………………………………………..
 FOREWARD

First of all, thanks to Allah SWT because of the help of Allah,

writer finished writing the paper entitled “Lexical Semantics”
right in the calculated time.

The purpose in writing this paper is to fulfill the assignment

that given by Drs. Irman Nurhapitudin, M. Hum & Erlan
Aditya Ardiansyah. S.S., M.Hum as lecturer in semantics
major.

in arranging this paper, the writer trully get lots challenges and
obstructions but with help of many indiviuals, those
obstructions could passed. writer also realized there are still
many mistakes in process of writing this paper.

because of that, the writer says thank you to all individuals

who helps in the process of writing this paper. hopefully allah
replies all helps and bless you all.the writer realized tha this
paper still imperfect in arrangment and the content. then the
writer hope the criticism from the readers can help the writer
in perfecting the next paper.last but not the least Hopefully,
this paper can helps the readers to gain more knowledge about
samantics major.

Bandung, September 20th, 2021

1. Lexical Semantics

Lexical semantics The systematic study of meaning-related

properties of words. Exactly what is included in the field is likely
to vary from scholar to scholar, but central topics include: how
best to specify the meaning of a word. The traditional descriptive
aims lexical semantics have been: a.) To represent the meaning of
each word in the language. b.) To show how the meaning of words
in a language are interrelated. This aims are closely related,
because the meaning of a word is defined in part by its relations
with other words in the language.

For example:

Horse: Horse is the animal which has four feet and could be
driven.

Pencil: Pencil is the thing which could help to write something.

I saw my mother just now: Without any further information, the

speaker saw a woman. As we will see, there are a couple of ways
of viewing this: one is to say that this knowledge follows from the
relationship between the uttered word mother and the related, but
unspoken woman, representing in vocabulary.

Lexicographers and semanticists sometimes have to decide

whether a form with a wide range of meanings is an instance of
polysemy or of homonymy.

a. Homonymy

Homonymy, Homonymy occurs when unrelated meanings are

signalled by the same linguistic form, as with bank (‘side of river’)
and bank (‘financial insti- tution’): the two banks are said to be
‘homonyms’. Dictionaries usually treat these as different words
and give them different main headings. Pronunciation and
spelling are identical but meanings are unrelated. In other pairs,
numerous in English, reflecting the fact that the words were once
different in their phonological form. Some author distinguish
between homograph and homophone. We can distinguish
different types depending on their syntactic behaviour, and
spelling, for examples:

Lexemes of the same syntactic catagory and with the same

spelling: e.g. Lap: Circuit of course; part of body when sitting
down.

Of the same category, but with different spelling. e.g. the verb ring
and wring.

Of the different category, but with the same spelling. e.g. the verb
keep and the noun keep.

Of different category and different spelling. e.g. not and knot.

b. Polysemy

polysemy A word which has more than one distinct, established

sense is said to be polysemous (or to show polysemy). To be
considered as belonging to the same word, multiple senses must
be felt by native speakers to be related in some way. Palmer
said“… it is also the case that same word may have a set of
different meanings”; Simpson (1979: 79), said “a word which
have two (or more) related meanings.”

For example:

Flight

Passing through the air.

Power of flying.

Air journey.

Unit of the Air Force

Head
The head of a company.

Head of a table or bed.

A head of lettuce or cabbage.

The head to the rest of the body.

Bit

A tool for drilling into wood.

The cutting edge of an axe.

The mouthpiece of a bridle.

A small quantity of any substance.

A small role in a play or film.

Foot

The foot of a person or animal.

The foot of a hill.

The foot of a bed.

The foot of a table.

The foot of a ladder.

The foot of a page; 12 inches.

2. Lexical Relation

Lexical relations there are a number of differnt type of lexical

relation as we shall see. A particular lexeme may be
simultaneously in a number of these relations so that it be more
accurate to think of the lexicon as a network. (sense relations)
There are two main ways of looking at sense relations. According
to the viewpoint of structural semantics, the sense of a word is the
sum total of its sense relations with other words in the language.

We consider two approaches to the description of lexical relations,

semantic field theory and truth conditional semantics. Field theory
is an attempt to classify lexemes according to shared and
differentiating features. For example, wasp, hornet, bee and other
items denote ‘flying, stinging insects’; moth and housefly, among
others, denote insects that fly but do not sting; ant and termite are
names of insects that neither fly nor sting. (And what
differentiates wasp, hornet and bee from one another? What
differentiates insects from other living things?) Entomologists
develop a careful classification on a scientific basis but
semanticists often need to pay more attention to folk taxonomy,
the traditional ways in which non-scientists classify the
phenomena of their world. Truth conditional semantics studies
lexical relations by comparing predications that can be made
about the same referring expression. Its task is to account for the
meaning relations between different expressions in a language.

Three such relations are entailment, paraphrase and contradiction.

Entailment is the relation between two propositions— let’s label
them ‘p’ and ‘q’—such that if p is true, q must also be true, but if
q is true, it does not necessarily follow that p is true. If it is true
that my necktie is (entirely) maroon, is it true that my necktie is
red? If it is true that my necktie is red, is it true that my necktie is
maroon? Paraphrase is the relation between two propositions, p
and q, such that if either is true, the other is necessarily true also,
and if either is false, the other is false. If it is true that my necktie
was cheap, is it true or false that my necktie was inexpensive? If
it is true that my necktie was inexpensive, is it true or false that
my necktie was cheap? Contradiction is the relation between two
propositions such that if either is true, the other is necessarily
false. If my necktie was cheap, is it true or false that my necktie
was expensive? If it was expensive, was it cheap?
3. Synonymy

Synonymy, A word is said to be a synonym of another word in the

same language if one or more of its senses bears a sufficiently
close similarity to one or more of the senses of the other word. It
should be noted that complete identity of meaning (absolute
synonymy) is very rarely, if ever, encountered. Words would be
absolute synonyms if there were no contexts in which substituting
one for the other had any semantic effect. However, given that a
basic function of words is to be semantically distinctive, it is not
surprising that such identical pairs are rare. That being so, the
problem of characterising synonymy is one of specifying what
kind and degree of semantic difference is permitted.

For example:

Fall = autumn.

Freedom = liberty.

Fide = broad.

Hard = difficult

Lawyer = attorney

4. Antonymy

Antonymy (also known as ‘grad- able contraries’) are a variety of

lexical opposite. Most antonyms are gradable adjectives, although
a few. Antonyms denote degrees of some variable property like
length, weight, or temperature. When intensified, they move in
opposite directions on the scale. Antonyms typically have a
contrary re- lationship, that is to say, denying one does not auto-
matically assert the other, as there are degrees of the denoted
property that do not fall under either term.

For example:

Love X hate
Long X short

Fast X slow

Heavy X light

Strong X weak

Old X young

Good Xxbad

Clean x dirty

In oppositeness (lexical) (also frequently called ‘antonymy’). The

sense relation of oppositeness is a special variety of
incompatibility involving a binary contrast. That is to say,
opposite meanings represent a two-way division of some
inclusive notion. The feeling of oppositeness is strongest if the
‘two-ness’ is somehow logically necess- ary.

For instance, there are only two vertical directions, so up and

down, rise and fall and top and bottom are ‘good’ opposites.
Similarly, there are only two ways of changing one’s marital
status – one can get married or get divorced; there only two ways
of deviating from average length – something can be either long
or short. And so on.

Sometimes a domain happens to have only two members without

this being a logically necessary restriction. Think of the domain
of buses, which is divided into single-deckers and double-deckers.
In such cases the feeling of oppositeness, if present at all, is
typically weak. There are various types of lexical oppo- site: Like
converses, reversives.

5. Converseness

Converse (lexical) Lexical converses are a species of oppo- site.

Two expressions which are converses designate a given state of
affairs or event from the perspective of two different participants.
For instance ‘A is above B’ describes a spatial relationship
between two entities A and B by locating A with reference to B;
the same state of affairs is described by ‘B is below A’, but this
time B is located with reference to A. The mutual entailment
relation between ‘A is above B’ and ‘B is below A’, in which the
arguments are reversed and above is replaced by below,
establishes above and below as lexical converses. Other examples
are in front of: behind (‘A is in front of B’, ‘B is behind A’),
follow: precede (‘B follows A in the alphabet’, ‘A precedes B in
the alphabet’), parent: offspring (‘X and Y are A’s parents’, ‘A is
X and Y’s offspring’), and buy/sell (‘A bought B from C’, ‘C sold
B to A’). The comparative forms of adjectival oppo- sites stand in
a converse relationship (‘X is longer than Y’, ‘Y is shorter than
X’), as do the active and passive forms of transitive verbs: ‘Pete
built this house’, ‘This house was built by Pete’. Some lexical
converses (e.g. buy: sell) have a direc- tional component.

6. Reversiveness

Reversives involve movement or change (or cause of movement

or change) in opposite directions between two states. Like
antipodals they may involve literal motion, as in rise: fall (e.g. in
water level), advance: retreat, ascend: descend, arrive: depart,
enter: leave, embark: disembark, mount: dismount, or they may
involve non-spatial change, as in lighten: darken, heat (up): cool
(down), improve: deteriorate. For a reversive relation it is not
necessary for the path of change to be the same for both items as
long as the initial and final states are reversed.

For instance, the action of untying a knot is not normally the exact
reversal of the action of tying it.

7. Hyponymy
Hyponymy is the asymmetrical re-lation of sense between, for
instance, dog and animal and between daffodil and flower. This
relation is usually explained in terms of inclusion, but there are
two ways of looking at this. Thinking of categories of things in
the world (the extensional perspective),

the category of animals includes the category of dogs, so that if

some- thing is a dog it is necessarily an animal. But thinking of
meanings (the intensional perspective), the meaning of dog
includes the meaning of animal. The term in a re- lation of
hyponymy associated with the more inclusive category (flower,
animal) is called the ‘hyperonym’ (also often called the
‘superordinate’) and the included cat- egory (daffodil, dog) is the
‘hyponym’. Notice that a word may be a hyponym of one word
and a hyperonym of another: dog is a hyponym of animal, but a
hyperonym of collie. (Hyponymy must be distinguished from the
other main relation of inclusion, namely, meronymy.) It is
common for a hyperonym to have a set of incom- patible
hyponyms. This is the basis of a taxonomic hierarchy:

Animal Color Flower

Horse Dog Cat Green Red Yellow Lily Rose

Jasmine

Creatures

Mankind Animals
Plans

Birds Fish Insect

Eagle Peguin sparrow

hyperonym

8. Markedness

markedness This is a notion particularly associated with structural

linguistics. It refers to a type of asymmetry between the terms of
an opposition, with one term being ‘marked’ and the other
‘unmarked’.

There are several interpretations of the notion of markedness; the

main ones are as follows (they are not mutually exclusive):

Formal markedness: the marked term is signalled by the presence

of a morphological ‘mark’; the unmarked term is signalled by the
absence of a mark. Examples are: accurate (unmarked): in-
accurate (marked); mount (unmarked): dismount (marked); lion
(unmarked): lioness (marked).

Semantic markedness: the unmarked term has an interpretation

where the contrast between the terms is inoperative or
‘neutralised’. For example, a group of lions may include both
males and females, but a group of lionesses has only females,
hence lion is unmarked and lioness is marked. We may speak of
the accuracy of a measurement that we know to be inaccurate, but
not of the in- accuracy of a measurement we know to be accu-
rate; How long is it? is neutral with regard to the expected answer,
whereas How short is it? assumes the answer will lie in the range
of short, hence accu- rate and long are unmarked.

Distributional markedness: the unmarked term occurs in a wider

range of contexts than the marked term. Consider the case of Are
your parents alive? vs Are your parents dead? Both of these are
normal when there are reasonable grounds for supposing the
answer to be Yes, but only the former is normal as an open-
minded question. Hence alive is distributionally unmarked.

The three types of markedness frequently go together, but not

always. For instance, prince and princess show formal
markedness, with princess being marked and prince unmarked.
But neither of these has a use in which the contrast is neutralised,
so there is no semantically unmarked term. Also, semantic
markedness entails dis- tributional markedness, but not vice versa:
for instance, the contrast between alive and dead is never
neutralised. Oppositions, like that between hot and cold, where
neither term is unmarked, are described as ‘equipollent’.

9. Polarity

polarity This is displayed when one term of a binary opposition is

described as ‘positive’ and the other as ‘negative’. The most
obvious cases are where one term carries a negative affix which
the other lacks: possible: impossible, happy: unhappy, obey:
disobey, dress: undress, and so on. But other types of opposition
are said to have positive and negative terms. The main ones are as
follows:

1. Logical polarity is based on the principle that ‘two negatives

make a positive’. For instance, It’s true that it’s true is equivalent
to It’s true, but It’s false that it’s false changes polarity and is
equivalent to It’s true. From this we can conclude that false is the
negative term and true is positive.

2. Quantity polarity applies particularly to antonym pairs, where

the positive term indicates ‘more of’ some property and the
negative term ‘less of’, as with long (positive) and short
(negative).

3. Evaluative polarity is where the positive term expresses

approval and the negative term dis- approval, as with good: bad,
polite: rude.
 There are also negative polarity items (negpols) These are
items like any, anything, anybody, anywhere, ever, which occur
in certain negative environments but not in the corre- sponding
affirmative environments (at least not with the same meaning).