INTRODUCING SEMANTICS Nick Riemer (CHAPTER 5)

CHAPTER 5

ANALYSING AND DISTINGUISHING  MEANINGS

CHAPTER PREVIEW

The different sections of this chapter follow three logical steps in meaning analysis. In 5.1, some of the different possible semantic relations among words are exemplified and discussed. We concentrate on those relations which are of most use for semantic description: 

◆ antonymy (oppositeness; 5.1.1), 

◆ meronymy (part of-ness; 5.1.2), 

◆the class-inclusion relations of hyponymy and taxonomy (kind of-ness; 5.1.3–4) and 

◆ synonymy (5.1.5). 

These meaning relations can be seen as reflecting the presence of various isolable components in the meanings of the related words; accordingly, Section 5.2 introduces the possibility of analysing senses as composed of bundles of semantic components, and considers the wider applicability of componential analysis as well as the problems it faces. The third section (5.3) discusses the necessity for a theory of meaning to specify the number of senses associated with a lexeme in a rigorous way. In 5.3.1 we distinguish the case where a single lexeme possesses several related meanings (polysemy) from two other cases: the case where it possesses only a single meaning (monosemy) and the case where it possesses two unrelated meanings (homonymy). Section 5.3.2 then shows that any attempt to make these definitions rigorous confronts serious problems, the implications of which are discussed in 5.3.3. 

SUMMARY

 As well as knowing a word’s definitional meaning, a competent speaker knows how it relates to other words of the language. Five important types of lexical relation have been identified.

Antonymy

Antonymy (oppositeness) may be characterized as a relationship of incompatibility between two terms with respect to some given dimension of contrast. The principal distinction to be made in discussion of antonymy is between gradable (e.g. hot–cold) and non-gradable (e.g. married–unmarried) antonyms, i.e. antonyms which do and do not admit a midpoint.

Meronymy 

Meronymy is the relation of part to whole: hand is a meronym of arm, seed is a meronym of fruit, blade is a meronym of knife. Not all languages seem to have an unambiguous means of lexicalizing the concept PART OF, but meronymy is often at the origin of various polysemy patterns in languages.

Hyponymy and taxonomy 

Hyponymy and taxonomy (kind of-ness) define different types of class- inclusion hierarchies; hyponymy is an important structural principle in many languages with classifiers, while taxonomy has been argued to be basic to the classification and naming of biological species.

Synonymy 

Synonymy is frequently claimed to exist between different expressions of the same language, but genuine lexical synonyms prove extremely hard to find: once their combinatorial environments have been fully explored, proposed lexical synonyms often prove not to be such.

Componential analysis 

The importance of appreciating a lexeme’s semantic relations in order to understand its meaning is one of the motivations for a componential approach to semantic analysis. Componential analysis analyses meaning in terms of binary features (i.e. features with only two pos- sible values, + or –), and represents a translation into semantics of the principles of structuralist phonological analysis. As a type of definitional analysis, componential analysis inherits the failings of traditional  definitions, and words for which it proves hard to couch definitions are also hard to analyse componentially.

Polysemy and monosemy 

Theoretical and ordinary description of meaning would both be impossible without the recognition of separate senses within the same word. Words with several related senses are described as polysemous. Polysemy contrasts simultaneously with monosemy, the case where a word has a single meaning, and homonymy, the case where two unrelated words happen to share the same phonological form. In spite of the intuitive obviousness of these distinctions, there are many instances where it is not clear whether a word should be analysed as polysemous or monosemous, and no absolute criteria have ever been proposed which will successfully discriminate them.