Different english sense relations between words

Further a vocabulary item.

Different english sense relations between words

Word senses and taxonomies Word senses As cultures develop, they create or learn about new categories of things, for example, tools, and they then have the need to refer to these new things.

Where might the words for the new categories come from? We have seen that words — common nouns — are associated with categories of things. I will refer to those categories that make up the meanings of words as semantic categories.

As already noted, people also have plenty of categories that have no words associated with them. In fact which categories have labels varies from person to person and from language to language, as we will see soon. How words change What happens when there is a new category that we need a word for?

More often the meaning of an existing word is extended to include the new category. When meaning is extended, this is done on the basis of some kind of relationship between the old meaning and the new. I will refer to this as a conceptual relation. The general situation involved in extending the meaning of a word, semantic extensionis shown in the figure below.

Now they discover tigers and leopards. Each of these new categories gets its own noun, but in becoming familiar with these new animals, the Lexies see their similarities with domestic cats and develop a new category that encompasses all three categories of animals. How do they refer to this new category, that is, to the more general category of cats, what zoologists refer to as members of the family Felidae?

One possibility, which is the one used by many English speakers, is to refer to this category using the same word that is used for its most familiar sub-category, that is, cat.

Note that the word cat now has two related meanings. I will refer to related meanings of a single word as word senses.

For a word that has more than one sense, it is up to the Hearer to figure out when the word is used which of the senses is intended by the Speaker. Here is another English example of a word with multiple senses.

The noun chicken can refer both to a particular kind of bird an object and to a kind of meat made from this bird a mass.

Notice the two senses in the following sentences. The discussion so far might make it seem that language users, or entire language communities, extend the meanings of words consciously, but this rarely happens.

Instead there seems to be a natural process by which the meanings of words change over time. As with other kinds of language change, the details of the process are not well understood.SYNOMYMY Synonymy is the relationship between two words that have the same sense.

Linguistics Study Sheet for Semantics

This is a strict definition of synonymy – the identity of sense. Some linguists, however, consider synonymy a similarity of meaning. There are a few other minor semantic relations that may pertain between words.

The first involves the distinction between a category vs. a particular type or example of that category. For example, a tiger is a type of feline, so feline is a category containing lion, tiger, etc.; color is a category containing red, green, etc, red, green are. + Confusing English Words Explained E-Book.

Difference between effective and efficient. If something is effective, it is good at achieving goals and accomplishing the desired result. an effective diet helps you lose weight successfully an effective medicine cures a disease or makes you get better an effective solution successfully resolves the .

Later he attempts to adopt a more empirical definition of sense and he states that: „ By analysing or describing the sense of the word is to be understood its analysis in terms of the sense- relations which it contracts with other words;” (Lyons, ) In simpler words, sense holds between the words or expressions within the language.

Lexical sense relations are therefore the relationships between meaning of words, in either their similarity or contrast in a language.

Different english sense relations between words

It (Lexical sense relations) is used in lexical semantics to t describe the relationship between terms (words), as Semantics largely deals with word meaning. A sense relation is a paradigmatic relation between words or predicates. Two major types of sense relations can be distinguished: Two major types of sense relations can be distinguished: Sense relations of inclusion, esp.

hyponymy and synonymy.

Linguistics Study Sheet for Semantics