1

Unit 2

Lexical Relations, Componential Analysis and Lexical Field

In linguistics, a lexical relation refers to the semantic (meaning-based) relationships

between words. It's the study of how words and their meanings interact with each other
within a language. These relationships are crucial for understanding how words are related
and how their meanings can be described and analyzed.

Lexical relations (YULE)

Not only can words be treated as containers of meaning, or as fulfilling roles in

events, they can also have “relationship” with each other. In everyday talk, we often explain
the meaning of words in terms of their relationships. If we are asked the meaning of the
word conceal, for example, we might simple say, “It’s the same as hide,” or give the
meaning of shallow as “the opposite of deep,” or the meaning of pine as “a kind of tree.”
In doing so, we are characterizing the meaning of each word, not in terms of its component
features, but in terms of its relationship to other words. This approach is used in semantic
description of language and treated as the analysis of lexical relations. The lexical relations
we have just exemplified are synonymy (conceal/hide), antonymy (shallow/deep) and
hyponymy (pine/tree).

Synonymy

Synonyms are different phonological words that have the same or very similar
meaning. (SAEED) They can often, though not always, be substituted for each other in
sentences. Other common examples of synonyms are the following pairs:
 2

Couch/sofa large/big broad/wide

buy/purchase Handbag/purse cab/taxi

One source of synonyms is dialectal variation. In some dialects of North American

English, a long, upholstered seat is called a couch, but speakers of another dialect call the
same piece of furniture a sofa. Canadian English speakers might call this item a chesterfield,
and still other speakers might call it a divan. Though these words all mean the same thing
and are therefore synonyms, they tend to be dialect specific and may not be shared across
dialect boundaries.

Synonyms can also across dialect boundaries; most North American English speakers
are familiar with the synonyms professor/instructor, doctor/physician, and lawyer/attorney.
Still other synonyms arises as a result of language change over time. For example, your
grandparents might use a particular term that seems old-fashioned to you, and you might
use a more modern term. For example, what might be a pocketbook for your grandmother
is called in current fashion circle a handbag or a bag or a purse. An older term for dress is
frock, and what used to be called a baby carriage or perambulator is now a stroller or
jogger, we are less likely now to refer to women as gals.

Two other, closely related sources for synonyms are style and register. In casual
speech, speaker might say, “That’s a nice ride,” but in more formal speech, “That’s a nice
car.”

Euphemisms
 3

English has a vast number of synonyms, more than most languages, largely because
of borrowing from other languages, especially French and Latin. Though synonymy allows
for a variety of ways to express ideas, it can also be the source of euphemisms.
Euphemisms are words and phrases used to avoid offending (by directly addressing taboo
subjects) or to deliberately obscure actual (usually unpleasant) meanings. Government
terminology provides a good source of examples. Area denial munitions are ‘landmines’,
and physical persuasion means ‘torture’. Operational exhaustion means ‘shell shock’, and
wet work is ‘assassination’. We use euphemisms to avoid talking about bodily functions:
sweat can be preplaced by perspire, genitalia by privates, and urinate by go to the
bathroom. Still another source of synonyms is politically correct language, terminology
specifically intended to limit use of certain terms in favor of more socially and culturally
acceptable ones in public discussion. Common examples include Native American for
Indian, firefighter for fireman, differently abled rather than disabled or handicapped, and
mail carrier rather than mailman. The use of politically correct language can be the source
of some controversy because politically correct terms can be – not surprisingly – political,
which raises questions about the accuracy of their meanings and implications of those
meanings.

Antonymy

Antonyms are words which are opposite in meaning (Saeed, 2015). Some commons
examples are the pairs:

alive/dead big/small buy/sell

 4

True/false married/single hot/cold

Antonyms are usually divided into 5 types (Seed, 2015).

Complementary 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 contradictory, binary, or simple antonyms.
In effect, the words form a two-term classification. Examples would include:

Dead/alive 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, for example, rich/poor, fast/slow, young/old,
beautiful/ugly. This relation is typically associated with adjectives and has two major
identifying characteristics: firstly, there are usually intermediate terms so that between the
gradable antonyms hot and cold we can find:

Hot (warm tepid cool) cold

This means of course that something may be neither hot nor cold. Secondly, the
terms are usually relative, so a thick pencil is likely to be thinner than a thin girl; and a late
dinosaur fossil is earlier than an early Elvis record. A Third characteristic is that in some pairs
one term is more basic and common, so for example of the pair long/short, it is more
natural to ask of something How long is it? than How short is it? For other pairs there is no
such pattern: How hot is it? And How cold is it? Are equally natural depending on context.
 5

Other examples of gradable antonyms are: tall/short, clever/stupid, near/far,

interesting/boring.

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, ; for example, the term push and pull on a swing door, which tell
you in which direction to apply force. Other such pairs are 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 that can be reversed: so other
reverse are inflate/deflate, expand/contract, fill/empty, or knit/unravel.

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.
Again these relations are parts of speaker’s semantic knowledge and explain why the two
sentences below are paraphrases, that is can be used to describe the same situation:

My office is above the library.

 6

The library is below my office.

Taxonomic Sisters

The term antonymy is sometimes used to describe words which are at the same
level in a taxonomy. Taxonomies are hierarchical classification systems; we can take as an
example the color adjectives in English, and give a selection at one level of the taxonomy
as 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.

Hyponymy

Hyponymy is a relation of inclusion. A hyponymy includes the meaning of a more

general word (Saeed, 2015)

Hyponymy is a word whose meaning is included, or entailed, in the meaning of a

more general word, for examples:

dog and cat are hyponyms of animal

rose and tulip are hyponyms of flower

 7

The more general term is called the superordinate or hypernym (alternatively

hyperonym). Much of the vocabulary is linked by such systems of inclusion, and the
resulting semantic networks from the hierarchical taxonomies mention above.

Look at the example in figure…, we can say that “vegetable” is a hyponym of

plant”. “flower” is a hyponym of plant and “tree” is a hyponym of plant.” In these 3
examples “plant” is called superordinate (= higher level) terms. We can also say that 2 or
more words that share the same superordinate term are co-hyponyms. So carrot and garlic
are co-hyponyms, and the superordinate term is vegetable, while lily and lotus are co-
hyponyms with flower as the superordinate. Or pine and oak are co-hyponyms, with tree as
one superordinate and plant as another at a more general level.

The relation of hyponymy captures the concept of “X is a kind of Y,” as when we

give the meaning of the word by saying, “carrot is a kind of vegetable.” Sometimes the only
thing we know about the meaning of a word is that it is a hyponym of another term. That is,
we may know nothing more about the meaning of the word carrot other than that it is a
kind of vegetable or that pine is a kind of tree.
 8

Of course, it is not only words for “things” that are hyponyms. Words such as punch,
shoot and stab, as verbs describing “actions,” can all be treated as co-hyponyms of the
superordinate term injure and the verb bake, boil, fry and grill as co-hyponyms of the
superordinate cook. For a lot of people, microwave has become another one.

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. We can identify this relationship by using sentence frames
like X is a part of Y, or Y has X, as in A page is a part of a book, or A book has pages.
Meronymy reflects hierarchical classifications in the lexicon somewhat like taxonomies; a
typical system might be:
 9

The vertical lines stand for the part-whole relation between single potential referents
of the terms. For example, a potential referent of face is always part of a potential referent
of head.

The technical term for the constituting meaning relation is meronymy (from ancient
Greek meron ‘part’: the term partonymy is also used). A system based on meronymies is
called a mereological system, or mereology.

By a ‘constitutive part’ we mean a part that necessarily belongs to the whole and
contributes to making the whole what it is. Thus, the meaning of the meronym is a concept
that describes its potential referents as belonging to this kind of whole; conversely, the
meaning of the holonym describes its potential referents as having this kind of part(s). For
example, the concept >hand< describes hands as having fingers, and the concept >finger<
describes fingers as being certain parts of hands.

Meronymies involving nouns can be spelt out with the help of sentences of the form
“an A has a B’, e.g. a head has a face, a face has a mouth, a mouth has a tongue, a
tongue has a tip, etc.

There is a further important difference between lexical hierarchies and meronymic

systems: unlike hyponymy and subordination, meronymy is not necessary a transitive
relation. Although in Fig.. the term eye is linked to face and face is linked to head, this does
not result in the same kind of link between eye and head. If ‘part’ is taken in the sense of
‘constitutive part’, i.e. something that essentially contributes to making up the whole, then
 10

an eye is not a part of the head, as the tongue is not a part of the face, or the face a part of
the whole human body.

Componential Analysis (SAEED)

In the previous topic, we reviewed a range of lexicon relations, including the MALE-
FEMALE and ADULT- YOUNG relations in sets of words like those below:

man-woman- child ram-ewe-lamb

dog-bitch-pup bull-cow-calf

As we saw, these and other relations are characteristics of the lexicon. To explain this
networking, some semanticists have hypothesized that words are not the smallest semantics
units but are built up of smaller components of meaning which are combined differently (or
lexicalized) to form different words.

Thus, to take perhaps the commonest examples in the literature, words like woman,
bachelor, spinster, and wife have been viewed as being composed of elements such as
[ADULT], [HUMAN] and so on:

woman [FEMALE] [ADULT] [HUMAN]

bachelor [MALE] [ADULT] [HUMAN] [UNMARRIED]
spinster [FEMALE] [ADULT] [HUMAN] [UNMARRIED]

wife [FEMALE] [ADULT] [HUMAN] [MARRIED]

 11

The elements in square brackets in the table above are called semantic
components, or semantics primitives, and this kind of analysis is often called
componential analysis (CA for short).

Lexical Relations in CA

One use for semantic components is that they might allow us to define the lexical
relations we looked at earlier. Take, for example, hyponymy (inclusion). Below we can see
that spinster is a hyponym of woman, and their components might be given as shown:

Woman (Q) [FEMALE] [ADULT] [HUMAN]

Spinster (P) [FEMALE] [ADULT] [HUMAN] [UNMARRIED]

We can see that by comparing the sets of components we could define hyponymy
as: a lexical item P can be defined as a hyponym of Q if all the features of Q are contained
in the feature specification of P

Similarly, we might be able to deal with some kinds of antonymy, or more generally
incompatibility, as in the table below. The words spinster, bachelor, wife are incompatible
and from a comparison of their components we might suggest a definition like:

woman [FEMALE] [ADULT] [HUMAN]

spinster [FEMALE] [ADULT] [HUMAN] [UNMARRIED]

wife [FEMALE] [ADULT] [HUMAN] [MARRIED]

Lexical items P, Q, R … are incompatible if they share a set of features but differ from
each other by one or more contrasting features.
 12

Thus, spinster is compatible with bachelor by contrast of gender specification, and

with wife by marital specification. Note that these definitions are not exact but are meant to
give a general idea of how this approach might proceed. Componential Analysts also often
make use of binary features and redundancy rules, which we can briefly describe.

Binary Features

Some linguists use a binary feature format for these components, similar to that used
in phonology and syntax.

woman [+FEMALE] [+ADULT] [+HUMAN]

bachelor [-FEMALE] [+ADULT] [+HUMAN] [-MARRIED]

spinster [+FEMALE] [+ADULT] [+HUMAN] [-MARRIED]

wife [+FEMALE] [+ADULT] [+HUMAN] [+MARRIED]

Note that this allows a characterization of antonyms by a difference of the value
plus or minus a feature, and so offers a more economical format.

table horse boy man girl woman

animate - + + + + +

human - - + + + +
female - - - - + +

adult - + - + - +
 13

Redundancy Rules

The statement of semantic components is also more economical if we include some

redundancy rules which predict the automatic relationship between components. An
example of such a rule is:

2.1 HUMAN → ANIMATE

ADULT → ANIMATE

ANIMATE → CONCRETE

MARRIED → ADULT

etc.

If we state these rules once for the whole dictionary, we can avoid repeating the
component on the right of a rule in each of the entries containing the component on the
left: so every time we enter [HUMAN], for example, we don’t have to enter [ANIMATE]. With
redundancy rules like 2.1 an entry like 2.2 a below for wife might be stated more
economically as in 2.2 b:

2.2 a. wife [+FEMALE] [+HUMAN] [+ADULT] [+MARRIED] [+ANIMATED] [+CONCRETE], etc.

b. wife [+FEMALE] [+ADULT] [+MARRIED]

To sum up: in this approach each lexical item would be entered in the dictionary
with a complex of semantic components. There will be in addition a set of redundancy rules
 14

for these components which apply automatically to reduce the number of components
stated for each item. Lexical relations can be stated in terms of the components.

Lexical Fields

Most lexical items form groups with other lexemes. Antonyms and complementaries
belong together as opposite, as do pairs of words such as father and mother or adult and
child or set of words like the terms for the days of the week, for colors, for numbers, for
pieces of furniture or other kinds of thing within one superordinate category.

Semantic theories of different orientations have tried to capture this phenomenon by

the notion of a lexical field. The literature offers very different definitions. Here the following
informal characterization will be adopted.

A lexical field is a group of lexemes that fulfils the following conditions:

• The lexemes are of the same class.

• Their meanings have something in common.

• They are interrelated by precisely definable meaning relations.

• The group is complete in terms of relevant meaning relations.

Lexical fields are notated like sets by including a list of lexemes in set brackets {…}.
For example, the field of the terms for the day of the week would be written {Sunday,
Monday, Tuesday, …., Saturday}.

For example, "father," "mother," "uncle," and "aunt" all belong to the lexical field of
"family".
 15

Here are some additional examples:

Food: banana, sushi, pizza, Tom Yum Kung, cake

Clothing: shirt, pants, dress, jacket, shoes

Colors: red, blue, green, yellow, orange

Parts of the Body: head, arm, leg, foot, eye

Furniture: chair, table, bed, sofa

Transportation: car, bus, train, plane

Emotions: happy, sad, angry, surprised

Verbs of Movement: walk, run, jump, climb