Universität Salzburg
Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik
PS: The Vocabulary Of English: Lexical And Morphological Issues

Lexical Relations

by:
Martin Payrhuber and
Herbert Reichl
6th Semester

SS 1999

1 Introduction

2 Types Of Ambiguity
2.1 Polysemy And Homonymy
2.2 “Relatedness” As Seen By Historic Semantics
2.3 “Relatedness” As Seen By Synchronic Semantics
2.4 Psychological Relatedness

3 Types Of Congruence
3.1 Synonymy

4 Types Of Congruence
4.1 Synonymy
4.2 Meronymy
4.3 Relations Of Contrast
4.3.1 Opposition
4.3.1.1 Antonymy
4.3.1.2 Complementarity
4.3.1.3 Converseness
4.3.1.3 Converseness
4.3.2 Incompatibility
4. 3.2.1 Scales
4.3.2.2 Ranks

5 Lexical Fields

6 Conclusion

7 List Of Works Cited

1 Introduction

There is no doubt, also - and especially - among experts, that our mental vocabulary is highly organised. There are a lot of relations between the single words of a language and the meanings of these words, respectively. Among linguists, these relations are called “semantic relations”, “sense relations” or “lexical relations”. These semantic relations can be analysed and described for the most part, and in the following, the most important ones of these relations are to be presented. In order to give a short, critical description of the state of the art, it must be said that there are lots of research projects on this topic. However, this paper can only include some of them. Literature which was used can be found under point six, “List Of Works Cited”. Project delimitations have only been made as far as detail is concerned. Since this paper is only a very short piece of research, the authors have confined themselves not to go into too much detail, but rather try to give a good survey of the topic.

Lexical relations can be roughly divided into:

• Types of ambiguity (polysemy, homonymy)
• Types of congruence (synonymy, hyponymy, meronymy, relations of contrast)
• Lexical fields

2 Types Of Ambiguity

2.1 Polysemy And Homonymy

Polysemy can be defined as “a term used in semantic analysis to refer to a lexicalitem which has a range of different meanings” (Crystal 1997, 297). Crystal gives asexample for polysemy the lexical item “plain”, which has the different meanings“clear”, “unadorned”, “obvious”, etc.(ibid. Crystal).

Now, the problem that arises for linguists is how to distinguish polysemy from another type of ambiguity, from homonymy. Crystal defines homonymy as “a term used in semantic analysis to refer to [two or more] lexical items which [happen to] have the same form, but differ in meaning” (Crystal 1997, 185). Crystal’s examples here are “bear” and “ear”. “Bear” can define an animal or can have the meaning of “to carry”, “ear” can refer to the human body or to corn (ibid. Crystal).

In these examples, homonymy covers both spoken and written forms, but it is also possible that the identity of two lexemes is within a single medium, in which case linguists would speak of partial homonymy or heteronymy (ibid. Crystal). One can distinguish two types of partial homonymy:

• Homography: two lexical items have the same written form, but differ in pronunciation (an example would be the two lexical items of “lead”, one pronounced [li:d] and meaning “to be in front”, the other pronounced [led] and defining a special kind of metal).

• Homophony: two lexical items have the same pronunciation, but differ in spelling (e.g. the two lexical items “led” and “lead”, both of which are pronounced [led], the first being the past tense of “to lead”, the latter again defining a special kind of metal).

Thus, polysemy and homonymy can be distinguished from each other by the existing or missing relatedness between the meanings which can be allocated to one phonological form. What is the core of the matter, is the question to what extent this notion of “relatedness” can be specified. In other words: how can “relatedness” be defined? If a clear and precise definition could be provided, the whole problem would be solved, for then the phenomenon of phonological forms whose relatedness can be proved would be called “homonymy”, whose relatedness cannot be proved would be called “polysemy”. However, as happens so often in the field of semantics, one cannot provide a clear and indisputable definition of the term “relatedness”. There are two basic approaches to this matter, one offered by historic semantics, the other by synchronic semantics.

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