semantic

Semantic relationships

4. Antonyms

It is a binary relationship in that it can characterize the relationship between only two words at a time. Antonymous words are not always words having different meanings. In fact two antonymous words must be semantically similar. It means that they have almost the same referents. They differ only in one referent.

e.g.      the word “tall” and “short” share the same semantic features of “measures” they only differ in the feature of “positive” and “negative”.

It cover a very large variety of phenomena, more or less clearly defined.a basic definition could be that W1 and W2 are antonyms or opposites if they have most semantic characteristics in common but if they also differ in a significant way on at least one essential semantic dimension. There are also various degrees of opposition : some pairs of words-senses are more prototypically opposites than others. Antonyms refer to gradable properties and opposites to non-gradable ones.

The role of opposites in a lexical semantics knowledge base in a lexical semantics knowledge base is somewhat difficult to define. Similarly to synonyms, opposite and antonyms may certain play the role of integrity constraints. Their use in natural language generation, for example to avoid the use of too many negations, is somewhat hard to make explicit, because of numerous pragmatic factors that may intervene, such as the polarity of an element in a pair of opposites or antonyms.

There are three kinds of antonymy :

1.      Gradable amtonymy   :  when two words are opposite in meaning and the negative of the first word is not means the other and vice versa, they are called gradable antonyms. It Means that the first word can be used to describe a particular referent and the second word can not be used to describe the same referent.

E.g.      the word “large” and “small” are gradable antonymous words.

“Not large” does not always mean “small” and “not small” does not mean “large”. They may be a meaning of “rather large” or a “bit small” between “large” and “small”.

            Gradable antonyms do not have equal markedness. A word is said to be marked when they are more rarely or less often used in a language by the speakers of the language. Two words have equal markedness when they have the same frequency in the use of language.

            e.g.      the word “large” is less marked than “small”

in the use of English we may find “how large?” but rarely find “how small?”

2.      Complimentary antonymy      : when two words are opposite in meaning and the negative of the first means the other, then they must be complimentary antonyms. It means that if the word can not be used to describe a referent then that referent must be describable by the negative of second one and vise versa.

e.g.      the word “single” and “married” are complimentary antonyms.

“not single” means “married” and “not married” will always mean “single”. Here the negative of the first word can describe the referent of the second one and vise versa.

3.      Relational antonymy   : when two words seem to be opposite in meaning and have a reciprocal semantic relationship, then they belong to relational antonyms or converse words. Some words form a relational antonymy with a complex relationship. Different pairs of relational antonyms may be related by different reciprocal semantic relationships.

e.g. the words “father” and “mother” are two relational antonyms or converse words.

The two words are related in oppositional meanings in terms of “male” and “female” parent. The term “father” can also be the relational of the term “son” related in meaning of “tupper” and “lower” male relationship. But the term “father” is not normally contrasted to the term “daughter” because they have more than one reciprocal semantic relationships.

5.Polysemy and Homonymy

            When a word has more than one meaning, it called a polysemic word. It is actually several words having exactly the same both pronunciation and spelling, but of course they have different meanings.

e.g.      the word “plain’ can mean “aesy”, “clear”, “undecorated”, or “not good looking”.

            When two words or more are pronounced similarly but they have different meanings they are homonymic or homophonic words.

e.g.      “for”, “four” sound the same but differ in meanings.

Some words may be homonymous or polysemous. It depends on both etymology of the words (historical origin of the words) and also their various antonymy and synonymy.

e.g.      the word “bank” of a river and “bank” as “financial institution” come from different origins, so they belong to homonymous words.

The word “plain” meaning “easy”, “clear”, “undecorated”, “not good looking” share the same synonym os “simple” and the antonym of “complex”, so they are polysemous, all are adjectives. But “plain” meaning “a level area of land” is a noun and share no synonym not antonym, therefore “plain” as adjective and “plain” as noun belong to homonymous words.

6. methaporical Extension

            A metaphor is an extension of use of a word beyond its primary meaning. We need a different basis to describe referents that have similarities to the word’s primary referent. It means that a word may have literal meanings (methaporical extention).

e.g.      the word “eye” normally means “a pert of human organ” but methaporically it means “part of a needle” or “the center of a storm”.

The use of metaphor are based on the conventions among language speakers/users, otherwise it will sound strange.

Therefore to understand a metaphore we must know how it is used in a certain society and certain aspects that work with that metaphor.

e.g.      “time is money”

to understand this metaphore, it is necessary to know that in English society, people are often paid according to the number of hours or days worked. So the more hours days someone works, the more money he will earn.