Lecture by: Ms.

Sadaf Siddiq
▪ Semantics is the study of the meaning of words, phrases and sentences.
▪ In semantic analysis, there is always an attempt to focus on what the words
conventionally/literal mean, rather than on what an individual speaker might want
them to mean on a particular occasion.
▪ This approach is concerned with objective or general meaning and avoids trying
to account for subjective or local meaning.
▪ Conceptual/denotative meaning covers those basic, essential components of
meaning that are conveyed by the literal use of a word. It is the type of meaning
that dictionaries are designed to describe. Some of the basic components of a word
like needle in English might include “thin, sharp, steel instrument.”
▪ Associative/connotative meaning are the type of meaning that people might
connect with the use of words (e.g. needle = “painful”)associations or connotations
attached to a word like needle. They might associate it with “pain,” or “illness,” or
“blood,” or “drugs,” or “thread,” or “knitting,” or “hard to find” (especially in a
haystack), and these associations may differ from one person to the next. These
types of associations are not treated as part of the word’s conceptual meaning.
▪ semantic features: basic elements of meanings, used in an analysis of the
components of word meaning. Features such as
“+animate, −animate,” “+human, −human,” “+female, −female,”
for example, can be treated as the basic elements involved in differentiating the
meaning of each word in a language from every other word.
▪ This approach takes words as containers of meanings and is used to analyze
conceptual components of word meaning, but it is not without problems. try to think
of the components or features we would use to differentiate the nouns advice,
threat and warning…
▪ Words play certain roles in sentences e.g. nouns tells names of person, place,
things, verbs tell about some state or action etc. The noun phrases in sentences can
be recognized for some roles (semantic or thematic) in sentences.
The boy kicked the ball.
Semantic roles or thematic roles of noun phrases:
▪ Agent and theme
▪ Instrument and experiencer
▪ Location, source and goal
▪ agent: the semantic role of the noun phrase identifying the one who performs the
action of the verb in an event
(The boy kicked the ball)

▪ Theme or patient: the semantic role of the noun phrase used to identify the entity
involved in or affected by the action of the verb in an event
▪ (e.g. The boy kicked the ball)
▪ instrument: the semantic role of the noun phrase identifying the entity that is used
to perform the action of the verb
(e.g. The boy cut the rope with a razor)

▪ experiencer: the semantic role of the noun phrase identifying the entity that has the
feeling, perception or state described by the verb
(e.g. The boy feels sad)
▪ location : the semantic role of the noun phrase identifying where an entity is
(e.g. The boy is sitting in the classroom)

▪ source: the semantic role of the noun phrase identifying where an entity moves
from
(e.g. The boy ran from the house)

▪ goal: the semantic role of the noun phrase identifying where an entity moves to
(e.g. The boy walked to the window)
▪ We recognize the meanings of one word by association of their meanings with
other words. Thus lexical relation is the relationships of meaning between words.
▪ Synonymy
▪ Antonymy
▪ Hyponymy
▪ Prototype
▪ Homophones and homonyms
▪ Polysemy
▪ Word play
▪ Metonymy
▪ The relationship between words based on sameness of meanings. Words with
closely related meanings are called synonyms.
▪ We should keep in mind that the idea of “sameness” of meaning used in discussing
synonymy is not necessarily “total sameness.”
▪ There are many occasions when one word is appropriate in a sentence, but its
synonym would be odd. For example, whereas the word answer fits in the sentence
Sandy had only one answer correct on the test, the word reply would sound odd.
▪ Synonymous forms may also differ in terms of formal versus informal uses. The
sentence My father purchased a large automobile has virtually the same meaning
as My dad bought a big car, with four synonymous replacements, but the second
version sounds much more casual or informal than the first.
▪ Words with totally opposite meanings are called antonyms and their relationship is
known as antonymy. hot/cold, long/short, male/ female, married/single
types of antonyms:
▪ Gradable: words with opposite meanings along a scale (e.g. big–small)
▪ Non-gradable: words which are direct opposites (e.g. alive–dead). There is no scale
of being alive. Someone is either alive or dead. Nothing in between
▪ Reversives: antonyms in which the meaning of one is the reverse action of the other
(e.g. pack/unpack, raise/lower)
▪ the lexical relation in which the meaning of one word is included in the meaning of
another (e.g. “Daffodil” is a hyponym of “flower”) The concept of “inclusion”
involved in this relationship is the idea that if an object is a rose, then it is
necessarily a flower.
▪ When we consider hyponymous connections, we are essentially looking at the
meaning of words in some type of hierarchical relationship.
▪ superordinate: the higher-level term in hyponymy (e.g. flower)
▪ co-hyponyms: words in hyponymy that share the same superordinate (“Daffodil”
and “rose” are co-hyponyms of “flower”)
▪ Prototypes are the most characteristic instance of a category. The concept of a
prototype helps explain the meaning of certain words, like bird, not in terms of
component features (e.g. “has feathers,” “has wings”), but in terms of resemblance
to the clearest example.
▪ Furniture chair
▪ Clothing shirts shoes
▪ Vegetable carrot
▪ homophones: two or more words with different forms and the same pronunciation
e.g. to/too/two, bare/bear, meat/meet, flour/flower

▪ homonyms: two words with the same form that are unrelated in meaning
e.g. mole (on skin) – mole (small animal), bank/bank, bat/bat
▪ Polysemy is the potential for a word to have multiple meanings or a polysemous
form is a word having two or more related meanings (e.g. foot, of person, of bed, of
mountain)
▪ These last three lexical relations are the basis of a lot of word play, usually for
humorous effect. Words with more than one interpretations such as lamb, bark etc.
are examples of word play.
▪ In the nursery rhyme Mary had a little lamb, we think of a small animal, but in the
comic version Mary had a little lamb, some rice and vegetables, we think of a small
amount of meat.
▪ Why are trees often mistaken for dogs? by recognizing the homonymy in the
answer: Because of their bark.
▪ Why is 6 afraid of 7?, you can understand why the answer is funny (Because 789 (7
ate 9))
▪ word used in place of another with which it is closely connected in everyday
experience (e.g. He drank the whole bottle (= the liquid))
▪ based simply on a close connection in everyday experience. That close connection
can be based on a container–contents relation (bottle/water, can/juice), a whole–
part relation (car/wheels, house/roof) or a representative–symbol relationship
(king/crown, the President/the White House).
▪ a relationship between words that frequently occur together (e.g. salt and pepper).
▪ the study of which words occur together and their frequency of cooccurrence has
received a lot more attention in corpus linguistics . A corpus is a large collection of
texts, spoken or written, typically stored as a database in a computer. Those doing
corpus linguistics can then use the database to find out how often specific words or
phrases occur and what types of collocations are most common .