Chapter 3

Word meaning
Introduction
• Word meaning > Lexical Semantics

• (i) represent the meaning of each word in the language

• (ii) show how the meanings of words in a language are interrelated.

• a) I saw my mother right now. (mother > woman)

• How is this relationship represented?

Introduction
• a) I saw my mother right now. (mother > woman)

• How is this relationship represented?

• i) perhaps it follows from the relationship between the uttered word

mother and the related, but unspoken word woman, (links in the
vocabulary)
• ii) the word mother contains a semantic element ‘woman’ as part of
its meaning.
Introduction
• b. My bank manager has just been murdered.
• c. My bank manager is dead.
• d. My bank will be getting a new manager.

• e. Rob has failed his statistics exam.

• f. Rob hasn't passed his statistics exam.
• g. Rob can't bank on a glittering career as a statistician.

• h. This bicycle belongs to Logan.

• i. Logan owns this bicycle.
• j. Logan rides a bicycle.
Words and Grammatical categories
• We observe some regularities (as we have mentioned) between
syntactic categories and kinds of meaning

• Nouns, nominals > entities, objects

• Verbs > actions, events
• Quantifiers, logical connectives > ???
Words and Lexical Items
• Lexicon consists of lexemes

• Lexemes are “semantic’ words (compare that to phonological words

or grammatical words).

• Walks, walked, walking > three grammatical words, one lexeme.

• But what are words?

Words and Lexical Items
• This can get a bit tricky.

• Semantics definitions are often inadequate… Speakers of different

languages package semantic information into words differently.

• We can try grammatical (distributional) definitions. Not perfect but

they work better. For instance a word could be the smallest part of
speech that has semantic content and can occur on its own. (you will
notice that this is very similar to a free morpheme, but excludes
logical words).
Words and Lexical Items
• This can get a bit tricky.

• Similar to how a lexeme can correspond to different grammatical

forms, we can also have the inverse:

• k. He scored with his left foot.

• l. They made camp at the foot of the mountain.
• m. I ate a foot-long hot dog.
Words and Lexical Items
• What kind of information does a lexicon have? Our book seems to refer to
actual dictionaries, but I would urge you to think more about the lexicon as
part of the human linguistic knowledge (like we learned in 201) or as an
abstract component of a language (the book really refers to this second
way to think about the lexicon, even if it is not immediately obvious).

• What kind of information should a lexeme have?

• 1. the lexeme’s pronunciation
• 2. its grammatical category and other related info
• 3. its meaning (likely some link to a concept)
• 4. its meaning relations with other lexemes
Words and Lexical Items
• What kind of information does a lexicon have? Our book seems to
refer to actual dictionaries but I would urge you to think more about
the lexicon as part of the human linguistic knowledge (like we learned
in 201).

• More generally anything that cannot be predicted by rules of the

grammar and needs to be memorized.
Problems with Pinning Down Word Meaning
• Word meaning can be tricky

• a. I go for a run every morning.

• b. The tail-end batsmen added a single run before lunch.
• c. The ball-player hit a home run.
• d. We took the new car for a run.
• e. He built a new run for his chickens.
• f. There's been a run on the dollar.
• g. The bears are here for the salmon run.
Problems with Pinning Down Word Meaning
• a. I go for a run every morning.
• b. The tail-end batsmen added a single run before lunch.
• c. The ball-player hit a home run.
• d. We took the new car for a run.
• e. He built a new run for his chickens.
• f. There's been a run on the dollar.
• g. The bears are here for the salmon run.

• Ambiguity vs. vagueness

Problems with Pinning Down Word Meaning
• Ambiguity vs. vagueness

• Are these seven different senses of the word run? Or are they just
examples of the same sense influenced by different contexts?

• “The basic idea is that in examples of vagueness the context can add
information that is not specified in the sense, but in examples of
ambiguity the context will cause one of the senses to be selected”.

• How can we tell???

Problems with Pinning Down Word Meaning
• Do so replacement (remember 201?)

• a. Charlie hates mayonnaise and so does Mary.

• b. He took a form and Sean did too.

• convention of identity between the do so expression and the

preceding verb phrase

• How can we use this?

Problems with Pinning Down Word Meaning
• a. Duffy discovered a mole (small burrowing animal/spy).

• b. Duffy discovered a mole, and so did Clark.

• Whatever Duffy discovered, Clark discovered as well. It cannot be that

Duffy discovered an animal and Clark a spy (unless someone is being
facetious)

• Therefore we have lexical ambiguity here.

Problems with Pinning Down Word Meaning
• a. We hired a publicist. (John/Mary/Sam)

• I publicist ambiguous here, or simply vague with regard for instance

to gender?

• They hired a publicist and so did we.

• Is it necessary that these two publicists identify with the same

gender? Not really. > vagueness
Problems with Pinning Down Word Meaning
• Another test has to do with the semantic relations between words:

• a. I go for a run every morning.

• b. I go for a jog every morning.
• c. ?I go for an enclosure every morning.

• a. He built a new run for his chickens.

• b. He built a new enclosure for his chickens.
• c. ?He built a new jog for his chickens.
Lexical Relations
• Homonymy: lexemes with unrelated senses of the same phonological
word.

• 1 lexemes of the same syntactic category, and with the same spelling: e.g.
lap “circuit of a course” and lap “part of body when sitting down”;
• 2 of the same category, but with different spelling: e.g. the verbs ring and
wring;
• 3 of different categories, but with the same spelling: e.g. the verb bear and
the noun bear;
• 4 of different categories, and with different spelling: e.g. not, knot.
Lexical Relations
• Polysemy: lexemes with related senses of the same phonological word.

• Can you show that one comes from the other?

• hook n. 1. a piece of material, usually metal, curved or bent and used to

suspend, catch, hold, or pull something. 2. short for fish-hook. 3. a trap or
snare. 4. Chiefly U.S. something that attracts or is intended to be an
attraction. 5. something resembling a hook in design or use. 6.a. a sharp
bend or angle in a geological formation, esp. a river. b. a sharply curved spit
of land. 7. Boxing. a short swinging blow delivered from the side with the
elbow bent. \
Lexical Relations
• Synonymy: lexemes that are different phonological words that have
the same or very similar meanings.

• Couch/Sofa
• Lawyer/Attorney
• Lad/Boy

• Sometimes synonyms can belong to different registers

(formal/causal/slang)
Lexical Relations
• Antonymy: lexemes that are opposite or antithetical in meaning.
Several sub-categories.

• Complementary antonyms: the negative of one implies the positive of

the other

• Dead/alive
• Pass/fail
Lexical Relations
• Gradable antonyms: the positive of one term does not necessarily
imply the negative of the other

• rich/poor
• fast/slow
• young/old
• beautiful/ugly
Lexical Relations
• Reverses: terms describing movement, where one term describes
movement in one direction, →, and the other the same movement in
the opposite direction, ←;

• come/go
• go/return
• ascend/descend.
• Left/right
Lexical Relations
• Converses: terms which describe a relation between two entities from
alternate viewpoints, as in the pairs:

• own/belong to
• above/below
• employer/employee
Lexical Relations
• Hyponymy: inclusion. A hyponym includes the meaning of a more
general word

• dog and cat are hyponyms of animal

• sister and mother are hyponyms of woman

• The more general term is called the superordinate or hypernym.

Much of the lexicon is linked by such systems of inclusion, and the
resulting semantic networks form hierarchical taxonomies
Lexical Relations
Lexical Relations
• Meronymy: part–whole relationship between lexical items. Thus
cover and page are meronyms of book.
Lexical Relations
• Similar to Meronymy: Member/Collection > relationship between the
word for a unit and the usual word for a collection of the units
Lexical Relations
• Similar to Meronymy: Portion/Mass > relation between a mass noun
and the usual unit of measurement or division
Lexical Typology
• Semantic typology: cross-linguistic study of meaning
• Can we identify regularities across the obvious variation between
languages?

• One important branch is lexical typology. Why?

• “Because a language's lexicon reflects interaction between the

structures of the language, the communicative needs of its speakers
and the cultural and physical environment they find themselves in.”
Lexical Typology
• Two important ways to look for such regularities:

• the comparison of lexical organization or principles

• the comparison of lexical fields and individual lexical items.

• An example of the first is the study of cross-linguistic patterns of

polysemy.
• “Do you drink cigarettes?” = Do you smoke (in Hindi, Turkish and
Hausa).
Lexical Typology
• An example of the second is the cross-linguistic study of color terms.

• it might be surprising to some of us that terms for colors should vary.

• (we all share the same physiology, right?)

• In an important study Berlin and Kay (1969) investigated the fact that
languages vary in the number and range of their basic color terms.
Color Terms
• Basic color terms (Berlin and Kay 1969)

• a. The term is monolexemic, i.e. not built up from the meaning of its
parts. (terms like blue-gray are out)
• b. The term is not a hyponym of any other color term, i.e. the color is
not a kind of another color. (red is basic, scarlet is not)
• c. The term has wide applicability. (blonde does not)
• d. The term is not a semantic extension of something manifesting that
color. (silver, gold, and chestnut are out)
Color Terms
• Basic color term systems:
• Two terms: Dani (Trans-New Guinea; Irin Jaya)
• Three: Tiv (Niger-Congo; Nigeria), Pomo (Hokan; California, USA)
• Four: Ibibio (Niger-Congo; Nigeria), Hanunóo (Austronesian; Mindoro
Island, Philippines)
• Five: Tzeltal (Mayan; Mexico), Kung-Etoka (Khoisan; Southern Africa)
• Six: Tamil (Dravidian; India), Mandarin Chinese
• Seven: Nez Perce (Penutian; Idaho, USA), Malayalam (Dravidian; India)
• Ten/eleven: Lebanese Arabic, English14
Color Terms
• Basic color term systems:
• Two terms: Dani (Trans-New Guinea; Irin Jaya)
• Three: Tiv (Niger-Congo; Nigeria), Pomo (Hokan; California, USA)
• Four: Ibibio (Niger-Congo; Nigeria), Hanunóo (Austronesian; Mindoro
Island, Philippines)
• Five: Tzeltal (Mayan; Mexico), Kung-Etoka (Khoisan; Southern Africa)
• Six: Tamil (Dravidian; India), Mandarin Chinese
• Seven: Nez Perce (Penutian; Idaho, USA), Malayalam (Dravidian; India)
• Ten/eleven: Lebanese Arabic, English
Color Terms
• Rather than finding any possible division of the color spectrum into
basic terms, their study identifies quite a narrow range of
possibilities, with some shared structural features.
• within the range of each color term there is a basic focal color that
speakers agree to be the best prototypical example of the color.

• this focal color is the same for the color term cross-linguistically >
color naming systems are based on the neurophysiology of the
human visual system
Color Terms