English Semantics

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MODULE 5
Sense Relations

Instructor: Lam Hoang Phuc

5.1. Synonymy

▪ Synonymy is the relationship between two predicates

that have the same sense.
E.g. In many dialects, mercury and quicksilver are synonyms.
▪ Examples of perfect synonymy are hard to find, perhaps
because there is little point in a dialect having two
predicates with exactly the same sense.
▪ In considering the sense of a word, we abstract away from
any stylistic, social, or dialectal associations the word may
have. We concentrate on what has been called the
cognitive or conceptual meaning of a word.
E.g. We would say that kids and children have the same
sense, although clearly they differ in style, or formality.
▪ Synonymy is a relation between predicates, and not
between words (i.e. word-forms).
5.1. Synonymy

▪ Synonymy is a relation between predicates, and not

between words (i.e. word-forms).
▪ The notion of synonymy can be extended to hold
between words of different parts of speech, for example
between the verb sleeping and the adjective asleep.
▪ Examples like these are not the kind usually given of
synonymy, but they help to make the point that the sense
of a word does not depend entirely on its part of speech.
5.2. Hyponymy

▪ Hyponymy is a sense relation between predicates (or

sometimes longer phrases) such that the meaning of one
predicate (or phrase) is included in the meaning of the
other.
E.g. The meaning of red is included in the meaning of scarlet.
Red is the superordinate term; scarlet is a hyponym of red
(scarlet is a kind of red).
▪ In general, the superordinate term is more abstract,
general, or schematic than its hyponyms.
5.2. Hyponymy

▪ Hyponymy is defined in terms of the inclusion of the

sense of one item in the sense of another. We say, for
example, that the sense of animal is included in the sense
of cow. This inclusion can be shown roughly by a diagram
giving a list of the ‘sense-components’ of cow. It will be
seen that this list includes the component ‘animal’:
5.2. Hyponymy

▪ But, if we draw a diagram of the extensions of cow and

animal, the inclusion relationship appears the other way
around:
5.2. Hyponymy

▪ We define hyponymy in such a way that synonymy counts

as a special case of hyponymy. For example, given two
synonyms, such as mercury and quicksilver, we say for
convenience that these also illustrate the hyponymy
relationship, and that mercury and quicksilver are
hyponyms of each other. Thus synonymy can be seen as a
special case of hyponymy, i.e. symmetrical hyponymy.
If X is a hyponym of Y and if Y is also a hyponym of X,
then X and Y are synonymous.
5.3. Antonymy

▪ A traditional view of antonymy is that it is simply

‘oppositeness of meaning’. This view is not adequate, as
words may be opposite in meaning in different ways, and
some words have no real opposites.
5.3. Antonymy

1. Binary antonyms
▪ Binary antonyms are predicates which come in pairs and
between them exhaust all the relevant possibilities. If the
one predicate is applicable, then the other cannot be, and
vice versa.
▪ Another way to view this is to say that a predicate is a
binary antonym of another predicate if it entails the
negative of the other predicate.
E.g. true and false are binary antonyms.
If a sentence is true, it cannot be false. If it is false, it cannot
be true. Alternatively, if something is true, this entails that it
is not false. If it is false, this entails it is not true.
5.3. Antonymy

2. Converses
▪ If a predicate describes a relationship between two things
(or people) and some other predicate describes the same
relationship when the two things (or people) are
mentioned in the opposite order, then the two predicates
are converses of each other.
E.g. Parent and child are converses, because X is the parent
of Y (one order) describes the same situation (relationship)
as Y is the child of X (opposite order).
▪ The notion of converseness can be applied to examples in
which three things (or people) are mentioned.
E.g. If John bought a car from Fred, then it means Fred sold a
car to John.
Therefore, buy and sell are converses.
5.3. Antonymy

3. Multiple incompatibility
▪ In binary antonymy and converseness, the antonyms
come in pairs. Between them, the members of a pair of
binary antonyms fully fill the area to which they can be
applied. Such areas can be thought of as miniature
semantic systems. Such semantic systems are sometimes
known as ‘semantic fields’.
▪ Thus, for example, male and female between them
constitute the English sex system. Other such systems (or
fields) can have three, or four, or any number of
members, depending upon the way in which the system is
organized.
5.3. Antonymy

3. Multiple incompatibility
▪ All the terms in a given system are mutually incompatible,
and together, the members of a system cover all the
relevant area.
▪ For instance, a playing card cannot belong to both the
hearts suit and the spades suit. And besides hearts, clubs,
diamonds, and spades, there are no other suits. Systems
such as these are called systems of multiple
incompatibility.
▪ There are large numbers of open-ended systems of
multiple incompatibility.
▪ E.g. colour words (like red, grey)
5.3. Antonymy

4. Gradable antonyms
▪ Two predicates are gradable antonyms if they are at
opposite ends of a continuous scale of values (a scale
which typically varies according to the context of use).
E.g. Hot and cold are gradable antonyms.
▪ Between hot and cold is a continuous scale of values,
which may be given names such as warm, cool, or tepid.
What is called hot in one context (e.g. of oven
temperatures in a recipe book) could well be classed as
cold in another context (e.g. the temperatures of stars).
▪ A good test for gradability, is to see whether a word can
combine with very, or very much, or how? or how much?
E.g. How tall is he? is acceptable, but How top is that shelf?
is not generally acceptable
5.4. Ambiguity

▪ A word or sentence is ambiguous when it has more than

one sense.
▪ A sentence is ambiguous if it has two (or more)
paraphrases which are not themselves paraphrases of
each other.
E.g. We saw her duck is a paraphrase of We saw her lower
her head and of We saw the duck belonging to her, and
these last two sentences are not paraphrases of each other.
Therefore We saw her duck is ambiguous.
5.4. Ambiguity

▪ In the case of words and phrases, a word or phrase is

ambiguous if it has two (or more) synonyms that are not
themselves synonyms of each other.
E.g. Coach is synonymous with trainer and with charabanc
(or bus) but these two are not synonyms of each other, so
coach is ambiguous.
▪ In the case of ambiguous words, a distinction is
sometimes made between polysemy and homonymy.
This distinction has basically to do with the closeness, or
relatedness, of the senses of the ambiguous words.
5.4. Ambiguity

▪ A case of homonymy is one of an ambiguous word whose

different senses are far apart from each other and not
obviously related to each other in any way with respect to
a native speaker’s intuition.
E.g. Bank (financial institution vs the side of a river or
stream) is a clear case of homonymy. There is no obvious
conceptual connection between the two meanings.
5.4. Ambiguity

▪ A case of polysemy is one where a word has several very

closely related senses. In other words, a native speaker
of the language has clear intuitions that the different
senses are related to each other in some way.
E.g. Mouth (of a river vs of an animal) is a case of polysemy.
The two senses are clearly related by the concepts of an
opening from the interior of some solid mass to the outside,
and of a place of issue at the end of some long narrow
channel.
5.4. Ambiguity

▪ In practice, it is nearly impossible to draw a clear line

between homonymy and polysemy. It appears that
homonymy and polysemy occupy places along a graded
continuum of meaning with homonymy at one extreme
and vagueness at the other extreme, with polysemy
falling somewhere in between.
▪ A word is said to be ‘vague’ when it appears to have one
basic sense (monosemy) which is nevertheless flexible
enough to allow for minor variations in meaning or use.
▪ The English word aunt is often cited as an example of
vagueness, since most speakers feel it has one fairly
unified sense in spite of the fact that it can be used to
refer to distinct members of a person’s family: the sister
of either a person’s father or his or her mother.
5.4. Ambiguity

▪ It is not always possible to find an exactly synonymous

phrase for a given word. Where exact synonyms are not
available, it is possible to indicate different senses of a
word by giving different environments in which the word
may be used.
E.g. Grass has two senses which are indicated by the
following environments:
(a) Please keep off the grass
(b) The informer grassed on his partners-in-crime
▪ In many cases, a word used in one sense belongs to one
part of speech, and used in another sense, it belongs to a
different part of speech.
E.g. long in the sense of yearn is a verb and in the sense of
not short is an adjective
5.4. Ambiguity

▪ Some sentences which contain ambiguous words are

ambiguous while others are not.
E.g. Cinderella watched the colourful ball is ambiguous but
John sawed a rotten branch off the ash tree is not.
▪ And some sentences which contain no ambiguous words
are ambiguous while others are not.
E.g. The drunken visitor rolled up the carpet is ambiguous but
Semantics is a subdiscipline of Linguistics is not.
5.4. Ambiguity

▪ A sentence which is ambiguous because its words relate

to each other in different ways, even though none of the
individual words are ambiguous, is structurally (or
grammatically) ambiguous.
E.g. The chicken is ready to eat is structurally ambiguous.
▪ Any ambiguity resulting from the ambiguity of a word is a
lexical ambiguity.
E.g. The captain corrected the list is lexically ambiguous.
5.5. Referential versatility

▪ A phrase is referentially versatile if it can be used to refer

to a wide range of different things or persons. This is very
similar to the notion of vagueness.
E.g. The pronoun she can be used to refer to any female
person. On a given occasion she might be used to refer to
Mary, on another occasion to Lucy, etc., but this does NOT
mean that she is ambiguous, because although it is used to
refer to different people this is not a matter of a difference
in sense.
5.6. Anomaly

▪ Anomaly is semantic oddness (as opposed to grammatical

oddness) that can be traced to the meanings of the
predicates in the sentence concerned. Anomaly involves
the violation of a selectional restriction.
E.g. Christopher is killing phonemes is anomalous because
the meanings of the predicates kill and phoneme cannot be
combined in this way.
5.6. Anomaly

▪ We treat anomaly as a special, indirect case of

contradiction. That is, it is possible to deduce (by logical
rules) a basic contradiction from an anomaly:
REFERENCES

Hurford, J. R., Heasley, B. & Smith, M. B. (2007).

Semantics: A course book. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.