Semantic meaning Fields and Components of Meaning Semantic

Semantic/ meaning Fields and Components of Meaning

Semantic field • The students analyze a text and discuss with their teacher • Fish, fisherman, fishhook, wave, boat, sea. • Infant, child, adolescent, adult • Mother, father, daughter, child, grand mother, grand father, uncle.

Semantic/ meaning components/ semantic features/ semantic properties/ markers component/ semantic primitives • mother human, female, adult, married. • father human, male, adult, married. • Bicycle • Motorcycle

Horse • • Mammals Four legs Herbivore Animal farm yes yes sheep yes yes

• Words which stay in one semantic field are classified into collocation (linear) set (paradigmatic)

Components of meanings Semantic Component Description Example Contrastive diagnostic, Distinguishes “Male” is the one lexical unit contrastive semantic distinctive, essential from another component distinguishing man from woman, and boy from girl. Occurs in each “Human” is a shared Shared common member of a component for group of man, woman, boy, lexical units and girl.

Examples of componential analysis

• • Reasons for identifying such components are: They may allow an economic characterization of the lexical and sentential relations. It shows the sentence relations like the contradiction, e. g. a. Ferdinand is dead. b. Ferdinand is alive. and entailment, e. g. a. Henrietta cooked some lamb chops. . b. Henrietta cooked some meat. They have linguistic import outside semantics. It can help to describe a range of syntactic and morphological process. They provide us with an unique view of conceptual structure or psychological architecture.

• To show hyponymy • woman [FEMALE] [ADULT] HUMAN] • spinster [FEMALE] [ADULT] HUMAN] [UNMARRIED] • Wife [FEMALE] [ADULT] HUMAN] [MARRIED]

• To show antonymy. bachelor spinster wife [MALE] [ADULT] [HUMAN] [UNMARRIED] [FEMALE] [ADULT] [HUMAN] [MARRIED]