Word Meaning

Word Meaning

1. Lexical relations – the way speakers and hearers construct meaning.

2. Words – can be identified at the level of writing, where we are familiar with them being separated by white space.

3. Lexical entry – may contain several lexemes or senses, usually we try to group words that make sense in a semantic grouping (by having some common elements or meaning or by being historically related.

4. Collocation

5. Idioms

6. Ambiguity – where a words can have a different sense

   • Homonyms – are unrelated senses of the same phonological word (people say it the same click and clique).
   • Homophones – Senses of the same spoken word (See /sight/ and Sea /the ocean/)
   • Homographs – senses of the same written word (Bat /the animal/ and /the wooden bat in baseball/)
   • Lexemes same syntactic category and same spelling (lap /circuit of a course/ and lap /part of a body/). Same category but different spelling (ring /jewelry/ and wring /when you squeeze and twist something/). Different category but same spelling (verb keep and noun keep) Different category different spelling (not and knot)

7. Polysemy - is the capacity for a sign (such as a word, phrase, or symbol) to have multiple meanings (PLAIN /simple/ and /not decorated in anyway/).

   • Synonym – different phonological words which have same or very similar meanings.

8. Antonyms are words that have the opposite meaning.

   • Gradable pairs good/bad, hot/cold.
   • Reverses antonyms (in/out, pull/push)
   • Converses (above/below, teacher/student, own/belong to)
   • Taxonomic sisters (colors /red,blue,yellow/ days /Monday, Tuesday, Friday/

9. Member Collection (Tree/forest, book/library). Portion mass (drop/liquid, sheet/paper)

   • Causative verbs (The barking dog made the postman run away). Agentive nouns (walk/walker, toast/toaster, sail/sailor, calculate/calculator)