INGLÉS Maestro

CURSO 2021/22
SEMANA: Week 21
TEMAS: Language Practice – Listening Task based on topic 11.
MATERIAL ELABORADO POR: Amaia Terán

Lexical Semantic Relations

Hi everyone this lecture we're going to be focusing on semantics let's start with the obvious
question. What is semantics? Probably heard people say something like you are just arguing
semantics which probably means that you think semantics is something that doesn't really
matter as it's usually put in a way as if you're not really making a contribution to a
discussion. The reality is actually the opposite, semantics is the study of meaning and if I'm
being honest I would say that meaning is decently important when talking to someone. In
this set of lectures we're going to be going through a broad overview of the different ways
that linguistics talks about the meaning of words and sentences. To start with
we're going to talk about how words relate to each other. These relationships are called
lexical-semantics relations and there are eight main semantic relations that we will be going
through one by one. Before we start though I'd like to talk about a central feature of
language ambiguity. Ambiguity is the feature of language that allows single words to mean
multiple things depending on different contexts. Ambiguity is present in every language; in
English you can find ambiguity all over the place, take the word sick as in I am sick or that is

1
INGLÉS Maestro
sick. Ambiguity can be brought to an extreme degree with the concept of auto-antonyms or
words that actually contradict themselves. In this English example, we have words like table
meaning to bring something forth or to put something on the backburner, ravel which
can mean either to tangle or untangle something and sanction which at once means to allow
or to punish. Ambiguity is a property that is inherent to language and it's something that
allows language to be creative. The first of the lexical semantics relations we'll be covering is
synonymy. Synonymy is when two words have the same or at least similar meaning.
Synonymy is rarely exact. Words almost always have some difference but their meanings can
be very close words like run and rush or cry and bawl as in: he bawled all night or even sleep
and doze these are all synonyms because they more or less impart the same meaning.
The second relation we'll be looking at is that of antonymy. Antonymy is the
opposite of synonymy. It is when two words have opposite meanings. Words like run versus
walk; cry versus laugh sleep versus awake or yes versus no. Antonymy has three subtypes:
there is relational antonyms, gradable antonyms and absolute antonyms.
Relational antonyms are those words which are on opposite sides of a relationship;
- so a child and his or her parent are said to be on opposite sides; of a parent-child
relationship;
- a buyer and a seller are on opposite sides of a sale and could be considered relational
antonyms; and then finally,
- lend and borrow are on opposite sides of the verb to transfer an object which again
allows them to be relational antonyms.
One way to think about these words is that one word generally implies the existence of
another. The child must have at least biological parent, a buyer must have a seller or else
they're not buying anything and lending something implies that somebody is borrowing it
otherwise you're not really lending it.
The second type of antonyms are gradable antonyms, which exist on a scale. These are
things like hot versus cold, tall versus short or old versus young. These are scales with grey
area in between so something can be more hot or more cold it can be almost entirely hot or
almost entirely cold and the absence of one means the presence of another if someone is
not tall that means they are short if something is not cold that means it is hot and if

2
INGLÉS Maestro
something is not old that means that they are young or at least middle-aged. I guess in that
example the final type of antonymy are absolute antonyms. These are antonyms that do not
exist on a spectrum words like live versus dead, zombies don't count. True versus false or yes
versus no. There is no grey area in between for the most part.
The third type of lexical relation is that of hyponymy. Hyponymy describes the relationship
that occurs when one word is the subset or a part of another word. You can think of this in
the frame X is a Y relationship this can be seen in the following words: dog is a hyponymy of
animal we can say a dog is an animal. Atticus is a hyponym of people, we can say Atticus is a
person. Purple is a hypony of colour because we can say purple is a colour. Hyponymy, to
rephrase is the relationship that occurs when one word is an instantiation of the full set of
another word.
On the flip side we have hypernymy, as our fourth lexical relation hypernymy can be thought
of as the opposite or antonym of hyponymy. It describes a word that is a superset of
another so animal is a hypernym of dog because dogs are a type of animal, human is a
hypernym of Atticus because Atticus is a type of animal and colour is a hypernym of purple
because purple is a type of colour. Note be careful because hyponomy and hypernymy differ
only by one letter and so in a test situation if you accidentally write hyponomy when you
mean hypernymy you will not be given a grade as they're actually opposite situations.
Our fifth lexical relation is meronomy or often called partonomy. Meronymy means when
one word is an actual physical part of something else when hyponomy deals with abstract
categories, meronymy deals with structural components so a thumb is a meronym of hand
because thumb is an actual component of a hand; likewise a kitchen is a meronym of a home
and pants are a meronym of a suit. Note that in the instance of pants and suit the pants are
not physically connected to the jacket of a suit and yet we would still say they are a
meronym because the suit is not complete without the component of pant.
Our sixth lexical relation is that of holonymy. Holonymy is the opposite of meronymy
and denotes something that is a whole made up of some part or having something
as some component. So we would say that a hand is a holonym four thumb, a house
is a hollonym of kitchen and a suit is a hollonym of pants.
The final two lexical relations that we will focusing on go together as a set. They are also the
two most easily confused terms so I'll be spending a bit more time on them. Both of these

3
INGLÉS Maestro
terms deal with words that are pronounced the same but have different meanings. Note
that spelling is not important in this distinction. Polysemy is the relationship between two
words that sound the same but have different related meanings. The term wood which is to
say the product of a tree and wood an area made of many trees are polysemous because
they do have different meanings but meanings that are very clearly related. Similarly book,
the object and book the verb, to schedule something are said to be polysemous because the
verb is clearly related to the now it comes from the act of writing a date down in a physical
book. Crane the animal and crane the construction equipment are said to be polysemous
because the construction equipment is named for how its shape is shared with that of the
animal.
The last lexical relation is homophony and is when you're probably familiar with homophony
is the relationship between two words that sound the same but are completely unrelated.
The best example of this is Bank the financial institution and Bank the side of a river which
are said to be homophones because they have completely different meanings and in fact
one, comes from the French that is the financial institution while Bank the sides of a river
comes from a Germanic root. To die (cease living) and to die (changing the colours of
something) are homonyms because their meanings are unrelated again one coming from
Germanic roots the other from French roots; and then we have the example of site which is
a place and site the sense of perceiving something these are considered him off on us
although some might say they seem like they are polysemous in fact once again one of these
words comes from a completely different root than the other. Now not all homophony is
due to ideological differences, etymology being the study of the history of words. Some
words were related in past but have since diverged a meaning significantly, over time an
example of this might be something like break to wreck something and break to stop we
would say these two words are homophones because they don't seem to be related on
meaning although when we look at them they are derived from the same root in both cases
there was a single term that meant to apply something with force to another thing so we
would say when you would smash something with a hammer you might be breaking it over
time this became applied to the carriage and later the automobile where something was
physically applied to stop the wheel from moving the relationship between

4
INGLÉS Maestro
these words grew less and less transparent over time and now we have break meaning to
stop and break meaning to destroy as a result we would say that synchronically or at this
particular time they are homophony so rather than polysemous with that we have covered
lexical semantics relations in the quizzes for this section you will be expected to look at a set
of words and describe the relationship between them if you have any questions please don't
hesitate to shoot me an email or ask in the anonymous forum I think most of these
relationships are pretty straightforward except for polysemy and homophony but if I need to
explain anything slightly better feel free to ask me and I'll see what I can do
the next video in this section will be covering the relationships between sentences and
defining senses of meaning I'll see you all there