Hypernyms and hyponyms are such that the latter is a type of the former. The relationship between words can also be described in terms of reference, categorization, phonological form, and past meaning. Reverse pairs refer to movement or opposite directions, such as ‘left/right’, ‘up/down’, and ‘east/west’. For example if X is the husband of Y, then Y has to be the wife of X. Ĭonverse/reverse/relational opposite pairs are words that are defined in reference to each other. An elephant is ‘large’ compared to a rabbit, ‘small’ however, a rabbit is ‘large’ compared to a field mouse, ‘small’. Gradable pairs are words holding an opposite relationship to one another to varying degrees based on context. It cannot be ‘sort of dead’ or ‘kind of’ alive. They are sometimes referred to as ‘either-or.’ For instance an animate object is either dead or alive. There are three types of antonyms that you will come across in most textbooks.Ĭomplementary pairs are words whose meanings exclude the possibility of co-existence and are not context-dependent. Although most conceive antonyms to have opposite meanings, they are actually words that share most semantic features, e.g., ‘happy’ and ‘content’, with one word bearing negative values for all/most features and the other bearing positive. On the other side of the coin are antonyms. Although it is acceptable to introduce someone as ‘my little brother’, stating ‘my small brother’ would sound strange to most speakers of Standard English. ‘Content’ relates a more stable emotional state, where as ‘happy’ bears a nuance of transiency.Ī similar example would be the synonyms ‘little’ and ‘small’. Synonyms are two words that are semantically similar enough that they may, in certain contexts, be interchanged, one for the other such as ‘happy’ and ‘content’.Ībsolute synonymy does not exist due to the fact that if two words were to bear identical semantic features and could be exchanged with no difference in meaning or register, then one would become less used than the other until one would bear a distinguishing feature.Īlthough the two sentences fundamentally read the same, there is a nuanced difference depending on which adjective is used. Semantic features can also show relationships in word pairs. īy adding the feature, we are left with an even more reduced set: If we add the feature, the set is now reduced to only those words that are.
Consider the set below.Įach of these words bears the features, , (as well as others which we will not discuss here). List of words can share semantic properties for example, shark, sturgeon, cichlid, holacanthus ciliaris, and tuna, all share the properties of ‘live in the water,’ ‘have fins,’ and ‘eat fish.’ Binary values for semantic features are used to denote word meaning. Lexical semantics is the study of individual words and their relationships to each another. Most introductory linguistics courses focus on three basic areas: lexical semantics (word meaning and relatedness), phrasal or sentential semantics (sentential meaning and relatedness), and pragmatics (meaning in the context of discourse). Semantics covers a very broad list of topics dealing mainly with meaning of and the relationships between words.