Types of Meaning Relationships



 Synonymy

Synonymy refers to the phenomenon of "more than one form having the same meaning". Eg: "Prison" and "jail" are synonymous.

Polysemy 

Polysemy refers to the phenomenon of the "same form having more than one meaning". Eg: "Eye" refers to a part of animal body and to the hold of a needle.

Homonymy 

Homonymy is the likeness of different words. Two words are homonyms because they are pronounced and spelt alike. Eg: "Bank" (the side of a river) and "bank" (financial institution).

Homophones

Homophones is when words are pronounced alike but spelt differently. Eg: "Quay" and "key"; "sweet" and "suite".

Homographs

Homographs are words which spelt alike but pronounced differently. Eg: "Lead"(verb) and "lead"(noun) - a metal.

Metaphor

Metaphor illustrates how a particular meaning feature of a word is extended to refer to the quality feature of another referent. Eg: "Gol" is metaphorically used to mean anything valuable or genuine.

Metonymy

Metonymy is the use of an item to refer to some other item by association. Eg: "The chair" is used to refer to "the person who is in the chair".

Antonymy

Antonymy is the "oppositeness of sense". Antonymy of the type found in "tall" vs "short" is absolute antonymy. Antonymy in some cases depends on the dimension one has in mind. For eg:

  1. Man ✖ boy (+ adult)
  2. Man ✖ beast (+ human)
  3. Man ✖ woman (+ female)
Some linguists consider incompatibility a more comprehensive term and prefer it to antonymy.

While incompatibility refers to "meaning exclusion", hyponymy refers to "meaning inclusion". Hem is hyponymous to a general item.

The specific item is subordinate to the general item, also called a hypernym or superordinate item.

Ambiguity

Ambiguity can have its source in homonymy or polysemy, can be syntactic or lexical.

  1. She saw me near the bank. (lexical)
  2. Visiting professors can be expensive. (syntactic)
In sent (1) ambiguity is due to lexical homonymy: "bank" and "bank". On the other hand, in sent (2) ambiguity is due to what is called structural homonymy.

    2.a. Visiting (the professors) {can be} expensive.
    2.b. (The) visiting professors {can be/are} expensive.

Dr. Susan Mathew
CMS College


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I See Kashmir From New Delhi at Midnight

Image
  I See Kashmir From New Delhi at Midnight Agha Shahid Ali The Poet Agha Shahid Ali was born in 1949: just one year or more after Independence, and also after partition. His birth was in Delhi, but he was raised up in Kashmir. Life in Kashmir was difficult in those days. The problems of partition, with India and Pakistan holding claim to the territories there, made the place a constant field of fights and tensions. The poet moved over to the USA in 1976. This poem forms part of a collection “The Country without a Post Office”. which came out in 1997. Agha Shahid Ali is a representative of diaspora. He has childhood memories of Kashmir. He spent his youthhood partly in Delhi, where he had his college education. Then he moved over to the United States of America, where he became a teacher and emerged as a noted poet. In most of his poems, Kashmir and its problems form the theme. The Poem “I See Kashmir From New Delhi at Midnight”, by Agha Shahid Ali, is a diasporic poem, where the po...
Read more

Romeo and Juliet (Savouring the Classics)

Image
Romeo and Juliet William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616) The Writer Shakespeare needs little introduction! A writer of plays - tragedies, comedies, and histories, and also the composer of poems and sonnets. He lived in Elizabethan England, in the sixteenth century. But he belongs not to any particular place or time. As his friend and contemporary writer Ben Jonson puts it: “He was not of an age, but for all time!” A Shakespearean drama, according to the Elizabethan convention, is divided into five Acts. Each Act may have a number of scenes. The Elizabethan stage had no curtains in the front. Hence, the writers arranged each section in a way all characters left the stage at the end of a scene. Even if there is a dead body, there will be someone to carry it away. Because there is no back curtain depicting any scenery or background, the plays will have lots of descriptions explaining what all can be seen. The Play “Romeo and Juliet” is one of the early plays from Shakespeare. The plot is develo...
Read more

THE BOY WHO PAINTED CHRIST BLACK

Image
  John Henrik Clarke: John Henrik Clarke was an African-American historian, professor, and a pioneer in the creation of Pan-African and Africana studies. Being a member of a sharecropper’s family, he was expected to become a farmer by his mother. But he followed his dreams and went to Harlem. There he pursued scholarship and became part of the Black Power Movement, which aimed at instilling confidence of the Black people and at their upliftment. He was one of the pioneers who founded the Black Academy of Arts and Letters. Major Works: Novel - Confessions of a Nat Turner Short stories –             The Boy Who Painted Christ Black: A Short Story             On the Other Side: A Story of the Color Line             Leader of the Mob: A Story of the Color Line        ...
Read more