Cas LX 02 Semantics 3a. Word meaning 6ish Lexical semantics

Antonyms

• The opposition can be gradable as well. Something that is not hot is not necessarily cold, but they are still in opposition. Beautiful/ugly, fast/slow, tall/short, large/small.
• Or, they can be opposed in a non-binary way (taxonomic sisters): red/green/blue, January/September/November/December.

Hyponymy

• Some words are related in an inclusion relation.
• Couch, furniture.
• Capybara/mammal/animal.

Meronymy

• Meronymy: Part-whole relations:
• Word/sentence/paragraph/page/chapter/book
• Member-collection: boat/fleet, bird/flock

So where are we?

• The meanings of words (ahem, lexemes) are related to each other in many different ways. Some relations are prominent enough to be classified (synonyms, antonyms, hyponyms, polysems, …).
• An empirical result of these connections can be seen in our inference patterns.
• Fido is a dog. Fido is a mammal. Fido is a cat.

What we know (about English, say)

• Part of an English-speaker’s knowledge of language is the information in the lexicon: lexemes, their pronunciation, their syntactic category, their relationships to other lexemes, … and whatever is left, that we might call their meaning.

Back to the question of “words”

• We might imagine that we can come up with some kind of “meaning” (definition, say) for tie or wrap.
• We might observe that the relation between untie to tie rather like the relation between unwrap and wrap. And we might observe that one is simply the other plus un-.
• Words themselves are composed of morphemes, some of which are meaningful in and of themselves (and would have lexical entries of their own).