Introducing English Linguistics

Semantic relations
Although the goal of componential analysis is to develop semantic fea-
tures that define an individual word, the features also serve to distinguish
words from one another. For instance, as we saw above, Cruse (2004) pro-
posed a system which compared words such as chair with a series of words
that differed from chair by a single feature. More traditionally, semanti-
cists have compared words in terms of a group of more general semantic
relations that describe various degrees of similarities and differences that
words exhibit. In her survey of the literature on semantic relations, Sparck
Jones (1986: 42–7) identifies twelve different relations that have been pro-
posed, including the three below:
Synonymy: words having the same meaning (e.g. help/assist, common/
ubiquitous, hard/difficult)
Antonymy: words having opposite meanings (e.g. light/dark, heavy/light,
open/closed)
Hyponymy: words whose meanings are included in the meaning of a
more general word (e.g. daisy, rose, tulip
→ flowers; desk, table, sofa →
furniture; sparrow, robin, crow
→ birds)
Even though the above relations do not exhaust the number of relations
that exist, they are very common and, additionally, play an important role
in human cognition. We perceive the world in terms of similarities, dif-
ferences, oppositions, and class inclusion – general perceptual categories
that also apply to our views of the relationships existing between words in
a language.