Semantic structure of the word

Points for discussion:

1. The problem of meaning.

2. Semantic structure of the word.

3. Changes in meaning. Causes of semantic change.

4. Semantic relationships between words.

5. Homonyms and polysemes.

I. In everyday language the words “meaning” and “sense” are used interchangeably. In linguistics, however, these two words are differentiated. The sense of a word is its cognitive meaning as determined by its place within the semantic system of the language. Thus, the word “comedy” means a funny play (film, story) in contrast with “tragedy” that is a serious play dealing with the bad, violent, or harmful side of human nature, while “opera” refers to a play in which all the words are sung, and “musical” means a play in which singing is combined with dancing and speaking of the actors to tell, as a rule, a romantic story. According to Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners the meaning of a word is defined as the thing, action, feeling, idea that a word represents and according to J.R. Firth, it almost always depends on the perceived situation.

The two main types of meaning are the grammatical and lexical meanings of a word. The gram­matical meaning of a word deals with the expression in speech of relationship between words. The lexical meaning of the word is the realization of the notion by means of a definite language system.

Such word-forms such as “tables, chairs, bushes” though denoting widely different objects of reality have something in common. This common element is the grammatical meaning of plurality. Thus, grammatical meaning may be defined as the component of meaning recurrent in identical sets of individual forms of different words. e.g.: the tense meaning in the word-forms of verbs (asked, spoke) or the case meaning in the word-forms of various nouns (the girl’s, the night’s). In modern linguistics it is commonly held that some elements of grammatical meaning can be identified by their distribution. The word-forms “asks, speaks” have the same grammatical meaning as they can all be found in identical distribution (e.g. only after the pronouns he, she but before such adverbs and phrases as yesterday, last month, etc.). It follows that a certain component of the meaning of a word is described when you identify it as a part of speech, since different parts of speech are distributionally different. The part-of-speech meaning of the words that possesses but one form, as prepositions, is observed only in their distribution (cf: to come in (here) and in (on, under) the table).

Unlike the grammatical meaning this component of meaning is identical in all the forms of the word. e.g.: the words “write – writes – wrote – written” possess different grammatical meanings of tense, person but in each of these forms we find the same semantic component denoting the process of putting words on the paper. This is the lexical meaning of the word which may be described as a linguistic unit recurrent in all the forms of the word and in all possible distributions of these forms.

The lexical meaning of the word can be of two types: denotational and connotational.

One of the functions of the words is to denote things, concepts, etc. Users of a language cannot have any knowledge or thought of the objects or phenomena of the real world around them unless this knowledge is ultimately embodied in words which have essentially the same meaning for all speakers of that language. This is the denotational meaning, i.e. the component of the lexical meaning which makes communication possible. The denotative meaning is the notional content of a word. A word’s denotation is its relationship to a substance (or its certain characteristics) of the outer world. The denotative meaning of the word “cat” is a small domestic animal with soft fur kept as a pet or for catching mice.

The connotational meaning of a word is the component which has some stylistic value of the word, its emotive charge is connected the emotive association that a word evokes. It is the expressive part of meaning, though it is not necessarily present in the word.

Many connotations associated with names of animals, birds, insects are

universally understood and used.

e.g.: calf (теля) – a young inexperienced person; donkey (осел)– a foolish person; monkey (мавпа) – a mischievous child; serpent (змія)– a treacherous, malicious person.

But different peoples structure the world differently. E.g.: the word “bug” has such figurative meanings in the English language as a crazy, foolish person and an enthusiast, the word “shark” means a swindler. In the Ukrainian language the words “жук” and “акула” do not have such meanings.

Sometimes words in different languages can have different meanings.

e.g.: the word “gull” means a fool, a swindler, in the Ukrainian language the word “чайка” can be applied to a woman or a girl. The word “hawk” possesses a negative meaning in the English language (a deceiver), the word “сокіл” is applied to a handsome and strong young man.

Metals possess well-established connotations, derived from their individual qualities. The word “gold” is associated with great worth. Iron and steel connote strength, brass – audacity, lead – sluggishness or weight.

II. Semantics is the study of meaning, which is a complex matter in that it involves the relationship between words, ideas and things as well as the relationship between words of similar meaning. A distinction is often made in this respect between reference, or the relations between language and the world, and sense, or the relationship between words of similar meaning. Semantics also examines how sets of words are used to classify our experi­ence. Geoffrey Hughes notes that in English “black” and “blue” designate differ­ent colours, whereas in Old Norse the term bla served for both; in Russian, however, there are two distinct terms for “blue” – голубой for light blue and синий for dark blue, like azure and violet. The prism of colour terms tends to open up with time and cultural contacts: historically black, white, red, yel­low, and green are Anglo-Saxon in origin, but blue, brown, orange, azure mid violet entered the vocabulary from Norman French.

The semantic structure of a word is complicated and may include, among others, the following oppositions of its meanings:

· direct meaning:: figurative meaning. The meaning is direct when the word names the thing without the help of context and can be viewed as a certain label for the thing (a “word thing” connection). The mean­ing is figurative when the thing named gets some additional charac­teristics through comparison or confrontation with another thing to make a description more impressive or interesting. For instance, in the sentence My mother died of stomach cancer the verb died is used in its direct meaning of “to stop being alive”, whereas in the sentence I laughed until I died it is used figuratively, meaning that the person laughed a lot.

· main meaning:: secondary meaning. The distinction between the two meanings lies in the frequency rate of a certain meaning of the word. The most frequently used meaning is labeled “main”, whereas the others are thought to be “secondary”. Compare the uses of the adjec­tive “high” in the sentences that follow: (1) These mountains are too high to climb and (2) These socks are a bit high. In sentence (1) the adjective high is used in its main meaning – “large in size from the top to the ground”, whereas in sentence (2) it is used in one of its secondary meanings – “to have an unpleasant smell”.

From the diachronic perspective it is possible to point out the dated (or old-fashioned) and present-day uses of the word. Thus, for instance, the noun “cobbler” in its old-fashioned meaning denotes someone whose job is to repair shoes, whereas at present it is used to refer to a type of food consisting of vegetables or fruit covered with a soft thick layer of pastry.

Stylistic differentiation of the vocabulary makes it possible to speak of stylistically neutral and stylistically coloured uses of the word. The latter include, among others, formal and informal uses, spoken (colloquial), offen­sive and impolite uses, etc. Thus, the verb “to steal something” is more common in speech than in writing and is not used in formal situations, hence its label informal. The verb “elucidate” which has the meaning “to clarify, to make something easier to understand by giving more information” is labeled as formal since it is not characteristic of ordinary conversation or everyday writing.

Stylistically coloured words are classified into bookish and colloquial, bookish styles in their turn may be general, poetical, scientific or learned, while colloquial styles are subdivided into literary colloquial, familiar colloquial and slang.

III. Language is never static. Nor is society, for any changes of the latter can’t but be reflected in language, precisely in its word-stock. Words may acquire new meanings that usually coexist with the old.

Among causes of semantic change we should list historic changes in the society. Thus, in the feudal system “a knight” was a military servant of his lord; nowadays the word has a new significance: the title “knight” is con­ferred on a man by the British monarch in recognition of personal merit or services to the state.

Technological changes may affect meanings. A vivid example is the word “manufacture”. The etymology of the word (borrowed from Latin) specifies that the work was done by hand, and that was the first use of the word in English, but when it became usual for the production of goods and materials to be performed by machines, the common use of “manufacture” and its derivatives excluded work by hand.

Scientific developments can also be causes of semantic change. Thus, “germ” was used vaguely for something that causes a disease; it now more specifically refers to a micro-organism.

Changes of meaning can occur in two directions: 1) narrowing of meaning, and 2) widening of meaning.

Narrowing of meaning, or special­ization, is the process of meaning change in which a word in the course of time begins to have fewer referents than it used to have. For instance, in Old English the noun “hund” meant a dog, but nowadays “hound” stands for a dog used for hunting other animals or for racing. The verb “starve” originally meant to die by any means, now it has restricted its meaning to die because of a lack of food.

Widening of meaning,or generalization, is the opposite process: a word extends its use and begins to include a wider scope of the new notion.

“Season” once had the meaning spring, time for sowing. Now it embraces all parts of the year. “Salary” once had the meaning the money to buy salt for. Now it means money to buy anything. “Town” once meant fence. Now it denotes a settlement. “Столяр” meant той, що виготовляє столи. Now it means той, хто виготовляє вироби з дерева.

There are two more types of extension of the semantic volume of a word: metaphorical and metonymical.The former is more common and is based on the similarity of the objects compared, e.g. hand (of a clock), face (the front of a clock). A metonymic extension occurs when a word acquires a new meaning on the basis of contiguity between certain things, e.g hand stands for someone who does physical work (It was a large farm, with over 20 hired hands, and face may be used instead of person: a new face, a familiar face.

A shift in social evaluation and emotional tone may also bring about the change of meaning of a word. The process of moving to a less favour­able connotation with the corresponding derogatory emotive tone is called pejoration of meaning.As an example, let’s take the adjective “crafty”. In Old English the word had the favourable sense of skillful, but in Modem English it is used to describe a dishonest action or behaviour of a person. The reverse process is called amelioration (or elevation) of meaning, which consists in moving to a more favourable connotation. Thus, the adjective “wicked”, meaning morally wrong and deliberately intending to hurt, in Modern English is also used (by young people) in the sense “very good”.

IV. Semantic relationships between words are various. Words can be arranged into groups headed by a general term. For instance, the nouns day­light, moonlight, sunlight, glare, glow refer to a type of light, so the noun light is regarded to be a more general term, called in linguistics hypernym.The words semantically “subordinated” to the hypernym are called hyponyms. Thus, the nouns in the above mentioned chain are hyponyms of light. In the chain of words to drink, to sip, to gulp down the first verb is hypernym whereas the others are hyponyms of it. The nouns ballet, disco, foxtrot, lambada, tango, twist, and waltz are all hyponyms of a more general dance.

However, we should not confuse hypernymic-hyponymic relations between words with those of the part-of-the-whole type. The latter can be illustrated with the following example: root, trunk, bough, branch, twig, bark, leaf are words denoting certain parts of the whole – a tree, but these words cannot be considered hyponyms of the noun tree. Taken together, they con­stitute a unity, a complete thing. That’s why we say that these words are in the part-of-the-whole relation to the head word.

Words can also be arranged into oppositions. A word which means the opposite of another word is called antonym. For instance, the antonyms of light are dark and heavy depending on the meaning of the adjective light. We also may say that light and dark, on the one hand, and light and heavy, on the other, make up antonymous pairs of words. Antonymous can be not only adjectives (e.g. huge - tiny; hot - cold; tall - short; shadowy - sunlit; dry - wet; smooth - rough), but words of other parts of speech, e.g. nouns: friend- enemy; birth - death; verbs: differentiate - associate; love - hate; stop -start; prepositions: up - down; into - out of; behind- in front (of); pronouns (quantifiers): many - few; much - little; etc.

The opposite meaning in words can be obtained by adding a negative affix to it. There are a number of negative prefixes in Modem English, among them: a- (‘without’): amoral, apolitical', anti- (‘against’): anti-ageing, anti­freeze, anti-cyclone-, de- (‘opposite’): decaffeinated, decipher, deform; il- (‘not’, used before 1): illegal, illogical, illiteracy; im- (‘not’, before b, m, p): imbalance, immature, imperfect', in- (‘not’): incapable, incompetence, incorrect', ir- (‘not’, before r): irrational, irrelevance', mis- (‘wrongly’): misconduct, misunderstand, mislead', non- (‘not’, used with adjectives and nouns): non-fiction, nonsense, non-alcoholic, un- (‘not’): unaided, unaccus­tomed, unaffected. The suffixes of opposite meaning are -ful and -less, as in careful - careless; useful - useless.

On the contrary, words associated in meaning, i.e. having almost the same meaning, are called synonyms. For instance, frightened and afraid are synonymous words. Synonyms are similar but not identical in meaning. Moreover, there are, as a rule, slight differences in connotation, stylistic us­age, semantic valency and/ or distribution of synonymous words; hence, the latter are seldom interchangeable. For instance, the sentences I’m hot and I’m boiling are synonymous in that they denote a certain (uncomfortable) state of a person, but the latter is more common in spoken English. In an­other situation they can hardly be considered synonyms: hot water is not the same as boiling water. The adjectives hungry, starving, ravenous indicate a person’s need to eat something. They all can fit the predicative position in I’m, however, only hungry is possible after the adverb very: I’m very hungry (not *I’m very starving or *I’m very ravenous!). Since most words in English are polysemantic, i.e. have more than one meaning, they may enter more than one synonymous, as well as antonymous, group. Take adjective “thin” as an example. In its various meanings, it can be used as a synonym to many words, among them: attenuated, bony, deficient, delicate, dilute, di­luted, emaciated, feeble, filmy, fine, flimsy, gaunt, inadequate, insubstantial, insufficient, lanky, lean, light, meager, narrow, poor, rarefied, runny, scant, scanty, scarce, scattered, see-through, shallow, sheer, skeletal, skimpy, skin­ny, slender, slight, slim, spare, sparse, superficial, translucent, transparent, unconvincing, underweight, unsubstantial, washy, watery, weak.

The list of antonyms of thin includes broad, dense, fat, solid, strong, thick. The opposite to the adjective in a thin person is fat, but in a thin layer of ice is thick. A thin explanation does not sound con­vincing, likewise a thin moustache does not look solid, a thin smile implies insincerity, etc. So, we see that in such cases thin can hardly be replaced by any word taken at random from the synonymous set given above.

Synonymy in Modem English can be accounted for historically, as a result of mutual influence and interference between native Germanic (English), on the one hand, and Scandinavian dialects, French, Latin, etc., on the other.

Nowadays, if the borrowed words co-exist with their native correlates, they, however, differ stylistically, the native elements being stylistically neutral, the borrowed elements belonging to the formal speech, e.g. to ask (Anglo- Saxon,) – to question (of French origin) – to interrogate (Latin).

5. There are also words having the same outer form, i.e. they are spelt and pronounced in the same way, but differ in meaning. Such words are called homonyms.For instance, the noun bank stands for: (a) a financial institution that people or businesses can keep or borrow money from: the Royal Bank of Scotland; (b) a raised area of land along the side of a river: the east bank of the river; (c) a large mass of cloud or fog; (d) a large collection, a store of something that is available for use when it is needed: a valuable bank of old documents. Homonyms may belong to the same word class, as

drill (n) – (1) a tool for making a hole in something (an electric drill); (2) a way of teaching/ training (grammar drills); (3) a type of strong cotton dress; (4) a line in the earth in which seeds are planted;

eye (n) – (1) a body part for seeing; (2) the calm area at the centre of a storm; (3) the hole at the top of a needle; (4) one of the spots on a potato that new growth comes from, (5) the part into which a hook fits to fasten clothing;

or may belong to different parts of speech, as

train (n) – a group of railway vehicles that are connected and pulled by an engine; and train (v) meaning to teach someone to do a particular job or activity;

bear (n) – a large wild mammal, and bear (v) –– to carry.

When two words are pronounced in the same way (although their spelling may be different), they are called homophones.Here are a few examples:

hole - whole sea - see new - knew

night - knight one - won hair - hare

weak - week break - brake right - write

When two words have the same spelling but are pronounced differently, they are called homographs.To such words belong:

read: [ri:d] - [red] tear: [tia] - [tea]

sow: [ssu] - [sau] lead: [li:d] - [led]

It is not always clear whether the two words are distinct or related. In English words usually have more than one meaning and they appear in the dictionary within the same entry. Sometimes these meanings become so dis­tant that certain meanings of the word get separated and given separate entry/entries in the dictionary. Thus, hand (of a human) and hand (of a clock) are regarded as polysemes rather than homonyms. Polysemy refers to the range of meanings denoted by a word. The most frequent words tend to be polysemantic. Take as an example the verb “get” and in any dictionary you –a great number of meanings. Polysemy exists only in language. In actual usage, i.e. in speech, only one meaning of the word is realized. Put differently, the context always unveils possible ambiguity, foregrounding only one meaning from a range.