Semantics

The study of Language by George Yule (2006)

New words
Semantics: the study of the meaning of words, phrases and sentences
Conceptual meaning: the basic components of meaning conveyed by literal use of words
Associative meaning: the type of meaning that people might connect with the use of words (e.g. needle=’painful’) that is not part of conceptual meaning
Semantic features: basic elements such as ‘human’, included as plus (+human) or minus (-human), used in an analysis of the components of world meaning
Agent: the semantic role of the noun phrase identifying the one who performs the action of the verb in an event (e.g. The boy kicked the ball)
Theme: the semantic role of the noun phrase identify the entity involved in or affected by the action of the verb in an event (e.g. The boy kicked the ball)
Semantic role: the part played by a noun phrase, such as agent, in the event described by the sentence
Instrument: the semantic role of the noun phrase indentifying the entity that is used to perform the action of the verb (e.g. The boy cut the rope with a razor)
Experiencer: the semantic role of the noun phrase indentifying the entity that has the feeling, perception or state described by the verb (e.g. The boy feels sad)
Lexical relations: the relationships of meaning, such as synonymy, between words
Synonymy: the lexical relation in which two or more words have very closely related meanings (e.g. ‘Conceal’ is a synonym of ‘hide’)
Antonymy: the lexical relation in which words have opposite meanings (e.g. ‘Shallow’ is an antonym of ‘deep’)
Gradable antonyms: words with opposite meanings along a scale (e.g. bug-small)
Non-gradable antonyms: words which are direct opposites (e.g. alive-dead)
Reversives: antonyms in which the meaning of one is the reverse action of the other (e.g. dress-undress)
Huponymy: the lexical relation in which the meaning of one word is included in the meaning of another (e.g. ‘Daffodil’ is a hyponym of ‘flower’)
Superordinate: the higher-level term in hyponymy (e.g. flower-daffodil)
Co-hyponyms: words in hyponymy that share the same superordinate (‘Daffodil’ and ‘rose’ are co-hyponyms of ‘flower’)
Prototype: the most characteristic instance of a category (e.g. ‘Robin’ is the prototype of ‘bird’)
Homophones: two or more words with different forms and the same pronunciation (e.g. to-too-two)
Homonyms: two words with the same form from that are unrelated in meaning (e.g. more (on skin)-mole (small animal))
Polysemy: a word having two or more related meanings (e.g. foot, of person, of bed, of mountain)
Metonymy: a word used in place of another with which it is closely connected in everyday experience (e.g. He drank the whole bottle (the liquid))
Corpus linguistics: the study of language in use by analyzing the occurrence and frequency of forms in a large collection of texts typically stored in a computer

Study questions
1 Prototype is used to present the most characteristic example of a category.
2 a) The verb drink needs a subject with the feature (+animate) and the noun television has the feature (-animate).
b) The verb write needs a subject with the feature (+human) and the noun dog has the feature (-human).