lexical and semantie relations

ans
C RELATION,
M,
l,
PROACH ,
ILOCKJNG
n among words.
i between en es.
n in which it i
i of the lexemes,
g at the detai I of
:etwo approache
icon. In the fir t
:h records sense
he lexicon like a
l.
into two type :
ilations between
captain or dogs
me Greek roots,
gmatic relations
ses, syntagmate.g.
dog (noun)
re these day as
Lexical and semantie relations 109
corpu re earch highlight the way in which word tend to occur with certain
words rather than other. For in tance, we can notice that the adjective asleep
goe with certain modifier to indicate 'ab olute tate of sleep,' as in fast asleep
or sound asleep, and that it occasionally goe with orne other general-purpose
modifier that indicate the arne meaning, like completelyasleep, but le with
others, like very asleep. Our focus in thi chapter i the more traditional area of
tudy for lexical emantic : paradigmatic relation. We'll see orne yntagmatic
is ue in the later chapter - including the issue of which modi fiers go with which
adjectives, in chapter Il.
Words in paradigmatíc relations belong to the ame word cla s and hare
orne characteri tie in common. The word in uch relations can be aid to
form a paradigm - that i , a et of example that how a pattern. One kind of
paradigmatic relation i amorphological paradigrn, uch as the tense forms of a
verb: drink, drank; drunk. Notice that the ve rb in this paradigm have eve ry thing
in common except their ten e. We are interested in emantic paradigms, which
involve word sen e that hare many emantic propertie , but differ in orne. So,
for example, the et of ba ic color adjective form a paradigm who e members
each refer to a different part of the color spectrurn. Unlike syntagmatically related
words, paradigmatically related word are u ually ub titutable for each other.
For exarnple, red, white, and any other member of the color paradigm can en ibly
and grammatically occur in the ame phrases, as in (l) and (2).
(l) a red/white/green/blue house
(2) a hade of red/white/green/blue
Lexical emantici t tudy paradigmatic relation becau e of their roles in logical
relation arno ng entence meanings, uch a entailment (see §2.2), and because
of what they might tell us about how the mental lexicon is organized, as we'lI
ee in §6.3. They are alointeresting for their u e in creating coherent discourse.
U ing related word allow u to describe the ame things in different way, thu
providing varied information and avoiding repetition in di cour e.
A few paradigmatic relations receive the mo t attention in lexical emantics.
Synonymy i the relation of having (nearly) the ame meaning. Couch and sofa
are ynonym in many people' dialect. Hyponymy i the 'type-of' relation;
for example, house i a hyponym of building becau e a house i a type of
building. Co-hyponymy (ometime called lexical contrast) involves a group
of ense that make up a et, but which contra t with one another, for example
heart/club/spade/diamond. That i , they are different varietie within a single
type - in thi ca e, playing card uit. Antonymy i a peci al ca e of contra t in
which two word are oppo ite, for example black/white. We examine each of
these relation in more depth in the following sub ection .
While people of ten talk about word being ynonyms or antonyrn , it i more
accurate to talk about senses or lexical units (form + en e-in-u e - see § 1.2.4) as
being ynonym or antonym, ince a ingle word may have different ynonym