lexical and semantie relations

union
locomotion,
, indicate it
ound,' while
; oppo ed to
polyemou
en e .
on the ame
er and, tranog,
run, and
ne lexernes'
a member
d jog/sprint
d to contra t
to de cribe a
IId sprint ing
: hyponymy
:ly)of move.
.ither run or
. a for stroll
can pretend
iere there i
like aunter
initely saun-
Iarea) could
are potential
hi diagram,
lexical and semantie relations 127
there i a box above walk.jog, run, andjump that contra t with crawl.
We can describe what that box symbolizes - the category of upright,
bipedal locomotion - but there is no particular English lexeme that
cover this meaning.
Box diagram are also useful for comparing emantic field across language, in
order to ee differences in lexicalization.
Puzzle 6-4
Devise a box diagram for the f llowing COLOR words.
red,purple, yellow. bille, cala 1', lavender, scarlet, orange, green, crimson
To test your diagram:
From the bottom up, ask your elf whether the lower word name 'type
of the above color .
A k your elf whether all the color name on any horizontal level
contrast with one another.
Alternatives to box diagram include repre enting emantic relations a a
network of sense with line linking related enses (e.g. Word et, Fellbaum
1998b) or by creating attribute-value rnatrice (see §3.2.l) in which lexical
entries have features like A TO N Y M and s Y o Y M and the values speci fied
for those features are other lexeme - a done in Meaning- Text Theory (MIT;
Meľčuk 1996). The e are all fairly equivalent (e.g. the AVM in MIT could be
"translated" into a network diagram). The box diagram, however, give a sen e
of the" emantic pace' that the lexemes take up, o one can visualize certain
use of walk (e.g. to denote 'power walking') a clo er to thejog boundary than
other u e .
Evaluating the thesaurus approach
Proponents of thesauru -style lexical model hold that the relation that one
word ha to others at lea t part1y determine the word' sen e. In other word,
no meaning exi t in a vacuum, in tead meanings are created through relation .
Box diagram how the e relation within the ernantic field. Space are "car ved
out" for individual lexeme , and one can imagine the "ten ion" between word
at their boundarie .
One type of evidence for the idea that lexical meaning depend on relation
i the phenomenon known as lexical blocking, which can be exemplified by the
meaning of finger and thumb, hown in the box diagram in figure 6.6. Finger
can mean 'any digit of the hand', as in 1 have ten fingers. But that 'any digiť
meaning i blocked when one refer to a ingle finger. So, if omeone say 1 broke
my finger, you would probably feel mi led if you di covered that the finger in