Chapter 7 Sense Relations between Words.doc

英语语言学：Y100100周虹霞Chapter Seven: Sense Relations between WordsWords may be classified according to the relation between their senses. There are synonymy, antonymy, homonymy, hyponymy, meronymy, taxonymy etc. In this chapter, it mainly deals with the types of synonymy, antonymy and hyponymy.1. SynonymySynonymy is a relationship of “sameness or similarity of meaning” that may hold between two words. The word that means the same as another is called synonym.Traditionally, synonyms are defined as words differing in sound form but identical or similar in meaning. This definition is vague and inaccurate, because a polysemic word has different synonyms according to different its senses. For example, the word “fashion” its synonym is “vogue” in “fashion show”, while in “by this fashion”, its synonym is “means”.Now, we have a more scientific definition of synonym. It is defined as a word having the same essential or generic meaning as another word and differing only in connotation, application or idiomatic use. (1) Types of synonymsThere are two kinds of synonyms.A. Complete synonyms: Two words are totally synonyms only if they are fully identical in meaning and interchangeable in any context without the slightest change in connotative, affective and stylistic meanings. Complete or absolute synonyms are very rare. They may be found in scientific terms such as “word formation” and “word building”, “fricatives and spirants”.B. Relative synonyms: When we speak of synonymy, we usually mean loose or relative synonymy, where we find not only a significant overlap in meaning between two words, but also some contexts where they cannot be used interchangeably. Relative synonyms may differ in shades of meaning, in emotional meaning, in level of formality, and in collocation. Here are the examples of different kinds of relative synonyms.a. Relative synonyms differ in shades of meaninge.g. anger, rage, fury, indignation and wrathb. Relative synonyms differ in emotional meaning e.g. statesman and politicianc. Relative synonyms differ in level of formality e.g. kick the basket, pass away, died. Relative synonyms differ in collocation e.g. powerful country and strong will(2) Synonymous patterns English is noted for its large number of borrowings. Hence, many English words are synonymous with Latin, Greek, and French words. In modern English, there are two patterns of synonymous sets: double scale and triple scale patterns. That the native English words co-exist with the synonymous borrowed words is called double scale pattern. For example, friendship and amity (Latin), motherly and maternal (Latin) etc. The triple scale pattern is that native, French and Latin or Greek words co-exist. For example, ask, question (French) and interrogate (Latin).Besides synonyms of the same word class we have mentioned above, there are synonyms of different word classes (fashion and fashionable), word synonymous with phrases (leave and be away) and different sentence patterns expressing roughly the same idea. Synonyms are useful for avoiding repletion and achieving precision in meaning and variety in style.2. Antonymy Antonymy is a relationship of “meaning opposition” that may hold between two words. Antonyms are words which are opposite in meaning. (1) Types of antonymsAntonyms can be classified according to semantic contrast or morphological structure. Based on the semantic contrast, antonyms fall into three types: gradable antonyms, contradictory or complementary antonyms and converse antonyms.(a) Gradable antonyms As for the gradable antonyms, there are often intermediate terns between the two opposites, the semantic contrast in a contrary pair is relative. For example, hot, warm, cool, cold.(b) Contradictory or complementary antonymsContradictory antonym is a type of binary semantic contrast, they do not allow comparison. For example, dead and alive, man and female.(c) Converse antonymsConverse antonyms are words that exhibit the reversal of a relationship between the two items, such as up and down, mother and son, buy and sold.Another type of antonyms is based on morphological structure: Words like come-go, up-down are root antonyms, for they are words with different roots, while words with same roots having negative affixes are derivational antonyms, such as like-dislike, possible-impossible.(2) Some relevant points about antonymsa. marked and unmarked membersThere are marked and unmarked members in some antonymous pairs. And the unmarked one is used much more widely than marked one. For example, when we want to know the age of someone, we will say “How old are you?” We do not necessarily assume that the person is old.The marked one usually carries a certain implication of distinctiveness while the unmarked one does not. For instance, we say, he is taller than me. The statement does not mean he is tall. But the sentence “he is shorter than me.” implies that he is short.b. Some words without antonymsAlmost every word has antonyms, but some words do not. Words like book, grass, stone etc. do not have antonyms.c. Different antonyms under different circumstancesWhen a word has several meanings, it will demand a separate antonym in each sense. For example, the antonym of “smart” in He is a smart boy and quick in mind is “clever”, but the antonym of “smart” in She got a smart salary this month is “slender”.Antonyms are often used for stylistic purpose, as in antithesis. We must pay attention to the word order of the antonymous words in the phrases. Sometimes the word order is the same as the Chinese equivalents in the phrases but sometimes is not. For example, 因果：heaven and earth;饮食: eat and drink; 迟早: sooner or later. 3. HyponymyHyponymy is the relationship which obtains between specific and general lexical items. The former is included in the latter. The specific one is the hyponym