5. Seminar tasks and questions.

1. Universal versus nationally biased lexicon.

2. Systemic organization of lexicon: lexical fields.

A lexical field is made up of a set of lexical units (words) that share certain notes of
meaning. All members of the set belong to the same grammatical class
(nouns, adjectives, verbs ). Furthermore, they all encompass the entirety of the relevant
meaning domain, but also show definite contrasts. An example of a lexical field would be
walking, running, jumping, jumping, jogging, and climbing, verbs (same grammatical category),
which mean movement made with the legs.

Thus, for example, the word such, tamal, corn cake, belong to the same lexical field. All of them
are nouns. They also all refer to the food of Mesoamerican origin made with corn dough,
wrapped in leaves, and with different fillings. But these are markedly different versions.

3. Types of semantic relashionships within the vocabulary system.

Semantic relationships are the associations that there exist between the meanings of words
(semantic relationships at word level), between the meanings of phrases, or between the
meanings of sentences (semantic relationships at phrase or sentence level).

At word level, the study semantic relationships are: synonymy, antonymy, HIERARCHICAL,

GENERAL‐PARTICULAR, PART ‐ WHOLE, SEQUENCES AND CYCLES

 synonymy -words of one part of speech, different in sound and spelling, which
have a very similar or identical lexical meaning. (Bad: awful, terrible, horrible.)
 antonymy - Sunny – Cloudy
 HIERARCHICAL- a way of organizing things that goes from high to low. The human body itself is a
hierarchy. We are made up of systems of organs, which are made up of individual organs.
Those organs are composed of tissues, then cells, then organelles. The final category of a
human body hierarchy are the atoms that make up the organelles.
 GENERAL‐PARTICULAR- flowers (rose, chamomile, periwinkle)
 PART ‐ WHOLE- between two concepts, one of which is whole, and the other is one of
its elements (сосна - шишка, людина - рука, кінь - грива,- ) pine - cone, man - hand, horse -
mane,
 SEQUENCES AND CYCLES- January February March April, and so on

4. Approaches to the research of synonyms in contrastive lexicolog y.

5. Comment on the essence of the interpretational test suggested by Bendix.
6. Read the article by G. Miller in Additional Resources and indicate the value
of WordNet for contrastive lexicological studies.