INGLÉS Maestro

CURSO 2021/22
SEMANA: Week 21
TEMAS: Language Practice – Listening Task based on topic 11.
MATERIAL ELABORADO POR: Amaia Terán

Lexical Semantic Relations

Hi everyone this lecture we're going to be focusing on semantics let's start with the obvious
question. What is semantics? Probably heard people say something like you are just arguing
semantics which probably means that you think semantics is something that doesn't really
matter as it's usually put in a way as if you're not really making a contribution to a
discussion. The reality is actually the opposite, 1_________________________________and
if I'm being honest I would say that meaning is decently important when talking to someone.
In this set of lectures we're going to be going through a broad overview of the different ways
that linguistics talks about the meaning of words and sentences. To start with
we're going to talk about 2______________________________. These relationships are
called lexical-semantics relations and there are eight main semantic relations that we will be
going through one by one. Before we start though I'd like to talk about a central feature of
language 3.__________________. Ambiguity is the feature of language that allows single
words to mean multiple things depending on different contexts. Ambiguity is present in
every language; in English you can find ambiguity all over the place, take the word sick as in I

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am sick or that is sick. Ambiguity can be brought to an extreme degree with the concept of
4._______________ or words that actually contradict themselves. In this English example,
we have words like 5.____________meaning to bring something forth or to put something
on the backburner, 6._______________ which can mean either to tangle or untangle
something and 7._______________ which at once means to allow or to punish. Ambiguity is
a property that is inherent to language and it's something that allows language to be
creative. The first of the lexical semantics relations we'll be covering is synonymy. Synonymy
is when two words have the same or at least similar meaning. Synonymy is rarely exact.
Words almost always have some difference but their meanings can be very close words like
8.____________________ or 9.___________________ as in: he bawled all night or even
10.____________________________________these are all synonyms because they more or
less impart the same meaning.
The second relation we'll be looking at is that of 11._____________________. Antonymy is
the opposite of synonymy. It is when two words have opposite meanings. Words like run
versus walk; cry versus laugh sleep versus awake or yes versus no. Antonymy has three
subtypes: there is 12.______________ antonyms, 13._______________ antonyms and
14.________________ antonyms.
Relational antonyms are those words which are on opposite sides of a relationship;
- so a child and his or her parent are said to be on opposite sides; of a parent-child
relationship;
- a buyer and a seller are on opposite sides of a sale and could be considered relational
antonyms; and then finally,
- lend and borrow are on opposite sides of the verb to transfer an object which again
allows them to be relational antonyms.
One way to think about these words is that one word 15.__________________________of
another. The child must have at least biological parent, a buyer must have a seller or else
they're not buying anything and lending something implies that somebody is borrowing it
otherwise you're not really lending it.
The second type of antonyms are gradable antonyms, which
16.______________________________. These are things like hot versus cold, tall versus
short or old versus young. These are scales with grey area in between so something can be

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more hot or more cold it can be almost entirely hot or almost entirely cold and the absence
of one means the presence of another if someone is not tall that means they are short if
something is not cold that means it is hot and if something is not old that means that they
are young or at least middle-aged. I guess in that example the final type of antonymy are
17.____________________________ These are antonyms that do not exist on a spectrum
words like live versus dead, zombies don't count. True versus false or yes versus no. There is
no grey area in between for the most part.
The third type of lexical relation is that of 18._____________________. Hyponymy describes
the relationship that occurs when one word is the subset or a part of another word. You can
think of this in the frame X is a Y relationship this can be seen in the following words: dog is a
hyponymy of animal we can say a dog is an animal. Atticus is a hyponym of people, we can
say Atticus is a person. Purple is a hypony of colour because we can say purple is a colour.
Hyponymy, to rephrase is the relationship that occurs when one word is an instantiation of
the full set of another word.
On the flip side we have 19._____________________, as our fourth lexical relation
hypernymy can be thought of as the opposite or antonym of hyponymy. It describes a word
that is a superset of another so animal is a hypernym of dog because dogs are a type of
animal, human is a hypernym of Atticus because Atticus is a type of animal and colour is a
hypernym of purple because purple is a type of colour. Note be careful because hyponomy
and hypernymy differ only by one letter and so in a test situation if you accidentally write
hyponomy when you mean hypernymy you will not be given a grade as they're actually
opposite situations.
Our fifth lexical relation is 20.______________________ or often called partonomy.
Meronymy means when one word is an actual physical part of something else when
hyponomy deals with abstract categories, meronymy deals with structural components so a
thumb is a meronym of hand because thumb is an actual component of a hand; likewise a
kitchen is a meronym of a home and pants are a meronym of a suit. Note that in the instance
of pants and suit the pants are not physically connected to the jacket of a suit and yet we
would still say they are a
meronym because the suit is not complete without the component of pant.

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Our sixth lexical relation is that of holonymy. Holonymy is the 21._________________ of
meronymy and denotes something that is a whole made up of some part or having
somethingas some component. So we would say that a hand is a holonym four thumb, a
house is a hollonym of kitchen and a suit is a hollonym of pants.
The final two lexical relations that we will focusing on go together as a set. They are also the
two most easily confused terms so I'll be spending a bit more time on them. Both of these
terms deal with words that are 22._______________________ but have
23.______________________. Note that spelling is not important in this distinction.
24._______________________ is the relationship between two words that sound the same
but have different related meanings. The term wood which is to say the product of a tree
and wood an area made of many trees are polysemous because they do have different
meanings but meanings that are very clearly related. Similarly book, the object and book the
verb, to schedule something are said to be polysemous because the verb is clearly related to
the now it comes from the act of writing a date down in a physical book. Crane the animal
and crane the construction equipment are said to be polysemous because the construction
equipment is named for how its shape is shared with that of the
animal.
The last lexical relation is 25.__________________ and is when you're probably familiar with
homophony is the relationship between two words that sound the same but are completely
unrelated. The best example of this is Bank the financial institution and Bank the side of a
river which are said to be homophones because they have completely different meanings
and in fact one, comes from the French that is the 26._______________while Bank
27.____________________________comes from a Germanic root. To die
(28.________________) and to die (29.__________________________) are homonyms
because their meanings are unrelated again one coming from Germanic roots the other from
French roots; and then we have the example of site which is a place and site the sense of
perceiving something these are considered him off on us although some might say they
seem like they are polysemous in fact once again one of these words comes from a
completely different root than the other. Now not all homophony is due to ideological
differences, 30.________________________________ being the study of the history of
words. Some

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words were related in past but have since diverged a meaning significantly, over time an
example of this might be something like break to wreck something and break to stop we
would say these two words are homophones because they don't seem to be related on
meaning although when we look at them they are derived from the same root in both cases
there was a single term that meant to apply something with force to another thing so we
would say when you would smash something with a hammer you might be breaking it over
time this became applied to the carriage and later the automobile where something was
physically applied to stop the wheel from moving the relationship between
these words grew less and less transparent over time and now we have break meaning to
stop and break meaning to destroy as a result we would say that synchronically or at this
particular time they are homophony so rather than polysemous with that we have covered
lexical semantics relations in the quizzes for this section you will be expected to look at a set
of words and describe the relationship between them if you have any questions please don't
hesitate to shoot me an email or ask in the anonymous forum I think most of these
relationships are pretty straightforward except for polysemy and homophony but if I need to
explain anything slightly better feel free to ask me and I'll see what I can do
the next video in this section will be covering the relationships between sentences and
defining senses of meaning I'll see you all there