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Lexical Semantics
Lexical semantics also called lexicosemantics, is concerned with the analysis of word meanings
and relations between them, the meaning of a word, phrase, or text. It is the study of word
meaning. Descriptively speaking, the main topics studied within lexical semantics involve either
the internal semantic structure of words, or the semantic relations that occur within the
vocabulary.
Mainly, the areas of study in lexical semantics include: the coding of word meanings,
grammatical use of words and word concreteness. The units of analysis in lexical semantics are
not only words but also sub-words or sub-units such as affixes and even compound words and
phrases. These lexical units can stand alone such as in the case of root words or parts of
compound words or they necessarily attach to other units such as prefixes and suffixes do. The
former are called free morphemes and the latter bound morphemes. They fall into a narrow
range of meanings (semantic fields) and can combine with each other to generate new meanings.
This provides another field of study to semanticist. The development of linguistic lexical
semantics appears to be characterized by a succession of distinct theories. Each of them has
drawn the attention to specific phenomena such as the prestructuralist tradition vs. the
structuralist tradition. The structuralist focus on syntagmatic relations.
Another important topic in lexical semantics is the difference between reference and sense. The
term ‘reference’ means what the word denotes, and is external to the mind. It is the denotative,
objective meaning. In contrast, the sense of a word is its meaning internal to the mind. Hence it
is the subjective meaning. Words in a language are linked through sense relations and this gives
rise to another important area of inquiry which is how the vocabularies of languages are
structured by means of sense relations. The semantically related words are connected with each
other and constitute a semantic field.

Semantic fields
First proposed by Trier in the 1930s, semantic field theory proposes that a group of words with
interrelated meanings can be categorized under a larger conceptual domain. This entire entity is
thereby known as a semantic field. The words boil, bake, fry, and roast, for example, would fall
under the larger semantic category of cooking. Semantic field theory asserts that lexical meaning
cannot be fully understood by looking at a word in isolation, but by looking at a group of
semantically related words. This forms sense relations between words. Some types of these
sense relations are synonymy, antonymy, hypernymy and hyponymy etc.
These terms are explained below:
Synonymy
Synonymy refers to words that are pronounced and spelled differently but contain the same
meaning e.g. happy, joyful, delighted, pleased, excited and glad are synonyms.
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Antonymy
Antonymy refers to words that are related by having the opposite meanings to each other e.g.
dead, alive; big, small; dark, light; left, right; east, west; happy, unhappy. There are three types
of antonyms: graded antonyms, complementary antonyms, and relational antonyms.

Gradable antonyms are pairs of words opposite to each other, but the positive of one word does
not necessarily imply the negative of the other, or vice versa. A person who is not rich is not
necessarily poor. The two words represent two polarities between which there is continuum. This
relation is found between many adjective and adverb pairs. They have three characteristics.
Firstly, they can be used in comparative or superlative degrees (faster, fastest; slower, slowest).
Secondly, they can be modified by adverbs of degree, very, fairly, quite, rather, etc. Thirdly, they
can follow ‘how’ in questions (such as: How large is the room? How long is the river?). In
raising such questions the basic one of the two is preferred. Otherwise, there is presupposition in
the question. For instance, “How short is the man?” presupposes the man is below the average in
height.

Complementary antonyms are words opposite to each other and the positive of one implies the
negative of the other. Dead/alive, male/female, pass/fail, etc. are complementary antonyms. An
animal may be neither big nor small, but it cannot be neither dead nor alive. Adjectives and
adverbs which are complementarily opposite to each other cannot be used in comparative or
superlative degrees, nor modified by adverbs of degree. In addition, they cannot appear in
questions beginning with how.

Relational/Reversal antonyms are words that denote the same relation or process from
opposite points of view. Push/pull, come/go, ascend/descend, buy/sell, up/down, in/out,
employer/employee, husband/wife, are all reversal antonyms. If you see push on the door when
you enter a room, then you will expect to see pull, going out of the room through the same door.
If John is on the right of Jane, Jane must be on the left of John. These examples show that
reversal antonyms describe a relation between two entities from alternate directions or view
points.

Antonymy is frequently utilized as a rhetorical resource in language use. Oxymoron, a

rhetorical device, is based on antonymy. He was received with cold warmth there contains an
oxymoron. Antithesis, another rhetorical device, is also based on antonymy. The English
expression the rise and the fall of the empire is an example. Gradable antonyms may give rise of
fuzziness. The phrases a young statesman and an old king are both fuzzy in meaning.

Homonymy
Homonymy refers to the relationship between words that are spelled or pronounced the same
way but hold different meanings e.g. bank (of river), bank (financial institution), bank/bank,
arm/arm, hand/hand, blade/blade, address/address etc. Homonyms are of two types: homophones
and homographs.
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Homophones
It is a group of words/signs having similar pronunciation but different meaning and spellings
such as hour/our, know/no, I/eye, one/won, beet/beat.
Homographs
It refers to a group of words/signs having same spellings but different meanings. Sometimes their
pronunciation also differs such as conduct/conduct, advocate/advocate, digest/digest.
Polysemy
Polysemy refers to a word having two or more related meanings e.g. bright (shining), bright
(intelligent). The difference between homographs and polysemy is that homographs generally
belong to a different word class whereas words/signs in polysemy belong to the same word class,
have same spellings and even pronunciation is similar. In order to know what each one of them
actually means we need to consider the context.
Hypernymy
It refers to a supertype, a broad term including the general semantic content of many related
words. Hypernym is the superordinate, umbrella term covering a wide range of words under it
e.g. animal, plant, vertebrate etc. Similarly, ‘nocturnal animal’ is a hypernym.
Hyponymy
It refers to a subtype, a subordinate, narrow term that comes under the broad category of
hypernym e.g. [lion, cat] and [dog, monkey] are hyponyms that come under the hypernym
‘animals’ whereas [rose, jasmine], [grapes, mangoes] are hyponyms of the hypernym ‘plants’.
And [owls, bats, foxes, moths] are hyponyms of the hypernym ‘nocturnal animals’.
Semantic field theory does not have concrete guidelines that determine the extent of semantic
relations between lexemes. A semantic field can be very large or very small.

Compiled by: Dr. Salma Qayyum