Words_about_words_An_introduction_to_Eng

Word Meaning

Besides borrowings, another source of synonymy in English, seen from a diachronic perspective, is represented by archaisms. Many of these are at present used only in dialectal speech, having been replaced in the common language by various synonyms. Thus, as Hulban (1975: 159) illustrates, king-stool has been substituted for throne, book-hoard for library, leechcraft and leechdom for medicine, seamer for tailor, to betake

for to deliver over and to occupy.

Neologisms often lead to synonymy. An interesting phenomenon sometimes takes place in their case: the neologism is replaced by an earlier word which undergoes transfer of meaning, the two words eventually becoming synonyms: automobile is very frequently replaced by motor-car, shortened to car. However, not all attempts that linguists in favour of preserving the native stock of English made to replace neologisms have been successful. Saxonists failed with such words as wheelman, wordhoard, folk-wain which had been meant to replace cyclist, vocabulary and

omnibus.

The existence of ideographic and stylistic synonyms of the kind discussed in the previous section proves that the geographical and stylistic varieties of English are a rich source of synonymy. Thus, charm, chest and church in standard British English may be paired with glamour, kist and kirk in Scottish English, to add to the examples of ideographic synonyms already given. The British words autumn, tin, lorry, insect, sweet and maize as synonyms of the American words fall, can, truck, bug, candy and corn respectively may enlarge the same category as may Cockney words and phrases such as trap, chap or ill speed together with their standard English synonyms sailor, friend and bad luck. As far as stylistic synonyms are concerned, it is already obvious that euphemisms are another important source of synonymy as in the pairs of words: illiterate – uneducated,

chaotic – unformed, sterile – unfruitful, short – vertically challenged, pregnant – having a bun in the oven, etc. The belonging of words to various styles in the language may lead to synonymy as well. For instance, lazy is the standard neutral word for which the colloquial lazybones may be substituted, trousers is neutral, while its synonym pants is colloquial, evening, morning, valley and sorrowful are neutral, while their synonyms eve, morn, vale and doleful, respectively, are poetic, heart attack and headache belong to the everyday language, while their synonyms myocardial infarct and cephalalgia are medical technical terms.

4.5.2. Antonymy

Antonymy is the sense relation holding between words belonging to the same morphological class and having opposite meanings.

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4.5.2.1. General characteristics of antonyms

Antonymy is possible only if the words entering this semantic relationship share a common component of their senses. Thus, old and young share the component “age”, long and short share the component “length”, while deep and shallow both refer to depth.

Antonyms are found in certain typical configurations in English:

•A and B: Young and old were present at the meeting, a matter of life and death, the long and the short of it;

•A or B: wanted dead or alive, We’ll see if she was right or wrong, Good or bad, I’ll take it;

•neither A nor B: neither friend nor foe;

•A not B: He was alive, not dead as they thought;

•X is A and Y is B: “Youth is wild and age is tame” (Shakespeare). Another context in which antonyms are typically employed is when

reference is made to a change of state as in The exhibition opens at nine

and closes at noon or The poet was born in 1924 and died in 1991.

I have previously mentioned that polysemantic words have a synonymic series for each of their meanings. They also have different antonyms according to their different senses. Thus, if even refers to numbers and means “divisible by two”, its antonym is odd; if it refers to character or mood and it means “calm”, its antonym is agitated; for its meaning “dull”, it enters an antonymic relationship with interesting, while sharp may be considered its antonym when it means “unable to cut”. On the other hand, polysemantic words may have a number of antonyms for some of their meanings and none for others. Thus, criticism has the antonyms praise, approval, when it means “blame”, while, when it is employed with the sense “writing critical essays”, it has no opposite meaning correspondent.

Antonyms appear in a great number of idioms (to make neither

head nor tail of something, to see something in black and white) and proverbs (What soberness conceals, drunkness reveals, What is done

cannot be undone, A small leak will sink a great ship, You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, One man’s loss is another man’s gain), as well as in several figures of speech extensively used in literature. Of the last, among which there are oxymoron, irony, and anticlimax, antithesis is the one that relies most heavily on antonymic relationships. To illustrate this, Hulban (1975: 169 – 170) quotes two excerpts selected from G.B. Shaw’s writings. In the former, contrast is established by using quite predictable antonyms. In the latter, however, the antonymic associations are not revealed through the semantic features of the words used, but rather thorough the innovative context in which they are used:

(1) Youth, which is forgiven everything, forgives itself nothing; age, which forgives itself everything, is forgiven nothing.

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(2) Your friends are the dullest dogs I know. They are not beautiful: they are only decorated. They are not clean: they are only shaved and starched. They are not dignified: they are only fashionably dresses. They are not educated: they are only college passmen. They are not moral: they are only conventional. They are not virtuous: they are only cowardly. They are not even vicious: they are only frail. They are not artistic: they are only lascivious. They are not prosperous: they are only rich. They are not loyal: they are only servile; not dutiful, only sheepish; not courageous, only quarrelsome; not determined, only obstinate; not masterful, only domineering, not self-controlled, only obtuse, not self-respecting, only vain; not kind, only sentimental; not social, only gregarious; not considerate, only polite; not intelligent, only opinionated… liars everyone of them, to the very backbone of their souls.

4.5.2.2. Types of antonyms

If we refer to the type of oppositeness of meaning, we may speak about three major classes of antonyms (finer subclassifications are made by linguists such as Cruse (1986); they are, however, too detailed to be reproduced in a book on general lexicology): gradable antonyms,

ungradable or contradictory antonyms and converses.

The class of gradable antonyms includes pairs of words such as:

beautiful – ugly, small – big, rich – poor, wide – narrow, fast – slow, increase – decrease. As their name suggests, the semantic relationship between gradable antonyms is not of the “either – or” type, but rather of the “more – less” type. They represent the end-points of a continuum or a scale. The “more – less” relationship is made obvious by the fact that gradable antonyms allow comparison - My dress is longer than yours, The tree is less tall than the building – and that they may be modified by intensifying

adverbs: very good, extremely bad, extraordinarily beautiful.

The assertion containing one of the gradable antonyms in a pair implies the negation of the other, but not always vice-versa. Thus, as Lipka (2002: 164) exemplifies, “John is good implies John is not bad. But John is not good does not necessarily imply John is bad. The negation of one term does not necessarily imply the assertion of the other. Using a further example, The water is not hot does not necessarily imply The water is cold. However, from The water is cold, the negation The water is not hot does follow. Furthermore, The water is hot logically implies the negation The

water is not cold.”

In a pair of gradable antonyms, one of the terms is unmarked, while the other one is marked. The unmarked member is the one that is normally expected in, for example, How old are you? or How long is the way to the museum?. When unmarked terms such as old or long in these sentences are used, the speaker / writer does not prejudge anything whereas, when their marked opposites are used, certain presuppositions

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hold. If the two previous questions had been How young are you? and How short is the way to the museum?, the implications had been that the person asked about his / her age was young and the way to the museum was short.

The class of ungradable or contradictory antonyms comprise pairs such as asleep – awake, dead – alive, on – off, permit – forbid, remember – forget, win – lose, shut – open, true – false. Unlike in the case of gradable antonyms, the semantic relationship between the two members of an ungradable antonymic pair is of the “either – or” type, i.e. the assertion of one member always implies the negation of the other, with no options in between (in the case of adjectives, this is proven by the fact that they do not allow degrees of comparison). Thus, an animate being may be described as either dead or alive, but not as some degree of these or as being more one than the other. If certain behaviour is permitted, then it is not forbidden; if one lost a contest, then one has not won it; if a switch is off, then it is not on.

The following are examples of converse antonyms (as quoted by Jackson and Amvela 2007: 116): above – below, before – after, behind – in

front of, buy – sell, give – receive, husband – wife, parent – child, speak – listen. The meanings of the two antonyms are like the two sides of the same coin, one member of the pair expresses the converse meaning of the other. Buy and sell describe the same transaction, the difference lying in the vantage point from which it is viewed. If the transaction is seen from the point of view of the person who gives up the goods in exchange for money, we speak about selling, if it is seen from the point of view of the person who receives the goods upon paying a sum of money for them, we speak about

buying.

If we take into consideration the form of the antonyms, we may speak about root and affixal antonyms.

•root or radical antonyms are different lexical units with opposite meanings: warm – cold, kind – cruel, open – shut;

•affixal antonyms are words having the same root, the relation of oppositeness of meaning between them being established by means of negative (and positive) affixes which are added to the common

root: careful – careless, important – unimportant, to believe – to disbelieve, to entangle – to disentangle.

4.5.3. Hyponymy and meronymy

This section is dedicated to a pair of sense relations that relate words hierarchically. Its starting point is the fact that some words have a more general meaning, while others have a more specific meaning, though they refer to the same entity. Thus, for example, dog and spaniel may be both used to refer to the same creature, but spaniel is a more specific designation than dog and may be employed to refer to breeds other than the spaniels, which, however, share with them a number of essential

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features (they are four legged omnivorous animals, kept as pets or for guarding buildings, etc.). Similarly, as Jackson and Amvela (2007: 118) point out, “a pain in the foot and a pain in the toe may refer to the same phenomenon; the second is merely a more specific way of designating the location of the pain.”

Both dog and spaniel and foot and toe are related to each other by a general – specific type of semantic relationship. However, the two pairs of words mentioned illustrate slight differences in this relationship. In the case of dog and spaniel, the relationship is of the “kind of” type – a spaniel is a kind of dog. This is the relation of hyponymy. The more general term that can be used for a number of more specific terms is the superordinate term, while its directly subordinate terms are its hyponyms. Mc Arthur (1981) exemplifies the semantic relation of hyponymy with a simplified variant of the taxonomies of natural elements, reproduced by Jacskon and Amvela (2007: 118):

Fig. 4. Hyponymy

According to this branched scheme, fungus, lichen, shrub, creeper and tree are the hyponyms of plant. In their turn, all but one of them may function as the superordinate terms of other hyponyms: fungus is the superordinate of mushroom and toadstool, creeper is the superordinate of ivy and bindweed, while tree is the more general term for the more specific conifer and deciduous. At the bottom level of the scheme, there are pine and spruce as hyponyms of conifer and oak and ash as hyponyms of deciduous. If there is a direct connection between the terms at the lower levels of the scheme and the terms at the upper levels, the former may be considered hyponyms of the latter, even if they are more than one level apart: for example, oak and ash are hyponyms of tree, pine and spruce are hyponyms of plant.

In the case of foot and toe, the relationship is of the “part of” type – the toe is part of the foot. Cruse (1986) calls it meronymy. Jackson and

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Amvela (2007: 120) illustrate it schematically, under the form of a hierarchy of superordinate and subordinate (meronym) terms:

Fig. 5. Meronymy

Read from the bottom to the top, what this hierarchical model suggests is that petal and stem are meronyms of flower, as are cap and hair to root and stalk and blade to leaf. One more level up, leaf, bud, stem, root, flower and shoot are meronyms of plant.

Part – whole relationships like the one that has just been mentioned exist between numerous words in the English vocabulary. Most of the objects around us are made of parts that have their own names. A knife is made of a blade and a handle, the parts of a day are the dawn, the morning, the noon, the afternoon and the evening, while the head, the trunk and the limbs constitute the human body.

4.5.4. Homonymy

Homonymy, a pervasive phenomenon in English, is a relation of lexical ambiguity between words having different meanings, or, as Katamba (2005: 122) sees it, it is “a situation where one orthographic or spoken form represents more than one vocabulary item”.

4.5.4.1. Types of homonyms

If their pronunciation and spelling are taken into consideration, homonyms may be of the following types:

•perfect homonyms or homonyms proper - words identical in both spelling and pronunciation: light (adjective) – light (noun);

•homophones - words that have the same pronunciation, but differ in spelling: air – heir, I – eye, buy – bye – by;

•homographs - words that have the same spelling, but differ in pronunciation: wound [wu:nd] – wound [waund], bow [b∂u] – bow [bau], lead [led] – lead [li:d].

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Word Meaning

As the examples below demonstrate, homonyms are a rich source of humour. They are, as well, a source of confusion for both users of English who do not master the language and, sometimes, for proficient speakers of it:

Why did the teacher wear sunglasses? Her students were too bright. Waiter, will the pancakes be long? No, sir, round. (www.firstschoolyears.com)

A family of three tomatoes was walking downtown one day when the little baby tomato started lagging behind. The big father tomato walks back to the baby tomato, stomps on her, squashing her into a red paste, and says ‘Ketchup!’” (www.ahajokes.com, reproduced by Katamba (2005: 122)

Drunk Gets Nine Months in Violin Case (www.macmillandictionary.com)

In the first two sentences, humour arises from the homonymy between bright meaning “intelligent” and bright meaning “full of light” and, respectively, between long referring to time in the phrase to be long and long referring to shape, extension in space. In the paragraph cited by Katamba, it is the homophones catch up and ketchup that produce a hilarious effect, while in the last quotation, a headline from a newspaper, due to the homographic relationship between case meaning a legal matter presented before a court and case meaning container, it is not clear, at a quick reading, whether the drunkard was sentenced for a crime connected to the violin’s box, not to mention that a person with an imaginative mind and the sense of humour might as well see the criminal squeezed in a violin box for nine months.

According to the type of meaning that helps to differentiate words that have the same sound and / or form, homonyms may be grouped in three categories:

•lexical homonyms are homonyms which belong to the same grammatical class and have different lexical meanings: the noun seal meaning “a kind of sea animal” and the nouns seal meaning “the special mark put on documents to prove that they are authentic”;

•grammatical homonyms are homonyms which belong to different grammatical classes and have different lexical meanings: the noun bear referring to “a particular kind of large wild animal with thick fur” and the verb bear meaning “inability to accept or to do something”;

•lexical - grammatical homonyms are homonyms which differ in grammatical meaning only: that as a demonstrative noun and that as a demonstrative adjective, played as the past tense of the verb to play and played as the past participle of the same verb.

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4.5.4.2. Sources of homonymy

There are three major phenomena which account for the existence of so many homonyms in English: phonetic convergence, semantic

divergence and conversion.

Phonetic convergence or convergent sound development lies at the basis of etymological homonyms, words that can be traced back to different etymons and that have come to be identical in form as a result of sound changes. These changes have been frequently accompanied by the loss of inflections. Thus, the verb bear (I can’t bear to be talked to so impolitely) comes from the Old English (OE) beran, while the noun bear

(There’s a big bear behind that tree) comes from the OE bera. The adjective fair has a Common Teutonic etymon which gave in OE fæger, meaning “beautiful, blond” (My sister is a fair woman), the noun fair, meaning “a periodical market sometimes with various kinds of entertainment” (There’s a fair in the village every two weeks) comes from the Old French (OFr) feire, which is itself a transformed variant of the Latin feria, meaning “holiday”.

Semantic divergence or disintegration / split of polysemy leads to semantic homonyms. The cause of this phenomenon in English is found, as one of its names suggests, in polysemy. Semantic homonyms have the same etymon and are the result of a process by which some meanings of polysemantic words have deviated so far from each other that they have gained an existence as completely separate words. Hulban (1975: 175) quotes a number of examples of such semantic homonyms. The Latin etymon capitalia, for instance, has given in English the homonymous adjectives capital (1), meaning “relating to the head”, “punishable by death”, “deadly, mortal” (The criminal received the capital punishment for his deeds) and capital (2), meaning “standing at the head, upper case” (Names of countries are spelt with capital letters), when referring to letters or words and “chief, important, first-rate” (This capital error will make you lose much money) in other contexts. The OE gesund gave sound (1), meaning “free of disease, infirmity, having bodily health” (He looked

perfectly sound after he had taken those medicines) and sound (2), meaning “in accordance with fact, reason, good sense, free from error” (This is a sound statement). Another example that may be added to those offered by Hulban (1975) is that of the pair flower – flour, which were originally one word, the Latin florem. In France, the word became variously flur, flour and flor and passed into English as flur, “the blossom of a plant”. During the Elizabethan period, the term flower came to mean “the best”. Millers of the era were still using a crude process to grind and sift the meal and only the finest of it was able to pass through a cloth sieve. This top quality wheat was reserved for the gentry and the royalty and was known as “the flower of the wheat”. Since, during that period, English used to be

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pretty flexible in spelling, the word was often spelled flour. Around the 1830’s, the two words were officially differentiated.

Conversion, the process by which one lexical item changes its morphological class without changing its form, accounts for a great number of homonyms. The pairs ship (noun), meaning “large boat for longer voyages on the sea” - ship (verb), meaning “to send goods or people by ship” and answer (noun), meaning “a spoken or written reply to a question” - answer (verb), meaning “to give s spoken or written reply to a question” are examples of homonyms obtained by conversion.

4.6. Polysemy

Though not a sense relation between words, polysemy may be introduced here in order to later emphasize its connection with homonymy.

Unlike monosemantic words (very few in English and mainly technical or scientific words such as saline, dioxide, ontology), polysemantic words are words which have more than one meaning. The noun box, for example, is mentioned in the Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners (2002) with the following meanings: (1) “a container with straight sides, a flat base, and sometimes a lid” – Read the instructions before taking it out of its box.; (1a) “the things in a box or the amount that a box contains” – Jim gave us some chocolate and we ate the whole box.; (2) “a space on a printed form, in which you write” – Tick the boxes that apply to you.; (2a) “a space on a computer screen, where you can read or write a particular kind of information” – the dialog / error box; (3) “a small enclosed space with seats in a theatre or sports ground, separate from where the rest of the audience is sitting” – a corporate entertainment box; (4) BrE informal for “television” – Is there anything on the box tonight?; (5) “an address that some people use instead of having letters delivered to their houses” – My PO Box address is…; (6) “a tree with small shiny leaves that people grow especially around the edges of their gardens”

– a box hedge; informal for “coffin for a dead body” – The box was lowered into the grave.; BrE for “a hard cover worn by men to protect their sex organs when playing sports” – Footballers always wear a box when

playing.

Most English words are polysemantic, the number of meanings ranging from three to about one hundred. The commomer the word, the more meanings it has.

Polysemy may be approached diachronically and synchronically. From a diachronic point of view, polysemy may be considered a

change in the semantic structure of a word, resulting in new meanings being added to the one or ones already existing. Diachronically, we speak about primary meaning, the meaning of the word when it first appeared in the language, and secondary meaning(s), the meaning(s) that

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