Лекция № 6. Смысловые отношения в лексико-семантической системе

Semantic relations in the lexical system

Euphemisms

Euphemism from Greek ‘eu’ (well) + ‘pheme’ (speaking) is the substitution of rough and unpleasant expressions by a conventionally more acceptable one, by words of mild or vague connotations. Euphemism is called figuratively ‘a whitewashing device’. For example, the word ‘to die’ has the following euphemisms: to expire, to be no more, to pass away, to join the majority, to give up the ghost, to depart, to kick the bucket.

Euphemisms are words or expressions that speakers substitute for taboo words in order to avoid a direct confrontation with topics that are embarrassing, frightening, or uncomfortable: God, the devil, sex, death, to lie, money, war, crime, religion, etc.

Antonyms

The term ‘antonymy’ (from Greek ‘opposite’ + ‘name’) is used for oppositeness of meaning. Antonyms are words that are opposites with respect to some component of their meaning. For example, widenarrow, admitdeny, produceconsume, oldyoung, bigsmall, bittersweet, cleandirty.

Not every word may have an antonym, though practically every word has a synonym. For example the words ‘table’ or ‘blackboard’ have no antonyms.

Words may be put into antonymic groups according to their lexico-semantic variants: dry-wet, dry-interesting, dear-cheap, dear-hateful. So, if a word is polysemantic, it can have several antonyms.

The most widely known dictionary of antonyms in Russia is compiled by V.N.Komissarov. In this dictionary “Dictionary of English Antonyms”, antonyms are subdivided into two groups:

1. root antonyms (badgood, tallshort, slowfast, ancientmodern) which express contrary notions;

2. derivational antonyms (likedislike, efficientinefficient, usefuluseless, logical-illogical) which express contradictory notions.

There are several affixes in English which help in the formation of antonyms: un-, in- (with its allomorphs il-, im-, ir-). The difference between derivational and root antonyms is in their structure and in their semantics.

Hyponymy and Paronymy

Hyponymy is a paradigmatic relation of sense between a more specific, or subordinate lexeme, and a more general, or superordinate, lexeme. For example, ‘cow’ is a hyponym of ‘animal’, ‘rose’ is a hyponym of ‘flower’. As ‘rose’, ‘tulip’, ‘daffodil’, etc. each is a hyponym of ‘flower’ they are co-hyponyms of the same lexeme. The upper term is the superordinate lexeme.

For example: red: scarlet, vermilion, crimson; vegetable: potato, cabbage, carrot.

Hyponym (from Greek ‘under’ + ‘name’) is a word the meaning of which is included in the meaning of another word.

Paronyms

Paronyms are words that are kindred both in sound form and meaning and therefore liable to be mixed but different in meaning and usage and therefore only mistakenly interchanged. For a a example, the verbs ‘to affect’ (which means ‘to influence’) and ‘to effect’ (which means ‘to bring out’, ‘to result in’). Or the words ‘prosecute’ and ‘persecute’, ‘policy’ and ‘politics’, ‘moral’ and ‘morale’, ‘respectfully’ and ‘respectively’, ‘human’ and ‘humane’, ‘conscience’, ‘conscious’, ‘consciousness’ and ‘conscientious’.