UNIT 11
SENSE RELATION
(contd)
GROUP 11
LÊ TRẦN HỒNG ÂN
VÕ ĐỖ HẠNH DUNG
LẠI THỊ MĨ DUYÊN
NGUYỄN THÀNH CHÂN
MAI THỊ KIM NGÂN
CONTENT
01 TYPES OF ANTONYMY
02 CONTRADICTORINESS
03 AMBIGUITY
04 HOMONYMY
05 POLYSEMY
1. ANTONYMY
1. ANTONYMY
The traditional view of antonymy is the
semantic relationship between words that
have opposite meaning
→ Simply 'oppositeness of meaning'
1. ANTONYMY
Some words may be opposite in meaning in
different ways
Some words have no real opposites.
-E.g. Thick is not the opposite of thin in the same
way as dead is the opposite of alive.
There are 4 basic types of antonymy (or
semantic incompatibility)
1.1. BINARY ANTONYMY
→ also called complementarity
BINARY ANTONYMS are predicates which come
in pairs and between them exhaust all the
relevant possibilities. If the one predicate is
applicable, then the other cannot be, and
vice versa.
1.1. BINARY ANTONYMY
Another way to view this is to say that a
predicate is a binary antonym of another
predicate if it entails the negative of the
other predicate.
1.1. BINARY ANTONYMY
The natural way to pair off pairs of
antonyms is along the same dimension
man vs woman (along the male/female
dimension)
1.1. BINARY ANTONYMY
A four-way contrast (not natural) two
different binary antonyms combine in a set of
predicates
more complicated systems of contrast
man vs girl → (cutting across both dimensions)
1.2. CONVERSES
If a predicate describes a relationship between
two things (or people) and some other
predicate describes the same relationship when
the two things (or people) are mentioned in the
opposite order, then the two predicates are
CONVERSES of each other.
applies when three things (or people) are
mentioned.
E.g. buy & sell
1.3. Multiple Incompatibles (systems)
All the terms in a given system are mutually incompatible
e.g. Heart (cơ) → Club / Diamond / Spade (chuồn, rô, bích)
= not heart (type of card)
Together, the members of a system cover all the relevant
area.
e.g. Sweet (ngọt) → Bitter / Sour / Salty (đắng, chua, mặn)
= not sweet (taste)
There are large numbers of open-ended systems of
1.4. GRADABLE ANTONYMY
Two predicates are GRADABLE antonyms if they
are at opposite ends of a continuous scale
of values (a scale which typically varies
according to the context of use).
WAR COO TEPI COL
HOT
M L D D
e.g.
1.4. GRADABLE ANTONYMY
Gradability test:
Check whether a word can combine with (very,
or very much, or how? or how much?)
E.g. How tall is he? is acceptable.
How top is that shelf? is not acceptable.
2. CONTRADICTORINESS
2. CONTRADICTORINESS
Contradictory sentences are sentences which are
definitely and have to be judged as false
because of the contrast information among the
words.
It occurs when sentences are unlikely to be
correct at the same time.
2. CONTRADICTORINESS
E.g: Mrs Reeves is a bachelor FALSE
-We know the exact meaning of the
words.
E.g: Ken is at the party. Ken is at home
FALSE
-The sentence is obviously contain
3. AMBIGUITY
3. AMBIGUITY
Describing and explaining ambiguities in words
and in sentences is one of the goals of a
semantic theory.
A word or sentence is AMBIGUOUS when it
has more than one sense. A sentence is
ambiguous if it has two (or more)
paraphrases which are not themselves
3. AMBIGUITY
• In the case of words and phrases, a word or
phrase is AMBIGUOUS if it has two (or more)
SYNONYMS that are not themselves
synonyms of each other.
3. AMBIGUITY
3.1. LEXICAL AMBIGUITY
Any ambiguity resulting from the ambiguity
of a word is a LEXICAL AMBIGUITY.
E.g. The captain corrected the list
3. AMBIGUITY
3.2. STRUCTURALLY (or GRAMMATICALLY) AMBIGUOUS
A sentence which is ambiguous because its
words relate to each other in different ways,
even though none of the individual words
are ambiguous, is STRUCTURALLY (or
GRAMMATICALLY) AMBIGUOUS.
3. AMBIGUITY
3.2. STRUCTURALLY (or GRAMMATICALLY) AMBIGUOUS
E.g. The chicken is ready to eat
a question of 'what goes with what' in a
sentence
can be shown by using constituency
diagrams
square brackets around the relevant parts
of the sentence (or phrase).
4. HOMONYMY
4. HOMONYMY
A case of HOMONYMY is one of an
ambiguous word whose different senses are
far apart from each other and not obviously
related to each other in any way with respect
to a native speaker's intuition.
Mug (drinking vessel vs gullible person)
Bank (financial institution vs the side of a
river. or stream)
4. HOMONYMY
Homonymy seems to be a matter of
accident or coincidence There is no
obvious conceptual connection between
the two meanings of either word.
4. HOMONYMY
It is not always possible to find an exactly
synonymous phrase for a given word
yet it is possible to indicate different
senses of a word by giving different
environments in which the word may be
used.
4. HOMONYMY
E.g. sage
→ we had to resort to the Latin botanical label
→ (cheating) → synonymy is usually a relation
between words (and phrases) in the same
language.
E.g. Grass
has two senses which are indicated by the
following environments:
(a) Please keep off the grass
(b) The informer grassed on his partners-in-crime
4. HOMONYMY
In many cases, a word used in one sense
belongs to one part of speech, and used in
another sense, it belongs to a different
part of speech.
E.g. long
in the sense of yearn a verb
in the sense of not short an adjective
5. POLYSEMY
5. POLYSEMY
A case of POLYSEMY is one where a word has
several very closely related senses. In other
words, a native speaker of the language has
clear intuitions that the different senses are
related to each other in some way.
5. POLYSEMY
E.g. Mouth (of a river vs of an animal) is a
case of polysemy.
the concepts of an opening from the interior
of some solid mass to the outside, & of a place
of issue at the end of some long narrow
channel.
5. POLYSEMY
Polysemy in nouns is quite common in human
languages.
QUIZZ !!!!!!
Q1. The word fine has the following
meanings: 'superior in quality’ and 'a
sum of money paid as a penalty’, which
illustrates
A. POLYSEMY B. HOMONYMY
Q2. The word bank has the following
meanings: an incline of land adjoining a
river’ and ‘a financial institution’, which
illustrates
A. HOMONYMY B. POLYSEMY
Q3. The word monitor has the following
meanings: 'a pupil who assists a
teacher' and 'a device that receives
video signals from a computer’, which
illustrates
A. HOMONYMY B. POLYSEMY
Q4. The word horn has the following
meanings: ‘a structure projecting from
the head of an animal’ and 'a musical
instrument’, which illustrates
A. HOMONYMY B. POLYSEMY
Q5. The word pilot has the following
meanings: ‘one who operates an
aircraft or ship’ and ‘a television
program produced as a prototype of a
series’, which illustrates
A. POLYSEMY B. HOMONYMY
Q6. How many types of antonymy ?
A. 10 B. 20
C. 4 D. 7
Q7. What is the semantics
relationship between (or among)
the following words? strong :
weak
A. antonomy: gradableB. antonomy:
contradictory
[Link] is this sense relation:
common – rare ?
A. antonomy B. polysemy
Q9. I read a Book – The reservations
can be made to book a banquet.
A. antonomy B. polysemy
Q10. LEXICAL AMBIGUITY occurs
____________
A. when a word B. when a phrase
has 2 or more or sentence has
meanings more than 1
underlying
structure
THANKS
FOR LISTENING
