Sense relations

Consider directionality, for example. As we have seen, it provides the basis for the distinction between ‘come’ and ‘go’. But it also figures in other contrasts as well, for example, ‘give / take’, ‘advance / retreat’, ‘arrive / depart’, ‘push / pull’, ‘send / receive’, and ‘buy / sell’. All of these pairs have the common feature of process, but the terms in each pair express opposite directionality, and in this respect are examples of antonymy. And within this group, we can distinguish a sub-set of which ‘give / take’ and ‘buy / sell’ are members. Here, there is a relation of reciprocal implication, known as converseness: ‘sell’ necessarily implies ‘buy’ and vice versa (if X sells a car to Y, Y necessarily buys the car from X). However, this sense relation is independent of directionality. Notonly does it exist between the locational terms ‘above / below’, forexample (if A is above В, В is necessarily below A), but also between such reciprocal roles as ‘parent / child’, where the sense and family relations, so to speak, coincide: ‘If Anne is Harry’s child, he is her parent’.

If we now consider a different semantic feature, that of dimen­sion, we come to a meaning opposition (or antonym) of a rather different kind. Consider the adjective pairs: ‘big / small’, ‘long / short’, ‘thin / fat’, and ‘far / near’. Here, we have not absolute but relative oppositeness: not either/or but degrees of difference in respect to some norm or other. Thus, a large mouse is a small animal as compared with a small elephant — or even a very small elephant — which is a large animal. Adjectives of this kind are said to be gradable. They can, naturally, occur with intensifiers (for example, ‘very’, ‘extremely’) and with comparative and super­lative degrees (for example, ‘smaller’, ‘smallest’). Again, as with the directional component above, this kind of antonymy is by no means restricted to lexical items with a dimensional component. ‘Hot / cold’, ‘old / new’, and ‘happy / unhappy’ are gradable, for example. ‘Male / female’, and ‘married / unmarried’, on the other hand, are not. You can be ‘very happy’ or ‘rather old’ but not (normally) ‘rather female’ or ‘very married’.

The examples ‘happy / unhappy’, and ‘married / unmarried’ bring us to another sense relation. According to the earlier argu­ment, these items with their explicit prefixes un- are equivalent in denotation to fused versions ‘unhappy’ = ‘sad’, ‘unmarried’ = ‘single’. With the prefixed versions, the antonymy is explicitly sig­nalled. But there are innumerable other examples where two lex­ical items will contract exactly the same opposition: ‘buy / sell’ = ‘purchase / sell’, ‘arrive / depart’ = ‘arrive/leave’, and so on. To the extent that ‘buy’ and ‘purchase’, and ‘depart’ and ‘leave’ are rela­tional equivalents, they can be said to be examples of synonymy.

Earlier we analysed ‘come’ as consisting of the features [move + towards]. But ‘move’ as a semantic feature figures in the denota­tion of countless other lexical items as well of course. Thus, ‘walk’ is ‘to move on foot’. But ‘walk’, too, is semantically incorporated into other words: ‘march’, ‘amble’, ‘stroll’, ‘tramp’, and ‘stride’, for example. ‘Walk’, then, is the general or superordinate term, and the others, the more particular instances included within it, are its subordinate terms or hyponyms. In the same way, ‘animal’ is a superordinate term, ‘mouse’ and ‘elephant’ are hyponyms. But we can establish intervening levels of hyponymy: ‘mouse’ is a hyponym of the superordinate ‘rodent’ (together with the co-hyponyms ‘rat’, ‘porcupine’, etc.), while ‘rodent’ is a hyponym of the superordinate ‘mammal’, which is in turn a hyponym of ‘animal’.

Figure 5.1. Part of a hyponymic tree for ‘animal’

Each superordinate necessarily possesses a semantic feature common to all its hyponyms. To the extent that each co-hyponym has a distinct semantic specification, it serves as a superordinate to the next level of classification down, until all distinctive features are exhausted. It follows that where two lexical items appear in the same position on the tree as hyponyms we have synonymy. We may decide, for example, that ‘amble’ and ‘stroll’ are not distin­guishable as ways of walking, and so are synonyms in that they have the same hyponymic relation to the superordinate word ‘walk’. Notice, though, that this has to do with the equivalence of denotation as elements of the code. Synonymy as discussed here is a semantic relation. […]