Semantic Relationships: Meaning in Language
Denotation and Connotation
Denotation is the objective meaning of a word, while connotation is the meaning developed over time. Connotations can be cultural and/or subjective.
Meaning and Sense
The meaning of a word is determined by the linguistic context and the communicative situation.
Context and Situation
The linguistic context of a word is affected by the following factors:
- The set of words that surround the discourse.
- The syntactic relationship that links the terms of a statement.
- The relationship with other units.
The communicative situation is determined by the extralinguistic set of circumstances and intentions of the speaker.
Sense
The meaning of linguistic expressions in a communicative act includes specific linguistic meaning, context determinations, and determinations of the situation in which it is issued. We can distinguish the following components:
- A descriptive or linguistic meaning.
- A sense in the sentence determined by contextual elements that can be phrasal (e.g., “The center is a prison”) and paradigmatic (e.g., prison, reclusion).
- Aspects related to the situation and connotative elements.
Homonymy
Homonymy is a relation between signs that have the same significant, but different meanings (e.g., “my”). Homonyms can be:
- Homophones: words pronounced the same.
- Homographs: words with graphic identity.
Synonyms
Synonymy refers to the relationship between two or more words that have the same grammatical category and have an identical or similar meaning.
Opposition
In language, there is a set of words with opposite meanings that reflect the human tendency to be expressed through binary contrasts. There are two types:
- Antonymy: The denial of its term; a positive relationship between the two supports gradient (e.g., high/low, cold/hot).
- Complementarity: A relationship between contrary terms that do not support gradient (e.g., male/female, doctor/patient).
Semantic Fields
A semantic field is a set of lexical units in opposition to each other, sharing a common content (e.g., days, hours, months, years).
Morphological Fields
The form of words and procedures for creating new terms allow groups that organize the meanings of a language.
- Prefixes and suffixes production (e.g., “TV”: television, news, cable, television).
- Productive lexical morphemes (e.g., “useful”: useful, useless).
Associative Fields
The words of a language are also related by contiguity in the context or communicative situation. For example, the word “war” is related to interests, victims, suffering, etc.
Neologism
Neologisms are words that name recently incorporated new concepts and realities, existing or voices that incorporate new meanings. Procedures include:
- Derivation: Prefixes indicate denial, deprivation, number, size, and intensity.
- Composition: There are many in the scientific and technical language (e.g., email, harassment).
- Parasintesis: The formation of new voices (e.g., breed).
- Acronymy and acronyms: Examples (alphanumeric, that).
Semantic Change
The semantic changes experienced by words can be due to historical, psychological, social, and linguistic causes.
Historical Causes
The invention of new objects, changes in institutions, ideas, or scientific concepts, as well as technical advances, may result in changes of meaning.
Psychological and Social Causes
Factors include emotional, expressive, social, and cultural constraints or political/ideological reasons. The most frequent cases are euphemisms and the restriction or extension of the meaning of some words.
Linguistic Causes
The change comes under the influence of the context in which the repeated words appear (e.g., “coffee cut” – meaning a small amount of coffee).