Understanding Vocabulary and Semantics in Linguistics
Vocabulary and Semantics
1.1. The Linguistic Sign
Features:
- The linguistic meaning is arbitrary: The relationship between signifier and signified does not obey any rules. It’s conventional.
- The linguistic sign is immutable: Individual speakers cannot change the signs.
- It is mutable: Some linguistic signs change their meaning over time, and society adopts the new meanings.
Examples:
- Pass:
- Transit
- Not minding
- Roll:
- Cylindrical geometry
- Something boring
- Occasional erotic relationship
1.2. The Word and Its Meaning (Semantics)
Word: An independent linguistic unit, consisting of one or more monemes, appearing bounded between two spaces in writing.
1. Monemes
- Lexeme: The root or base of the word.
- Morpheme:
- Independent (single words: conjunctions, adverbs, pronouns, determiners (and, the, I))
- Dependent: derivative (prefixes, suffixes, infix)
- Inflectional (gender, number, person, tense…)
2. Loanwords
The lexicon is a large collection of words which, over time and due to political and cultural reasons, has been enriched with words from other languages.
The most important loanwords incorporated into Castilian are:
- Germanic: white, rich, war, spy
- Arabic: storage, cup, pillow, sugar, rice, eggplant
- French: lady, horse, boy, inn, young man, walking stick
- Italian: sonnet, sentinel, soprano, driver, shotgun, novel
- Americanisms: Hurricane, chocolate, potatoes, cocoa (from indigenous languages of America)
- English: film, check, soccer, tram
Loanwords from the Iberian languages:
- Portuguese: jam, mussels, diver, oyster, sweet
- Basque: chorizo, left, slate, cowbell, beret
- Catalan: rape, cabin, sausage, bandit
- Galician: botafumeiro, homesickness
3. Neologisms
These are words that have recently entered the language (druggie, scan, zoom, boutique, show).
4. Denotation and Connotation
The denotation is the objective meaning that a word conveys.
The connotation is the additional meaning a word acquires from a person or social group.
5. Polysemy and Homonymy
A word is polysemous when its signifier corresponds to two or more meanings.
Example: “Cup” can mean “standing glass to drink” and “set of branches forming the top of the tree.”
A word is a homonym when two or more words, which originally had different meanings and signifiers, through evolution, have become words with different meanings and signifiers that are spelled the same or similarly and are pronounced identically.
Homonymous words are divided into two groups:
- Homophones: words whose signifiers are pronounced alike but have different spellings. Example: to (preposition), too (also), two (number).
- Homographs: words whose meanings are different but are pronounced and spelled the same. Example: wine (drink), wine (simple past tense of the verb to come).
6. Synonymy and Antonymy
Two or more words are synonymous when they have different signifiers and the same or similar meaning.
The antonym is the relationship between two words with opposite meanings.
7. Hyperonymy and Hyponymy
Hyperonyms are words whose meaning includes the meaning of other words. Example: flower, seat.
Hyponyms are words with a narrower and more specific meaning. Example: lily, carnation, chair, armchair, rocking chair.
8. Semantic and Lexical Family
A semantic field is a set of words in the same grammatical category that share certain features of meaning and, at the same time, have significant features that differentiate them from one another.
The lexical family consists of words with the same lexeme.
Example: bread – bread-maker, bread-crumb
9. Formation of Words
- Derivation: A lexeme plus one or two prefixes or suffixes. Example: re/load, un/dress.
- Composition: Union of two lexemes. Example: scarecrow, tooth-puller, dropper.
- ParasÃntesi: Two lexemes plus some suffix or prefix. Example: seven-month-old, moody.