Welcome.

Thanks for joining me.

In this video, I will be discussing semantics, which has to do with the study of meaning in terms of words, phrases, and sentences.

Specifically in this video, I'll be talking about lexical semantics, which has to do with the study of words. Now, in this video, I'll be covering several concepts, including lexical relations, componential analysis, and prototype theory.

First, let's clarify the scope of denotational meaning, rather than connotational meaning, meaning that semantics is focused on what something means, rather than how it is used in context.

That is the domain of pragmatics. Now, for example, consider this image.

Is this a chair?

What about this?

Or this?

There's no easy answer to those questions, and hopefully by the end of this video, you will see that it largely depends on the person being asked that question.

So, first, let's talk about lexical relations. Now, lexical relations has to do with the meanings of words in relationship to one another, and there are several of these that we'll talk about.

First, let's talk about synonymy.

Synonyms are words with similar meanings, such as big and large, small and little, doctor and physician.

Each pair there has very similar meanings.

So, they might be different words, but they have very similar meanings.

Those are synonyms. Now, we could also talk about antonyms, which is the opposite, because antonyms are words that have opposite meanings.

There's actually two types of antonyms.

There's gradable antonymy and non-gradable antonymy.

Gradable antonyms are those in which there's a kind of graded difference.

It's something that you could imagine on a continuum or a spectrum.

For example, something could be kind of wide and kind of narrow.

It's unclear where one stops and the other begins.

Similarly, with kind of short and kind of tall, it's unclear where one stops and the other begins.

So, non-gradable antonyms are different.

They are either one or the other, and they fail the kind of test.

So, you can either be alive or dead.

You can't really say something is kind of alive or kind of dead, never mind all the zombies that you've seen in movies.

If you think about the meaning of something as a living being, it's either alive or it's dead.

Similarly, somebody could either be married or unmarried.

You're either one or the other.

There is no kind of in-between.

It's not a graded category.

Those are non-gradable antonyms. Next, we can talk about hyponymy, and hyponymy is when the meaning of one form is actually included in the meaning of a larger other form.

So, for example, a daisy is a hyponym of flower.

A carrot is a hyponym of vegetable.

Aspen is a hyponym of tree.

A cat is a hyponym of a vomit maker.

These are all examples of the meaning of one word being included in the meaning of a larger category. Now, we can next talk about homophony, and homophony are forms that sound the exact same, and that's what the word means, homo as in same and phone, same sound, but they are actually spelled differently, and they have very unrelated meanings.

So, we could talk about sea.

The sea is in the body of water, and we could talk about sea as in the action that you perform with the eyes to look.

We could also talk about bear as in being naked, and we could talk about bear as in the creature that you don't want to encounter in the woods.

These are homophones.

These are often confused with homonyms, so that means same name, homonym.

So, homonyms are forms that sound the same, and they are spelled the same, but they have unrelated meanings.

So, for example, consider the word bank as in the side of a river, and bank as in a financial institution.

They're spelled the same, they sound the same, but they have very unrelated meanings.

We could also talk about a pen as in a writing instrument, and a pen as in a small enclosed space where we might keep livestock or unruly children.

In both of those examples, again, we're talking about forms that are the exact same.

They're spelled the same, they sound the same, but unrelated meanings. Now, we could talk about polysemy, and polysemy has to do with words that are the same.

They're spelled the same, they sound the same, but they have related meanings, often based on metaphor.

So, for example, consider the foot as in an anatomical part, but we could also talk about the foot of a table, or the foot of a mountain.

So, using the metaphor here of the anatomical part, that's sort of the source for us to understand that it's the part of the table that's holding the rest of the table up, or the same thing with a mountain.

Similarly, we could talk about a mole as in the mammal that burrows underground, spends most of its life in the subterranean environment, and we could also talk about a mole as in a spy, or somebody who's been planted for the purpose of espionage, that's sort of using a metaphorical relationship with the animal because it is a mole as in a human being.

A spy is perceived as being hidden or unseen, that's polysemy, the poly meaning many, and seem meaning meaning, so many meanings. Next, we could talk about metonymy, and metonymy is really interesting because it's a big category, but it's really the idea that you're referring to one thing based on some close relationship to another thing, and this could be in terms of association, like for example when a server says table 14 needs water, of course table 14 doesn't need anything, it's an inanimate object, but it is used to refer to the customer who is seated at that table, they're the ones who need water, so it's based on association.

But we could also talk about metonymy in terms of referring to a container to talk about the contents, like when for example I say I ate the whole bag, I didn't literally eat the bag, if I did I wouldn't be making this video, I would be in the hospital, so I'm just referring to bag to talk about the container, the chips that are inside of it for example.

But we could also talk about metonymy in terms of a part-whole relationship, where for example a captain might say on a boat, all hands on deck, that means that the people themselves, they have to go up and do work, they have to be on deck, but we're just picking out one salient feature of the human being, the hand, to refer to the whole body.

So incidentally, that last example of part-whole relationship is often called synecdoche