9. Hyponymy.

When the meaning of one form in included in the meaning of another, the relationship is described as Hyponymy. (animal-dog, dog-pudel). The concept of inclusion involved this relationship is the idea that if an object is a rose than it is necessarily a flower, of the rose is a hyponym of a flower. When we consider hyponymous connections we are essentially looking at the meaning of words in some type of hierarchical relationship. We can represent the relationships in the following diagram

Living thing

Creature Plant

Animal Insect Vegetable Flower Tree

Dog Snake Horse Ant Cockroach carrot rose oak poodle asp

Horse the hyponym of animal or cockroach is a hyponym of insect. Animal & insect are called superordinate (high-level terms). We can also say that two or more words that share the same superordinate term are co-hyponyms. Dog & horse are co-hyponyms & superordinate term is animal.

The relationship of hyponymy captures the concept of “is a kind of” as when we give the meaning of a word by saying “an asp is a kind of snake”. Sometimes the only thing we know about the meaning of a word is that it is a hyponym of another term. It’s worth emphasizing that it’s not only words for things. Words such as “shoot punch kick stab”, words describing actions, can also be treated as co-hyponyms of the superordinate term “injure”/

10.Polysemy.

When we accounted two more words with the same form and relative meaning we have technically known as polysemy. Polysemy can be defined as one form( written or spoken) having multiple meanings that are all related by abstention( E.g. head- used to refer an object of our body and person at the top of the company etc.). if the word has multiple meanings they will be a single entry with a numbered least of the different meanings of that word. If two words are treated as homonyms they will typically form two separate entries. Of course, it is possible for 2 forms to be distinguished through homonymy and for one of the forms also to have various uses via polysemy.

Many words in English are polysemantic or have a complicated semantic structure. There are few monosemantic words in English. They are mainly special terms like morpheme, numerals etc.

In a polysemantic words various meanings or lexica semantic variants(L S V) coexist as a certain period of the English language. All L S V of a word taken together from its semantic structure.

Semantic structure of a word.

The semantic structure is an interrelation and interdependence of all its lexico-semantic variants. It’s determined not only by a number of its lexico-semantic variants, but also by their type. The semantic structure is a flexible category, it is changing with a development of the language. As a polysemy semantic structure exists only in language not in speech. Paradigmatic relation defines the word meaning through its interrelations with other members in dictionaries with one of the subgroup of vocabulary units. Syntagmatic relations defines the word meaning in the flow of speech in different combinations through varies context. There is no single semantic component common to all lexico-semantic variants. Every variant has something in common with one of the other. Every meaning in language and every difference in meaning is singled either by the form word itself or by context. Lexico – grammatical variants of a word are its variants characterized by paradigmatic all morphological peculiarities, valency, different syntactic functions, very often belong to different lexico-grammatical groups of the same part of speech. In the semantic structure of the word “youth” lexico-grammatical variants can be distinguished: 1) uncountable noun (friend of one’s youth) 2) countable personal noun (as a young man) 3) as a collective noun (young men and women). There are 2 approaches to polysemy: diachronic and synchronic. If polysemy is viewed diachronically it’s understood as growth and development or as a change in the semantic structure of the word. It means that a word may retain the previous meaning and at the same time acquire one or several new ones. According to this in the semantic structure of the word 2 types of meaning can be singled out: primary and secondary. FE: the word “table” today has 9 meanings. Synchronically polysemy is understood as the coexistence of various meaning of the same word at a certain historical period oh language development. The same word “table” most of all occurs as “an article of furniture” it‘s the central meaning of the word, other meanings are marginal. Central meaning occurs widely in different context, while marginal is only in certain context.