Synonymy,Antonomy and Hyponymy

 A.SYNONYMY

                Synonymy is the state or phenomenon in which the words that sound different (different in pronunciation) but have the same or identical meaning as another word or phrase. The concrete form of synonymy is called “synonym”. Examples: 

small = little  big = large  mother and father = parents politician = statesman

B.ANTONYMY

Antonymy is the state or phenomenon in which the words have the sense relation which involve the opposite of meaning. The concrete form of antonymy is called “antonym” (opposite). The word pairs of antonym can be divided into several types:

a. Implicitly Gradable Pairs (Graded Antonym)

implicitly Gradable Pairs (Graded Antonym) refers to the words related to the object they modify. The words themselves do not provide an absolute scale. Examples:

big >< small good >< bad Relatively fast >< slow comparable young >< old Thus, when we say that “a fly is bigger than another”, we imply that „big‟ is to be understood in the context of „flies‟. Another fact dealing with this type is that “a small elephant”, for example, is much bigger that “a big mouse”. A big mouse A small elephant.

b. Complementary Pairs (Complementarity)

Complementary Pairs (Complemetarity) refers to the existence of pairs that the denial of one, implies the assertion of the other. Examples:

 male >< female alive >< dead Incomparable present >< absent objects awake >< asleep Thus, if one is not male, then one is certainly female; if one is not present, then he/she must be absent, and so on.

 c. Relational Pairs (Converseness).

Relational Pairs (converseness) refers to the pair of words that display symmetry in their meaning. If X gives Y to Z, then Z receives Y from X Relationships between certain semantic features can reveal knowledge about antonyms. Consider: A word that is [+married] is [-single] A word that is [+single] is [-married]These show that any word that bears the semantic property “married”,such as „wife‟, is understood to lack the semantic property “single”; andconversely, any word that bears the semantic property “single”, such as„bachelor‟, will not have the property “married”.

 C.HYPONYMY

Hyponymy is the state or phenomenon that shows the relationship between more general term (lexical representation) and the more specific instances of it. The concrete forms of sets of word (the specific instances) are called “hyponyms”. Example:

The lexical representation of: red, yellow, green, blue, purple, black, is [+color]. Thus, we can say that: “red” is a hyponym of “color”, and so on.

Sometimes there is no single word in the language that encompasses as set of hyponyms. Example:

clarinet, guitar, piano, trumpet, violin are hyponyms because they are “musical instruments”, but there is not a single word meaning “musical instrument” that has these words as its hyponyms.The relationship between the general term and the specific instances is often be described using a hierarchical diagram, called “taxonomy”.Example of Taxonomy:

vegetable greens pulses roots tuberscabbage spinach peas beans carrots turnips potatoes yams

 Look at the following list: Tea,Black coffee , coffee ,Milk ,White coffee ,Beverage From the list, we can make the taxonomy as follow: Beverage tea coffee milk Black coffee White coffee.