Semantics concepts

Conceptual and associative meanings: These are two types of meanings that are associated with a word. Conceptual meaning refers to the basic dictionary definition of a word, while associative meaning refers to the personal, cultural, or emotional associations that people have with a word.

Semantic features: These features are the building blocks of meaning that are used to distinguish one word from another. For example, the semantic features of the word “cat” might include “four-legged,” “furry,” “carnivorous,” and “domesticated.”

Semantic roles: These are the roles that different words play in a sentence, based on their relationship to the action or event described in the sentence. The most common semantic roles are:
• Agent: the person or thing that performs the action (e.g. “John kicked the ball”)
• Theme: the person or thing that is affected by the action (e.g. “John kicked the ball”)
• Instrument: the object or tool that is used to perform the action (e.g. “John cut the bread with a knife”)
• Experiencer: the person or thing that experiences a certain feeling or state (e.g. “John is afraid of spiders”)
• Location: the place where the action takes place (e.g. “John is at the park”)
• Source: the place where the action originates from (e.g. “John came from the store”)
• Goal: the place where the action is directed towards (e.g. “John went to the library”) Understanding semantic roles is important in teaching English because it can help learners to understand how different words relate to each other in a sentence and to communicate their ideas more effectively.

Lexical relations
Lexical relations are the connections between words. Lexical relations are used to analyze the meanings of words based on their relationships with one another. In fact, it is one of the so many ways of understanding the meaning of words.
1. Synonymy: This refers to the relationship between two or more words that have similar or identical meanings. Examples include “happy” and “joyful,” “big” and “large,” or “cat” and
“feline.”
2. Antonymy: This is the relationship between words with opposite meanings, such as “hot” and
“cold,” “good” and “bad,” or “light” and “dark.”
3. Hyponymy: This relationship exists when one word is a specific type or subclass of another word. For example, “dog” is a hyponym of “animal,” “poodle” is a hyponym of “dog,” and “miniature poodle” is a hyponym of “poodle.”
4. Prototypes: This refers to the most typical or representative example of a category. For example, when we think of the category “fruit,” our prototype might be an apple or a banana.
5. Homophones and homonyms: Homophones are words that sound the same but have different meanings, such as “flower” and “flour.” Homonyms are words that are spelled and pronounced the same but have different meanings, such as “bear” (the animal) and “bear” (to carry).
6. Polysemy: This refers to the phenomenon where a single word has multiple meanings. For example, “bank” can refer to a financial institution, the edge of a river, or the action of tilting.
7. Word play: This refers to the use of language in creative or playful ways, such as puns, rhymes, or tongue twisters.
8. Metonymy: This is a type of figurative language where one word is used to refer to something closely associated with it, such as using “the White House” to refer to the US government or “the crown” to refer to the monarchy.
9. Collocation: This refers to the way words tend to occur together in language, such as “strong coffee,” “heavy rain,” or “make a decision.” Collocations are often language-specific and can be challenging for language learners to master.

Understanding these lexical relations is important for language learners as it helps them expand their vocabulary and use words in appropriate contexts.