application of lexical relation

Application of Lexical Relation on ‘THE KITE’ short story

INTERNATIONAL ISLAMIC

UNIVERSITY ,ISLAMABAD

M.A ENGLISH LITERATURE & LANGUISTICS

4th SEMESTER-SECTION A

POST COLONIAL LITERATURE

ASSIGNMENT TOPIC: APPLICATION OF LEXICAL RELATIONS

SUBMITTED TO: DR. NIGHAT SHAKOOR

SUBMITTED BY: HUMA HAFEEZ

HUMA ASLAM

KINZA GHAFOOR

SUMAIRA BIBI

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INTRODUCTION:

Semantics concerns knowledge of the meanings of lexical items and how meanings of

grammatical combinations of lexical items, including sentences, depend upon the meanings of

their structure and constituents. Semantics thus concerns knowledge of expression types that

competent speakers bring to particular contexts of language use. Semantics investigation of

language operates at two grammatical ranks; word rank and sentence rank. At word rank

semantics explore the relationships which words have with each other within the language as a

whole. This constitutes their sense, that is, the meaning which word has by virtue of its place in

the linguistic system.

Although semantics is consider a rather young branch of linguistics, interest in today’s

problems of semantics was alive already in ancient times. Semantics (as the study of meaning) is

central to the study of communication; and as communication becomes more and more a crucial

factor in social organization, the need to understand it becomes more and more pressing.

Semantics is also at the centre of human mind; thought processes, cognition, conceptualization,

all these are strongly connected to the way in which we classify and convey our experience of

the world through language.

So Semantics can be defined as a branch of linguistics; it is an area of study parallel to, and

interacting with syntax and phonology. While syntax and phonology study the structure of

expressive possibilities in language, semantics studies the meaning that can be expressed. Nearly

all linguists have accepted a linguistic model in which semantics is at one end and phonetics at

the other, with grammar somewhere in the middle. However, until recently, semantics has been

the ‘Cinderella’ of linguistics, a branch that had been abandoned to philosophers and

anthropologists. But in the past 20 –25 years there has been a swing away from the view that

semantics is a messy, unstructured intellectual no-man’s-land on the fringes of linguistics, and

little by little it has acquired a central position in linguistic studies. The concentration on

semantics has come not only from linguists, but from logicians, too. Consequently, in semantics

we witness an unusual convergence of disciplines; the techniques and investigations of

philosophy and cognitive psychology, in particular, have helped to lay a more solid foundation

for linguistic studies. Semantics further includes semantic roles, dimensions of meaning, lexical

relations etc.

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Literature Review:

Lexical relations are relations between pairs of lexemes which are sufficiently common

to constitute a general pattern. In Lexical Relations Words are not only the ‘containers’ or as

fulfilling ‘roles’. They can also have ‘relationships’. It’s like the meanings of words in terms of

their relationships. For example: if meanings of word ‘conceal’ has been asked then it can b

replied same as ‘hide’. The meaning of ‘shallow’ can be replied as ‘the opposite of deep’. The

meaning of ‘daffodil’ can be replied as ‘it is a kind of flower’. Lexical relations can also be

defined as characterizing the meaning of a word not in terms of component features, but in terms

of relationship to other words. The branch of semantics that deals with the word meaning is

called lexical semantics. It is the study of systematic, meaning related structures of words.

Lexical field or semantic field is the organization of related words and expressions in to a

system, which shows their relationship with one another. For example; set of emotions includes

angry, sad, happy, depressed, and afraid. This set of word is a lexical field all its words refer to

emotional states.

Lexical semantics examines relationships among word meanings. It is the study of how

the lexicon is organized and how the lexical meanings of lexical items are interrelated, and its

principle goal is to build a model for the structure of the lexicon by categorizing the types of

relationships between words.

There are further two approaches of lexical relations i.e. semantic field theory and truth

conditional semantics.

SEMANTIC FIELDS THEORY (SFT):

Semantic field theory is “An area of meaning containing words with related SENSES”1 .

Semantic field theory derives very largely from the work of German and Swiss scholars in the

1920s and 1930s. According to this theory, meanings of words cluster together to form fields of

meaning which turn cluster onto even larger fields until entire language is encompassed.

Semantic Field theory is an attempt to classify lexemes according to shared and differentiating

features.

1 Linguistic terms and concepts by Geoffrey Finch

3

http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/enc2010/articles/lexeme.htm


Sets:

‘A set of words (or lexemes) related in meaning’. Linguist2has defined semantic

field more specifically as "a set of lexemes which cover a certain conceptual domain and which

bear certain specifiable relations to one another." Set is further divided into three parts:

Part Whole Relationship

It is defined as a part is one of the segments or portions into which something is regarded

as divided; a part is less than a whole; together, parts constitute a whole. Some lexical sets

involve part-whole relationship as shown in flow chart below;

Body

Face arms legs foot

Sequential set /Cyclical set:

It is defined as a specific condition or situation following sequence or rotation in event like;

week, days, months, seasons etc.

Saturday Sunday Monday Tuesday ………. Friday Saturday… So on.

Paradigms:

It is defined as a set of forms all of which contain a particular element, especially the set of

all inflected forms based on a single stem or theme. For example man, women, girl, and boy all

denote human so they form paradigms.

Componential Analysis:

“ Componential analysis (CA) is based on the presumption that the meaning of a word is

composed of semantic components. So the essential features that form the meaning are

elementary units on semantic level. By componential analysis, it is possible to state the smallest

indivisible units of lexis or minimal components”3 .

2 Adrienne Lehrer (1985)3 (Aitchison, 2003: 92).

4

http://grammar.about.com/od/c/g/conceptualdomainterm.htm

http://grammar.about.com/od/il/g/lexemeterm.htm


This is a very useful method of distinguishing members of a lexical set (words that are

semantically related such that they overlap):

Clean Pure Refined Chaste Clear

Unmixed + + + - -

Physical substance + + - - +

Person + + - + -

Washed + - - - -

Visibility - - - - +

Jackson in his book4 & Dan Nida in his book5categorize the types of components into two main

types, i.e. common component and diagnostic or distinctive component.

Common component.

This is the central component which is shared by all the lexemes in the same semantic

domain or lexical field.

Diagnostic or distinctive components.

They serve to distinguish the meaning from others from the same domain.

A very simple example to explain these two types is provided by the words man, woman,

boy, girl, and other related words in English (Leech, 1976: 96). These words all belong to the

semantic field of ‘human race’ and the relations between them may be represented by the

following matrix.

Components Man Boy Women Girl

Male + + - -

Human + + + +

Adult + _ + -

Female - - + +

4 “Words and their meaning” (1996: 83)5 “Componential Analysis of Meaning” (1975: 32)

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In the semantic domain of man, woman, boy, and girl, [human] is the common

component, and they are distinguished by [adult], [male], [female] as the diagnostic components.

The meanings of the individual items can then be expressed by combinations of these features:

Man + [human] + [adult] + [male]

Woman + [human] + [adult] - [male]

Boy + [human] - [adult] + [male]

Girl + [human] - [adult] - [male]

This is a very useful method of distinguishing members of a lexical set (words that are

semantically related such that they overlap):

Clean Pure Refined Chaste Clear

Unmixed + + + - -

Physical substance + + - - +

Person + + - + -

Washed + - - - -

Visibility - - - - +

Kinship:

Kinship systems make an interesting area for componential analysis. Kinship is universal

since all humans are related to other humans through blood ties through marriage, but kinship

systems differ from society to society.

A relationship is a kind of predicate. Sentence such as Samuel is Herbert father and betty is

Herbert sister have a propositional; content that we represent this way:

Theme Predicate Associate

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samuel Father-of Herbert

Betty Sister-of Herbert

Some of predicate relations in all kinship systems can be described with four primitive

features: [parent], [offspring] and [spouse]. The components are [male], [female], of course,

which indicates as M and F, respectively. Combining M and F with the four basic features gives

definition of eight predicates: father = M parent, mother =F parent, brother= M sibling, sister = F

sibling, son=M offspring, daughter = F offspring, husband = M spouse, wife=F spouse.

Truth conditional semantics:

Truth conditional semantics studies lexical relations by comparing predications that can be

made about the same referring expression. Its task is to account for the meaningful relations

between different expressions in a language .Three such relations are given below:

Entailment:

A logical relationship between two sentences such that the truth of the second sentence

necessarily follows from the truth of the first.

Paraphrase:

Paraphrase is the relation between two propositions.

Contradictions:

It is the relation between two propositions such that if either is true, the other is necessarily

false.

Synonymy:

Two or more words with very closely related meanings are called synonymy. They can

often, though not always, be substituted for each other in a sentence. In the appropriate

circumstances like what was her answer? Or what was his reply? These both questions have

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much the same meaning. Other common examples of synonyms are the Pairs: almost/nearly,

Big/large, board/wide, buy/purchase, cab/taxi, car/automobiles, couch/sofa, and freedom/liberty.

On the other hand idea of ‘sameness’ of meaning used in elaborating synonym is not

necessarily “total sameness’. There are many occasions when one word is appropriate in a

sentence, but its synonymy would be odd. Use of synonyms also differs in terms of formal versus

informal .The sentence ‘My father purchased a large automobile’ has virtually the same meaning

as ‘My dad bought a big car’ , with four replacements, but the second version sounds more

casual than the first.

Antonyms:

Two forms with opposite meanings are called antonyms. It is defined as ‘Two sentences

that differ in polarity or mutually contradictory are antonyms’6. Some common examples are the

pairs: alive/dead, big/small, fast/slow, happy/sad, married/single, rich/poor, true/false.

1a- she is alive.

1b-she is dead.

If one is true, the other must be false. Two sentences that have the same subject and have

predicates which are antonyms are also mutually contradictory.

Binary and Non binary antonyms:

There are different types of antonymous relationship like on/off are binary of antonyms:

an electric light or a radio or a television set is either on and off; there is no middle ground for

them. Other binary pairs are open/shut, dead/alive, and asleep/awake. The terms old and young

are non-binary antonyms and so is wide/narrow. They are opposite ends of scale that includes

various intermediate terms: Mr. Adnan may be neither old nor young, the road may be something

between wide and narrow. Non binary antonyms are also called polar antonyms; like North and

South poles, they are at opposite ends with territory between them. Analogously, binary

antonyms might be called hemispheric antonyms; as with the northern and southern hemisphere

[or the eastern or western hemisphere], there is no space in between, only a line of demarcation.

6 Introducing English Semantics by Charles w. Kreidler page 100

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Some semanticists use the term ‘complementary antonyms’ in place of ‘binary antonyms’ and

‘contrary’ instead of ‘non binary’.

The difference between binary and non binary antonyms can be shown this way:

Converse Antonyms:

To illustrate synonyms, hyponyms and antonyms in previous paragraphs it has been

presented pair sentences; each sentences of a pair had the same subject and different predicate;

each predicate had a valency that was only a subject and no other referring expression. The next

paired sentences contain converse predicate, which necessary have a valency of two or more.

Common converse pairs include kinship and social roles (husband of , wife of ,

employers, employers of ,employ of ) and directional opposite (above all below; in front of /

behind; left –of /right-of ;before and after , north-of , south-of, outside /inside).if a predicate

consist of a verb and its objects and object has the role of affected . of course there is no such

passive convers when the object of verb , or apparent object , has the role of associate.

Hyponymy:

It is defined as a hierarchical sense relation who exists between two terms in which the

sense of one is included in the other. Terms such as daisy, daffodils and rose all contain the

meaning of flower. The more general term is called super ordinate. Much of the vocabulary is

linked by such systems of inclusion: red is hyponym of color, flute of musical instrument, and

hammer of tool. Hyponymy is a vertical relationship which is fundamental to the way in which

one classifies things. Most dictionaries rely on it for the provision of definitions (‘a chair is a

type of furniture’, ‘a flute is a type of musical instrument’, and so on). The set of terms which are

hyponyms of the same super ordinate term are co-hyponym.

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DEAD

ALIVE

OLD

YOUNG


Introduction of the text:

We applied Lexical Relations on the short story The Kite by W. Somerset Maugham.

This story revolves around the main character Herbert. In the common the local people fly kites

on Saturday afternoon. Herbert was too young to fly a kite, so his father does the same Herbert

holds the cord and enjoys the tug of the soaring kites. This rouses the passion for kites in Samuel

also. By and by they become the family kite fliers.

One day Herbert tells his parents that he has invited a girl named Betty, to tea on the next

day. On meeting her, His mother does not like the girl as she thinks that Betty is a rival for the

affection of Herbert. She makes the girl fell uncomfortable in any way. One day Herbert tells

her that he is going to marry Betty and will rent a home and live there. Herbert then moved

away. This made the relationship between Herbert and his mother no friendlier.

One day Mr. Sunbury told Herbert that he along with his mother used to fly kite and that

his mother has learnt to fly it. This is the news for Herbert who arouses his passion again for the

kite and next day he went to the same place where he used to fly kite. Betty begins to suspect

that there is something more than that he told her so she follows him to the common and finds

him flying kite with his parents. On that day Betty and Herbert had a quarrel on this issue.

At the end Betty lodges a complaint with the magistrate that his husband is not paying

her. He calls Herbert and tried to settle between them but he refused to live with her at any cost.

He refused and is imprisoned. He remained in prison for long time without paying her the sum

stipulated and enjoys the pleasure of thinking how much she must have been suffering on

account of the nonpayment of maintenance.

Application:

We applied semantic field theory and truth conditional semantic on short story The Kite.

As semantic field theory is meanings of words cluster together to form fields of meaning which

turn cluster onto even larger fields until entire language is encompassed. Semantic Field theory is

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an attempt to classify lexemes according to shared and differentiating features.whereas Truth

conditional semantics studies lexical relations by comparing predications that can be made about

the same referring expression. Its task is to account for the meaning relations between different

expressions in a language. Below are the examples of the lexical relations taken from above

mentioned text.

Semantic field theory:-

SET:-

A set is comprised of different items which share common features, and on the bases of

these features, they are differentiated from others. It can be thoroughly analyzed by the

meticulous description of physical appearance of Betty Bevan in the kite. Writer has used diverse

colors.

1) “She had the same sharp features and the same rather small beady eyes but her lips were

scarlet with paint, her cheeks lightly rouged and her short black hair permanently waved. Mrs.

Sunbury took in all this at a glance, and she reckoned to a penny how much her smart rayon

dress had cost her, her extravagantly high heeled shoes and the saucy hat on her head. Her frock

was very short and she shoed a good deal of flesh coloured stocking.”

From the given statement a set of different colours can be made, which contains scarlet,

rouged, black and flesh coloured. The analysis of this statement demonstrates that scarlet, flesh-

coloured and rouged confines within the set of red colour.

The definition of set will be further elaborated by the following example.

“He was neat in his dress; he went to work in quiet grey trousers, a black coat and a bowler hat.”

The scrutiny of the statement illustrates that trouser, coat and bowler hat comes under the

category of set.

Kinship:-

W. Somerset Maugham’s ‘The kite’, comprises four major characters Mr. Samuel

Sunbury, Miss. Beatrice, Herbert and Betty Bevan. Kinship system can be explained through

four primitive features, parent, offspring, sibling and spouse. Mr. Samuel Sunbury and Miss

Beatrice are husband and wife, Herbert is their son and Betty Bevan is their daughter in law.

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Samuel is M parent, Beatrice is F parent, Herbert is M offspring and Betty is M offspring spouse.

Herbert has consanguineal relation with Mr. and Mrs. Sunbury. The relation of Miss Beatrice

and Mr. Samuel; Herbert and Betty is called affinities.

Componential analysis:-

The classification of the set on the basis of distinctive features is called componential

analysis, and how various members of the same group are different from each other.

Componential analysis can be illustrated by the underlined words in the two statements

mentioned below.

“on principle the Sunbury’s were total abstainers, but on Sundays, when to make up for the

frugal lunch consisting of scone and butter with a glass of milk, which Samuel had during the

week, Beatrice gave him a good dinner of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, for his health’s sake

she liked him to have a glass of beer”.

“She poured out tea and asked Herbert to give a cup to his lady friend. ‘Ask Miss Bevan if she’ll

have some bread and butter or scone, Samuel, my dear.’

Scone bread butter pudding roast beef milk beer tea

The words mentioned above have a common feature that is food. If these food items are

further classified on the basis of their distinctive features then scone, butter, roast beef, pudding

are cooked food items while milk, beer and tea come within the category of drinks. Scone and

bread differ from the butter and pudding in being, [baked in an oven]. Let say that scone differs

from the bread in the feature [cut into diamonds or sticks shape]. As for the differentiating

features of the beer and milk, it can be analyzed that beer is a liquor containing alcohol as the

active agent which differs from the milk because milk is a nutritious liquid secreted by

mammals. Both are liquids but the differ from each other on the basis of there advantages, beer is

harmful for human health and milk is good for human beings.

Truth conditional semantic: Application of truth conditional semantics are given below

with reference to the examples from text.

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Hyponymy:

“on principle the Sunbury’s were total abstainers, but on Sundays, when to make up for

the frugal lunch consisting of scone and butter with a glass of milk, which Samuel had during

the week, Beatrice gave him a good dinner of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding , for his health’s

sake she liked him to have a glass of beer”.

From the statement given above it can be extracted that, food consisting of butter, milk

and roast beef were served to Samuel Sunbury on Sunday.

We transform the statement in this way:

a) Butter, milk and roast beef was served to Samuel in lunch.

b) Food was served to Samuel on Sunday.

If we say that statement a) is true, then statement b) must be true, if we say that a) is not

true then we cannot challenge the truth of b). We can infer that terms milk, butter and beef are

hyponyms of food. We can also say that beef is a food item and it is a hyponym of food and any

lexeme (milk, scone, butter) can be substituted for a for a hyponym is also a hyponym, and milk,

butter and scone are co-hyponyms of beef.

“He was neat in his dress; he went to work in quiet grey trousers, a black coat and a bowler hat”.

From the example given above it can be deduced that trousers, coat and hat confines

within the dress or clothing. If coat is dress then trouser and hat are two hyponyms of dress and

they are the co-hyponym of coat.

“She gave him back three half-crowns for his lunch and ten shillings for pocket money”.

The currency half-crowns and shillings falls within the category/ class of pounds, they are

the hyponyms of pound, they are the co-hyponyms of each other and pound is their super

ordinate. Pound is hyponym of currency and is co-hyponym of rupee, yen, dollar and euro.

This can be illustrated that hyponymy is hierarchical; one term may be a super ordinate to

various hyponyms and at the same time it may be a hyponym of some higher super ordinate.

Synonymy:

1a) He just stood there for a while looking on and then strolled away.

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2b) He’d told Betty he was just going for a walk to stretch his legs.

Supposing that he refers to the same person in two sentences, and then if a) is true then b)

is also true, if a) is false then b) should be false. When two lexemes are use to predicate with the

same referring expression, the predicates have the same truth value. Lexemes smashed and

ruined are synonyms and both sentences are paraphrase of each other.

2) The kite, the new, expensive kite, was in fragments. It had been savagely attacked with the

hatchet, the woodwork was all in pieces, and the reel was hacked to bits.

3) She was a little woman, but strong, active and wiry, with a sallow skin; sharp, regular features

and small beady eyes.

4a) ‘it was not without satisfaction that Mrs. Sunbury perceived that Betty was offended. 4b)

‘She said she’d never been so insulted in her life. I had a rare job pacifying her’.

5) ‘There was a fresh breeze blowing and a number of kites small and large were sailing through

the air’.

In these sentences given above strolled and walk, fragments and pieces, offended and

insulted, breeze and air are synonyms of each other. The underline words have the same sense in

the given context, they are the instances of synonymy and they are synonymous to each other.

Synonyms share the same meaning but they never have the same range of syntactic occurrences.

It can be noticed from the sentences given above that W. Somerset Maugham has expeditiously

used synonyms in his literary piece, ‘The kite’.

6a) ‘he (Herbert) had a good head for figures’.

6b) he was good in mathematics.

The head for figures, the complex term is a paraphrase of the simple term mathematics,

but not synonymous to each other, because synonyms are typically single lexemes of the same

weight.

Antonym:

W. Somerset Maugham has explicitly used antonyms in his short story ‘The kite’, which

can be analyzed from the sentences cited below.

1a) ‘Perhaps the acquaintance is a bit short for that,’ said Mrs. Sunbury with a gracious smile’.

1b) ‘I hope so.’ said Mrs. Sunbury with an acid smile, ‘I Wouldn’t dream of letting you eat a

piece of cake that’s been on the floor’.

In the above sentences gracious smile and acid smile are mutually contradictory words. These

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have the same subject and have predicates which are antonymous and contradictory. Both of the

sentences were uttered by Mrs. Sunbury, but the act of smiling is opposite in each sentence.

2) ‘He was a stubborn boy and he wasn’t going to be beaten. Something was wrong and it was up

to him to put it right’.

3) ‘She hesitated. Mr. Sunbury fidgeted, he didn’t know whether to stay or go’.

4) ‘Mrs. Sunbury was anxious because she had never let him play with the children in the street.

Evil communication corrupts good manners’.

5) They weren’t flying the big kite which he was used to, but a new one, a box kite, a small one

on the model for which he had made the designs for himself.

In the sentences mentioned above, gracious and acid; wrong and right; stay and go; evil

and good; big and small are antonyms of each other. They differ in polarity and are mutually

contradictory. They are antonymous and are instances of antonyms.

Binary antonyms:

1a) ‘I’m not going to let you, so that’s that she shut the door and stood in front of it’

1b) ‘She said, I’ll see her. She opened the door. Betty was standing on threshold’.

Open and shut are binary antonyms because the door is either open or shut and there is no middle

ground.

2) It was an accident like she was sitting next me and she dropped her bag and I picked it up.

In the above quoted sentence dropped and picked are binary antonyms.

Non binary antonyms:

1) They were contemptuous of smaller kites than theirs and envious of bigger ones.

Small and big are non binary antonyms and they are having various intermediate terms. Non

binary antonyms are easily modified, like very big, quiet big, rather big, extremely small, very

small, etc.

2) “Just the right height, said his mother ‘Not too tall and not too short.”

In the above statement tall and short are binary antonyms.

Conclusion:

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All the lexical relations has been successfully applied on short story ‘The Kite’ by W. Somerset

Maugham ‘that are semantic field theory and truth conditional semantics. Features that were not

applicable are paradigms and converse antonyms. By applying most of the features on the text it

is proved that lexical relations are not just a theory but are actually applicable.

REFERENCES:

LINGUISTIC TERMS AND CONCEPTS BY Geoffrey Finch

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http://staff.uny.ac.id/sites/default/files/compential%20analysis%20of

%20meaning.pdf

Susana Widyastuti (Yogyakarta State University)

The Study of Language - Page 118

http://hardy.christine.free.fr/index.htm .... CHRISTINE HARDY)

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http://hardy.christine.free.fr/index.htm%20....%20CHRISTINE

http://books.google.com/books?id=EYIwL-Gr0XIC&pg=PA118&dq=definition+of+hyponymy&hl=en&sa=X&ei=H3_DUPimFuSJ4gSg0oDwDg&ved=0CEcQ6AEwCQ

http://staff.uny.ac.id/sites/default/files/compential%20analysis%20of%20meaning.pdf

http://staff.uny.ac.id/sites/default/files/compential%20analysis%20of%20meaning.pdf


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application of lexical relation

Education