Word MeaningSo, a lower category inherits or includes the characteristics of all the catego-
ries above it on the tree. For example, woman is human and animate while
armadillo is nonhuman but animate by virtue of their relationships with
other words and by virtue of the meaning components associated with those
other words. Abbreviatory rules like these are called redundancy rules.
Exercise
- The vast number of lexical items in any language makes it unlikely
that a small set of lexical relationships or components will suffice to
differentiate all words. For example, we know that high and deep have
a great deal of meaning in common—e.g., vertical measurement—but
nonetheless they are semantically distinct, as is shown by the anoma-
lies in (a) and (b):
a. The river is 50 feet deep/high.
b. The mountain is 14,000 feet deep/high.
High and deep and their derivatives are thus not synonyms; the first in-
dicates “measurement to the top”; the second denotes “measurement
to the bottom” from some vantage point (Room, 1981, p.62). However
unable speakers might be to articulate this difference, the consistency
of their semantic judgments in cases such as (a) and (b) indicate that
they do know the meanings of these items. Create sentence pairs like
(a) and (b) that clearly distinguish between the pairs of words below
(from Room) and on the basis of your sentences accurately characterize
the meaning differences between the word pairs.
a. astronomy—astrology
b. crime—offense
c. regret—remorse - Standard dictionaries (and style manuals) often attempt to distin-
guish the following word pairs.
a. infer—imply
b. include—comprise
Does your dictionary distinguish them? How? Does this distinction match
your use of these words and your observations about how they are used?
mental dictionaries
At this point we must ask whether the book dictionaries we are accustomed
to are accurate models of the dictionaries we have in our minds/brains,
which allow us to perform as speakers of a language. While we know a great