Paradigmatic Relations
Important paradigmatic relations include:
synonymy - "sameness of meaning" (pavement is a synonym of sidewalk)
hyponymy - "inclusion of meaning" (cat is a hyponym of animal)
antonymy - "oppositeness of meaning" (big is an antonym of small)
incompatibility - "mutual exclusiveness within the same superordinate category" (e.g. red and green)
We also need to distinguish homonymy from polysemy:
Words with same form – orthography and pronunciation -- but different, unrelated meanings (e.g. "too" and "two");
A single word is polysemous if it has several (originally related) meanings (idea bank, data bank, blood bank).
CONCLUSION
Semantics examines meaning “as part of the language system irrespective of wider context”
Pragmatics = the study of "how to do things with words“ (Austin, 1976)
Pragmatics = “the branch of linguistics which seeks to explain the meaning of linguistics messages in terms of their context of use” (Leech and Weisser, 2003)
CONCLUSION
In conveying a message, we have to consider more than just "who did what to whom."
We also have to keep in mind what
our listeners know, and how to lay the message out for them in an orderly and understandable way.
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