Lexical relations
Knowing an expression’s meaning does not simply involve knowing its definition or inherent semantic content. As well as knowing a word’s definitional meaning, a competent speaker knows how it relates to other words of the language: which words are synonyms? Which are antonyms? Which are meronyms, linked by the relation of a part to a whole? And which are hyponyms, linked by the relation kind of? Describing and accounting for these relationships has often been taken as one of the principal tasks of lexical semantics. Relationships like synonymy, antonymy, meronymy and so on all concern the paradigmatic relations of an expression: the relations which determine the choice of one lexical item over another. In the construction of any utterance, the speaker is typically confronted with a choice between various lexical items. Thus, the highlighted expressions of (1a) stand in various types of paradigmatic relation to those of (1b): kitchen is a meronym of restaurant; often is the antonym of rarely, many is (in this con text) a synonym of numerous, and sushi is a hyponym of Japanese food.
The choices between different antonyms, meronyms and hyponyms will be made on the basis of the different meanings which they convey: if the speaker utters (1b) instead of (1a), it is because the different paradigmatic choices result in different propositions being expressed. (The choice of one synonym over another cannot be made on the basis of meaning, synonyms being words which have the same meaning: we will consider some of the factors behind synonym choice in 5.1.5.) Antonyms, meronyms, hyponyms and synonyms are only the most important of the lexical relations it is possible to identify within the vocabulary of a language. Their study is important since, as noted by Nyckees (1998: 178), they play a deter mining role in linguistic intercomprehension:
It would seem that the members of a linguistic community must be able to construct relations between different expressions in order to understand each other. Being genuinely able to speak a language involves understanding the equivalence or the differences between different phrases, in other words, mastering the relations of synonymy and para phrase; it involves the ability to draw out the consequences of a given utterance, and the ability to sequence utterances in a reasonably coherent, intelligible way; the ability to reformulate one’s own messages in different ways, make one’s expression tighter or looser according to the demands of the situation . . .
