Page 220 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

SEMANTICS

meaning where the meaning of one expression includes that of
another. Thus, the expression ‘dog’ is a hyponym of the expression
‘animal’, the latter being a superordinate term for a range of co-
hyponyms with dog, such as cat, monkey, giraffe, rabbit. Dog itself, of
course, is a superordinate term for another range of hyponyms such
as terrier, hound, retriever, etc.

Synonymy, antonymy and hyponomy consist, therefore, of differing kinds
of sense relations possible within the vocabulary of a language. They
provide a way of conceptualising the construction of meaning as it
goes on within the linguistic system. In this respect it is worth
emphasising that they display linguistic and not ‘real-world’ classifica-
tion. There is no reason in real world why terms for animals should be
organised in the particular types of sense relation adopted in English, as
becomes immediately apparent when comparisons in particular areas
of meaning are made between languages. According to Whorf (1956),
the Hopi tribe of North America used one word masaytaka to
designate all flying objects except birds. Thus, they actually designated
an insect, an aeroplane and an aviator by the same word, whereas
English provides quite separate lexical items.
Word meaning versus sentence meaning. Other approaches to the
meaning of words involve notions such as semantic features and
collocation. Whatever approach is adopted, however, it does not seem
possible to account for the meaning of a sentence merely by building
upwards from the individual words that make it up. Otherwise ‘Man
bites dog’ would mean the same thing as ‘Dog bites man’.
Nonetheless, it seems possible that there may be parallels between
the kind of sense relation we have described between words and those
that exist between sentences. A sense relation such as synonymy, for
instance, may be considered to hold not only between individual
words but also between whole sentences. Thus ‘Sidney sold the book
to Sheila’ may be considered to be synonymous with ‘Sheila bought
the book from Sidney’, and the same kind of relation can be claimed
between ‘The police arrested the miners’ and ‘The miners were
arrested by the police’. Other kinds of relationship that can hold
between sentences are those of entailment and presupposition. Entailment
is a relation whereby, given two sentences A and B, A semantically
entails B if under all conditions in which A is true, B is also true. Thus,
a sentence such as ‘Achilles killed Hector’ entails ‘Hector is dead’. In
such cases B follows from A as a logical consequence. If it is true that
Achilles killed Hector, then Hector must as a logical consequence be

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