SEMANTIC PROPERTIES

Words and morphemes have meanings. We shall talk about the meaning of words, even though words may be composed of several morphemes.

Suppose someone said :

The assassin was stopped before he got to Mr. Thwacklehurst.

If the word assassin is in your mental dictionary, you know that it was some person who was prevented from murdering some important person named Thwacklehurst. Your knowledge of the meaning of assassin tells you that it was not an animal that tried to kill the man that Thwacklehurst was not likely to be a little old man who owned a tobacco shop. In other words, your knowledge of the meaning of assassin includes knowing that the individual to whom the word refers is human, is a murderer, and is a killer of important people. These pieces of information, then, are some of semantic properties of the word upon which speakers of the language agree. The meaning of all nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs─the ‘content words’─and even some of the ‘function words’ such as with, or over can at least partially be specified by such properties.

The same semantic property may be part of the meaning of many different words. ‘Female’ is a semantic property that helps to define

tigress   hen      actress       maiden

doe       mare   debutante   widow

ewe      vixen    girl            woman

The words in the last two columns are also distinguished by the semantic property ‘human’ which is also found in

doctor dean professor bachelor parent baby child

The last two of these words are also specified as ‘young’. That is, part of the meaning of the word baby and child is that they are ‘human’ and ‘young’.

The meanings of words have other properties. The word father has the properties ‘male’ and ‘adult’, as do man and bachelor ; but father also has the property ‘parent’, which distinguishes it from the other two words.

Mare, in addition to ‘female’ and ‘animal’, must also denote a property of ‘horseness’. Words have general semantic properties such as ‘human’ or ‘parent’, as well as more specific properties that give the word its particular meaning.

The same semantic property may occur in words of different categories. ‘Female’ is part of the meaning of the noun mother, of the verb breast-feed, and of the adjective pregnant. ‘Cause’ is a verbal property of darken, kill, beautify, and so on.

darken                 cause to become dark

kill                       cause to day

beautify                cause to become beautiful

Other semantic properties that help account for the meaning of verbs are as follows:

Semantic Property                   Verbs having it

motion                                        bring, fall, plod, walk, run…

contact                                        hit, kiss, touch…

creation                                       build, imagine, make…

sense                                           see, hear, feel…

For the most part no two words have exactly the same meaning. Additional semantic properties make for finer and finer distinctions in meaning. Plod is distinguished from walk by the property ‘slow’, and stalk from plod by the property such as ‘purposeful’.