In linguistics, a semantic field is a lexical set of words grouped semantically (by meaning) that refers to a specific subject. The term is also used in anthropology, computational semiotics, and technical exegesis.
Brinton (2000: p. 112) defines "semantic field" or "semantic domain" and relates the linguistic concept to hyponymy:
Related to the concept of hyponymy, but more loosely defined, is the notion of a semantic field or domain. A semantic field denotes a segment of reality symbolized by a set of related words. The words in a semantic field share a common semantic property.
A general and intuitive description is that words in a semantic field are not necessarily synonymous, but are all used to talk about the same general phenomenon. Synonymy requires the sharing of a sememe or seme, but the semantic field is a larger area surrounding those. A meaning of a word is dependent partly on its relation to other words in the same conceptual area. The kinds of semantic fields vary from culture to culture and anthropologists use them to study belief systems and reasoning across cultural groups.
Andersen (1990: p.327) identifies the traditional usage of "semantic field" theory as:
Traditionally, semantic fields have been used for comparing the lexical structure of different languages and different states of the same language.
The origin of the field theory of semantics is the lexical field theory introduced by Jost Trier in the 1930s, although according to John Lyons it has historical roots in the ideas of Wilhelm von Humboldt and Johann Gottfried Herder. In the 1960s Stephen Ullmann saw semantic fields as crystallising and perpetuating the values of society. For John Lyons in the 1970s words related in any sense belonged to the same semantic field, and the semantic field was simply a , which he described as a lexical field. Lyons emphasised the distinction between semantic fields and semantic networks. In the 1980s Eva Kittay developed a semantic field theory of metaphor.
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Polysemy (pəˈlɪsᵻmi or ˈpɒlᵻˌsiːmi; ) is the capacity for a sign (e.g. a symbol, a morpheme, a word, or a phrase) to have multiple related meanings. For example, a word can have several word senses. Polysemy is distinct from monosemy, where a word has a single meaning. Polysemy is distinct from homonymy—or homophony—which is an accidental similarity between two or more words (such as bear the animal, and the verb bear); whereas homonymy is a mere linguistic coincidence, polysemy is not.
In linguistics, a word sense is one of the meanings of a word. For example, a dictionary may have over 50 different senses of the word "play", each of these having a different meaning based on the context of the word's usage in a sentence, as follows: We went to see the play Romeo and Juliet at the theater. The coach devised a great play that put the visiting team on the defensive. The children went out to play in the park. In each sentence different collocates of "play" signal its different meanings.
A synonym is a word, morpheme, or phrase that means exactly or nearly the same as another word, morpheme, or phrase in a given language. For example, in the English language, the words begin, start, commence, and initiate are all synonyms of one another: they are synonymous. The standard test for synonymy is substitution: one form can be replaced by another in a sentence without changing its meaning. Words are considered synonymous in only one particular sense: for example, long and extended in the context long time or extended time are synonymous, but long cannot be used in the phrase extended family.
The notion of similarity between texts is fundamental for many applications of Natural Language Processing. For example, this notion is particularly useful for the applications designed for the management of information in large textual databases, such as ...
EPFL2002
Different senses of source words must often be rendered by different words in the target language when performing machine translation (MT). Selecting the correct translation of polysemous words can be done based on the contexts of use. However, state-of-th ...