Culture of societies consist of whatever it is one has to know or believe in order to operate in manner acceptable to its member, and to do so in any role that they accept
for any one of themselves
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. Cultures involve the way of the society daily living, music, literature, customs, language, values, and arts.
Linguist mentioned that culture of a people finds reflection in the language they employ, because the value certain things and do them in certain way, its means they
come to use their language in way that reflect what the value and what the do. A cultural meaning is the typical frequently requiring and widely shared aspect of
the interpretation of some type of object or event evoked in people as a result of their similar life experiences Spiro 1987a:163. To call it a cultural meaning is to imply
that a different interpretation would be evoked in people with different characteristic life experiences. For example, “the cultural of X” contains or cause the meaning of
the X people. It is because
cultures are sets of beliefs or values that give meaning to ways of life and produce and are reproduced through material and symbolic forms.
F. Meaning Relation
Meaning relation is thus the most significant factor in semantic field and the componential analysis is a device to identify the meaning relation. When a word
contains various relation of the meaning to one another, they may be related semantically. Words are connected by virtue of meaning from subgroups within the
lexicon of the language. Words have a multiple sense, namely the primary and secondary meaning. The meaning relation is possibly derived by a variety of processes
34
Ronald Wardhaugh. Sociolinguistics Fourth Edition.Blackwell Publisher.2002.p.219
of semantic change. Semantic relations comprise synonymy, antonym or incompatible, hyponymy and meronymy defined by semantic field.
Lyon and Geckeler are of the opinion that there is a close relationship among semantic field, component analysis, and meaning relation.
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We should know that componential analysis is the broadening of semantic field theory. The subset from all
lexemes may create and blend the meaning relation of one element to the other. Leech looked upon meaning relation under
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: 1. Synonymy is a relation in which words have same meaning. Yule added that
we should keep in mind that the idea of ‘sameness’ of meaning in used in discussing synonymy is not necessarily ‘total sameness’. There are many
occasions when one word is appropriate in a sentence but its synonymy would be odd. For example, whereas the word answer fits in the sentence Sandy had
only one answer correct on the test, the word replay would sound odd. Hatch and Brown 1995:19 revealed that synonym refers to the similar entity so that
the words might be interchangeable if all features are the same. Then Akmajian 1988:284 added that “synonym is relation that structures the lexicon of a
language into sets of words of sharing a meaning. For instance automobile is synonymous with car.
Nevertheless synonyms do not always share their entire feature. It is called looser synonym when X is synonym for Y but not vise versa. A typical
example is murder is synonym for kill but kill not a synonym for murder.
37
35
John Lyons. Semantics.Melbourne:Cambridge University Press.1997.p.45
36
Geoffrey Leech, Semantics. New Zealand: Penguin Press Ltd. 1997. p.99-102
37
Evelyn Hatch and Cheryl Brown. Vocabulary, Samantics and Language Education. London: Cambridge University Press
2. Antonym is relation where words have opposite meaning. Akmajian added that “words can share an aspect of meaning but be ‘opposite’ in some other aspect
of meaning called antonym”.
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Whereas Parera added there 2 kinds of antonym:
a. Contradiction or true antonym: the opposite meanings of 2 items or lexemes are absolute. It consists of only 2 terms; the one is the opposite of
the other. For example: Alive X dead that were visualized by Leech 1978:106 in
diagram below: ‘alive
+live ‘dead’
-live
b. Gradable antonym ‘kontrer’: the meaning relation of items words may consist of a number of dimensions at once.
For instance: hot and cold share the notion of temperature dimension. Here they are defined as follows:
II Cold cool lukewarm
warm hot Whereas, Leech proposed incompatible instead of antonym. It is because
antonym contrasts only on a single dimension. In fact, the word may contrast on a number of dimensions at once. It is supported by Leech’s theory that two
38
Akmajian,et al. An Introduction to Language and Communication. London: The MIT Press, 1988.p.294
componential formulae may be incompatible if the one has at least one feature contrasting with a feature in the other.
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3. Hyponym is a relation which is termed meaning inclusion of one meaning in another. Cruse reported that “the lexical relation corresponding to the inclusion
of one class in another is hyponym”.
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For instance: in the sense of crow, hawk, and duck are included in bird. These typical terms mentioned that super
ordinates as the upper term and hyponym as the lower term. Again a diagram will help:
bird
crow hawk duck etc 4. Meronymy is relation which has hierarchical concept. Saeed pointed out
meronymy is a concept used to explain a part – whole relationship between lexical items. To differentiate it from another hierarchical concept, meronymy
can be identified by using “part of relationship. For instance: B is part of A, and A has B.
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this concept might be as follows: car
wheel seat engine door window etc
39
Geoffrey Leech, Semantics. New Zealand: Penguin Press Ltd. 1997.p.100
40
D.A Cruse. Lexical Semantics. New York: Blackwell Publisher. 2001.p.88
41
John Saed. Semantics. London: Blackwell Publisher.2004.p.70.
F. Semantic Change
