14
Another way to find meanings of a word is by analyzing the semantic features of words that is
“conditions that must be met in order for a word to be appropriate to use” Bergmann, Hall, Ross, 2010, p. 246. For example, the word stallion
which refers to a male horse has the semantic features as [+animal] [+mammal] [+horse] [+male]. Those features show that the stallion is not a mare which is a
female horse, or it is not a dog which is not a horse. The relation among words also determines the meaning of the word. Some
examples of word relations are hyponymy the meaning of words that is included in other word meanings, synonymy words that have the same meanings, and
antonymy words that have the opposite meanings. This study will investigate the polysemy phenomenon where a single word
has several meanings. Geeraerts 2010 claims that polysemy is the result of the fact that meaning is changed when language is used in new situations and
contexts. Multiple meanings, such as polysemy, happen under this circumstance. Thus, lexical semantics is also used to study polysemy as it also deals with a word
that has multiple meanings.
b. Compositional Semantics
Compositional semantics studies the meaning of words which combined to each other to create a larger unit of meaning Bergmann, Hall Ross, 2010.
Compositional semantics, or phrasal semantics Riemer, 2010, is the study of meaning of phrases and sentences. The meanings of some words can create
another meaning when combined together. This can happen when the words are put in a structural composition in phrases or sentences. The combination here does
15
not mean merely putting the word meaning together to get the whole new meaning. The order of the words must be precise to determine the whole meaning
in a phrase or sentence. In this case, the application of syntactic structure is needed.
There must therefore be some grammatical principles governing how meanings of words combine in phrases and sentences; and the principle of
compositionality is the meaning of a sentence is determined by the meaning of its words in conjunction with the way they are put together
syntactically Bergmann, Hall Ross, p. 252.
Meaning is compositional Riemer, 2010. The combination of words in a sentence will create a meaning for the sentence. If people know the meaning of
every word in the sentence, they can understand the meaning of the sentence as well. Furthermore, Riemer adds that compositional or phrasal semantics governs
the principles in constructing a phrase or a sentence meaning by the combinations of individual words. Thus, if people know the lexical and grammatical meanings
conveyed in a sentence, they will know the meaning of the sentence and vice versa Kreidler, 1998.
Polysemous words are also used to compose sentences. Some sentences that have the same word which is polysemous as one of the constituents words
in them will have several meanings as in polysemous words. The words that are combined with a polysemous word in the sentence can also determine the distinct
meanings of the polysemous word by building up certain circumstances that make the polysemous word has several different meanings.
16
According to Nida 1975, analyzing polysemous words in sentences with different types of context can be done by grouping them into general assemblies
of apparently related meanings. More specific distinctions of meaning categories can be made from the groups of loosely defined categories in the next phase. In
order to interpret the meaning of a complete sentence, the meanings of each word which constructs the sentence should be defined. Generally, the functions of the
words in a sentence are recognized as subject, predicate, object, complement, and adverbial Kreidler, 1998. However, in semantics study, different terms are used.
The terms are predication, predicate, and argument. A predication is the major unit that expresses the content of a sentence. A predicate, which is usually a verb,
links the arguments in the sentence. An argument is the referring expression Leech, 1981. Leech proposes a structure for the analysis of sentence meanings
as shown in Figure 2.1. consist of consist of
Figure 2.1 Three-tier Structure for Sentence Meaning Analysis
