18 but may be distinguished by the range of nouns with which they are likely to co-occur
or collocate. We usually use the word pretty followed by girl or woman and we use the word handsome followed by boy or man.
Thematic meaning refers to what is communicated by the way in which a speaker or writer organizes the message, in terms of ordering, focus, and emphasis.
For example, it is often felt that an active sentence such as Mr. Brown donated the first prize has a different meaning from its passive equivalent The first prize was
donated by Mr. Brown, although in conceptual content they seem to be the same. These two sentences have different communicative values in that they suggest
different contexts: the active sentence seems to answer an implicit question What did Mr. Brown donate? While the passive sentence seems to answer an implicit question
Who was the first prize donated by? or Who donated the first prize?.
2.1.4. Semantic Domain
According to Nida 1975, distinctions in meaning are best described in terms of the semantic domains to which they belong. It is essential that an extensive
analysis and description of domains be provided, in order that their nature and function may be understood. A semantic domain consists essentially of a group of
meanings which share certain semantic components. The features of domains can be best described in terms of size, hierarchical levels, multiple memberships,
archilexemes, or boundaries. Nida has found that the largest single domain in any language consists of
four items. The first is entities or objects, which can be classified into countable, e.g. man, tree, dog, house, gun, stone, etc., or mass, e.g. sand, water, air, ice, salt, sugar,
19 etc. The second is events, which can be classified into actions and processes, e.g.
rain, come, run, go, hit, speak, grow, enlarge, widen, diminish, etc. The third is abstracts, which consist of qualities, e.g. good, bad, beautiful, ugly, etc., quantities,
e.g. much, few, many, little, etc., and degrees, e.g. very, too, so, etc. The fourth is relationals, which primarily mark the relations between objects, events, and abstracts,
are a somewhat smaller class, e.g. in, beside, through, around, with, and, or, but, when, although, nevertheless, etc.
Nida has found an interesting aspect of these four principal semantic domains, that is they appear to be universals and that these sets of meanings are tied
in all languages to corresponding grammatical classes: nouns, verbs, adjectives- adverbs, and preposition-conjunctions. For the semantic domain which consists of
four items, Nida referred to a Greek dictionary to present all of them. The table of semantic domain can be shown in table 2.1.
2.1.5. Semantic Features
Another approach to the description of word meanings is semantic features. The concept of features was firstly developed by the Prague School of linguistic
around 1940 for phonology within a so-called functional approach Lipka, 2012: 124. Later on, Chomsky 1965 took over the concept of features from phonology
and introduced complex symbols as sets of „syntactic features‟ Lipka, 1986: 87. Hjelmslev, one of the founders of structural semantics, found out that there parallels
between phonological and semantic levels of languages. Then, the concepts of features were transferred to the study of semantics by generative grammarians
because of this obvious parallelism.
20
Table 2.1 Semantic Domain Nida, 1975: 178
1 Entities 1.1 Inanimate
1.1.1 Natural Geographical
Celestial-atmospheric: sky, cloud, smoke, air, rainbow, sun, moon, etc. Supernatural: heaven, paradise, hell, hades, abyss, etc.
Relating to the earth Generic: world, place, location, region, country, etc.
Features of the land: surface, valley, ravine, slope, mountain, hill, desert, etc. Sea and nearby land: sea, deep, lake, reef, island, beach, shore, bay, gulf, etc.
Cultivated areas: field, farm, grainfield, etc. Politically defined areas: kingdom, domain, province, empire, etc.
Natural Substances
Generic: elements Metals: iron, silver, copper, brass, etc.
Gems: crystal, topaz, beryl, emerald, etc. Stone-to-dust: stone, pebble, rock, marble, sand, mud, soil, dirt, dust, etc.
Fire: fire, flame Water in various forms: water, rain, moisture, hail, ice, snow, foam
Flora and Plant Product
Trees: tree, forest, olive tree, palm, fig, mulberry, etc. Bushes and herbs: vegetation, crop, weed, grass, hay, barley, grapevine, thornbush,
briar, wormwood, mustard, dill, etc. Wood products: charcoal, ashes, wood, stick, splinter, speck, etc.
Fruit parts: fruit, olive, carob pod, grain, seed, etc. Non-fruit parts: branch, leaf, blade, shoot, reed, blossom, thorn, chaff, straw, root,
etc.
1.1.2 Manufactured or constructed entities Artifacts non constructions
