Presented as Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements to Obtain the Sarjana Pendidikan Degree in English Language Education

  UNDERSTANDING POLYSEMY PHENOMENON: THE MEANINGS OF THE WORD TAKE IN C. S. LEWIS’ THE LAST BATTLE A SARJANA PENDIDIKAN THESIS

  Presented as Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements to Obtain the Sarjana Pendidikan Degree in English Language Education

  By Bonaventura Dedy Wiliartha

  Student Number: 091214146

ENGLISH LANGUAGE EDUCATION STUDY PROGRAM DEPARTMENT OF LANGUAGE AND ART EDUCATION FACULTY OF TEACHERS TRAINING AND EDUCATION

  UNDERSTANDING POLYSEMY PHENOMENON: THE MEANINGS OF THE WORD TAKE IN C. S. LEWIS’ THE LAST BATTLE A SARJANA PENDIDIKAN THESIS

  Presented as Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements to Obtain the Sarjana Pendidikan Degree in English Language Education

  By Bonaventura Dedy Wiliartha

  Student Number: 091214146

ENGLISH LANGUAGE EDUCATION STUDY PROGRAM DEPARTMENT OF LANGUAGE AND ART EDUCATION FACULTY OF TEACHERS TRAINING AND EDUCATION SANATA DHARMA UNIVERSITY YOGYAKARTA

  ABSTRACT

  Wiliartha, Bonaventura Dedy. (2013). Understanding Polysemy Phenomenon:

  The Meanings of the Word Take in C. S. Lewis’ The Last Battle. Yogyakarta:

  Sanata Dharma University.

  People need to know the correct words to use when they want to convey messages in their communication with others. In selecting the correct words to use, people have to know the meaning of each word. However, it can be difficult to determine the meanings of words that have multiple meanings. Polysemy is one phenomenon of meaning multiplicity. Polysemy is one word that has several meanings in which the meanings are considered to be related to one another (O’Grady & Archibald, 2010). Many words in English are polysemous. Accordingly, this research was conducted to investigate polysemous words in order to give an example of extending the meanings of polysemous words.

  There were three objectives in this research. The first was dealing with figuring out the meanings of the word take based on the contexts in the novel. The second concerned with the categorization of the meanings of the word take to draw the relations between the meanings. The third was related to the comparison of the meanings from the finding with the meanings in the dictionary.

  The research method employed in this research was content analysis. This research focused on the word take in the context of a novel by C. S. Lewis entitled

  

The Last Battle . The word take was selected since it was a productive polysemy.

  The novel was chosen because it was a quiet famous literary work and frequently used in research. The researcher used the theory of semantic roles in the analysis of the relations between the meanings of the word take.

  The findings showed that word take occurred 70 times in 69 sentences or contexts in the novel. It was possible that there would be 70 meanings of the word

  

take . However, some meanings were similar. This first finding led to the

  categorization of the meanings. There were twelve groups resulted in the categorization process. Semantic roles were applied to those twelve groups of category to draw the relations between the meanings. The meaning of the word

  take as

  ‘to grab and hold’ determined as the central meaning in the meaning relations. From the central meaning, three major relations were drawn. The first was to grab and hold with an additional feature of possession. The second involved movements and the third denoted the process of obtaining. The comparison of the meanings from the finding with the meanings in the dictionary resulted that all the meanings could be found in the dictionary. It indicated that dictionaries, especially the unabridged version, could help language learners in dealing with polysemous words.

  

Keywords: polysemy, homonymy, lexeme, lexical entry, semantic roles,

dictionary.

  

ABSTRAK

  Wiliartha, Bonaventura Dedy. (2013). Understanding Polysemy Phenomenon:

  

The Meanings of the Word Take in C. S. Lewis’ The Last Battle. Yogyakarta:

Universitas Sanata Dharma.

  Seseorang perlu mengetahui kata yang tepat untuk digunakan ketika menyampaikan pesan dalam berkomunikasi. Pemilihan kata yang tepat dapat dilakukan apabila arti setiap kata yang digunakan sudah diketahui. Akan tetapi, pengartian kata yang memiliki arti jamak dapat menimbulkan kesulitan tersendiri. Polysemy adalah salah satu fenomena kata yang memiliki arti jamak di mana arti- arti tersebut saling berkaitan satu sama lain

  (O’Grady & Archibald,2010).. Banyak kata dalam Bahasa Inggris adalah polysemy. Penelitian ini dilakukan untuk mengobservasi kata polysemy sebagai contoh penentuan arti dari kata yang merupakan polysemy.

  Ada tiga tujuan dalam penelitian ini. Tujuan pertama berkaitan dengan arti dari kata take berdasarkan konteks dalam novel. Tujuan kedua berkaitan dengan pengelompokan arti kata take untuk melihat hubungan di antara arti-arti tersebut. Tujuan yang terakhir berkaitan dengan perbandingan antara arti kata dari hasil analisis dengan arti dalam kamus.

  Metode penelitian yang digunakan dalam penelitian ini adalah analisis dokumen. Penelitian ini berfokus pada kata take dalam konteks novel karya C. S. Lewis yang berjudul The Last Battle. Kata take dipilih karena kata tersebut merupakan kata polysemy yang produktif. Novel karya C. S. Lewis dipilih karena novel ini cukup terkenal sebagai karya sastra dan sering digunakan dalam penelitian. Peneliti menggunakan teori semantic roles untuk menemukan relasi antara arti kata take dengan satu sama lain.

  Hasil dari penelitian menunjukkan adanya 70 kata take dalam 69 kalimat atau konteks di dalam novel. Sangat dimungkinkan bahwa akan terdapat 70 arti kata take. Akan tetapi, beberapa kata take memiliki arti yang sama. Hal ini memungkinkan untuk dilakukannya proses pengelompokan arti kata take ke dalam kategori-kategori. Ada dua belas kategori yang dihasilkan dari proses pengelompokan arti. Dari kedua belas kategori tersebut, peneliti menerapkan

  

semantic roles untuk mengetahui relasi antar arti kata take. Arti kata take sebagai

  ‘mengambil’ dijadikan sebagai arti utama. Dari arti utama tersebut dapat ditarik tiga relasi arti utama. Arti yang pertama adalah mengambil dengan tambahan ciri kepemilikan. Arti kedua adalah tindakan yang melibatkan pergerakan. Arti yang ketiga adalah mendapatkan. Perbandingan arti dari hasil analisis dengan arti dari kamus menunjukkan bahwa semua kata dari hasil analisis dapat ditemukan di dalam kamus. Hal ini menunjukkan bahwa kamus, terutama yang komprehensif, dapat membantu mereka yang belajar bahasa dalam menemukan arti kata yang merupakan polysemy.

  

AKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I would like to thank God, my Lord Jesus Christ, for His blessing and guidance, especially during my process in writing this thesis. I thank Him for giving me a tough heart and perseverance so that I could accomplish my work on this thesis.

  I would like to express my deep sense of gratitude to my advisor, Dr.

  

Retno Muljani, M.Pd., for spending her precious time to guide me in writing this

  thesis. I thank her, especially for her guidance, support, insight, suggestions, and patience in the process of writing this thesis.

  I would like to thank Drs. Barli Bram, M.Ed., Ph.D., and Laurentia

  

Sumarni, S.Pd., M. Trans. St., for their help and support, especially in finding

  sources for my thesis and spending some evenings listening to my sharing. I would also like to thank all lecturers of the English Language Education Study Program Sanata Dharma University, especially my academic advisor, Christina

  

Kristiyani, S.Pd., M.Pd., for the countless knowledge and guidance they gave me

  during the teaching and learning process until the end of my study. I would like to thank PBI secretariat staff, LB secretariat staff, and library staff for their help and support during my study, and especially during the process of finishing this thesis.

  I would like to thank my father, mother, brother, and sister for all their prayers, support, understanding, and encouragement to me all this time. I would data, and give suggestions. My sincere thanks are also expressed to all my friends in ELSP batch 2009, SPACE comrades (SUMMIMASEN!!!), and especially some good friends who always accompany me during my good and hard time. Finally, I thank everyone, whose names cannot be mentioned one by one, for their help, support, and encouragement.

  Bonaventura Dedy Wiliartha

  

TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Page TITLE PAGE ........................................................................................................... i APPROVAL PAGES .............................................................................................. ii STATEMENT OF WORK’S ORIGINALITY ...................................................... iv

  

PERNYATAAN PERSETUJUAN PUBLIKASI ......................................................... v

  ABSTRACT ........................................................................................................... vi

  

ABSTRAK .............................................................................................................. vii

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS ......................................................................................... x LIST OF TABLES ............................................................................................... xiii LIST OF FIGURES ............................................................................................. xiv LIST OF APPENDICES ........................................................................................ xv

  CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION 1 A. Research Background................................................................................... 1 B. Research Problems ....................................................................................... 4 C. Problem Limitation ...................................................................................... 5 D. Research Objectives ..................................................................................... 6 E. Research Benefits ......................................................................................... 7 F. Definition of Terms ...................................................................................... 8 CHAPTER II. REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE 11 A. Theoretical Description .............................................................................. 11 1. Semantics: The Study of Meaning ....................................................... 11 a. Lexical Semantics .......................................................................... 13 b. Compositional Semantics ............................................................... 14

  1). Types of Meaning ..................................................................... 17 2). Meaning and Sense.................................................................. 21 d. Word and Lexeme .......................................................................... 22 e. Lexical Entry .................................................................................. 23 2. Homonymy ........................................................................................... 24 3. Polysemy .............................................................................................. 26 a.

  Definition of Polysemy .................................................................. 26 b. Polysemy and Homonymy ............................................................. 28 c. Types of Polysemy ......................................................................... 30 d. Levels of Polysemy ........................................................................ 32 4. Semantic Roles ..................................................................................... 33 5. Dictionary Definitions .......................................................................... 35 B. Theoretical Framework .............................................................................. 37

  CHAPTER III. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY 40 A. Research Method ........................................................................................ 40 B. Research Setting ......................................................................................... 43 C. Research Subject ........................................................................................ 43 D. Instrument and Data Gathering Technique ................................................ 44 E. Data Analysis Technique ........................................................................... 47 F. Research Procedure .................................................................................... 50 1. Conceptualization ................................................................................. 50 2. Research Design ................................................................................... 51 3. Data Collection and Analysis ............................................................... 51 CHAPTER IV. RESEARCH RESULTS AND DISCUSSION 53 A. Frequency of Occurrences of the Word Take in the Novel ....................... 53 B. The Meanings of the Word Take Based on the Context in the Novel ................................................................................................ 55 C.

  The Relations between the Meanings ........................................................ 59

  2. The Application of Semantic Roles to the Meanings of the Word

  Take .................................................................................................... 65 D.

  The Comparison of the Meanings with Dictionary Definitions ................. 74

  CHAPTER V. CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS ........................ 78 A. Conclusions ................................................................................................ 78 1. The Meanings of the Word Take in C. S. Lewis’ The Last Battle .................................................................................. 79 2. The Relations between the Meanings of the Word Take .................. 80 3. The Comparison of the Meanings of the Word Take with Dictionary Definitions .............................................................. 81 B.

  Recommendations ...................................................................................... 81 REFERENCES ....................................................................................................... 83

  

LIST OF TABLES

  Table page

  2.1 Some Polysemy in English .............................................................................. 27

  2.2 Semantic Roles (Keidler) ................................................................................. 34

  3.1 Form for the Frequency of Occurrences of the Word Take in the Novel ...................................................................................................... 45

  3.2 Form for the Frequency of Meanings of the Word Take Based on the Categories .................................................................................. 46

  4.1 The Frequency of Occurrences of the Word Take through the Chapters in the Novel ..................................................................................................... 54

  4.2 The Meanings of the Word Take in C. S. Lewis’ The Last Battle ................... 57

  4.3 The Categories of the Word Take in the Novel................................................ 60

  4.4 The Frequency of Meanings of the Word Take Based on the Categories .................................................................................. 64

  4.5 The Comparison of the Meanings of the Word Take with Dictionary Definitions ........................................................................................................ 75

  

LIST OF FIGURES

  Figure page

  2.1 Three-tier Structure for Sentence Meaning Analysis ....................................... 16

  2.2 Schematic Representation of a Lexical Entry .................................................. 24

  2.3 Homonymy Division into Homophony and Homography ............................... 26

  2.4 Semantic Roles (Norvig & Lakoff) ................................................................. 35

  3.1 Formula of Frequency 1 .................................................................................. 47

  3.2 Formula of Frequency 2 ................................................................................... 47

  4.1 The Sets of Semantic Roles ............................................................................. 66

  4.2 The Relations of the Meanings of the Word Take in the Novel....................... 73

  

LIST OF APPENDICES

  Appendix page Appendix A

  The List of Data with Coding Name “Context” ................................ 87 Appendix B The List of the Word Take based on the Levels of Polysemy ........... 92 Appendix C The Meanings of the Word Take in C. S. Lewis’ The Last Battle .... 98 Appendix D The List of Categories of the Word Take ....................................... 101 Appendix E The Comparison of the Meanings of the Word Take with Dictionary Definitions ............................................................ 104 Appendix F The Occurrences of the Word Take in the Novel ........................... 107 Appendix G The Occurrences of the Word Take based on the Meaning Categories ........................................................................................ 108 Appendix H Peer Debriefing for the Meanings of the Word Take in the novel ..................................................................................... 109

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION This chapter provides the background information and rationale of the

  research. Therefore, it is subdivided into six parts, namely the research background, research problems, problem limitation, research objectives, research benefits, and definition of terms.

A. Research Background

  When people learn a language, they have to deal with vocabulary in the first place. Mastering grammar of a language or having good pronunciation will be insufficient for good daily communication without mastering vocabulary items used in the language. People will not be able to convey a message to others properly if they do not know the appropriate words to use. It is more than likely that people can still survive in communication if they have mastered vocabulary because they can use the correct words to deliver their messages.

  Knowing the appropriate words to use in communication can be attained if people know the meanings of those words. Unfortunately, there are various rules or ways to derive the meanings of certain words that put possibilities for those words to have several meanings. A word can have many different meanings depending on the relations among the words and the contexts in the sentences. It word or a sentence. Kempson (1989) calls it as a non-clear-cut phenomenon “when both words and sentences can have more than one meanings; and what set of rules that states which words or sentences have more than one meanings

  ” (p. 123). People can think about a different meaning of a word when they face a word used in a certain sentence. They can have a different interpretation based on what is captured in the mind (contexts, knowledge, and backgrounds) when reading or hearing a sentence. This can be a problem for language learners if they do not know the rules and do not have the tool (dictionaries or thesaurus) to help them to interpret the intended meanings.

  The association between words and the meanings they address can be complex. Lyon (1995) notes the fact that as meaningful units, not only words but also phrases have the relations where one form can extend several meanings and the same meaning can be extended by several word-forms. The meaning that can be defined by several words is commonly called as synonymy and the word that can define several meanings termed as polysemy. There is also a case where two or more different words share the same form but their meanings are unrelated; those words known as homonymy.

  Synonymy might not trigger many difficulties for language learners because it deals with several different words that have the same meaning. There will be no much confusion because there is only one meaning to deal with. On the other hand, polysemy and homonymy can raise problems for language learners because there are several meanings to define from the same word (polysemy) or complicated because there should be relations between the multiple meanings of polysemous words. The meanings of polysemous words are not only related but distinguishable (Davis & Elder, 2004), that implies although the meanings are related, yet they are different from each other. For example, the word bright can have meanings as

  ‘full of light’ and ‘intelligent’. Both meanings are related to each other because they have the same property as to shine strongly. However, they are distinguishable because they have different contexts of usage. The former refers to light, as in sun or lamps, and the latter refers to a brain ability. Therefore, interpreting the meanings of polysemous words can be a problem because the meanings can be widely varied and it will be hard to memorize the exact meanings. Possibly, people can look the meaning up in the dictionaries or other sources. However, in certain cases, language learners, especially second language learners may not be able to match the dictionary definition with the intended meaning in the context they face.

  Naturally, a polysemous word has one central meaning among several other derived meanings. The other meanings or interpretations usually are still in the range of sense of the central meaning. The other meanings are related to the central meaning. The difficulty to interpret polysemous words depends on the range width of the senses or relations with the central meaning. However, determining one central meaning of a polysemous word can be unmanageable because it can happen that it is slightly possible to find a central meaning since the meanings are excessively varied. This is the case in which finding the relatedness words becomes more challenging because many, in fact most words, are polysemous (Radford, Atkinson, Britain, Clahsen, & Spencer, 1999; Nerlich & Clarke, 2003; Goddard, 2011). Therefore, the problem of polysemy is interesting to be observed in order to understand how to minimize the confusion in the interpretation of polysemous words.

  This thesis will figure out the meanings of polysemous word take. The word take is chosen because it is a productive and polysemous word (Davies & Elder, 2004), which means it has a great number of meanings. The focus is on the word take that occurs in

  C.S. Lewis’ book, The Last Battle. The book is a novel in the series called The Chronicles of Narnia which is quiet famous as a literary work. Besides, the series were also frequently used for research by other researchers.

  Based on the findings of this research, it is expected that language learners can interpret the meanings of polysemous words properly by categorizing the meanings based on the relatedness of the meanings. Furthermore, this research tries to figure out the relations among the meanings of a polysemous word by applying semantic roles in the sentences. This research also makes a comparison of the meanings from the finding with the meanings in the Oxford English

  

Dictionary . This research can help language learners to have better understanding

of polysemy and competences in interpreting the meanings.

  B. Research Problems

  The researcher formulated the research problems of this study as follows: 1.

  What are the meanings of the word take in C.S. Lewis’ The Last

  Battle ? 2.

  How are the various meanings of the word take related to one another?

  3. How are the meanings of the word take compared with the meanings in the dictionary?

  C. Problem Limitation

  Almost any words, as mentioned previously in the research background part, are polysemous. When looking words up in the dictionaries, people will find a list of meanings below the intended words. In this research, the writer focuses on the word take which belongs to part of speech verb. The data of the word take are taken from a novel by C.S. Lewis entitled The Last Battle. The research will figure out the multiple meanings of the word take in the context of the novel.

  The word take is selected because it is polysemous and considered as a productive polysemy by some researchers (Norvig & Lakoff, 1987; Nerlich, Todd, & Clarke, 2003; Davies & Elder, 2004). The word take is a basic, core word with a great number of meanings (Carter, 1998). Other interesting things about the word take are mentioned by Norvig and

  Lakoff (1987) in their research, “it can express a basic action, because it is so common…, because it is both a verb of and because it occurs in a great many idioms ” (p. 198). Accordingly, the word take will be a good example of polysemous words to be observed.

  In the next phase, the meanings of the word take will be compared with the meanings in the dictionary. The dictionary used for the comparison is the English

  Oxford Dictionary (OED). According to Lipka (1992), the OED

  is “the most comprehensive and impressive work of English lexicography” (p. 27). The special feature of the OED is it records every word in English language and gives historical information of each sense of the words. The recording includes the spellings, uses, and meanings. In this research, the unabridged dictionary, such as the OED, is used to preserve the validity of the content. The OED employed in this research is the online version because of the limitation of the researcher to get the printed version. However, the online version is a fully paid-up online dictionary. It means the contents of the dictionary are arranged by an official organization, that is Oxford, and cannot be changed or updated by random people.

D. Research Objectives

  Based on the questions in the research problems, the writer set the objectives of the research as follows:

1. To figure out the meanings of the word take in C.S. Lewis’ The Last as the example of polysemous word interpretations.

  Battle 2.

  To know the relations among the various meanings of the word take to determine the polysemous word characteristic that is having multiple related meanings and to facilitate the interpretation of the meanings.

3. To know how the meanings of the word take from the finding are listed in the dictionary.

E. Research Benefits

  Language learners need to master vocabulary in order to succeed in learning a language. Some words can be memorized easily; some words can be problematic to memorize because the words have multiple meanings. Interpreting polysemous words can be difficult for language learners. The meanings can be found in the dictionaries but some might not be found in the dictionaries and need to be interpreted merely based on the context.

  This research can be the example of how to interpret polysemous words in a certain context. It can help the readers to have better understanding of polysemous words. The meanings from the finding will be compared with the meanings in the dictionary to help the learners to perceive the interpretation.

  Another benefit can be proposed for language teaching. In teaching a language, in this case is English, one of important subjects to comprehend is vocabulary. Polysemy is one phenomenon that obviously will be encountered by the learners and teachers in the process of teaching and learning English.

  Moreover, this research employs the word take as the data. The word take is included in the most frequently or commonly words and verbs used in English.

  

Corpus , the word take is included in the list of the 100 commonest English words

  used. In the content word categories, take is in the ninth position of the 25 commonest verbs in English. Those facts indicate that the word take will be encountered often in language teaching and learning. The findings of this research can be an example of how to define the meanings of polysemous words that can be used in teaching and learning process.

F. Definition of Terms

  This part provides the definition of terms related to the research. The definition of terms are words or phrases used in the research in order to clarify the research concepts and avoid misinterpretation.

1. Polysemy

  Napoli (1996); Akmaijan, Demers, Farmer, and Harnish (2001); and O’Grady and Archibald, (2010) define polysemy as a word which has the property of having more than one related meanings. The multiple meanings or senses from polysemous words are related to the central meaning of the words. In this study, polysemy is the phenomenon where a word has multiple meanings.

  A word like mouth is polysemous because there are several meanings that can be derived from it, for example as ‘a part of face’ (Jenna opens her mouth

  widely ) and

  ‘an entrance to a place’ (You can wait in the mouth of the cave). Both meanings share a related sense of being an opening or the aperture of something.

  2. Homonymy

  Homonymy is another case of meanings multiplicity that traditionally occurs as the contrast to polysemy. While polysemy is a word with several related meanings, homonymy is two or more words sharing the same form but having different meanings. The same form of the words means having the same sound and spelling but the meanings of homonyms are unrelated (Jeffries, 1998).

  The word port is homonym that can have meanings as ‘a place where ships load and unload things

  ’ (The ship just left the port for the next sailing) and ‘a kind of wine’ (He drank too much port last night). The word port in both sentences is pronounced and spelled the same, yet their meanings are unrelated.

  3. Lexical Semantics

  Knowing the relations between words and meanings is necessary to understand polysemy. Those relations are studied in lexical semantics. Baldwin (2003) defines lexical semantics as

  “the study of what individual lexical items mean, why they mean, what they do, how we can represent all of this, and where the combined interpretation for an utterance comes from

  ” (p. 2). Thus, each lexical item has its own meaning. The relation between lexical item and its meaning is lexical semantics.

  Cruse (2006) defines lexical semantics as the study of the meaning of content words. Content words are the words that have already had their own meanings for example dog, rose, and run. In other words, content words can stand constructions for example the, of, and by. Form or grammatical words must be combined with content words in order to have a meaning.

4. Dictionary-Style Definition A dictionary provides lists of a large number of words and their meanings.

  In defining the words, there are many ways can be used. Dictionary-style definition is a way to define a word by giving a paraphrase to explain the meaning of the words. If there are several meanings of a word, the dictionary will give the definitions by listing the meanings one after another. The arrangement of the meanings is different in every dictionary. One key in using the dictionary-style definition is the user should know the other words used to define the chosen word (Bergmann, Hall, & Ross, 2010).

  Nida (1975) adds that dictionaries provide a quick access to find the meanings of words or terms related to the words being looked up. Dictionaries record many meanings of a lot of words listed. However, sometimes people cannot find certain meanings of words because the context is different from the situation referred in the dictionary. It is the reason that dictionaries cannot always give the relevant definitions. The list of meanings of polysemous words (and also homonyms) in the dictionary is one example of this case.

CHAPTER II REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE This chapter presents the review of theoretical writings and research

  related to the study matter. The purpose of this chapter is to give basic principles for the study. This chapter consists of two major points, namely the theoretical description and theoretical framework. The theoretical description presents the discussions of theories relevant to the study. The theoretical framework presents the summary of the theories related to the study.

A. Theoretical Description This part gives detailed discussions on the theories related to the study.

  The theories elaborated in this part are semantics, homonymy, polysemy, semantic roles, and dictionary definition.

1. Semantics: The Study of Meaning

  Semantics is one of the studies in Linguistics field. Semantics is generally defined as the study of meaning (Lyons, 1995). Semantics studies the meaning of a language. People build communication with one another using a language as a means to convey what they want other people to know and vice versa. In using a language to communicate, people have words as the object to speak to others. In order to make people know and understand what information is intended to deliver, there must be something to do with the words; the words must have something that serves that function. This something is called as a meaning. Semantics focuses on the meaning of a single word as well as the meaning of phrases and sentences (Bergmann, Hall, & Ross, 2010).

  Riemer (2010) states that semantics is a wide subject. It can answer some questions related to the meanings or definitions of a word, the relations between meanings, the difference between literal and non-literal meanings, the combinations of words to create the meaning of a sentence, the relations between concept of language in the mind and the things in the world it refers to, the connection between the meaning and the contexts in which it is used, the interaction between the meaning and linguistics principles, the meaning expression, and the change of the meanings.

  Meanings can be varied. It is the reason why interpreting meanings can be complicated. Through the study of semantics, the facts that an individual word can have many meanings and one meaning is possible to be defined by many words are discussed.

  The study of meaning can be complicated “that even a single meaning of a term may include an enormous range of referents…” (Nida, 1975, p.

  13). When words are put in phrases and sentences, they will create new meanings. When the phrases and sentences are combined to other phrases and sentences, the meanings become more complex. Nida (1975) views this phenomenon that, since so many words have so many different meanings, and each of the meanings tends to cover such a wide and seemingly poorly delimited area of meaning, many persons have concluded that natural languages, in contrast with mathematical or logical languages, are hopelessly inefficient

  Polysemy is one of those complex phenomena in the study of meanings. Polysemous words can have several meanings and it is rather complicated to know each meaning only by holding onto one possible meaning.

  An individual word has a meaning and words in phrases and sentences have meanings as well. Therefore, the major division of semantics is between the study of the meanings of words, namely lexical semantics, and the study of word meanings to determine the meaning of phrases and sentences, namely compositional semantics.

a. Lexical Semantics

  Lexical semantics is the study of meaning in a word level. Lexical semantics describes the meaning representation of every word in the language and the relations among the meanings of the words in the language (Saeed, 2003). Cruse (2006) defines lexical semantic as the study of “the meaning of words; the focus here is on ‘content’ words like tiger, daffodil, inconsiderate, and woo, rather than ‘form’/’grammatical’ words like the, of, than, and so on” (p. 15). Content words are words that can stand alone and have already had their own meaning while form or grammatical words are words that have a function in grammatical constructions of phrases or sentences. Pustejovsky (1995) gives more specific definition of lexical semantics as “the study of how and what the words of a language denote” (p. 1).

  In short, lexical semantics studies the meaning of an individual word. 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 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.

  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.

  

ARGUMENTS,

PREDICATIONS FEATURES

  consist of consist of

  

PREDICATES

Figure 2.1 Three-tier Structure for Sentence Meaning Analysis

c. Meaning

  The definition or the meaning of the word meaning or the verb to mean can be widely varied depends on the contexts (Lyon, 1995). The wide range of contexts leads to several meanings of the word meaning. Leech (1981) states that Leech cites several definitions of the word meaning from Odgen and Richard (1923) who state twenty-two definitions. Some of the definitions are an intrinsic property the other words annexed to a word in the dictionary the connotation of a word the place of anything in a system the practical consequences of a thing in our future experience that to which the user of a symbol actually refers that to which the user of a symbol ought to be referring that to which the user of a symbol believes himself to be referring that to which the interpreter of a symbol

  (a) refers (b) believes himself to be referring (c) believes the user to be referring (p. 1)

  Leech concludes that the list of the definitions of the word meaning shows the confusion and misunderstanding because of the lack of agreement about which definition is the most appropriate.