Syntagmatic Sense Relations.

# 19

Syntagmatic sense relations

Paradigmatic : syntagmatic :: selection :

___________

Normal vs. anomalous combination

(semantic affinity vs. semantic anomaly)

drink milk : *drink bread

John drinks milk : *Milk drinks John
drink milk / water / beer / petrol / sulphuric acid
skimmed / liquid / striped / syntactic milk

Semantic affinity / anomaly affected by

grammatical relations & extralinguistic knowledge

Syntagmatic sense
relations
drink bread, syntactic

drink milk skimmed

milk
old aunt
PHILONYMY

Semantic affinity

milk, male aunt

Semantic clash
-XENONYMY
female aunt, liquid
water, downward
descent
Semantic redundancy
Pleonasm
-TAUTONYMY

Semantic anomaly

XENONYMY
DEGREES OF SEMANTIC CLASH:

INAPPROPRIATENESS
The daffodils passed away. Their matrimony
sucks.
Curable e.g. replacing a xenonym with a
propositional synonym
PARADOX
drink bread, male aunt, a barking cat
Curable e.g. replacing a xenonym with an
incompatible co-hyponym or a hypernym
INCONGRUITY
syntactic milk, lustful affixes, purple gestures
Incurable

TAUTONYMY

male uncle : male relative : macho uncle

Jack kicked the ball with his foot :
Jack kicked the ball with his left foot :
Jack struck the ball with his foot
Curable replacing a tautonym with a
hyponym or a hypernym
Tautonymy vs. philonymy?
rush quickly, murmur softly, shout loudly
shrug ones shoulders, pout ones lips, stamp
ones foot

Tautonymy & near-synonymy

AND-test

- tautonyms or philonyms?
big and large, wide and broad
safe and sound, first and foremost, trials and
tribulations, hale and hearty, peace and quiet,
part and parcel
final and conclusive, cease and desist, due and
payable, legal and valid, null and void, power and
authority, sole and exclusive, terms and
conditions
cancel, annul and set aside, rest, residue and
remainder

PHILONYMY
You shall know the word by the company it
keeps (J.R. Firth 1957)
red shirt : black/blue/white shirt : red
dress/jacket/blouse
strong tea : *powerful tea
FREE COMBINATIONS
COLLOCATIONS

COLLOCATION
A permissible combination of two (or more)
lexemes within a grammatical structure?
A combination of two (or more) lexemes
that co-occur more often than would be
expected by chance
COLLOCATE
COLLOCABILITY

COLLOCATIONS

FIXED (BOUND)
shrug ones shoulders, a pride of lions, to and
fro
STRONG
mitigating ___________
auspicious __________
inclement ___________
auburn ___________
deliriously __________
adjourn ___________
WEAK
a broad avenue / smile / accent ...
strong men / competition / tea...

COLLOCATIONS &
COMPOSITIONALITY

Conventionalized form-meaning pairings

high/heavy + wind/rain/frost/speed

Collocations vs. IDIOMS (hot potato; wide

awake) or CLICHS (this day and age)

Types of collocations
LEXICAL COLLOCATION
(content word + content word)
deliriously happy / *glad

GRAMMATICAL COLLOCATION
(content word + function word /esp. Prep/,
particular form of V etc.)

depend on / *from, enjoy cooking / *to cook

Lexical collocations
different syntactic patterns:

Adj + N excruciating pain : excruciating joy

Adv +Adj completely satisfied : downright
satisfied
N+N
ceasefire agreement : ceasefire deal
N+V
lions roar : lions shout
V+N
commit a crime : perform a crime
V + Adj fall ill : fall happy
V + Adv wave frantically : wave feverishly

Collocation & COLLIGATION

Collocations across grammatical boundaries?

John argued strongly (against the proposal) : the
strength of Johns argument (against the
proposal)
COLLIGATION - the co-occurrence of grammatical
choices
The grammatical company a word keeps
treat cruelly, treat with cruelty, cruel treatment,
the cruelty of the treatment...

Collocation & SEMANTIC

PROSODY
Connotational perspective emotive or
evaluative attitude expressed by
surrounding words
lukewarm __________
___________ discovery
__________ happened

Collocations and
Corpus Linguistics
Firth,

Halliday ... Sinclair, Hoey, Stubbs

NODE (target word) +
COLLOCATE (co-occurring
word)
Concordance - Key Word in Context (KWIC) Index

T12
T02
T03
T01
T02
T06
T11
T01
T11
T11

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Referee: R Wiseman. [ Arsenal face heavy penalty;Football] ARSENAL,

Collocational

span?

Collocations &
semantic definitions
Collocations & semantic components?
Hlebec COLLOCATIONAL METHOD - Identifying
semantic components by observing acceptable
collocations
For a collocation to be acceptable, collocates must
share a semantic component
to irrigate a(n) area, land, soil, field, garden, lawn,
meadow, pasture vs. ?to irrigate a town square

[GROUND FOR GROWING PLANTS]

Hlebec (1998) Connect Your Words

Hlebec (2010) - Semantic lexicon based on a

collocational method

Collocations & EFL

Why is it important to learn collocations?

Oxford Dictionary of Collocations

English Collocations in Use
...

Match the elements that

collocate:

a
a
a
a
a
a
a
a

clove of
fillet of
knob of
pinch of
rasher of
sprig of
stick of
wedge of

butter
bacon
garlic
lemon
celery
fish
parsley
cinnamon

Which word collocates with all

the words in a given string?

fresh, raw, fried, poached, grilled, smoked

chop, cube, dice, mince, marinate,

tenderize
chop, peel, boil, parboil, steam
beat, whisk, boil, fry, poach, scramble

Collocations & register

alight from a bus : _________________
E.g. Academic discourse
groundbreaking ___________
_____________ contribution
supporting ___________
tentative ___________
challenge ____________
___________ illustration
___________ the sources
____________ plagiarism
submit ___________

Sample test questions:

Lexical

items involved in a paradox are called

_____________ .
Complete the following sentence to create
a) a
paradox b) a pleonasm
His gesture was
magnanimous and ____________ .
A collocation is
a) a specification of meaning
b) a combination of frequently co-occurring lexemes
c) a pleonastic combination of lexemes
d) a syntactic minimal pair
Provide two examples to illustrate - semantic
incongruity - tautonymy - strong collocations

Discussion topics
Compare and contrast paradigmatic,
syntagmatic and derivational sense
relations
Are derivational sense relations manifest in
the lexicon in addition to word families?
Consider the following lexical-semantic
relations:

write : pen, cut : knife

bird : aviary, dog : kennel

Lexical-semantic relations & analogical
reasoning