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Sense relations are paradigmatic relations between words or predicates of the same syntactic categories, which can replace one another without violating the grammatical rules; or in other words, those relations reveal the semantic choices available at a particular structure point in a sentence. The term “paradigmatic relations” introduced by Louis Hjelmslev is distinguished from “syntagmatic relations” which reflect the relations of combined elements in a sentence to create coherent limitation between them (1).
Paradigmatic relations are divided into 2 classes: sense relations of identity and similarity of sense, which includes hyponymy, meronymy and synonymy and sense relations of opposition and dissimilarity of sense and ambiguity consisting of antonymy. In the first class, hyponymy is a sense relation between a more specific predicate called a subordinate and a more general one called superordinate which include the specific one (e.g. house and building, cat and animal, etc.); meronymy, in contrast, is a part-whole relation, which indicates the relation between integral part of an entity and itself (for example, mouth is a meronym of face, or toe is a meronym of foot); and synonymy is the relation held between senses of words or predicates which have similar meanings (for instance, begin and start; deep and profound, etc.). In the second class, antonymy is the relation between words which have opposite meanings and is divided into different kinds: binary antonymy (or complementarity) which is the mutual incompatibility of words with opposite senses (e.g, true and false, alive and dead, etc.); conversion which is the reversed relation between pairs of words in the same situation (for example, son and father in the pair of sentences “John is Alex’s son” and “Alex is John’s father”); and gradable antonymy which indicates oppositeness of words differing in degree in a continuous scale (e.g., hot and cold are gradable antonyms)
The paradigmatic relations mentioned above occurred between items in the entire lexical items, therefore, learning a word means learning about the word itself and the relations it has with other similar or opposite words to gradually acquire knowledge of synonyms, antonyms and other sense relations of its semantic meanings. Take synonymy as an example. In lower level of learner, the use of synonyms to teach vocabulary can be effective to present word meaning as in an example suggested by Hedge, using a range of similar words to elicit the meaning of a new words
“Depressed, … what does this mean? …yes, he’s unhappy, he’s sad, look at the picture…he’s…yes… miserable, he’s depressed”
(Hedge, 2000:115)
Nevertheless, in higher level, though synonyms can be exchanged for one another without changing the meaning of the sentence, not all of them are substitutable as in many cases, their connotation is distinctive and the collocation of them is different, too. E,g,, English learners know that the exact sentence is “house is damaged by the storm” not “the house is hurt by the storm” even though “damaged” and “hurt” are synonyms. In terms of antonymy, though the incompatibility and opposition of words are obvious in some cases, there is still ambiguity when it comes to the case of gradable antonyms and converses. For example, in a particular context, “brother” is a converse of “sister” (“Alex is Mary’s brother” and “Mary is Alex’s sister”), but in another case, “sister” and “brother” are considered as hyponyms (sister or brother all belong to group family member). In case of gradable antonyms, with an item, it would be possible to create different scales; however, those scales cannot be used in the same context. For instance, the adjective “white” can collocate with some different words, but for each word, it has different antonym: white tea versus strong tea, but white coffee versus black coffee. As a result, when teaching vocabulary, it is necessary for teacher to help students find out the relations between words, teach new words in groups, make association between new words and the words they have mastered. Teacher can also uses different eliciting techniques based on the sense relations between words to help students understand the use and meaning of word.
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