Lexical Relations and Communication in Technical Texts
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Lexical Relations
1. Synonymy
Words with similar meanings can arise due to various factors:
- Archaisms: Words falling into disuse.
- Dialectical variations.
- Technological advancements.
- Colloquialisms: Informal language use.
- Standard lexicon: General vs. specific terms.
2. Antonymy
Words with opposite meanings can be categorized as:
- Complementary: One term negates the other (e.g., single-married).
- Gradual: Opposition on a scale (e.g., big-small).
- Reciprocal: One term implies the other (e.g., buying-selling).
3. Hyponymy and Hypernymy
These describe hierarchical relationships between words:
- Hyponymy: A more specific term (e.g., pink, purple are hyponyms of color).
- Hypernymy: A more general term (e.g., color is a hypernym of pink, purple).
- Co-hyponyms: Terms sharing the same hypernym (e.g., tulip and rose are co-hyponyms of flower).
4. Homonymy
Words with the same spelling or pronunciation but different meanings:
- Homographs: Same spelling, different meaning (e.g., deploy - to position, deploy - a period of time).
- Homophones: Same pronunciation, different spelling (e.g., talking - softening).
5. Polysemy
One word with multiple related meanings.
6. Monosemy
One word with a single meaning.
Communication in Technical Texts
Elements of Communication
- Issuer: A specialist in the field.
- Receiver: The target audience (scientific community, students, general public).
- Channel: Primarily written, but can be oral.
- Message: Typically expository and argumentative, but can also include description and narration.
- Code: Characterized by universality, objectivity, precision, and economy.
Language Functions
- Referential
- Emotive
- Conative
- Phatic
- Metalinguistic
- Poetic
Other Lexical Concepts
8. Cultisms
Loanwords from classical languages, often retaining their original form.
9. Neologisms
Newly coined words, often from Greek or Latin roots.
10. Lexeme
The root of a word.
11. Morphemes
The smallest meaningful units of language:
- Independent: Determiners, prepositions, conjunctions, pronouns.
- Dependent:
- Inflectional: Number, gender, person, tense, mode, aspect.
- Derivational: Prefixes, suffixes, infixes (rarely used).
- Prefixes: Added to the beginning of a word.
- Infixes: Inserted within a word.
- Suffixes: Added to the end of a word (nominalizers, verbalizers, adjectivizers, adverbializers).