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SEMANTIC PROPERTIES
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The same semantic property may occur in words of different categories. ‘Female’ is part of the meaning of the noun mother, of the verb breast-feed, and of the adjective pregnant. ‘Cause’ is a verbal property of darken, kill, beautify, and so on.
darken cause to become dark
kill cause to day
beautify cause to become beautiful
Mare, in addition to ‘female’ and ‘animal’, must also denote a property of ‘horseness’. Words have general semantic properties such as ‘human’ or ‘parent’, as well as more specific properties that give the word its particular meaning.
The words in the last two columns are also distinguished by the semantic property ‘human’ which is also found in
doctor dean bachelor
parent baby child professor
However, "cold" and "hot" have totally unrelated referents in the real world!
The same semantic property may be part of the meaning of many different words.
‘Female’ is a semantic property that helps to define
tigress hen actress maiden
doe mare debutante widow
ewe vixen girl woman
Often the semantic properties of adjectives and
verbs have a kind of constituent structure:
dead = not [ living ]
die = become [ not [ living ] ]
kill = cause [ become [ not [ living ] ] ]
Semantic properties exist in people's minds, not necessarily in the real world.
"Cold" and "hot" seem related because they share semantic properties:
COLD HOT
"temperature" "temperature"
"low" "high"
The last two of these words are also specified as ‘young’. That is, part of the meaning of the word baby and child is that they are ‘human’ and ‘young’.
The meanings of words have other properties. The word father has the properties ‘male’ and ‘adult’, as do man and bachelor; but father also has the property ‘parent’, which distinguishes it from the other two words.
Semantic properties
Semantic properties or meaning properties are those aspects of a linguistic unit, such as a morpheme, word, or sentences that contribute to the meaning of that unit.
Suppose someone said:
Semantic properties
The assassin was stopped before he got to Mr. Thwacklehurst.
SEMANTIC PROPERTIES
Words and morphemes have meanings. We shall talk about the meaning of words, even though words may be composed of several morphemes.