Semantic field

A semantic acreage is a abstruse appellation in the conduct of linguistics to call a set of words aggregate by acceptation in a assertive way.12 The appellation is aswell acclimated in added bookish disciplines, such as anthropology3 and computational semiotics.4

Definition and usage

Brinton (2000: p.112) defines "semantic field" or "semantic domain" and relates the linguistic abstraction to hyponymy:

"Related to the abstraction of hyponymy, but added about defined, is the angle of a semantic acreage or domain. A semantic acreage denotes a articulation of absoluteness adumbrated by a set of accompanying words. The words in a semantic acreage allotment a accepted semantic property."5

A accepted and automatic description is that words in a semantic acreage are not synonymous, but are all acclimated to allocution about the aforementioned accepted phenomenon.6 A acceptation of a chat is abased partly on its affiliation to added words in the aforementioned conceptual area.7 The kinds of semantic fields alter from ability to ability and anthropologists use them to abstraction acceptance systems and acumen beyond cultural groups.6

Andersen (1990: p.327) identifies the acceptable acceptance of "semantic field" approach as:

"Traditionally, semantic fields accept been acclimated for comparing the lexical anatomy of altered languages and altered states of the aforementioned language."8

History

The agent of the acreage access of semantics is the lexical acreage access alien by Jost Trier in the 1930s,9 although according to John Lyons it has actual roots in the account of Wilhelm von Humboldt and Johann Gottfried Herder.1 In the 1960s Stephen Ullmann saw semantic fields as crystallising and assiduity the ethics of society.10 For John Lyons in the 1970s words accompanying in any faculty belonged to the aforementioned semantic field,10 and the semantic acreage was artlessly a lexical category, which he declared as a lexical field.9 Lyons emphasised the acumen amid semantic fields and semantic networks.9 In the 1980s Eva Kittay developed a semantic acreage access of metaphor. This access is based on the abstraction that the items in a semantic acreage accept specific relations to added items in the aforementioned field, and that a allegory works by re-ordering the relations of a acreage by mapping them on to the absolute relations of addition field.11 Sue Atkins and Charles J. Fillmore in the 1990s proposed anatomy semantics as an another to semantic acreage theory.12

Semantic shifts

The semantic acreage of a accustomed chat accouterment over time — see "semantic shift." For example, the English chat "man" acclimated to beggarly "human being" exclusively, while today it predominantly agency "adult male," but its semantic acreage still extends in some uses to the all-encompassing "human" (see Mannaz).

Overlapping semantic fields are problematic, abnormally in translation. Words that accept assorted meanings (called polysemous words) are generally untranslatable, abnormally with all their connotations. Such words are frequently loaned instead of translated. Examples cover "chivalry" (literally "horsemanship," accompanying to "cavalry"), "dharma" (literally, "support"), and "taboo."

Anthropological discourse

Semantic acreage approach has abreast the address of Anthropology as Ingold (1996: p.127) relates:

"Semiology is not, of course, the aforementioned as semantics. Semiology is based on the abstraction that signs accept acceptation in affiliation to anniversary other, such that a accomplished association is fabricated up of relationally captivated meanings. But semantic fields do not angle in relations of action to anniversary other, nor do they acquire their acumen in this way, nor absolutely are they deeply belted at all. Rather, semantic fields are consistently abounding into anniversary other. I may ascertain a acreage of religion, but it anon becomes that of indigenous character and again of backroom and selfhood, and so on. In the actual act of allegorical semantic fields, humans appoint in an act of cease whereby they become acquainted of what they accept afar and what they have to accordingly include."13