The relation of the semantic opposition between two lexical units from the perspective of the average language user. The psycholinguistic research
Nawoja Mikołajczak-Matyja
Uniwersytet im. Adama Mickiewicza w Poznaniuhttps://orcid.org/0000-0003-2282-8960
Abstract
The article deals with the issue of the semantic opposition as an interdisciplinary problem and aims to check the psychological reality of the linguistic approach to the relation. It has been shown that the recognition of the essence of the semantic opposition as a combination of similarities and differences is the starting point of the linguistic analyzes of the relation, the basis for how to organize its examples in contemporary corpus research and the reason for treating it as similar to the synonymy relation. Some results of psycholinguistic research showing how language users understand the semantic opposition were mentioned. Then, the own study was presented: a test of guided (directed) associations, in which the stimuli were words without the obvious, well-established semantic opposition in Polish. 720 Polish native speakers were instructed to provide “maximally semantically opposed” words to the list of 12 stimuli words, Polish nouns from semantic fields of living organisms and artifacts. Each stimulus word came from a multi-element set of co-hyponyms and at the same time set of co-meronyms. It was assumed that the reactions qualified as co-hyponyms and/or co-meronyms of the stimulus can be treated as evidence of understanding of semantic opposition as a relation based on semantic similarity. The respondents showed a strong tendency to provide reactions that are co-meronyms and at the same time co-hyponyms of stimuli (for 11 stimuli, such reactions accounted for 40% to almost 90% of all responses) or co-hyponyms (but not co-meronyms) of stimuli. In addition, a group of answers indicating the treatment of the relationship between the part and its whole as an semantic opposition was extracted. However, there were also reactions indicating the understanding of the semantic opposition in terms of very strong differences: the names of objects from distant areas of the universe in relation to the denotatum of the stimulus or words suggesting the non-existence of the denotatum of the stimulus. It was concluded that the naive understanding of the semantic opposition is close to linguistic approaches, but is not identical with them.
Keywords:
linguistics, semantics, lexicology, psycholinguistics, linguistics, semantics, lexicology, psycholinguisticsReferences
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Uniwersytet im. Adama Mickiewicza w Poznaniu
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2282-8960
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