Hi, I'm Taylor and welcome to Crash Course Linguistics!
What is the meaning of… life?
Or of chair?
Or of rabbit?
Well, we might not know about life, but we can easily find out what a word means.
We just look it up in The Dictionary™.
Episode over!
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The first problem with relying on a dictionary to give a word meaning is that dictionaries are made by people.
And the people who write dictionaries, called lexicographers, still need some other way of figuring out what words mean.
The second problem is that writing a definition isn't always the most effective way of pinning down the meaning of a word.
The area of linguistics interested in meaning, and the many ways that we can describe it, is semantics.
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To better understand the complexities of meaning, let's start with the humble definition, a clear and concise description of how people are using a word.
Definitions are what we’re used to reading in dictionaries, and help us see when one word has a certain type of relationship to another word.
For example, several words can have about the same definition.
They're synonyms, like "happy" and "glad" and "joyful."
Two words can also have the opposite definition.
They're antonyms, like "inside" and "outside."
One word can refer to a specific member of a broader category, such as "red," which is a type of "color," or "rabbit," a type of "animal".
The specific word, like red and rabbit, is a hyponym.
And the broader word, like color and animal, is a hypernym.
A word which is a hyponym of one word can be a hypernym of another:
snowshoes are one type of rabbit, and a rabbit is a type of animal.
Semantic relationships, like synonyms, antonyms, hyponyms, and hypernyms,
are found across many languages, but not all languages draw semantic lines in the same place
For example, English has the one word “know,” while Polish splits this up.
It has wiem for ‘I know a fact’ and znam for ‘I know a person’.
In contrast, Portuguese fazer is used where English has both "to do" and "to make".
If you look up a word in a bilingual dictionary, you'll often find more than one possible translation,
and you need to know further context about how a language carves up the semantic space in order to know which translation to use.
Definitions are also useful for describing how words shift their meanings over time.
For example, words can become broader in their meaning.
"Thing" used to refer to a council or assembly in English, but now it can be used to refer to any… thing.
Words can also become narrower in their meaning.
For example "girl," used to mean "child," and now it’s more specific.
And words can change meaning all together.
"Nice" used to mean "ignorant," and then “silly,” then “fussy,” and now, well, “nice.”