2.0 Introduction
2.2.6 Semantic Field Theory
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test. Due to several criticisms, a lot of modifications have been done on the theory.
Later revisions by Kay, Berlin and Marrifield, (2000), have loosened the constraints on basicness and typology. Consideration is made for languages with fewer colour terms and identified as having Compositae Categories (CC). CC which refers to categories subsumed in other colour terms. Another significant development of the theory is by Maffi (1991) who proposes that basic colour terms should be general and salient. General means the ability for the term to be used for a wide range of objects and salient means that the colour term should be common among speakers of that language.
The notion that colour terminology is culturally influenced as borrowed from the Whorfian hypothesis that language influenced thought brought the belief that speakers of a language created colour categories for themselves and used terms particular to their language. The study uses the two theories in a bid to merge aspects of both. Modifications of both theories seem to suggest that there can amid position that recognizes that KPP have similarity in colour typology but there are a few exceptions to universalism. That KPP colours are culturally determined and largely drawn from a small set of national colours of red, green, white and black. This accounts for language relativism.
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(1977) is from Humboldt and Herder in the mid-1920s. The theory was first proposed by German and Swiss linguists such as Trier, Porzig, Ipsen, Weisgerber.
Trier‘s theory of semantic field opened a new chapter in the history of semantics. It demonstrates vocabulary organization on the paradigmatic level and paradigmatic relations between words such as hyponymy, synonymy and anatonymy. The basic assumption of this theory is that the system is unsteady and changes constantly i.e.
lexemes are not fixed, they can disappear and new ones appear. Fields are realities which are midway between individual words and the whole vocabulary. Since the vocabulary of a language is semantically related, we are not supposed to study the semantic change of individual words in isolation, but study vocabulary as an integrated system. Lexemes are interrelated in sense, so we can only determine the connotation of a word by analyzing and comparing its sematic relation with other words. A word is meaningful only in its own semantic field.
Trier distinguishes conceptual and lexical fields. The conceptual field exists independently of the lexical field. The lexical field is formed by a word and its conceptual corresponds to the entirety of the conceptual field. A word alone has no meaning but acquires one through neighboring words in the pattern.
Trier‘s general tenets include;
a) Meaning of a lexeme is dependent on its neighbors or lexeme in the same domain. If something happens to the meaning of one lexeme it automatically influences the meaning of neighboring lexeme.
b) Vocabulary of a language is an integrated system of lexemes which are interrelated in meaning.
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c) Lexical items are very orderly without gaps or overlaps in the system, like a mosaic, lexemes disappear and new ones appear.
d) Behind every semantic field there is a conceptual field. There is a concept behind every lexeme, when concepts change in our heads so the meaning of a lexeme.
However Triers field is rigid and limited in structure. In reality boundaries between lexemes and field are not so rigid. Porzig further criticized Trier for defining the field by extra linguistic means where he excludes syntagmatic relations.
Porzig develops a theory of semantic field based on the relations between pairs of syntagmatically related lexemes. He finds certain essential semantic relationships between verbs and nouns or between adjectives and nouns. For example, ‗to nod‘
presupposes the head and ‗to see‘ presupposes the eyes, that is, one can nod with the head only, but can do many other things with the head. These relationships form articulation of meaning system and therefore Porzig calls them elementary semantic fields. However Porzig‘s field is conceived as primitive concrete situations
linguistically designed.
Weigerber regards the linguistic field as reality. According to him, the language influences the members of a speech community by means of the field. The significance of a word exists only in the field, and our concept of the word is exclusively determine by these fields. He explains the relationship between the linguistic and extra linguistic. However Ullmann (1957) asserts that Wersgerber overemphasizes the intellectual side of language when he describes it as a social form of knowledge and the intellectual shaping of the word.
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Lyons (1977) defines semantic field as word related in any sense also called lexical category. He emphasized the distinction between semantic fields and semantic
network. Meaning is therefore field dependent. Lyons (1977) suggests that words in a semantic field though not synonymous are to explain about some general
phenomenon. He brings out the presence of paradigmatic relations within SFT. He observes that the sense of every lexeme can be analyzed in terms of a set of more general sense components or semantic feature, some or all of which will be common to several different lexemes in the vocabulary.
Mei (1987) says that the core of SFT id to analyze the relationship between genes and species of lexical semantics. It suggests that the words of a language system are related with each other and the form a complete lexical field system. In this system certain words could form a semantic field under a common concept, for instance, under the concept of furniture represents the genus i.e. general concept while desk, chair, bed, cupboard and table represent species or specific concept. In short semantic field is a combination of a group of words that interact, dominate, distinguish and depend on each other. The semantic range of combination is called the field range of the semantic field.
Kittay (1990) came up with the Semantic Field Theory of Metaphor. This is based on the idea that the items in a semantic field have specific relations of a field by mapping them on to the existing relations of another field.
Trask (1997) refers to semantic field as a lexical field theory which is the study of word meanings that shows the way such meanings are related within a particular area of the vocabulary, for instance, cooking terms include boil, roast, steam and fry. This is called a semantic field. Semantic fields are hierarchical and can be observed from
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top to bottom. The higher level of a semantic field is more general and the lower more specific. For instance;
Season→ Year→ Month→ Week→ Day→ Hour→ Minute→ Second→ Micro- Second
Anderson (1990) identifies the traditional usage of Semantic Field Theory as having been used for comparing the lexical structure of different language and different states of the same language.
Brinton (2000) defines semantic field as words which share a common property also called semantic domain. He relates it to the concept of hyponymy, whereby the semantic field of a word is included within another word. Brinton (2000) further claims that semantic field varies from one culture group to another.
Zhou (2001) calls a semantic field lexical field or domain. This refers to the combination of a bunch of words with interrelating meanings and under the same concept. It has two fold of meaning; words dominated under a certain concept, combined to form a semantic field. This may be represented by a super ordinate, while the semantic field is form either hyponyms or semantic features. For example, under a common concept of colour; green, red, purple, interact with each other orange, black and white could be a semantic field. Furthermore, words belonging to the same semantic field, aside from being semantically related they also interact with each other, that is, when checking the meaning of a word, first compare the semantic meaning of the other words under the same semantic field.
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For Murphy and Koskela (2010), semantic fields organise words into a system which shows their relationship. In addition, words that are semantically related, whether syntagmatically or paradigmatically, are said to belong to the same semantic field.
The SFT was found relevant and appropriate to this study. Using the views presented above, this study grouped KPP names and KPP symbols into semantic fields showing their relationships to each other by grouping them from common concepts or general items to specific items.