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Unit 32: Synonymy, Antonymy, Polysemy, Homophony and Ambiguity

etc. Red collocates with roses, blood, ink, apple, tomato, etc. Sea collocates with rough, cruel, Notes
raging blue, etc. Climb collocates with mountain, hill, tree, peak.
Collocation (Syntagmatic)
The mountaineer climbed to the top of the mountain peak.
But care should be taken while studying idioms, cliches and compound words which pose problems,
and cannot be dissected satisfactorily.

32.9 Sets
The relationship of collocation enables us to group items into lexical sets. The lexical set is formally
defined as a grouping of words having approximately the same range of collocations, having the
same contextual range, functioning in the same situation types. Whereas collocation refers to the
syntagmatic relationship, set refers to paradigmatic, vertical relationships of lexical items. A lexical
set, therefore, is ‘a group of lexical items from a similar class which seem to belong together’. Each
item in set is defined by its place in relation to the other members of the set. Adolescent, for
example, is the stage of growth between child and adult. Cool is the temperature between cold
and warm. Similarly good, bad, nice, excellent, fair are items of a set.

BABY APPLE COLD EXCELLENT

TODDLER ORANGE COOL GOOD

CHILD PEAR WARM FAIR

ADOLESCENT PEACH HOT NICE

ADULT BAD

From the above table the impression should not be formed that a semantic field is divided up like
a smooth mosaic. In fact, the items overlap, leave gaps and have fuzzy edges.
Furthermore, in two sets such as (1) dog, ran, stairs; and (2) a, the, down the, first set (dog, ran,
stairs) is of content words and the second one (a, the, down) is that of structure words. The
content words refer to ‘things’, ‘actions’ or ‘events’ in the real world, whereas the structure words
do not have this quality. In the former set, all the words can be inflected; dog and stair for ‘plural’
(dogs and stairs) and run for past tense; (ran). But in the latter set, a, the, and down cannot be
inflected. Thirdly, the first set is an ‘open’ set whereas the second set is a ‘closed set’, that is words
capable of taking inflections are being added to the language continually as new nouns and verbs
are created, but, no new determiners (a, the) or prepositions (down) are being created in the same
manner. A closed set of items is one of fixed and usually small membership : e.g. the set or
personal pronouns, tense, genders, etc. An open set is one of unrestricted, indeterminately large,
membership, e.g. the class of nouns or verbs in a language. Thus grammatical items belong to
closed sets, and lexical items to open sets.

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