The Faculty of Philology

The English Department

PORTFOLIO: ADOPT-A-WORD

Student:
Maja Kvrgi, 2012/849

Mentor:
Katarina Rasuli, PhD

Contents
1.
2.
3.
4.

The lexicon- some preliminaries..........................................................................................3

What do we mean by meaning?...........................................................................................5
Components and prototypes.................................................................................................6
Modern
componentital
approachesand
some
alternatives..................................................7
References

1. The lexicon- some preliminaries

A word is the smallest language unit which has a definite morphological structure
and meaning, which can be used in isolation. A lexeme is an abstract unit of vocabulary
arbitrarily chosen to stand for the whole of the paradigm. It appears in the dictionary in
its citation form as the entry word.

I used two different dictionaries (Macmillan and Oxford dictionary) in order to

compare and contrast two dictionaries entries for the word guy. These two dictionaries
are learners dictionaries by different publishers.

First definition (taken from the Macmillan Dictionary):

1. INFORMAL a man
2. guys [PLURAL] SPOKEN used for talking to a group of people
3. a model of a person made out of old clothes that is burned on Guy Fawkes Night in
the UK
Second definition (taken from the Oxford Dictionary): a guy (noun): a man.
1. informal A man.
2. (guys) People of either sex.
3. British A figure representing Guy Fawkes, burnt on a bonfire on Guy Fawkes Night,
and often displayed by children begging for money for fireworks.
4. VERB [WITH OBJECT] Make fun of; ridicule.

They do not vary in the amount of the information provided at all. They are both
very simple and self-explanatory.

Both dictionaries undoubtedly give a more than

appropriate amount of information for this type of dictionary. They indubitably cover the
same range of meanings and do it in the same way as well as accurately describing how
the word is used and what it means. The only difference I noticed was the verb Oxford
Dictionary included in their definition which could not be found in the definition of the
word guy provided by the Macmillan Dictionary.
The second edition of the Macmillan English Dictionary contains a wealth of new
material while building on the innovative features that won it two prestigious awards It is
specially designed to help learners to understand English use English and be more aware
of how English works. While, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is widely regarded
as the accepted authority on the English language. It is an unsurpassed guide to the

meaning, history, and pronunciation of 600,000 words past and presentfrom across
the English-speaking world.

2. What do we mean by meaning?

Using a thesaurus I found synonyms for the word guy and they are the
following: male, boy, young man. A denotative meaning is its literal meaning, a
meaning that is most directly represented in dictionary definitions of a word. Therefore,
we know what the word can and cannot refer to. The word guy is an informal use of the
word boy or a man.

Besides denotative meaning, words can also have connotative meaning which
refers to an additional idea or emotion that a word suggests to us. Boy refers to a young
man, a male child. Male is more general and its dictionary definition is the following:
Male (adjective): belonging to the sex that does not give birth.
The last dimension of meaning well consider is social meaning. Social meaning
can tell the audience a lot about the person who is speaking and the social situation that
they are in. Therefore, if somebody was to use a word guy they would use it in an
informal situation, for example Johns a really nice guy or She is currently dating some
French guy. We can conclude that a word guy had a really broad meaning. When it is in
its plural form guys it is used for talking to a group of people and addressing them as in
Hey, guys, whats happening? In such a case it means folks. It is predominantly used in
spoken language.
According to the Referential Theory the word I chose refers to all the boys and
men in the world and boys are men are full synonyms which is not true since there are
nuances between men and boys meaning that boys are young and that men are grown-up
males.
Image Theory thinks of word senses as pictures in the mind. According to this
particular theory we would not be able to make a difference between a man and a
boy for example. We might envision guy as a boy which cannot be true, since a guy
can refer to both young and grown-up man.

3. Components
Putting aside binary features and AVMs, for a thing to be called a guy, it must
meet the following conditions which are the words necessary and sufficient feature:
a) It must be a person.
b) It must be male.
c) Or it must include a group of people.

It is not necessarily hard to present the denotation of the word guy in this case, but the
problem arises once we use the guy in its plural form, which is guys. In such a case, the
word guy does not only refer to male persons but to female persons who are all a part of
the group we are addressing. Also, when it is used as a figure representing Guy Fawkes,
burnt on a bonfire on Guy Fawkes Night, and often displayed by children begging for money
for fireworks, the meaning of the word guy can cause confusion in such a case since there
is a cultural background to it.
A list of necessary and sufficient features for the connotation of mint will be reduced to
only two features:
a) There must be a group of people.
In order to determine the prototypical characteristics associated with the word guy I
decided to carry out one of the Roschs experiments. Therefore, I asked several people to
name different ways of addressing a male person. One of the most frequent were: man,
kid, boy, fella, lad and of course guy. Therefore, it is safe to say that guy is a herb
par excellence, and one of the prototypical examples of addressing a male person. It may
not be the first word that comes to peoples minds, but it certainly is among the top three.

4. Modern componential approaches- and some alternatives

Qualia representation

QUALIA=

constitutive= human flesh

formal= male person
telic= talk
agent= natural

Natural semantic language

6

Reductive paraphrase:
-

Something X is a human being.

X is a person.
X is male.
X can be either young or old.
X can be used in spoken language.

When trying to provide an explication of the word guy in the form of the reductive
paraphrase the only problem I faced was that the word is too simple and usually easy to guess.
We had to employ an intermediate level of semantic analysis, that is, to put semantic molecules
to use. After implementing semantic molecules, the task became easier.

References
Murphy, M. Lynne (2010). Lexical Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Milojevi, J. (2000). Word and Words of Engish. Belgrade: Papirus.

Electronic sources
http://www.macmillandictionary.com/
http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/