In order to express ourselves better, one of our concerns must be the proper use of words. And for this to be possible, we must be aware of the various relationships they can establish: relationship by origin, meaning, sound, subject area, etc.
When we study these aspects, we come across the termssemantic fieldand lexical field. Do you know what each one means? Before defining these elements, it is important to keep in mind that:
Lexicon: is the set of words used or belonging to a certain language.
Semantics: is the study of the meaning of each word that exists in a language.
With this in mind, we can see that, no matter how close they are, there are differences when the subject is semantic field and lexical field.
Lexical Field
O lexical field of a language is formed by words belonging to the same area of knowledge and by words formed by composition (process that forms words from the junction of two or more radicals) and derivation (the process that forms a new word from an existing one, call primitive). Example:
Lexical field of work: work, worker, labor, employee, boss, salary, union, profession, function, work card, professional, team, worker, etc.
Semantic Field
already the semantic field works with the meanings that a single word presents when inserted in different contexts. It is, therefore, the set of different meanings that a single word can present.
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The same term, depending on how and when it is used and what words are related to it, can have different meanings. Examples:
Semantic field of starting: leave, leave, get out, disappear, die, break, shatter, etc.
Semantic field of dying: dying, erasing, stamping boots, passing to a higher plane, erasing, going to heaven, etc.
Play semantic field: fun, distraction, joke, joking, clowning, teasing etc.
Semantic field of manufacture: build, assemble, create, design, build, manufacture, make, elaborate etc.
Tiredness semantic field: tiredness, fatigue, exhausted, nailed, low, prostrate, exhausted, etc.
It is possible to affirm, therefore, that the semantic field of a word or expression is the collection that we access in order to reach the intended interaction with our interlocutor. From this set, we can make the communicational situations of our day to day viable.
This definition is linked to what we understand as polysemy, but we cannot say that these two concepts are synonymous. The semantic field is the space in which polysemy acts, that is, the multiple and possible meanings that a given word has is its semantic field. Polysemy, in turn, consists of the various meanings that, in a given case/phrase/sentence, the word can assume. Example:
she left.
Semantic field of starting: leave, leave, get out, disappear, die, break, shatter, etc.
occurrence of polysemy: she died or she left.
by Mariana Pacheco
Graduated in Letters
