THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE USE OF LEXICAL RELATIONS IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE.

Abstract

Lexical relations are one of the most important semantic relations in exploring the meanings of words in English language. They are mainly used to analysis the meanings of words in terms of their relations to each other within sentences. Those relations vary according to the kind of the relation that a word may have with another word or words. The current study aims at investigating this level of language by illustrating what lexical relations are and how they are manifested in language. In addition, the paper surveys the most important and the most basic kinds of lexical relations. Finally, it discusses in detail the importance of lexical relations in language use being an important linguistic source in the analysis, understanding and use of language. Copy Right, IJAR, 2017,. All rights reserved. Introduction:-Lexical relations are one of the most important subfields of semantics which are entirely concerned with approaching the meanings of words through relating them to other words within English sentences. Such relations are manifested according to the type of the relation that a word may have with another word or words as when having two words with close meanings, two words with opposite ones and so on. They play major role in explaining the exact meaning of words in relation to other words and not in relation to the meaning of the word itself. The paper aims at exploring such types of semantic relations by showing the main features of lexical relations in addition to surveying their main types that are widely used in the explanation and analysis of the meanings of words. The study focuses in particular on synonyms, antonyms and hyponyms with various instances. Finally, it aims at showing the importance of lexical semantics in the use of language as well as the analysis of meanings. The Scope of Lexical Relations:-To start with exploring lexical relations first, it is a requirement to define semantics since lexical relations fall within this domain of language study and to have a better and more comprehensive view of what lexical relations mean precisely. In a more general sense, semantics is 'the study of the meanings of words, phrases and sentences. In semantic analysis, there is always an attempt to focus on what the words conventionally mean, rather than on what an individual speaker might want them to mean on a particular occasion (Yule, 2006). So semantics deal with the meanings of words as exactly what they mean. One of the subfields of semantics is called lexical semantics which is entirely concerned with the study of the meanings of the words in terms of their relationships with other words .In other words, semantics is the technical term used to refer to the study of meaning (ibid). Theories of language state that language users must have some sort of lexicon stored in memory. When they hear or read, they can recognize the patterns of sounds or letters that correspond to the lexical items in their lexicon. Each word or lexical item contains meaning. Kenworthy(1991) states that the description of the meaning of a word is complex and this description constitutes the area of study in modern linguistics called lexical semantics . He further shows some