Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

Lexical relations
Words do not exist by themselves, however, but are always in relationship to other
words. The meaning of ‘hot’ relates to ‘cold’; the meaning of ‘run’ to ‘walk’, of ‘high’
to ‘low’, of ‘pain’ to ‘pleasure’, and so on. When we speak, we choose one word out
of all those we have available, rejecting all the words we could have said: ‘I love you’
potentially contrasts with ‘I hate you’. Words function within systems of meaning.
A metaphor for meaning that is often used is traffic lights. When a traffic light has
two colours, red and green, red means ‘stop’, contrasting with green ‘go’. Hence ‘red’
does not just mean ‘stop’, it also means ‘not green’, that is, ‘don’t go’, a system with
two options. Add another colour, called ‘amber’ in England, and the whole system
changes, with amber acting as a warning that something is going to change, having
two possibilities: amber alone, officially ‘stop’ (unofficially, ‘prepare to stop’), and
amber and red together, officially ‘stop’ (unofficially ‘prepare to go’). If a simple
three-colour system can lead to such complexity of meanings (and indeed traffic acci-
dents), think what happens with the thousands of words in any human language.
In his book Lexical Semantics Cruse (1986) brought out many relationships
between words. Words can be synonyms if they have the same meaning – ‘truthful’
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and ‘honest’; hyponyms if they belong to the same group with a single superordi-
nate name – ‘dogs’, ‘cats’ and ‘horses’ are kinds of animals. Each category may have
many variations. For example, antonyms are pairs with the opposite meaning –
‘good’ versus ‘bad’. But there are several ways in which words can be opposites:
‘top’ and ‘bottom’ form a scale with extremes (called antipodals); ‘concave’ and
‘convex’ have reverse directions (counterparts); ‘rise’ and ‘fall’ are movements in
opposite directions (reversives); ‘above’ and ‘below’ are the relationship of one
direction to another (converses). And doubtless many more.
Prototypes
Some aspects of meaning cannot be split up into components but are taken in as
wholes. According to Eleanor Rosch’s prototype theory (Rosch, 1977), an English
person who is asked to give an example of a typical bird is more likely to say ‘spar-
row’ than ‘penguin’ or ‘ostrich’; sparrows are closer to the prototype for ‘birds’ in
the mind than penguins and ostriches. Rosch’s theory suggests that there is an
ideal of meaning in our minds – ‘birdiness’ in this case – from which other things
depart. Speakers have a central form of a concept and the things they see and talk
about correspond better or worse with this prototype.
Prototype theory claims that children first learn words that are ‘basic’ because
they reflect aspects of the world that stand out automatically from the rest of what
they see – prototypes. ‘Sparrow’ is a ‘basic-level’ term compared to a ‘superordi-
nate-level’ term like ‘bird’, or a ‘subordinate-level’ term like ‘house sparrow’. The
basic level of vocabulary is easier to use and to learn. On this foundation, children
build higher and lower levels of vocabulary. Some examples of the three levels of
vocabulary are seen in Table 3.2.
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