Lexis and Semantics It’s only words!
Lexis Lexis means vocabulary
Nice! It was a nice evening so I decided to go for a nice meal with a nice friend. We went to a nice restaurant and chose a nice table in the corner. The waitress was nice. She spoke nicely. The food was nice and my friend told me a nice story about a nice girl he had just met. I had a nice time. Rewrite the passage replacing the adjectives with: synonyms antonyms any adjectives of your choice
Word classes What word classes do you know?
Semantics Semantics is the study of meaning in words. Meaning can change in different contexts and be interpreted differently by different audiences.
Semantic fields Words grouped by topic (eg. Football, team, player…) Mallet’s mallet game
Collocations “a natural combination of words” More examples: Take a photo Pay attention Teapot a sense of pride blissfully unaware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_collocations
Can you think of any more? Euphemisms Dysphemisms He passed away. Freedom fighter The government initiated a revenue enhancement. I’m going to powder my nose . He kicked the bucket. Terrorist The government initiated a tax hike. . I am sweating like a pig.
Unit 6 of the course book covers lexis and semantics in more detail.