semantic field

In linguistics, a semantic field is a set of words that are grouped together because they all share a similar semantic property or meaning in reference to a specific domain or subject.

The members of a semantic field don’t have to be synonyms and often they are not, but they do all describe the same phenomenon within the scope of their subject or are all subclasses of the same parent object/class.

If the words of a semantic field are nodes in a tree-like structure, their parent node is the subsuming subject, also called a hypernym. The members of semantic field are called hyponyms.

For example, if the hypernym is color, then one of its semantic fields is the set of all color names. So, some hyponyms in the field would be red, blue, black, green, etc.

 

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