Semantic relation between lexical units roślina (‘plant’) and zwierzę (‘animal’) – determining the relation based on lexicographic and corpus analyses

Abstract

The paper presents an attempt to test whether the semantic relation between the lexical units roślina (‘plant’) and zwierzę (‘animal’) can be interpreted as a relation of binary opposition. The relationship was tested by analysing definitions contained in 10 contemporary dictionaries of the Polish language and by searching in sentences from the National Corpus of Polish for a set of oppositional pair functions, used in recent decades in works on various languages. The analyses carried out do not allow to unequivocally qualify the relationship between the words roślina and zwierzę as a binary semantic opposition. It was found that the words are rarely treated in Polish dictionaries as hyponyms of the same closest hyperonym and that they are rarely defined by features that clearly contrast their meaning. In the set of 1,291 sentences from the corpus in which the words roślina and zwierzę co‑occur, it was possible to extract most of the functions characteristic of typical examples of pairs with opposite meanings, with sentences with such functions accounting for almost 90% of the analysed set of sentences. However, the total share of functions emphasizing the differences between plants and animals is more than three times smaller than the total share of functions from the difference‑reducing group.