sememe

See also: sémème

English

Etymology

Ultimately from Ancient Greek σημαίνω (sēmaínō, “I signify, I mean”) + -eme. Compare morpheme.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /ˈsɛmiːm/

Noun

sememe (plural sememes)

1. (linguistics) The smallest unit of meaning; especially, the meaning expressed by a morpheme.

   Coordinate terms: chereme, chroneme, grapheme, lexeme, listeme, morpheme, phoneme, taxeme, toneme

   • 1995, Louise Schleiner, Cultural Semiotics, Spenser, and the Captive Woman, Lehigh University Press, page 71:

     Any given word of a natural language in its shared acceptations represents a seme, sememe, or set of sememes, but the profile that we can compile as representing the shared elements in a list of synonymous and parasynonymous words is an artificial construct, an instance of meta-language, thus called a constructed sememe.

   • 2007, Edward H. Y. Lim, Raymond S. T. Lee, “iJADE Infoseeker: On Using Intelligent Context-Aware Agents for Retrieving and Analyzing Chinese Web Articles”, in Raymond S. T. Lee, Vincenzo Loia, editors, Computational Intelligence for Agent-based Systems, Springer, page 138:

     Since sememes are enhanced in the sememe network (as shown in Fig. 3), both a topic and an article analysis can rely on the sememe network instead of explicit term matching.

   • 2014, Jia-Fei Hong, Verb Sense Discovery in Mandarin Chinese—A Corpus based Knowledge-Intensive Approach, Springer, page 58:

     HowNet organizes all the sememes into several trees, and each sememe is considered a node of a tree.

Derived terms

• sememic
• sememically
• sememics

Related terms

• monoseme
• semantic
• seme

Translations

smallest unit of linguistical meaning

• Armenian: please add this translation if you can
• Chinese:

  Mandarin: 義位／义位 (yìwèi)

• Esperanto: sememo
• Finnish: semeemi
• French: sémème (fr) m
• Georgian: please add this translation if you can
• German: Semem (de) n
• Greek: please add this translation if you can
• Hungarian: please add this translation if you can
• Italian: semema m
• Korean: please add this translation if you can
• Portuguese: semema m
• Romanian: please add this translation if you can
• Russian: семе́ма (ru) f (seméma), семанте́ма (ru) f (semantéma)
• Spanish: semema m
• Vietnamese: nghĩa vị (vi)

Further reading

• Semantics on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
  • Lexical semantics on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
• Semiotics on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
• Emic unit on Wikipedia.Wikipedia

Anagrams

• ememes