sememe
noun/ˈsɛmiːm/
Etymology Ultimately from Ancient Greek σημαίνω (sēmaínō, “I signify, I mean”) + -eme. Compare morpheme.
1
Human sciences, Linguistics, Sciences The smallest unit of meaning; especially, the meaning expressed by a morpheme.
- 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.1995, Louise Schleiner, Cultural Semiotics, Spenser, and the Captive Woman, Lehigh University Press, page 71:
- 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.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:
1 more example
- HowNet organizes all the sememes into several trees, and each sememe is considered a node of a tree.2014, Jia-Fei Hong, Verb Sense Discovery in Mandarin Chinese—A Corpus based Knowledge-Intensive Approach, Springer, page 58:
- Derived terms
- episememe, sememic, sememically, sememics