Meaning of monoseme | Babel Free

Definitions

1. A single semeion or mora.
2. A monosemous term; a term with one meaning.
3. An underlying meaning of a word, more general than a sememe.

Examples

“The foot pattern for the baby caprine song is: diseme/monoseme/diseme/diseme.”

“In a given poem, a monoseme contains a short vowel of one mora, and a diseme contains two moras.”

“But its primary meaning must be rhythmic, since it is not used to group notes longer than a monoseme […]”

“Moreover, a word that is a monoseme in general language can be used equivocally in a special language.”

“As a dictionary search makes clear, preciously few ordinary words are monosemes, but they do exist: hippopotamus may be an example.”

“The simplest kind of word is a monoseme […] So many words develop additional meanings over time that it’s quite difficult to think of examples, but three possibilities are telephone, word-processor, giraffe – all fairly recent additions to the English vocabulary.”

“A monoseme in the semantic respect is less than a word but in the syntactical configuration — more.”

“Our observations made it clear that the new meanings, which emerged in the inner forms of the lexical units, had taken root under direct “pressure” of the monosemes of the confronted and identified counterpart in the source-language.”

“Thus, we suggest that in semantic structures of standard words there emerge nonstandard monosemes which are stylistically marked or socially determined and dependent on contexts and extra-linguistic situations.”

“In many modern studies the underlying meaning of a preposition such as over is seen as a group of related meanings, a sort of molecule. Others see it as a single meaning, a monoseme, or ideal meaning, Jakobson’s Gesamtbedeutung […]”

CEFR level