The Iraqi undergraduates' ability to use and find correspondence between lexical and sentential relations

Abstract EN

There are semantic relations among words, i.e.

sense or lexical relations, which are synonymy1, hyponymy2, antonymy3, homonymy, homophony, homograph, polysemy, collocation ; and others among sentences.

The present study deals with the semantic relations among sentences which are paraphrase, entailment and contradiction, not sense relations.

Sense (lexical) relation is a relation which holds between words.

While sentential relation holds between sentences (or propositions).

The present study aims at measuring the Iraqi undergraduates' ability to recognize and produce the sentential relations and the second aim is to show to what extent they find any correspondence between the lexical and sentential relations, i.e.

between synonymy and paraphrase; hyponymy and entailment ; antonym and contradiction.

This study provides the reader with two hypotheses : the fourth- year students at the College of Education / University of Thi-Qar are unable to recognize and produce sentential relations before giving the students a lecture, but after two lectures in which those relations are explained, the students have an ability to recognize and produce the sentential relations but their receptive knowledge is better than their productive one.

The second hypothesis is that before and after the two lectures were delivered, the students are not capable of recognizing and producing the correspondence between lexical and sentential relations.

To confirm or disconfirm those two hypotheses, a test of three questions is designed.

The first question which consists of three branches and the third question, branch A are on the recognition side, while the second question with its three branches and the third question, branch B are on the production side.

Many modifications which are done on the test like adding and omitting some items, and changing the titles of the questions, depend on the jury members'4 valuable suggestions and recommendations.

The test was changed more than one time.

Then the test achieves validity and gets easiness of answer.

The students spent one hour and forty minutes in completing all the items of the test.

After applying the test, the two hypotheses are confirmed.

The results prove that giving them lectures is necessary to make the sentential relations clear but because they are two lectures, so they are not enough to shed light on all the details concerning the topic.

The number of the Fs' (Appendix I) Co.

Res.

is more than the Ms' ones.