Semantic Field of Utterances in ''Healthy Living Guide''

Abstract

    Many books, articles, guidelines, and other resources have been written to help us avoid the Covid-19 virus, which has affected our lives in many ways during the last few years.

    The corpus of this research is taken from ''A Healthy Live and Nutrition Guide'' by Harvard University. This guide presents tips about following a healthy style and how to do the best to eat healthy meals, exercise, and sleep well during coronavirus.

     It is essential to use the semantic field while analyzing word meanings and examining the semantic relationships among words within sentences in order to fully grasp the guide. Those relations vary according to the relationship that a word may have with another word or word.

       Only nouns are selected to be investigated and are grouped into different fields, such as eating, moving, sleeping, and other related fields, such as quantity and time. All nouns were classified into lexical-semantic fields to the lexical Field Theory as proposed by the German Linguist Jost Trier (1936). The semantic relations used to decide which semantic field a word belongs to are hyponymy (Type of) and meronomy (Part of). The researcher uses both qualitative and quantitative methods in dealing with the corpus.

      The study results reveal that the semantic field of “Eating” is by far the most common one, and it formed almost two-fifths of the data (almost 39%). The field of “Moving” is way less than that of “Eating”, and “Sleeping” is almost half the “Moving” field.