Basic semantic properties include being meaningful or meaningless – for example, whether a given word is part of a language's lexicon with a generally understood meaning; polysemy, having multiple, typically related, meanings; ambiguity, having meanings which aren't necessarily related; and anomaly, where the elements of a unit are semantically incompatible with each other, although possibly grammatically sound.
Beyond the expression itself, there are higher-level semantic relations that describe the relationship between units: these include synonymy, antonymy, and hyponymy.
[6] Physical properties refer to how an entity exists in space.
For example, in the Dyirbal language, the morpheme balam marks each entity in its noun class with the semantic property of edibility,[8] and Burmese encodes the semantic property for the ability to cut or pierce.
Encoding the functional property for transportation, housing, and speech are also attested in world languages.