The word "联赛" is formed by combining two conceptual building blocks: "联", which carries the meaning of connecting, uniting, or forming a league, and "赛", which means competition or match. By fusing these ideas, the compound directly depicts a specific organizational structure for sports, namely, a connected series of matches among a group of participants. It is a semantic synthesis where the first character defines the format (a league) and the second defines the activity (a contest), resulting in the complete concept of a "league competition".