The word "鲤鱼" is formed by combining the character "鲤", which specifically means carp, with the character "鱼", meaning fish. "鲤" is a pictophonetic character composed of the semantic component "鱼" to indicate its category and the phonetic component "里" to suggest its pronunciation. Thus, "鲤鱼" literally denotes "carp fish", where the first character specifies the type within the general class represented by the second character.