Lexical semantics

Lexical semantics is a subfield of computational linguistics and linguistics. It is the study of how and what the words of a language denote (Pustejovsky, 1995). Or put it in another way it looks at how words name concepts.

It covers theories of the classification and decomposition of word meaning, the differences and similarities in lexical semantic structure between different languages, and the relationship of word meaning to sentence meaning and syntax.

A question asked is if meaning is established by looking at the neighbourhood in the semantic net a word is part of and by looking at the other words it occurs with in natural sentences or if the meaning is already locally contained in a word. Another question is how words map to concepts. As tools, lexical relations like synonymy, antonymy (opposites), hyponymy and hypernymy are used in this field.

See also

• Thematic role

External links

• Philip Edmonds on near-synonyms (Chapter 4.1 Lexical semantics)
• Bibliography of linguistics papers dealing with lexical semantics
• The Lexical Semantics of a Machine Translation Interlingua by Rick Morneau

Reference

• Lexical Semantics by D.A. Cruse. Cambridge University Press, 1986. ISBN 0521276438
• Pustejovsky, James, The Generative Lexicon, 1995, MIT Press; presents a theory of lexical semantics.