Lexical semantics (also known as lexicosemantics), as a subfield of linguistic semantics, is the study of word meanings.Pustejovsky, J. (2005) Lexical Semantics: Overview in Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, second edition, Volumes 1-14.Taylor, J. (2017) Lexical Semantics. In B. Dancygier (Ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics (Cambridge Handbooks in Language and Linguistics, pp. 246-261). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. . It includes the study of how words structure their meaning, how they act in grammar and compositionality, and the relationships between the distinct senses and uses of a word.
The units of analysis in lexical semantics are lexical units which include not only words but also sub-words or sub-units such as affixes and even compound words and phrases. Lexical units include the catalogue of words in a language, the lexicon. Lexical semantics looks at how the meaning of the lexical units correlates with the structure of the language or syntax. This is referred to as syntax-semantics interface.
The study of lexical semantics concerns: the classification and decomposition of lexical items the differences and similarities in lexical semantic structure cross-linguistically the relationship of lexical meaning to sentence meaning and syntax.
Lexical units, also referred to as syntactic atoms, can be independent such as in the case of root words or parts of compound words or they require association with other units, as prefixes and suffixes do. The former are termed free morphemes and the latter bound morphemes. They fall into a narrow range of meanings (semantic fields) and can combine with each other to generate new denotations.
Cognitive semantics is the linguistic paradigm/framework that since the 1980s has generated the most studies in lexical semantics, introducing innovations like prototype theory, conceptual metaphors, and frame semantics.Geeraerts, Dirk (2010) Introduction, p. xiv, in Theories of Lexical Semantics.
Lexical relations
Lexical items contain information about category (lexical and syntactic), form and meaning. The semantics related to these categories then relate to each lexical item in the lexicon. Lexical items can also be semantically classified based on whether their meanings are derived from single lexical units or from their surrounding environment.
Lexical items participate in regular patterns of association with each other. Some relations between lexical items include hyponymy, hypernymy, synonymy, and antonymy, as well as homonymy.
Hyponymy and hypernymy Hyponymy and hypernymy refer to a relationship between a general term and the more specific terms that fall under the category of the general term.
For example, the colors red, green, blue and yellow are hyponyms. They fall under the general term of color, which is the hypernym.
Color (hypernym) → red, green, yellow, blue (hyponyms)
Hyponyms and hypernyms can be described by using a taxonomy, as seen in the example.
Synonym Synonym refers to words that are pronounced and spelled differently but contain the same meaning.
Happy, joyful, glad
Antonym Antonym refers to words that are related by having the opposite meanings to each other. There are three types of antonyms: graded antonyms, complementary antonyms, and relational antonyms.
Sleep, awake long, short
Homonymy Homonymy refers to the relationship between words that are spelled or pronounced the same way but hold different meanings.
bank (of river) bank (financial institution)
Polysemy Polysemy refers to a word having two or more related meanings. bright (shining) bright (intelligent)
Semantic networks Lexical semantics also explores whether the meaning of a lexical unit is established by looking at its neighbourhood in the semantic network, (words it occurs with in natural sentences), or whether the meaning is already locally contained in the lexical unit.
In English, WordNet is an example of a semantic network. It contains English words that are grouped into synsets. Some semantic relations between these synsets are meronymy, hyponymy, synonymy, and antonymy.
Semantic fields
How lexical items map onto concepts First proposed by Trier in the 1930s,Famer, Pamela B.; Mairal Usón, Ricardo (1999). "Constructing a Lexicon of English Verbs". Functional Grammar (in English) 23 (illustrated ed.). Walter de Gruyter. p. 350. . semantic field theory proposes that a group of words with interrelated meanings can be categorized under a larger conceptual domain. This entire entity is thereby known as a semantic field. The words boil, bake, fry, and roast, for example, would fall under the larger semantic category of cooking. Semantic field theory asserts that lexical meaning cannot be fully understood by looking at a word in isolation, but by looking at a group of semantically related words. Semantic relations can refer to any relationship in meaning between lexemes, including synonymy (big and large), antonymy (big and small), hypernymy and hyponymy (rose and flower), converseness (buy and sell), and incompatibility. Semantic field theory does not have concrete guidelines that determine the extent of semantic relations between lexemes. The abstract validity of the theory is a subject of debate.
Knowing the meaning of a lexical item therefore means knowing the semantic entailments the word brings with it. However, it is also possible to understand only one word of a semantic field without understanding other related words. Take, for example, a taxonomy of plants and animals: it is possible to understand the words rose and rabbit without knowing what a marigold or a muskrat is. This is applicable to colors as well, such as understanding the word red without knowing the meaning of scarlet, but understanding scarlet without knowing the meaning of red may be less likely. A semantic field can thus be very large or very small, depending on the level of contrast being made between lexical items. While cat and dog both fall under the larger semantic field of animal, including the breed of dog, like German shepherd, would require contrasts between other breeds of dog (e.g. corgi, or poodle), thus expanding the semantic field further.
How lexical items map onto events Event structure is defined as the semantic relation of a verb and its syntactic properties. . Event structure has three primary components: primitive event type of the lexical item event composition rules mapping rules to lexical structure Verbs can belong to one of three types: states, processes, or transitions. (1) a. The door is closed. b. The door closed. c. John closed the door. (1a) defines the state of the door being closed; there is no opposition in this predicate. (1b) and (1c) both have predicates showing transitions of the door going from being implicitly open to closed. (1b) gives the intransitive use of the verb close, with no explicit mention of the causer, but (1c) makes explicit mention of the agent involved in the action.
History of syntactic basis of event structure
Generative semantics in the 1960s The analysis of these different lexical units had a decisive role in the field of "generative linguistics" during the 1960s. The term generative was proposed by Noam Chomsky in his book Syntactic Structures published in 1957. The term generative linguistics was based on Chomsky's generative grammar, a linguistic theory that states systematic sets of rules (X' theory)can predict grammatical phrases within a natural language. Generative Linguistics is also known as Government-Binding Theory. Generative linguists of the 1960s, including Noam Chomsky and Ernst von Glasersfeld, believed semantic relations between transitive verbs and intransitive verbs were tied to their independent syntactic organization. This meant that they saw a simple verb phrase as encompassing a more complex syntactic structure.
Lexicalist theories in the 1980s Lexicalist theories became popular during the 1980s, and emphasized that a word's internal structure was a question of morphology and not of syntax. Lexicalist theories emphasized that complex words (resulting from compounding and derivation of affixes) have lexical entries that are derived from morphology, rather than resulting from overlapping syntactic and phonological properties, as Generative Linguistics predicts. The distinction between Generative Linguistics and Lexicalist theories can be illustrated by considering the transformation of the word destroy to destruction:
Generative Linguistics theory: states the transformation of destroy → destruction as the nominal, nom + destroy, combined with phonological rules that produce the output destruction. Views this transformation as independent of the morphology. Lexicalist theory: sees destroy and destruction as having idiosyncratic lexical entries based on their differences in morphology. Argues that each morpheme contributes specific meaning. States that the formation of the complex word destruction is accounted for by a set of Lexical Rules, which are different and independent from syntactic rules.
A lexical entry lists the basic properties of either the whole word, or the individual properties of the morphemes that make up the word itself. The properties of lexical items include their category selection c-selection, selectional properties s-selection, (also known as semantic selection), phonological properties, and features. The properties of lexical items are idiosyncratic, unpredictable, and contain specific information about the lexical items that they describe.
The following is an example of a lexical entry for the verb put:
put: V DPagent DPexperiencer/PPlocative
Lexicalist theories state that a word's meaning is derived from its morphology or a speaker's lexicon, and not its syntax. The degree of morphology's influence on overall grammar remains controversial. Currently, the linguists that perceive one engine driving both morphological items and syntactic items are in the majority.
Micro-syntactic theories: 1990s to the present By the early 1990s, Chomsky's minimalist framework on language structure led to sophisticated probing techniques for investigating languages. These probing techniques analyzed negative data over prescriptive grammars, and because of Chomsky's proposed Extended Projection Principle in 1986, probing techniques showed where specifiers of a sentence had moved to in order to fulfill the EPP. This allowed syntacticians to hypothesize that lexical items with complex syntactic features (such as ditransitive, inchoative, and causative verbs), could select their own specifier element within a syntax tree construction. (For more on probing techniques, see Suci, G., Gammon, P., & Gamlin, P. (1979)).
This brought the focus back on the syntax-lexical semantics interface; however, syntacticians still sought to understand the relationship between complex verbs and their related syntactic structure, and to what degree the syntax was projected from the lexicon, as the Lexicalist theories argued.
In the mid 1990s, linguists Heidi Harley, Samuel Jay Keyser, and Kenneth Hale addressed some of the implications posed by complex verbs and a lexically-derived syntax. Their proposals indicated that the predicates CAUSE and BECOME, referred to as subunits within a Verb Phrase, acted as a lexical semantic template.Pinker, S. 1989. "Learnability and Cognition: The Acquisition of Argument Structure." Cambridge. MIT Press. pp. 89. Predicates are verbs and state or affirm something about the subject of the sentence or the argument of the sentence. For example, the predicates went and is here below affirm the argument of the subject and the state of the subject respectively.
Lucy went home. The parcel is here.