Lexical semantics

Lexical semantics is a subfield of linguistic semantics. It is the study of how and what the words of a language denote (Pustejovsky, 1995). Words are carriers of meaning, and the theory of lexical semantics explores the nature of word meanings, their relationships with each other, and their role in the larger structure of the language.

Definition

Lexical semantics can be defined as the study of word meanings, including the systematic relationships among words. It is concerned with the nature of the meaning of words, how these meanings relate to each other, and how they function in sentences. This includes the study of synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy, meronymy, polysemy, homonymy, and other lexical relationships.

History

The study of lexical semantics has a long history in linguistics. It has been a central concern in philosophy and psychology as well, particularly in the study of cognition and language acquisition. The development of formal semantic theories in the 20th century, particularly truth-conditional semantics, brought new methods and questions to the study of word meaning.

Theories

There are several theories of lexical semantics, including structural semantics, cognitive semantics, and generative semantics. Each of these theories approaches the study of word meaning from a different perspective, and they often use different methodologies and have different goals.

Applications

Lexical semantics has applications in various fields such as computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and language teaching. In computational linguistics, for example, understanding the semantics of words is crucial for tasks such as machine translation and information retrieval.

See also

• Semiotics
• Pragmatics
• Phonetics
• Morphology
• Syntax

References

• Pustejovsky, J. (1995). The Generative Lexicon. MIT Press.