Lexical Meaning: Exploring Word Senses, Relations, and Semantic Fields
Lexical Meaning
Lexical meaning refers to the meaning of individual words in a language and how those meanings relate to one another. It encompasses the dictionary definition of a term, representing its common usage. Lexical definitions aim for simplicity to convey information effectively to a broad audience and can be either prescriptive or descriptive, sometimes including idiosyncratic information.
Word Senses and Semantic Fields
A word sense is a specific meaning of a word, as words can have multiple meanings depending on context. For example, the word “play” has numerous senses, each determined by its usage in a sentence. Semantic fields group words with related meanings, highlighting connections and associations within the lexicon.
What is in a Word? Word Senses and Lexically Encoded Relations
Words are more than just sounds or letters; they represent psychological realities and convey complex networks of information. Semantics seeks to connect phonological and grammatical words with their corresponding semantic words or lexemes. For instance, the sentence “Kill X is dead” demonstrates an inherent logical link between the words “kill” and “dead,” encoded within the lexicon.
Lexical Entry: Shared Properties
Lexical entries in dictionaries or mental lexicons share properties that define a word’s meaning, usage, and relationships with other words.
Entailment and Inference
Entailment describes a relationship between sentences where the truth of one sentence necessitates the truth of another. For example, “I passed the exam” entails “I passed the math exam.” Inference, on the other hand, involves drawing conclusions or making educated guesses based on available information.
Hyponymy and Lexical Organization
- Hyponymy is a relationship of inclusion, where a hyponym represents a more specific instance of a broader category. For example, “dog” and “cat” are hyponyms of “animal.”
- Lexical organization refers to the network-like structure of the lexicon, where words are interconnected through various semantic relationships.
Lexicon and Dictionary
- The lexicon encompasses the entire mental vocabulary of a speaker, while a dictionary is a reference tool that provides a limited representation of the lexicon.
The Notion of Lemma
- A lemma is the base form of a word, representing its entry in the lexicon. For example, “run” is the lemma for related forms like “running.”
Acoustic Words, Grammatical Words, Lexemes
- The concept of a “word” is complex and multifaceted, encompassing acoustic, grammatical, and semantic aspects. Defining a word precisely can be challenging due to its various dimensions.
The Problem of Defining a Word
- Determining the boundaries and atomicity of a word can be difficult, especially in languages where a single word-form can convey multiple meanings.
Words: Psychological vs. Distributional Explanations
- Linguists like Sapir and Bloomfield have proposed different perspectives on defining words, considering both psychological and distributional factors.
Related Tenses
- Tenses indicate the time frame of an event or action, and they are closely related to the meaning and interpretation of verbs.
Vagueness
- Vagueness refers to a lack of clarity or precision in meaning or expression.
Ambiguity
- Lexical ambiguity occurs when a word or phrase has multiple meanings, as exemplified by the word “bank” referring to both a financial institution and the edge of a river.
Polysemy
- Polysemy describes the existence of distinct lexemes with semantically related senses, such as the different meanings of “foot” (body part, unit of measurement).
Homonymy
- Homonymy refers to words with the same form but unrelated meanings, like “bat” (animal) and “bat” (sports equipment).
Subcategories of Homonymy
- Homonyms can be further classified based on their syntactic category and spelling, such as “lap” (noun and verb with the same spelling) and “ring/wring” (verbs with different spellings).
Metaphor
- Metaphor involves understanding one concept in terms of another, creating an analogy between a target domain and a source domain. For example, “life is a journey” uses the source domain of a journey to describe the target domain of life.
Metonymy
- Metonymy relies on the association or contiguity between concepts, such as using “the crown” to refer to the monarchy.
Metaphor and Metonymy as Factors in Generating Polysemy
- Metaphor and metonymy play a role in the development of polysemy, as they influence how speakers conceptualize and extend word meanings.
Features of Metaphor
- Metaphors can be conventional or novel, systematic or idiosyncratic, and often involve asymmetry and abstraction.
Synonymy and the Impossibility of Total Synonymy
- While synonyms share similar meanings, achieving complete synonymy is impossible due to factors like register, connotation, collocation, and semantic scope.
Antonymy and Opposite Senses
- Antonyms have opposite meanings, and they can be categorized as complementary, gradable, converse, or taxonomic sisters.
Meronymy
- Meronymy describes a part-whole relationship, where a meronym represents a constituent part of a larger entity. For example, “wheel” is a meronym of “car.”