Word Meaning

Word Meaning

1. Lexical semantics is the stdy of word meaning

   • Meaning of each word in the language
   • How the meanings of words in a language are interrelated
   • Lexical relations are central to how speakers and hearers construct meaning
     • Many types of relationship that can hold between words
   • Entailment
     • Two sentence in which the truth of the first imples the truth of the second, buth the truth of the second does not imply the truth of the first.
       • Saw my MOTHER just now
         • WOMAN

2. Words and Grammatical Categories

   • Names
     • Fred Flintstone
   • Common nouns
     • Dog, banana, tarantula
   • Pronouns
     • I, You, We, Them
   • Logical words
     • Not, and, or, all, any

3. Words and Lexical Items

   • Dictionary = Lexicon
   • Semantics words: Lexemes
     • An orthographic representation
     • A phonological form
     • A symbolic meaning representation or sense

4. Lexical Relations

   • Use of different senses for a word
     • Lexical Field: Group of lexemes which belong to a particular activity or area of knowledge
   • Homonymy
     • Unrelated senses of the same phonological word
   • Polysemy
     • Polysemy is invoked if the senses are judged to be related
   • Synonymy
     • Different phonological words that have the same or very similar meanings
   • Antonymy
     • Words with opposite meaning
   • Hyponymy
     • A Hyponymy includes the meaning of a more general word
   • Meronymy
     • Describes a part-whole relationship between lexical terms
   • Member-collection
     • Relationship between the word for a unit and the usual word for a collection of the units
   • Portion-Mass
     • Relation between a mass noun and the usual unit of measurement or division

5. Lexical Universal

   • One is whether there are universals of lexical organization or principals
   • That there are some lexemes that have correspondences in all the languages of the world

6. Color terms

   • Languages vary in the number and range of their basic color terms

7. Core vocabulary

   • Morris Swadesh suggested that each language has a core vocabulary that is more resistant to loss or change

8. Universal lexemes

   • Leaving out the formal metalanguages and relying on ‘reductive paraphrase in natural language’, just as dictionary writers that use a subpart of a natural language as a natural semantic metalanguage

9. Natural Semantic Metalanguage:

   • A meaning of an expression will be regarded as a paraphrase, framed in semantically simpler terms
     • This ending on the claim that the semantic primes of all languages coincide

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