Lexical Semantics
Lexical semantics studies the meanings of words and morphemes and how those meanings relate to one another within the vocabulary of a language.
Definition
Lexical semantics is the subfield of semantics concerned with the meaning of words and the principles governing the structure of the lexicon.
Scope
The area covers what individual lexical items mean, how their meanings can be analysed and represented, and how words are organized into structured relations such as synonymy, antonymy, and hyponymy. It addresses the internal structure of word meaning (componential analysis, semantic features, prototypes), the systematic phenomena of polysemy and homonymy, and the way verb meanings determine the syntactic frames in which words appear. Lexical semantics sits at the interface between the dictionary (the lexicon) and the grammar, and feeds directly into compositional semantics, since the meaning of a sentence is built in part from the meanings of its words.
Sub-topics
Core questions
- What is the meaning of a word, and can it be decomposed into smaller components?
- How are words related to one another through sense relations such as synonymy, antonymy, and hyponymy?
- How should polysemy (multiple related senses) be distinguished from homonymy and from vagueness?
- How does the meaning of a verb constrain its argument structure and syntactic behaviour?
Key concepts
- sense and reference
- synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy, meronymy
- semantic features / components
- lexical field
- polysemy and homonymy
- prototype and graded membership
- selectional restrictions
Key theories
- Componential analysis / semantic decomposition
- Word meanings are analysed as bundles of more primitive semantic features or components (e.g. MAN = [+human][+male][+adult]), allowing sense relations and entailments to be derived from shared and contrasting features.
- Sense-relation (structuralist) approach
- The meaning of a lexical item is characterized relationally through its place in a network of sense relations and lexical fields, rather than by reference to the world alone.
- Prototype theory of word meaning
- Lexical categories are organized around best (prototypical) exemplars with graded membership and fuzzy boundaries, challenging strict necessary-and-sufficient-conditions accounts of meaning.
History
Lexical semantics grew out of nineteenth-century historical semantics (the study of meaning change) and early-twentieth-century structuralist accounts of the lexicon as a system of oppositions, notably the lexical-field theories of Trier and Weisgerber. Mid-century componential analysis, borrowed from phonology and anthropology, sought to decompose word meanings into universal features. From the 1970s, Rosch's psychological work on prototypes and graded category membership reshaped the field, and Levin's studies of verb classes connected lexical meaning to syntactic argument structure.
Debates
- Decompositional vs. holistic theories of word meaning
- Whether word meanings can be reduced to combinations of semantic primitives, or whether meaning is irreducibly relational or use-based and resists decomposition into features.
- Polysemy vs. monosemy and vagueness
- Disagreement over how many distinct senses a word really has, and whether apparent senses are stored separately or generated by general principles from a more abstract underspecified meaning.
Key figures
- John Lyons
- D. Alan Cruse
- Eleanor Rosch
- Anna Wierzbicka
- Beth Levin
Related topics
Seminal works
- lyons1977
- cruse1986
- murphy2010
Frequently asked questions
- What is the difference between polysemy and homonymy?
- Polysemy is when a single word has multiple related senses (e.g. 'mouth' of a person and of a river), whereas homonymy is when distinct words happen to share a form (e.g. 'bank' as financial institution vs. riverside). The distinction is often drawn by whether the senses are felt to be related and historically connected.
- How does lexical semantics relate to the rest of semantics?
- Lexical semantics supplies the meanings of individual words that compositional semantics then combines into phrase and sentence meanings; the two are complementary parts of a full theory of linguistic meaning.