Lexical Semantics: Key Concepts and Definitions

Posted on Jan 4, 2025 in Language

Lexical Semantics: Key Concepts

Lexis (n) / Lexical (adj): A term in linguistics referring to a language’s vocabulary. Often used adjectivally in phrases like: -lexical item, -lexical entry (a language’s complete lexical items, its dictionary), -lexical structure (how lexical items are organized), -lexical field (a lexicon part defined by a concept).

WORD: A unit of expression recognized by native speakers in written and spoken language. Defining ‘word’ has challenges. Three senses of ‘word’ are:

A: The orthographic word (writing) or phonological word (speech). The term word form includes both.

B: The ‘underlying’ word, or lexeme, when considering variants of the same unit. Lexemes are units of vocabulary.

C: A grammatical unit. Sentences consist of words, and words of morphemes.

BINOMIALS AND TRINOMIALS: Fixed pairs and trios of words (e.g., fish and chips; morning, noon and night).


Reference Works

REFERENCE WORK: Any printed or electronic product providing information with easy access. May be lexicographic or non-lexicographic.

Lexicographic Reference Works:

  • Dictionary: A prototypical reference work, usually a general-purpose definition of a language’s vocabulary in alphabetical order. Dictionaries can be bilingual, monolingual, technical, encyclopedic, general, lexical, thematic, or alphabetic.
  • Thesaurus: A reference work focusing on synonymy and sense relations between words (e.g., The Oxford Thesaurus).
  • Encyclopaedia: A reference work providing factual information from subject disciplines, collected by experts (e.g., The Britannica Encyclopaedia). An encyclopedic dictionary is a hybrid.
  • Glossary: A selection of words and phrases with definitions and/or translations.

Dictionary Structure

DICTIONARY MACROSTRUCTURE: The overall structure for locating information in a dictionary or reference work. May be:

  • Alphabetical order in semasiological dictionaries (most common).
  • Thematic order in onomasiological dictionaries and thesauri.

MEDIOSTRUCTURE: Words or symbols linking information in different dictionary parts.

MICROSTRUCTURE: The internal composition of dictionary entries, encyclopaedia articles, or terminological glossary records.


Dictionary Typology

DICTIONARY TYPOLOGY: DISTINCTIONS by language, financing, user age, size (dictionary families by publisher), subject coverage (specialized technical dictionaries), lexical coverage (segmental dictionaries for restricted information), complexity of the lemma* (dictionaries based on grammatical status of units, e.g., morphemes, words, phrases, idioms).

*Lemma: The item at the beginning of a dictionary entry, also called headword**. The lemma is an abstract representation including all formal lexical variations.

**Headword: The typographically marked canonical form of a word or phrase at the start of a dictionary entry.

Distinctions by primary market language, time period covered, linguistic approach, and access means.


Types of Definitions

SOME TYPES OF DEFINITIONS:

  1. Intensional definition: The classic definition, most common in general dictionaries. Refers to the concept’s content (e.g., rectangle: n. right-angled quadrilateral; clean: adj. free from dirt).
  2. Extensional definition: Less common. Refers to the concept’s range (e.g., motor vehicle: n. car, motorcycle, moped, or van).
  3. Prototype definition: Contains few distinctive features, supplemented by typical cases.
  4. Circular definition:
    • Sometimes uses the definiendum in the definiens (unacceptable, e.g., triangle: n. polygon in the form of a triangle).
    • Acceptable to use part of the definiendum (e.g., blacksmith: n. smith who works with iron).
    • Two or more lemmas define each other (e.g., aluminium: n. metal extracted from bauxite).
  5. Synonym definition: Uses synonyms or near synonyms (e.g., femur: n. thigh-bone; norm: n. pattern, type, model).


Untypical Collocation

UNTYPICAL COLLOCATION:

  • In poetry: writers create unique word combinations (e.g., “time and fevers burn away,” W.H. Auden).
  • In advertising: Slogans like “Pause for Talk” (instead of “Pause for thought”).
  • L2 learners: Mistakes in collocation (e.g., *a cup of wine instead of a glass of wine).


Words: Definition and Problems

WORDS: DEFINITION, PROBLEMS, REQUIREMENTS. What is a word? Words are free-standing language items with meaning. Word structure is complex, causing identification problems:

  1. Words include prefixes/suffixes (e.g., reorganize [prefix+root]).
  2. There are compounds (e.g., washing-machine [compound]).
  3. Idiom meanings differ from constituent words (e.g., bury the hatchet [=die]).

The notion of morpheme is used to interrelate root/prefix/compound in word structure.

Morphemes: The smallest meaningful language unit. Morphemes are the smallest functioning units in word composition.

Vocabulary Acquisition

VOCAB IN L1, STAGES IN THE ACQUISITION OF WORDS:

  1. Reference: Associating words with extra-linguistic reality. References are entities in the external world (e.g., the referent for ‘table’ is the object ‘table’).
  2. Denotation: Relations between items and non-linguistic entities (e.g., the denotation of ‘dog’ is its dictionary definition as ‘canine quadruped’).
  3. Connotation: Emotional associations suggested by lexical item meanings (e.g., connotations of ‘dog’ might include ‘friend’, ‘helper’).
  4. Sense relations: Linguistic relationships between lexical items (e.g., tall/short in antonymy).
  5. Collocations: Habitual co-occurrence of lexical items (e.g., auspicious ‘collocates’ with occasion, event).


Meaning of a Lexeme

MEANING OF A LEXEME: The smallest unit in a language’s meaning system, distinguished from similar units. A lexeme is an abstract unit underlying morphological variants. Each lexeme merits a separate dictionary entry or subentry. A lexeme may have different senses, usually numbered within a dictionary entry. Lexeme meaning includes denotation, connotation, and relational aspects (associations with other words).

COLLOCATION: The likelihood of co-occurrence between words, how words are used together regularly. Ex [Adj+Noun collocation]: She has a beige car. *she has a beige hair-> beige doesn’t collocate with hair. Ex2: [Adj+Noun collocation]: high probability/ *high chance/ good chance/ *good probability.

OTHER COLLOCATION RELATIONSHIPS: subject + verb (e.g., Violence broke out on the streets of London); verb + object (e.g., I seized the opportunity of meeting my idol).

TYPES OF COLLOCATIONAL RESTRICTIONS:

  • Based on meaning (*a green cow).
  • Based on range (to cultivate the land).
  • Strictly collocational (rancid bacon/butter).

COLLOCATION IN DICTIONARIES: Dictionaries include information about collocational appropriateness. Dictionaries vary in the quantity and quality of collocation information. There are specific collocations dictionaries. Electronic corpora provide further information about language collocation.


Electronic Corpora

ELECTRONIC CORPORA IN LEX, DEFINITION AND USE: A corpus is a collection of naturally occurring linguistic data samples, collected for easy access, used for linguistic description or verifying language hypotheses, especially how words are used. Corpora are used in dictionary research, lexicographic projects, and EFL learning. Corpora are useful for identifying collocations in texts.

MAIN TYPES OF CORPORA:

  • Text corpus: Written texts documenting language features.
  • Spoken corpus: Transcriptions of sound recordings documenting speech usage.

TEXT CORPORA IN ENGLISH, MAIN CORPORA: British National Corpus, Corpus of Contemporary American English, Collins-Cobuild concordance and collocation sampler, and Concordance and corpus programs (e.g., WordSmith Tools).

BNC: University of Oxford, online. 100 million word collection of written and spoken language samples. Useful for finding examples of words in context, obtaining usage frequency, and collocation information.

WORNET: Princeton University, large lexical database of English, a network of related words and concepts. Online. Nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs are grouped into synsets (=sets of synonyms).


Semantic Fields

SEMANTIC FIELDS: BASIC DISTINCTIONS: A semantic field contains concepts, and a lexical field contains words. WORDS AND MULTI-WORDS UNITS: Words and multi-word units are grouped in lexical fields. Lexical fields are the linguistic reflection of semantic fields. There are differences between languages (e.g., English ‘do/make’ vs. Spanish ‘hacer’), but also similarities (e.g., kinship terms).

STRUCTURE OF A SEMANTIC FIELD: Superordinate (basic semantic notion): hyponym 1 (basic notion + differentiating features or semes), hyponym 1.1 (basic notion of hyponym 1 + semes). Example: POSITION: live: stay somewhere, having it as your home; lodge: to live somewhere for a short time and paying rent. (Basic notion: ‘to live somewhere’ + Semes: ‘for a short time and paying rent).

HOMONY: A word identical in spelling or writing but different in meaning (e.g., bank: 1. I’m just off to the bank to cash a cheque. 2. The bank was steep. 3. I know I can bank on her).

POLYSEMY: A single lexical item with multiple related ‘senses’ (e.g., foot: 1. They met at the foot of the mountain. 2. He hurt his foot. 3. There’s a diagram at the foot of the page).

SENSE: One of several meanings for a word or phrase, covered in the dictionary by sense discrimination and definitions.


Derived Sense and Metaphor

DERIVED SENSE: A subsidiary meaning of a word or phrase developed from its basic sense by semantic widening and metaphorical extension. Derived sense developed by metaphorical extension is also called figurative sense.

IMPLICATIONS: Lexicographers determine basic and secondary senses by semantic analysis, frequency, usefulness, etc. Dictionary users find literal senses first, followed by derived or figurative senses.

METAPHOR, TYPES OF SENSE: Two types of sense: A. Central/Focal meaning (e.g., Did you hurt your head?). B. Metaphorical extension (e.g., She’s head of the committee).

METAPHORICAL EXTENSION: The central or focal meaning is the basis of metaphorical extensions. Metaphor enables us to talk about one thing in terms of another (e.g., to lend sb a hand = help sb).

LEXICAL ITEMS INVOLVED IN METAPHOR:

  • Lexical item only (e.g., The foot of the stairs).
  • A fixed range of lexical items (e.g., argument is war: they bombarded me with objections).

TYPES OF METAPHOR:

  • Institutionalized/conventional: Not perceived as a metaphor anymore.
  • Uninstitutionalized: Easily noticeable for native speakers (e.g., in poetry and literature: All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their entrances; -William Shakespeare, As You Like It).