Psychology Wiki

Assessment | Biopsychology | Comparative | Cognitive | Developmental | Language | Individual differences | Personality | Philosophy | Social |
Methods | Statistics | Clinical | Educational | Industrial | Professional items | World psychology |

Language: Linguistics · Semiotics · Speech


Linguistics
Theoretical linguistics
Phonetics
Phonology
Morphology
Syntax
Lexis
Semantics
Lexical semantics
Statistical semantics
Structural semantics
Prototype semantics
Pragmatics
Systemic functional linguistics
Applied linguistics
Language acquisition
Psycholinguistics
Sociolinguistics
Linguistic anthropology
Generative linguistics
Cognitive linguistics
Computational linguistics
Descriptive linguistics
Historical linguistics
Comparative linguistics
Etymology
Stylistics
Prescription
Corpus linguistics
List of linguists
Unsolved problems

Lexical semantics is a subfield of computational linguistics and linguistics. It is the study of how and what the words of a language denote (Pustejovsky, 1995) (i.e., it looks at how words name concepts).

It covers theories of the classification and decomposition of word meaning, the differences and similarities in lexical semantic structure between different languages, and the relationship of word meaning to sentence meaning and syntax.

A question asked is if meaning is established by looking at the neighbourhood in the semantic net a word is part of and by looking at the other words it occurs with in natural sentences or if the meaning is already locally contained in a word. Another question is how words map to concepts. As tools, lexical relations like synonymy, antonymy (opposites), hyponymy and hypernymy are used in this field.

Anna Wierzbicka compiled a list of around 60 basic concepts (called semantic primes) which are said to constitute the core concepts for all languages. With the natural semantic metalanguage the other concepts may be described in a language and culture specific way.

See also[]

  • Polysemy
  • Thematic role
  • The German Wikipedia site on Lexikalische Semantik [1]

External links[]

Reference[]

  • Lexical Semantics by D.A. Cruse. Cambridge University Press, 1986. ISBN 0521276438
  • Pustejovsky, James, The Generative Lexicon, 1995, MIT Press; presents a theory of lexical semantics.

de:Lexikalische Semantik he:סמנטיקה לקסיקלית

This page uses Creative Commons Licensed content from Wikipedia (view authors).