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Lexical semantics (also known as lexicosemantics), as a subfield of linguistic semantics, is the study of word meanings. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] It includes the study of how words structure their meaning, how they act in grammar and compositionality , [ 1 ] and the relationships between the distinct senses and uses of a word.
Semantics studies meaning in language, which is limited to the meaning of linguistic expressions. It concerns how signs are interpreted and what information they contain. An example is the meaning of words provided in dictionary definitions by giving synonymous expressions or paraphrases, like defining the meaning of the term ram as adult male sheep. [22]
This can be explained by models that do not assume a distinct level between the semantic and the phonological stages (and so lack a lemma representation). [3] During the process of language activation, lemma retrieval is the first step in lexical access. In this step, meaning and the syntactic elements of a lexical item are realized as the lemma.
The latter, semantic network theory, proposes the idea of spreading activation, which is a hypothetical mental process that takes place when one of the nodes in the semantic network is activated, and proposes three ways this is done: priming effects, neighborhood effects, and frequency effects, which have all been studied in depth over the years.
A visual representation of a Semantic Lexicon. A semantic lexicon is a digital dictionary of words labeled with semantic classes so associations can be drawn between words that have not previously been encountered. [1] Semantic lexicons are built upon semantic networks, which represent the semantic relations between words. The difference ...
Nodes generally correspond to lexical and grammatical meanings as these are directly expressed by items in the lexicon or by inflectional means, but the theory allows the option of decomposing meanings into more fine-grained representation via processes of semantic paraphrasing, [3] which are also key to dealing with synonymy and translation ...
Before the 1950s, there was no discussion of a syntax–semantics interface in American linguistics, since neither syntax nor semantics was an active area of research. [17] This neglect was due in part to the influence of logical positivism and behaviorism in psychology, that viewed hypotheses about linguistic meaning as untestable.
The term was first used in the semantic literature in 1988 by Marc Moens and Mark Steedman, who adopted it due to its "loose analogy with type-coercion in programming languages.” [3] In his written framework of the generative lexicon (a formal compositional approach to lexical semantics), Pustejovsky (1995:111) defines coercion as "a semantic ...