Theories of Lexical Semantics

Author: Dirk Geeraerts
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019870030X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 362

Book Description
Theories of Lexical Semantics offers a comprehensive overview of the major traditions of word meaning research in linguistics. In spite of the growing importance of the lexicon in linguistic theory, no overview of the main theoretical trends in lexical semantics is currently available. This book fills that gap by charting the evolution of the discipline from the mid nineteenth century to the present day. It presents the main ideas, the landmark publications, and thedominant figures of five traditions: historical-philological semantics, structuralist semantics, generativist semantics, neostructuralist semantics, and cognitive semantics. The theoretical and methodological relationship between the approaches is a major point of attention throughout the text: going well beyond amere chronological enumeration, the book does not only describe the theoretical currents of lexical semantics, but also the undercurrents that have shaped its evolution.

Semantics - Theories

Author: Claudia Maienborn
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110589249
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 450

Book Description
Now in paperback for the first time since its original publication, the material gathered here is perfect for anyone who needs a detailed and accessible introduction to the important semantic theories. Designed for a wide audience, it will be of great value to linguists, cognitive scientists, philosophers, and computer scientists working on natural language. The book covers theories of lexical semantics, cognitively oriented approaches to semantics, compositional theories of sentence semantics, and discourse semantics. This clear, elegant explanation of the key theories in semantics research is essential reading for anyone working in the area.

The Oxford Handbook of Lexicography

Author: Philip Durkin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199691630
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 737

Book Description
This volume provides concise, authoritative accounts of the approaches and methodologies of modern lexicography and of the aims and qualities of its end products. Leading scholars and professional lexicographers, from all over the world and representing all the main traditions andperspectives, assess the state of the art in every aspect of research and practice. The book is divided into four parts, reflecting the main types of lexicography. Part I looks at synchronic dictionaries - those for the general public, monolingual dictionaries for second-language learners, andbilingual dictionaries. Part II and III are devoted to the distinctive methodologies and concerns of the historical dictionaries and specialist dictionaries respectively, while chapters in Part IV examine specific topics such as description and prescription; the representation of pronunciation; andthe practicalities of dictionary production. The book ends with a chronology of the major events in the history of lexicography. It will be a valuable resource for students, scholars, and practitioners in the field.

Semantic Theories in Europe, 1830-1930

Author: Brigitte Nerlich
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027245460
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 372

Book Description
It is widely believed by historians of linguistics that the 19th-century was largely devoted to historical and comparative studies, with the main emphasis on the discovery of soundlaws. Syntax is typically portrayed as a mere sideline of these studies, while semantics is seldom even mentioned. If it comes into view at all, it is usually assumed to have been confined to diachronic lexical semantics and the construction of some (mostly ill-conceived) typologies of semantic change. This book aims to destroy some of these prejudices and to show that in Europe semantics was an important, although controversial, area at that time. Synchronic mechanisms of semantic change were discovered and increasing attention was paid to the context of the sentence, to the speech situation and the users of the language. From being a semantics of transformations', a child of the biological-geological paradigm of historical linguistics with its close links to etymology and lexicography, the field matured into a semantics of comprehension and communication, set within a general linguistics and closely related to the emerging fields of psychology and sociology.

Lexical Analysis

Author: Patrick Hanks
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262312867
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 479

Book Description
A lexically based, corpus-driven theoretical approach to meaning in language that distinguishes between patterns of normal use and creative exploitations of norms. In Lexical Analysis, Patrick Hanks offers a wide-ranging empirical investigation of word use and meaning in language. The book fills the need for a lexically based, corpus-driven theoretical approach that will help people understand how words go together in collocational patterns and constructions to make meanings. Such an approach is now possible, Hanks writes, because of the availability of new forms of evidence (corpora, the Internet) and the development of new methods of statistical analysis and inferencing. Hanks offers a new theory of language, the Theory of Norms and Exploitations (TNE), which makes a systematic distinction between normal and abnormal usage—between rules for using words normally and rules for exploiting such norms in metaphor and other creative use of language. Using hundreds of carefully chosen citations from corpora and other texts, he shows how matching each use of a word against established contextual patterns plays a large part in determining the meaning of an utterance. His goal is to develop a coherent and practical lexically driven theory of language that takes into account the immense variability of everyday usage and that shows that this variability is rule governed rather than random. Such a theory will complement other theoretical approaches to language, including cognitive linguistics, construction grammar, generative lexicon theory, priming theory, and pattern grammar.

Words and Other Wonders

Author: Dirk Geeraerts
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110219123
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 505

Book Description
Cognitive Linguistics has given a major impetus to the study of semantics and the lexicon. The present volume brings together seventeen previously published papers that testify to the fruitfulness of Cognitive Linguistics for the study of lexical and semantic topics. Spanning the period from the late 1980s to recent years, the collection features a number of papers that may be considered classics within the field of cognitive linguistic lexicology. The papers are grouped in thematic sections. The first section deals with prototypicality as a theoretical and practical model of semantic description. The second section discusses polysemy and criteria for distinguishing between meanings. The third section tackles questions of meaning description beyond the level of words, on the level of idioms and constructions. The following section casts the net even wider, dealing with the cultural aspects of meaning. Moving away from the theoretical and descriptive perspective towards applied concerns, the fifth section looks at lexicography from the point of view of Cognitive Linguistics. The final section has a metatheoretical orientation: it discusses the history and methodology of lexical semantics. Each paper is preceded by a newly written introduction that situates the text against the period in which it was first published, but that also points to further developments, in the author's own research or in Cognitive Linguistics at large. The variety of topics dealt with make this book an excellent introduction to the broad field of lexicological and lexical semantic research.

The Geometry of Meaning

Author: Peter Gärdenfors
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262026783
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 357

Book Description
A novel cognitive theory of semantics that proposes that the meanings of words can be described in terms of geometric structures.

Theta Theory

Author: Martin Haiden
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110197472
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 308

Book Description
Theta Theory explores the lexicon as an interface in the strict sense, as facilitating the flow of information between cognition and the computational system of language. It argues for the traditional concept of a listed lexicon, where semantic roles are encoded as features of verbs, and against event decomposition. Part one of the book discusses the link between cognition and the lexicon. Mainstream theories of lexical semantics are critically reviewed. Furthermore, this part provides an extensive description of the relevant data in German, including agentivity, causation, psychological predicates, and different types of diathesis alternations. Part two is devoted to the link between the lexicon and syntax. It develops a parallel model of grammatical derivation, which allows the formulation of robust generalizations over thematic role assignment, but at the same time acknowledges the relevance of other components, in particular morpho-phonology and narrow syntax. The theory is applied to a wide range of German constructions including modal infinitives, the present and gerundive participle, the past/passive/adjectival participle, verbal particles, auxiliary selection, and unaccusatives/reflexives. The book is of interest for students and scholars of lexical semantics, for descriptive German linguistics, and for linguists concerned with the development of the Minimalist Program.

The Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics

Author: Barbara Dancygier
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108146139
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 1427

Book Description
The best survey of cognitive linguistics available, this Handbook provides a thorough explanation of its rich methodology, key results, and interdisciplinary context. With in-depth coverage of the research questions, basic concepts, and various theoretical approaches, the Handbook addresses newly emerging subfields and shows their contribution to the discipline. The Handbook introduces fields of study that have become central to cognitive linguistics, such as conceptual mappings and construction grammar. It explains all the main areas of linguistic analysis traditionally expected in a full linguistics framework, and includes fields of study such as language acquisition, sociolinguistics, diachronic studies, and corpus linguistics. Setting linguistic facts within the context of many other disciplines, the Handbook will be welcomed by researchers and students in a broad range of disciplines, including linguistics, cognitive science, neuroscience, gesture studies, computational linguistics, and multimodal studies.

Lexical Semantics: Semantic Fields and Collocations

Author: U. Dürr
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3656103534
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 18

Book Description
Seminar paper from the year 2011 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,0, University of Würzburg, language: English, abstract: This term paper will focus on an aspect of lexical semantics: interrelations of word meanings on a paradigmatic, as well as on a syntagmatic level. Starting with paradigmatic word relations, the paper will cover the topic of semantic fields first, describing the history of how this aspect was introduced to semantics and explaining the theoretical background behind the topic. Furthermore the development of different theories from the first structuralist approaches in the 1930s to the more recent approaches of cognitive semantics and the frame theory will be outlined. In the second part, the paper will cover the topic of syntagmatic relations of word meanings, namely collocations. The term will be defined and examples will be mentioned, before dealing with the important concepts of ‘statistically significant’ and ‘institutionalized collocations’. Finally there will be a demarcation to the phenomenon of idioms, before the term paper finishes with a conclusion about the whole topic.