Lexical semantics
• Study of word meaning
• Aims:
– Represent meaning of each word
Lexical Semantics – Meaning of morphemes and multi-word units
– Show interrelation of meanings of words
Words and lexical items
• Lexicon and lexeme
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“In the beginning was the Word…“ Approaches/ perspectives
• Almost everything in language is related to • The orthographic approach
words central for understanding of • The phonetic approach
language • The phonological approach
• Psychological reality of words for speakers • The semantic approach
• Associations between concept of word and • The grammatical approach
concept of language: eg. Proverbs
more than one way of looking at words
• Words are vital for communication!? interaction with other elements and linguistic
environment
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Definitions of word Definitions of word
• Minimal meaningful unit • A word cannot be interrupted or have its parts
– Adjective firm: something fairly hard, solid, cf. the reordered
word confirm, firm - a morpheme – no lexical – INTRODUCTion *Our today’s topic is Introduct to lexical
meaning semantics ion.
• A word can be moved about in a sentence, or its – Wann fangen Sie an? (When do you begin?)
position relative to other constituents in a – Heute ruft er seine Freundin an. (Today he’s calling his
sentence can be altered by inserting new girlfriend).
constituents • Words have a characteristic internal structure:
– Our topic is “Lexical semantics”. they normally have no more than one root
– Our topic today is “Introduction to lexical • BUTTER-FLY
semantics”. • BLACK-BOARD
– “Introduction to lexical semantics” is our topic today. • Some words have no lexical root at all: the, and, of
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Lexical meaning vs. grammatical
Meaning below word level
meaning
Words and grammatical categories • Morphology: form, shape, internal
• Names, common nouns, pronouns etc. structure of words and
• He walks like a duck.
processes of word formation
• He‘s walking like a duck.
• He walked like a duck.
• Basic unit: Morpheme
• For semantics = instances of the same lexeme smallest, indivisible
(three grammatical words) meaningful component
• The meaning of words is a combination of the
lexical meaning and the grammatical meaning
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Types of morphemes Types of morphemes
• Free vs. Bound (affixes) • Morphemes, morphs and allomorphs
derivational morpheme
• Bound morphemes ‘ past tense‘
inflectional
allomorph allomorph allomorph
• Morphemes, morphs and allomorphs
morph morph morph
/id/ /d/ /t/
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Types of morphemes Word-formation
• Roots Inflectional
(deals with forms of
• Affixes individual lexems)
Class-maintaining
• Stems Morphology Derivation
• Bases (affixation) Class-changing
Word-formation
(deals with formation
compound nouns
of new lexemes)
Compounding compound verbs
(more than 1 root)
compound adjectives
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Word-formation Relations between words
• Composition/ compounding • Meaning of words is defined partly by relations
• Derivation to other words with words in the same
sentence (syntagmatic)
• Zero-derivation/ Conversion with related but absent
• Clipping words (paradigmatic)
• Blending • E.g.: I talked to my mother yesterday.
• Backformation • Lexical relations are central to the construction
• Acronyms of meaning
Student presentation
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