Key words:

component, classical theory, definition, encyclopedic information, decomposition, necessary and suff icient conditions, semantic feature, semantic primitive, redundancy rules, prototype

Overview

This chapter introduces componential approaches to meaning and some of the more serious challenges to such approaches. In componential approaches, word senses are built out of constituent parts – that is, word senses are complexes of simpler meaning components. One type of componential approach is the Classical Theory of meaning, which defines words on the basis of necessary and sufficient conditions. After looking at general properties of classical componential approaches, we turn to Katz's groundbreaking work in the classical style from the 1960s and 1970s. Then we examine some psychological evidence about the nature of meanings – that senses have “fuzzy boundaries” and display “prototype effects.” This kind of evidence invalidates the classical notion that all senses are based strictly on necessary and sufficient conditions. Yet as we see in chapter 4, other componential approaches have risen to these challenges. This chapter provides some of the vocabulary that we need for discussing the more contemporary theories.

Key words:

pragmatics, inference, entailment, denotation, connotation, social meaning, affect, sense, reference, referential theory, extension, image theory

Overview

While the last chapter defined the lexical in lexical meaning, in this chapter we start to consider the meaning of meaning. While the term meaning is used in many ways inside and outside the discipline of linguistics, the semantic approach in this book is particularly concerned with denotative meaning. The next section compares denotative meaning to other meaning types and looks at the questions lexical semanticists ask and why they ask them. After that, we look at how to define denotative meaning, focusing on defining the difference between what a word refers to and what a word “means.”

Key words:

verb, predicate, argument, alternation, conf lation, event, state, motion verb, f igure, ground, path, manner, causative, copula, relational adjective, relational noun, preposition

Overview

Grammatically speaking, sentences (at least in English) are organized around a main verb, while semantically speaking the heart of a sentence is its main predicate, which is often represented by a verb. Sentences represent situations (either states or events), and so verbs can be expected to play a big part in the expression of situations. But a verb itself usually does not express a complete situation – so verbs interact semantically with other parts of the sentence, their arguments, in order to represent complete situations. This chapter starts with a focus on verb meaning, since most verbs have predicative meanings and verbs are central to sentences. The next section discusses predication, followed by a section on differentiating states and events. We look at these distinctions and at the relationship between verbs and other participants in states/events through a detailed analysis of motion verbs, particularly with reference to Jackendoff's Conceptual Semantics model. At the end of this chapter we examine how other word classes can serve as semantic predicates too.

Key words:

lexical semantics, lexicon, lexis, mental lexicon, lexeme, conventional, (non-)compositional, arbitrary, lexical unit, word, idiom, collocation, open/closed class, lexicography, corpus, native speaker intuition

Overview

In order to set the stage for exploring lexical semantics, this chapter defines basic terms and ideas in the field, particularly the notions of lexicon, lexeme, and word. It then describes and evaluates four methods for investigating the lexicon: dictionaries, corpora, intuition, and experimentation.

Lexical semantics is approached by students of linguistics at various points in their undergraduate and graduate curricula, and this book is intended to suit anyone who has had some introduction to linguistics, but who has not yet studied lexical semantics in any depth. Given such a broad audience, it is inevitable that at some points in the text some readers will consider the material difficult and others will consider it a bit basic. My aim is to present problems of word meaning in all their messy glory – showing where there are interesting problems to be solved and considering multiple viewpoints on those problems. The big questions of how meanings work have been pondered for centuries, but the answers remain elusive, since how these questions can be answered depends upon the background assumptions about the nature of language, meaning, and mind that different approaches bring to them. In order to limit the range of background assumptions, this book is biased toward componential theories that are compatible with generative approaches to grammar. For readers who already have some general knowledge about linguistic theories, this book demonstrates how those approaches tackle issues of word meaning. Readers for whom these theories are not yet familiar will discover how their perspectives vary when it comes to the lexicon and meaning. If this leaves you wanting more information about the theories generally, the “Further reading” section near the end of each chapter plots out a proposed course of reading to broaden and deepen your knowledge of these subjects.

Adopt-a-word

Two types of exercise are provided at the end of each chapter. The general exercises provide problems to think about and new data with which to practice the concepts introduced in the chapter. In addition to these, each chapter has some “Adopt-a-word” assignments. These assignments allow you to explore the concepts introduced in the text through the perspective of a single word. We will cover a variety of topics and theoretical perspectives in a limited number of pages, but if you specialize in a particular word, you will be able to explore those topics in some depth and build on the knowledge you gain from chapter to chapter, rather than just flitting from one topic to the next. While you may cover a lot of linguistic ground, you will follow a coherent theme – the study of a particular word.

Key words:

paradigmatic, syntagmatic, semantic relation, lexical relation, synonym, contrast, antonym, complementary, contrary, converse, hyponym, hyperonym, meronym, holonym, dictionary approach, thesaurus approach, semantic field, lexical blocking

Overview

This chapter examines particular semantic relations among words. They are called semantic relations because they are relations between senses. Some cases of semantic relation can also be lexical relations in which it is not just the meanings that are related, but also other aspects of the lexemes, like morphological form or collocational patterns. After looking at the details of synonymy, hyponymy, antonymy, and other relations, we evaluate two approaches to the representation of semantic relations in the mental lexicon. In the first approach, the lexicon is theorized to be like a dictionary, which records senses but not necessarily relations among them. The second views the lexicon like a thesaurus, in which relations, but not meanings, are represented.

Key words:

count, mass, non-count noun, bounded, internal structure, individual, aggregate, group, substance, linguistic relativity, cultural relativity

Overview

If you tell people that you study lexical semantics or “the meaning of words,” they are likely to assume that you spend your time thinking about things like “What does love mean?” or “What is a table, really?” While some lexical semanticists do think about questions like this, much lexical semantic work on nouns is instead focused on larger categories of nouns with particular morphosyntactic properties and patterns of polysemy. After discussing the types of issues that such nouns raise in the next section, this chapter looks at why it is that some nouns are countable and others are not. That is, some nouns, like cucumber or bungalow, can be preceded by numerals and made plural (104 cucumbers, three bungalows), and others are mass nouns and not usually made plural – for example fog (#three fogs) and wheat (#twenty-seven wheats). After discussing the issue of countability in general, we look at the Conceptual Semantics componential treatment of some countability categories and the polysemy of nouns in relation to those categories, then Chierchia's proposal that mass nouns are inherently plural. Lastly, we look at how languages may differ in their treatment of nouns for particular things and ask whether these differences are arbitrary or culturally predictable, with particular attention to the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach.

Key words:

word class, ontology, ontological category, semantic type, time-stability, derivation

Overview

We are used to hearing descriptions like “a noun names a person, place, or thing” or “a verb is an action word.” If you have already studied some linguistics, you've probably learnt that these semantic descriptions of word classes are insufficient, and instead categories like noun and verb are best defined by their morphosyntactic properties – such as where they can occur in sentences and what suffixes they can take. After all, any English noun can head the subject of an English sentence, but not all such nouns denote persons, places, or things (e.g., oblivion, unconventionality), and all lexical verbs in English sentences agree with their subjects, but not all describe actions (e.g. resemble, prefer). Nevertheless, there may be something to the notion that nouns are more thing-like and verbs are more action-y. In this chapter we introduce ontological, or semantic, categories, which can be used to classify meaning types, and look at the degree to which these semantic types correspond to grammatical word classes. This includes looking at the question of what happens when we use different word classes to describe the same kind of thing. For example, does it mean something different to use an adjective rather than a noun, as in Richard is optimistic and Richard is an optimist?

Key words:

vague, indeterminate, ambiguity, homonymy, polysemy, zeugma, regular (systematic) polysemy, metonymy, metaphor, monosemy, coercion

Overview

In this chapter we turn our attention to an issue we set aside earlier: the fact that in different contexts the same word form can be understood to have different semantic interpretations. For instance book can mean ‘a collection of pages that are bound in a rigid cover’ (hand me that book), ‘the information contained in a collection of pages that are bound in a rigid cover’ (that book is depressing) or ‘reserve’ (We want to book a table for four), and in any of its senses book can point to lots of different kinds of things. For example, the ‘collection of pages’ sense could refer to this book or to a phone book, and the ‘reserve’ sense of book can be used for booking a restaurant by phone or booking a hotel on-line. This chapter reviews three ways in which a single word form can have more than one interpretation: homonymy, polysemy, and vagueness. We'll refer to these three phenomena collectively as cases of meaning variation. After defining the types of meaning variation, we consider whether or not they denote completely distinct phenomena. Next we focus on polysemy (when a single word has several senses) and discuss how words come to have multiple senses and how those senses relate to one another. Finally, we consider how polysemy is treated in two theoretical approaches: the componential approach of Pustejovsky and the frame-based approach of Fillmore.

Key words:

aktionsart, aspect, static, dynamic, durative, punctual, telic, atelic, vendler class, activity, accomplishment, achievement

Overview

As we saw in chapter 7, typical verbs denote change – that is, the situations they describe are not time-stable. The last chapter concentrated on predication and the conflation of arguments into verb meanings, but it also discussed two types of situation that differ in their relationship to time: states and events. Stative verbs describe situations that involve little or no change, while dynamic verbs describe events in which changes, including physical actions or changes of state, happen. This chapter delves further into the relationship of verbs with time, exploring the differences between states and events and among various kinds of event. We are particularly interested here in lexical aspect, also known as Aktionsart.

Key words:

selectional binding, gradable/non-gradable, scale, scalar/non-scalar, absolute/relative, dimension, intensifier, positive/equative/comparative/superlative, standard of comparison, neutral range, open/closed scale, neutralization

Overview

As discussed in chapter 7, adjectives typically denote properties, many of which are gradable. In this chapter, we examine types of gradable and non-gradable adjectives and go into some detail about the use of dimensional scales (introduced in §6.2.4) to represent adjective meaning. We'll see how such scales can help to clarify aspects of the interpretation of gradable adjectives (e.g. why a deep ocean is deeper than a deep bowl) and the neutralization of some adjectives in some contexts (i.e. why we can say a child is six years old without committing ourselves to the proposition that the child is old). Before exploring these issues, we look at another source of variability in adjective meaning – why, for example, a good knife is sharp, but a good chair is not.

Key words:

conceptual semantics, (lexical) concept, generative lexicon, qualia, natural semantic metalanguage, semantic prime, explication

Overview and questions

While the Classical-style componential approaches of the last chapter were too inflexible to account for fuzzy meaning, various current componential approaches have broken down the traditional barrier between lexical and conceptual representations of meaning, thus confronting more directly the relation between linguistic semantics and general cognition, as well as interfacing with current theories of grammatical structure. This chapter gives overviews of three componential approaches: Jackendoff's Conceptual Semantics, Pustejovsky's Generative Lexicon, and Wierzbicka's Natural Semantic Metalanguage. Particular applications of these approaches are discussed in more detail in later chapters. The purpose of this chapter is to draw out the main motivations of these approaches and their chief similarities and differences. After looking at these componential approaches, we briefly consider two non-componential alternatives: meaning atomism and image schemas.