Talk:Lexical semantics

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 27 August 2020 and 18 November 2020. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): JesseA123.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 02:31, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Definition

Believe it or not, in Linguistics, so-called "Lexical Semantics" is NOT the study of the meanings of word. It is, roughly, the study of how the semantic organization of the lexicon interacts with syntax. (I have taken several courses on lexical semantics. I am still waiting to be told the meaning of a single word.) 171.64.42.82 06:16, 11 Dec 2003 (UTC)

The article below tells us that lexical semantics is the study of word meaning and its representation in the lexicon. Perhaps this reflects a more implementation oriented view of computational linguistics. Hirzel 12:17, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)

The intro states that LS is a theory of denotation. That is , at the best, a small part of the truth (as shown by the Morning Star paradox) (He thinks the Morning Star is (not) the Evening Star, but the names denote the same entity). I agree with 171.64... above, who expects lexical semantics to tell what the words mean. We study words, not things (denotata). One relevant theoretician is Anna Wierzbicka, another tradition (when it is at its best) can be found within lexicography. Trondtr 17:38, 10 August 2006 (UTC).

Words may either be taken to denote things in the world or concepts, depending on the particular approach to lexical semantics.

Doesn't "either" suggest an alternative (as in "words may either be taken to be X, or Y)? It feels like a chunk of this sentence was removed, but the editing was too crude to also fix the "either" part.79.183.183.207 (talk) 21:38, 13 February 2014 (UTC)

The suggestion to define the study of lexical semantics in as the "study of how semantic organization of the lexicon interacts with syntax" is a good one, and I recommend that the introductory text be revised accordingly.--RM Dechaine (talk) 00:21, 2 November 2014 (UTC)

I have a master's in communications linguistics and I can assure you that on lexical semantics; the meaning of a single word is defined as/by the measure of One Unit of Meaning, whatever that meaning is therein irrelevant, rather that the word is used to denote meaning, as a signifier, the world's meaning is one unit of what is being signified. — ξriηξlaiηε—Ꭶαωժεηξηglaηժ Eewolf xxii (talk) 02:26, 24 January 2021 (UTC)

Resources

1. http://omni.cc.purdue.edu/~vraskin/Choices-TR.pdf Ten choices for lexical semantics;

Hirzel 12:14, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Point of contention

The current article states: "Lexical units are the words so lexical semantics involves the meaning of each individual word. Lexical semantics is the one area of linguistics to which we can continually add throughout our lives, as we are always learning new words and their meanings whereas we can only learn the rules of our native language during the critical period when we are young."

Many would raise issue with this statement. The concepts of critical periods, and the limitations on learning native language at a young age, are not completely agreed upon. Many would argue that all languaging is an ongoing process, not just the learning of new words. We are forever reassessing our conception of our native language. Be careful with statements like "lexical semantics is the ONE area..."; it's just not that clear.

71.70.188.146 19:11, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

Annotated bibliography

As a part of a linguistics university course, my group members and I will be expanding upon this stub in the next couple months. Below are some of the sources we plan to use, along with brief annotations detailing our reasons for selecting them.

Aronoff, M. (1978). Language and perception. [Review of the book: Language and Perception by G. A. Miller and P. N. Johnson-Laird]. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 7-1, 61-72. doi:10.1007/BF01068046

A book review of Language and Perception. Most of the book covers lexical semantics, shedding some light on its history and inception. It references feature theory as a branch of lexical semantics which, according to this review, is closely related to generative grammar. Miller and Johnson theorize that a word has two parts that define its meaning: a concept (its meaning) and a schema (what its concept refers to; its function). While the review also poses interesting questions about the nature of words and their relative meanings, it does little in the way of answering them.

Beavers, J., Levin, B. & Wei Tham, Shiao (2010). The typology of motion expressions revisited. Journal of Linguistics, 46, pp 331-377 doi:10.1017/ S0022226709990272

This abstract is of interest on many levels, one of which is typologically or cross-linguistically. Linguists refer to the encoding of movement, including verbs of motion, as encoding motion events. Without wanting to undermine Talmy's proposal that there are basically two ways of encoding motion events across languages, this paper proposes that what is needed is to look at the whole area of motion events from a different perspective, as recent studies reveal a much greater cross linguistic variation. Beth Levin(linguist) has written extensively on verbs and seems to be currently very active in this field of research. The abstract is certainly challenging at a student level but has interesting examples of how languages use morphology and syntax independent of the verb itself to encode movement.

Cushing, S. (1979). Lexical functions and lexical decomposition: An algebraic approach to lexical meaning. Linguistic Inquiry, 10-2, 327-345. Retrieved from: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4178110

Likens a lexicon to a highly structured algebra with domains, ranges, and lexical constraints. The article also talks about the use of functions over semantic markers to describe lexical meaning, the latter of which, according to Cushing, generally aren't of any significance outside of lexical meaning. The article itself seems rather mathematically computational in nature, however, which might be somewhat difficult to grasp.

Gainotti, G., Nocentini, U., Daniele, A., & Silveri, M. C. (1989). The nature of lexical-semantic impairment in Alzheimer’s disease. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 4(3-4), 449-460.

This peer-reviewed article discusses the hypothesis that the lexical-semantic relationship is not fixed within older, monolingual populations, and ultimately theorizes that the lexical-semantic relationship is dynamic throughout life. It highlights some general theories surrounding lexical semantics including semantic markers and the underlying organization of word types, while applying a Chomskyan-approach to lexical-semantic disorders in an Alzheimer’s population: namely, what we can learn about lexical-semantics when things go wrong. Note: During my research, I found a significant number of related articles even after changing keywords, etc. I believe the wealth of literature available means we should reflect this by including a subsection in our Wiki on the nature of lexical-semantic impairments, in which case this would be a good source. Having said this, a general shortcoming of this article is that it is very specific, and does not discuss lexical semantics broadly. Overall, I found this work to be interesting and a good candidate to include in a subsection of our Wiki because of its comprehensiveness covering the largely researched topic of lexical-semantic impairment.

Geeraerts, D. (2010). Theories of Lexical Semantics. Oxford: Oxford Universtiy Press.

This book seems to be much acclaimed, especially for its unique and timely appearance on the market as it presents an up to date overview of major trends in lexical semantics going back to the mid nineteenth century. Each of these traditions is presented in a chapter. The five chapters are: 1. historical philological semantics 2. structuralist semantics 3. generativist semantics 4. neostructuralist semantics 5. cognitive semantics. Besides the main ideas, Geeraerts gives major publications and important scholars throughout the history of this field, making it an excellent reference for intermediate students as well. As Geeraerts’ current research focuses on cognitive semantics, it is to be expected that he favours this newest trend in cognitive approaches to meaning. The last chapters in particular could be useful to gain a better understanding of where lexical semantics is at and where it is going.

Goddard, C. (2011). The lexical semantics of language. Language Sciences, 33(1), 40-57. doi: 10.1016/j.langsci.2010.03.003

This article discusses word meanings across various languages, cultures and domains. It also expresses on the lacking status of lexical semantics in the linguistics field. This article contains many cross-linguistic studies to show word meaning relationships between them which is definitely valuable to understand differences and similarities that may arise with respect to lexical semantics. This article is written with a very empirical and analytical view/ approach which allows clear understanding to how words like ‘language’ and ‘culture’ contributed to the area of lexical semantics. However, one particular shortcoming of this article is that some information and examples that are provided are very detailed which may not be suitable for our project. Nevertheless, this article provides examples and information on studies that may fit under many categories of our Wikipedia project on lexical semantics.

Harris, R. A. (1995). The Linguistics Wars. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

This academically published book provides a focus on the theoretical debates within the 1960s and 1970s in reference to generative semantics. There are multiple chapters detailing the theoretical history of generative semantics. These provide a large amount of information, some of which appears to be useful in reference to the field of lexical semantics. This book may be most useful for the overall theoretical history it provides, and should aid in the understanding of the different theoretical models and how we have ended up where we are today. It may prove difficult to sift through all the information in the book, and the highly theoretical, historical and discussion-based nature of the book means that it provides only a broad view of the topics. We will have to look elsewhere for specifics and examples.

Johnson, K. (2008). An overview of lexical semantics. Philosophy Compass, 3(1), 119-134. doi:10.1111/j.1747-9991.2007.00101.x

This article gives a brief overview of lexical semantics, specifically delving into research on the grammatical distribution in semantic structure. It then discusses the relation between words and the concepts they’re connected to. Given that this article was written from a philosophical viewpoint—it was published in a philosophy journal—it gives some valuable insight into the origins of lexical semantics from the philosophical study of word meanings. One shortcoming of this piece, for the scope of our research at least, is that it delves a little too deeply into specific details of semantics research. Personally, I believe this article will be useful for brief details regarding the connections between philosophy and lexical semantics, but may not prove useful beyond that.

Johnson-Laird, P. (1987). The mental representation of the meaning of words. Cognition, 25(1-2), 189-211.

This peer-reviewed article is a good ‘foundation’ piece for the Wiki project, as it discusses lexical semantics in five core areas: (1) the limited, introspective access to the nature of lexical representations; (2) the existence of lexical entries that make accessible the sense of a word; (3) the effects of context on the interpretation of words; (4) the systematic gaps in the acquisition of lexical knowledge; and (5) the existence of different semantic types of open-class words. In the last section, the different semantic types help to provide evidence for the author’s claim that we can be conscious of what a word means and be conscious of the HOW and the WHY we know it, but are unconscious of the underlying structure, and what this means for our understanding of the particular lexicon. The topic is largely written from a syntactician standpoint. The article was dense and somewhat complex, but I believe that this information from the late 80’s presents a nice platform for introducing the more modern thoughts on our topic.

Lappin, S. (Ed.). (1996). Handbook of contemporary semantic theory. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers.

This academically published book provides a clear understanding of the field of semantics, with specific focus in one chapter on lexical semantics and syntactic structure. The book is written to provide an overview of all important topics related to semantic theory. The lexical semantics and syntactic structure chapter provides a brief discussion of the history of semantics and syntax in relation to each other, and goes on to introduce the non-accusative hypothesis. This chapter also provides a case study of ‘verbs of sound’ as a way of analyzing ways in which semantics and syntax work together to dictate structure for certain types of words. There are additional chapters with focus on formal semantics and the interference between syntax and semantics which provide information which supports the field of lexical semantics. Further research may be necessary before understanding whether these additional chapters will be useful for us, as lots of fringe information seems to be presented and it will be difficult at this point in our research to know how useful they will be.

Storjohann, P. (2010). Lexical-semantic relations: Theoretical and practical perspectives. Philadelphia; Amsterdam: John Benjamins Pub. Co.

This book concerns over different understandings of lexical semantics with regards to “sense relations”. In efforts to explore various use of data as lexical resource, it also focuses on the building of these lexical resources. This book also contains many cross-linguistic studies to show word meaning relationships between them. The points made in this book regarding lexical semantics may be useful for branching into specific ideas in our Wikipedia presentation. This book is presented with a data based view which is great for unbiased understanding of the material. Yet, a shortcoming of this book is that it seems to focus too much on methodologies of lexical semantics which may not be the most useful for our project. Still, this book covers a lot of cross-linguistic examples that may also be helpful to understand what occurs between different languages with respect to lexical semantics.

Von Fintel, K., & Matthewson, L. (2008). Universals in semantics. Linguistic Review, 25(1-2), 139-201. doi:10.1515/TLR.2008.004

This article looks at the possibility of semantic universals. It examines the possibility of universals within the lexicon, functional morphemes and composition principles, and pragmatics. It may be very useful should we decide to make a subheading on the universals of lexical semantics i.e.what it looks like across different languages. We may find that it delves too deeply into the specifics of semantics research, which may not be necessary for our purposes.

Stephmau (talk) 05:16, 3 October 2014 (UTC)

Review from C2

Hi C1! We're going to copy-edit your article by Sunday. :) We'll be posting the comments here most likely on Sunday night. Xmizuro (talk) 07:23, 1 November 2014 (UTC)

(i) Clarity

The introduction is well formed and clearly states what the article is about. Proper linking makes this an accessible article for anyone with general to little linguistic knowledge. Furthermore, in the introduction, explanations following specific terminology are concise and self-explanatory, adding on the clarity of this article. However, lists of terminologies (one of which can be seen at the end of the introductory part) are better avoided to maintain a steady pace and clarity; a suggestion would be to find umbrella terms for the different terminologies if possible. This is a very narrow topic and it is expected that there will be lot of jargon. However, as a first time reader, some parts were very difficult to understand (e.g. history). It would be great if more links were added to different pages or terms could be explained. Words like syntactic atoms, lexical entry, and VP shells could be defined or linked.

(ii) Verifiability

Overall, your sources are verifiable and it’s possible to find the papers or books that were used in the article. However, “Glossary of Linguistic Terms” needs to be correctly cited; at the moment, there is only a link to the site and nothing else. Otherwise, there was no problem in verifying your sources. Regarding actually verifying what is on the Wikipedia page, most claims can be verified. However, there were a couple paragraphs in the article that could receive more citations. For example, the part where causality in English and Tagalog was mentioned; and in the introduction, which only had two citations, but many points about what lexical semantics is that could have been cited.

(iii) Neutrality

Overall, this article is edited from a neutral point of view. Basically, some of the controversial issues are presented fairly, proportionately, and without bias. However, some of the aspects need a better balance, in terms of the equal weight of clearness, validity, and significance to the article topics. Some of the terms just appear as a jargon with neither clear definition/introduction, nor links to other Wikipedia pages that can explain them to readers. For instance, in the section of “history of VP shells”, when ‘“lexicalist" theories’ is used, it is not clear what is being referred to. What are probing techniques exactly, and why are they more sophisticated? Considering the target readers of Wikipedia, it would be helpful if more explanations or more related Wikipedia articles are introduced for these terminologies, since there are from various theoretical viewpoints. Also in the section of “history of VP shells”, considering the neutrality expectation, the necessity of mentioning what are in the majority in current theories may need to be reconsidered.

(iv) Quality of research

The quality of research is good since the authors just started looking for sources. It’s good to see that papers from peer-reviewed journals and reliable books have been used. However, a few sources (Johnson, and SKS) are used repeatedly for several points throughout the article, causing a bit of dependency. It would be better to diversify and look at the topic from many different perspectives. There is a good overview on the history of the topic; however, the section is a little dense with all of the information presented. The quality of research is great, but a little bit difficult to read, requiring some re-wording.

(v) Comprehensiveness

The article presents its data and evidence in a concrete manner, easing the process of understanding the topic. Furthermore, the style and lay-out of the article aid in the presentation of the material, which ultimately impacts comprehensiveness. However, some data sections seem to be lacking explanations. Inchoative/Anticausative Verbs section is rather short and does not quite hit the mark in terms of comprehension. More information could be added to this section, as well as The Unaccusative Hypothesis and Ditransitive Verbs sections. The style of Causative Verbs and Changes of State sections are more ideal, as more information is provided and hence a much clearer understanding.

(vi) Lay-out

The outline of the article has a lovely flow to it and easily changes sections. The definitions of some words in-between parenthesis were particularly helpful, and overall terms were linked to related pages. There are a few word choices like “atom” where a definition or disambiguation might be in order to explain how it is different from the scientific term. The flow into the data section was nice, however within the section no direct reference was made to the examples. Perhaps explaining the examples explicitly would help readers new to the field better understand the examples. Labelling which language is used for the example within the box would make it easier to quickly read over the page. Overall though, the article looks great, it just needs a little more data and some fine tuning of the transitions. Some concluding statements after the data would help summarize the important points of the article as well as giving the reader some take away points about why such a topic is important in the field.

(vii) Citations

Lexical semantics has done well in using a variety of sources from which to obtain their information. Wikipedia has some formatting tools for citations, which will help uniform the reference section (currently, most of the references follow variant styles of formatting, or no formatting at all). There is a template provided in the editing pane for which one only has to fill out the necessary information. Because of the lack of uniform formatting, many of the citations are missing important information such as volume/issue number, and journal or article title. Further, for the data examples especially, page numbers (and original example numbers) from where in the article the information was found are crucially needed.

(viii) Images

There are currently no images in the article. Trees or diagrams of the verbs assigning theta roles to their arguments would help readers better understand the differences between the different verb examples.

(ix) Style

In general, this article has an informative lead section and also a sense of Wikipedia-style framework. However, the consistency between the introduction in the lead section and the actual content in the following sections needs to be improved. The framework of the section headings, as well as the way the section headings are named may also need more consideration. The leading section provides a detailed overview of the article topic, but the framework of the topic that is described in the lead section (the three main areas the topic covers) do not seem to be consistently developed in the following sections. Otherwise, the content of the lead is good and clear. It seems that if second and third paragraph were swapped, the overall layout would look clearer and smoother. “What the topic covers” is more of the general and basic information that the readers expect, while “the unit of meaning” is a more specific concept and is closer related to the fourth paragraph. Also, there is no link on “syntax” between when it firstly appears in the first paragraph, until it appears again in the third paragraph. Most of the sections provide very well focused and profound discussion. The headings of the sections are very specific about the actual content within every section, but if we look at the overall framework with these heading (i.e. the content table), it does not seem to give readers a systematic sense of the concrete structure of the topic. All the contents are under “syntax of lexical semantics”, which are further divided into “introduction”, “history of VP shells,” and paralleled with three specific yet seemingly segmental sections. For instance, “history of VP shells”— it might be a specific term from the literature and it is a very vivid way of expression, but for the ease of the readers, if might be a better choice to change it to a more Wikipedia-style heading, namely, a more concise and direct one, similar to some of the other headings. Overall, try to choose some more descriptive headings, so that readers will be able to predict what each section is about, rather than using jargon or unfamiliar terms. Regarding the major purposes of Wikipedia, it would be more effective if the headings are clear, concise, and make sense to general readers, so that they can tract the contents, and find the answers of this topic that they may have in their mind before they start reading. Some suggestions include: (1) In the history section, there is “probing techniques” that “allowed syntacticians to hypothesize that lexical items with complex syntactic features (such as ditransitive, inchoative, and causative verbs), could select their own specifier element within a syntax tree construction.” Maybe try to start a new subsection here, and move the following specific subsection under this one? (2) Also under the history section, you start talking about current theories, maybe give it an independent section, and start elaborating it from there. (3) In “there are two types of change of state verbs: inchoative and causative” —it may be prudent to give two separate sub headings to introduce each concept. Lastly, there is no “binary-branching” page — it is a dead link.

Copy-edits

Edited some minor grammatical mistakes such as spelling and the use of As and Vs for adjectives and verbs. Also edited some non-neutral words such as “influential researchers”. Xmizuro (talk) 05:48, 3 November 2014 (UTC)

Fixed over-linking of causative and inchoative in Change of state section FulcoE (talk) 05:49, 3 November 2014 (UTC)

Fixed linking/structure of hyponymy and hypernymy so that both words act as the same link (given that there's one page only) FulcoE (talk) 05:49, 3 November 2014 (UTC)

Fixed Fodor citation to follow template guidelines, and linked several unfamiliar terms found within the article. -Tsadler00 (talk) 19:57, 3 November 2014 (UTC)

Tightened some of the wording in the introductory paragraphs, reduced repetitive phrasing and and changed passive voice to active voice.LingAnthNerd (talk) 00:46, 4 November 2014 (UTC)

Swapped the contents in lead section; added link to "syntax"; changed link layout in "History of VP shells section"Ziyasummer (talk) 04:57, 4 November 2014 (UTC)

Fixed citations

Since there were a couple sources that were cited multiple times in the footnotes (specifically, the Johnson and Lappin sources), I united them under a single footnote for each. Let me know if any of you want help with this in the future! Stephmau (talk) 22:57, 8 November 2014 (UTC)

Revisions of Aritcle

Referring to C2's comments/feedback, we (C1) have revised the article accordingly.

(i) Clarity • The introduction has been streamlined to make it as simple to read as possible for readers, while still giving a clear picture of what lexical semantics is. We have removed the list of terminologies in the introduction, moving them to a more appropriate subsection for further clarification.

(ii) Verifiability • Sources cited in our article come from standard linguistic literature and we have attempted to footnote as often as needed. Many of our sources (if not all) come from peer-reviewed journals and academic online databases, making them verifiable. We have also properly cited the “Glossary of Linguistic Terms” reference mentioned by Group C2, crediting the website’s editors and adding the website title to the reference.

(iii) Neutrality • Terms that were regarded as jargon have now been briefly explained and linked to other Wikipedia pages. Additionally, adjectives such as “prominent” when referring to theorists and syntacticians have been removed to maintain Wikipedia’s pillar of neutrality.

(iv) Quality of research • We have expanded our list of sources, referring to works by a variety of respected linguists (Haspelmath, Kayne, etc.) to add more balanced, diverse content to our article. The history section will also be expanded with more research and certain sections are still in progress.. •

(v) Comprehensiveness • Regarding your concerns about our change of state section, we have made appropriate changes to the inchoative/causative section as well as the ditransitive/unaccusative sections. We have given more concise introductions explaining why these sections are related to the overall topic of lexical semantics, and clarified why certain examples were given to better explain these types of verbs. • The ditransitive verb section was changed to the ‘change-of-possession predicates’ section, and has been edited to include more thoroughly introduced and explained examples. Tree diagrams were also added for each example. Two sub-sections were added to cover in more depth the two theories that have dealt specifically with ditransitive verbs and their tree structures. Within the Unambiguous path section, more tree diagrams were added in order to fully illustrate the theory. The theory is also introduced and explained in reference to the introductory information for a more comprehensive look at how the theories developed and contrast.

(vi) Lay-out • As previously mentioned, we have taken your comments into consideration regarding the layout of the examples and added steps to make them as clear as possible. In the inchoative/causative alternation section, we have added the names of the languages within the examples to make it more immediately clear, and we have also placed examples in their proper context.

(vii) Citations • To avoid cluttering and to reduce redundancy, the citations appearing more than once are linked as a/b/c, etc. in the references section..

(viii) Images • We have added pictures of tree diagrams where appropriate to clarify and give examples from other languages.Tree diagrams have been formatted in a uniform manner, and have all been introduced and explained in a way that weaves them in with the information as it is introduced.

(ix) Style • Based on the comments made by group C2 and help from our Linguistics 300 instructor, Rose-Marie Déchaine, Ph.D, we have revised the style and framework of our article. First, we introduced our main focus “lexical semantics,” and broke this topic down from the existing Wiki stub into three specific sections: 1) Semantic classification of lexical items 2) The syntactic basis of event structure: a brief history, and 3) Syntactic analysis of event types. These three topics make it easier to maintain the Wiki-structure and keep the layout consistent, which was one of C2’s concerns. • Furthermore, these three topics are more specific than our previous headings. This was an improvement from our last version, where sections tended to be too long without subheadings. For example, we have broken the “change of state verbs” into their own sections, namely organizing subheadings for “change of possession” and “change of state predicates”. This was possible through the feedback we received from C2 and Dr. Déchaine. • Additional internal links have been added to the article, specifically <syntax>, <general semantics,> and more specific information, including links to noteworthy books and literature that are available on Wikipedia (such as “Syntactic Structures” by Noam Chomsky). The dead link mentioned by group C2 has been removed. Veegu (talk) 08:19, 14 November 2014 (UTC)