Lexical Semantics
The study of word meaning: sense and reference, sense relations, semantic fields, and prototype structure.
Lexical semantics is the study of word meaning. Its two central notions are sense and reference: sense is the meaning a word has within the language system, while reference is what the word picks out in the world. "The morning star" and "the evening star" have the same reference — the planet Venus — but different senses, which is why the two expressions cannot always be substituted for each other in sentences.
Words relate to one another in structured ways that lexical semantics catalogs. Synonymy is approximate sameness of meaning; antonymy is opposition; hyponymy is the "kind of" relation (a dog is a hyponym of animal); meronymy is the part–whole relation (a wheel is a meronym of a car); polysemy is one word with related meanings (the "head" of a person, a bed, a company); homonymy is unrelated words sharing a form ("bank"). These relations organize the vocabulary into networks that dictionaries and thesauri exploit.
Structuralist semantics analyzed meaning through semantic fields — groups of words that partition a conceptual domain, such as color terms or kinship terms. Prototype theory, developed by Rosch and colleagues in the 1970s, showed that categories have graded membership: a robin is a more central "bird" than a penguin. This finding challenged the classical view that concepts are defined by necessary and sufficient conditions.
Lexical semantics interfaces with syntax through argument structure — verbs specify how many participants they take and which semantic roles (agent, theme, goal) those participants fill — and with computational linguistics through distributional models of meaning. Word meaning is context-sensitive, and capturing that flexibility is a central problem for both lexicography and natural language processing.
Tags
linguistics meaning semantics vocabulary
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