The Audiopedia
What is LEXICAL SEMANTICS? What does LEXICAL SEMANTICS mean? LEXICAL SEMANTICS meaning – LEXICAL SEMANTICS definition – LEXICAL SEMANTICS explanation.
Source: Wikipedia.org article, adapted under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ license.
Lexical semantics (also known as lexicosemantics), is a subfield of linguistic semantics. The units of analysis in lexical semantics are lexical units which include not only words but also sub-words or sub-units such as affixes and even compound words and phrases. Lexical units make up the catalogue of words in a language, the lexicon. Lexical semantics looks at how the meaning of the lexical units correlates with the structure of the language or syntax. This is referred to as syntax-semantic interface.
The study of lexical semantics looks at:
– the classification and decomposition of lexical items,
– the differences and similarities in lexical semantic structure cross-linguistically,
– the relationship of lexical meaning to sentence meaning and syntax.
Lexical units, also referred to as syntactic atoms, can stand alone such as in the case of root words or parts of compound words or they necessarily attach to other units such as prefixes and suffixes do. The former are called free morphemes and the latter bound morphemes. They fall into a narrow range of meanings (semantic fields) and can combine with each other to generate new meanings.
Lexical items contain information about category (lexical and syntactic), form and meaning. The semantics related to these categories then relate to each lexical item in the lexicon. Lexical items can also be semantically classified based on whether their meanings are derived from single lexical units or from their surrounding environment.
Lexical items participate in regular patterns of association with each other. Some relations between lexical items include hyponymy, hypernymy, synonymy and antonymy, as well as homonymy. .
what a lot of jargon! cause more confusion!
Even with overlooking the stilted mechanical narrator, there was not a single example given to clarify the content. The only way to understand this explanation of lexical semantics is to already know what lexical semantics are. This was poorly done.
This not Lexical Semantics!! Definition: lexical semantics, concerned with the analysis of word meanings and relations between them. Simple.