Theories of Lexical Semantics

by Geeraerts, Dirk

• ISBN13: 9780198700302
• ISBN10: 019870030X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-04-19
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Theories of Lexical Semantics offers a comprehensive overview of the major traditions of word meaning research in linguistics. In spite of the growing importance of the lexicon in linguistic theory, no overview of the main theoretical trends in lexical semantics is currently available. Thisbook fills that gap by charting the evolution of the discipline from the mid nineteenth century to the present day. It presents the main ideas, the landmark publications, and the dominant figures of five traditions: historical-philological semantics, structuralist semantics, generativist semantics,neostructuralist semantics, and cognitive semantics. The theoretical and methodological relationship between the approaches is a major point of attention throughout the text: going well beyond a mere chronological enumeration, the book does not only describe the theoretical currents of lexicalsemantics, but also the undercurrents that have shaped its evolution.

Author Biography

Dirk Geeraerts is Professor of Theoretical Linguistics at the University of Leuven and head of the research group Quantitative Lexicology and Variational Linguistics. He is the author of The Structure of Lexical Variation (1994), Diachronic Prototype Semantics (1997), and Words and Other Wonders (2006) and the editor, along with Hubert Cuyckens, of The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics (2007).

Table of Contents

List of Figures	p. x
Preface	p. xi
Introduction	p. xiii
Historical-philological Semantics	p. 1
The birth of lexical semantics	p. 2
Speculative etymology	p. 2
The rhetorical tradition	p. 5
Lexicography	p. 7
The nature of meaning	p. 9
Bréal on meaning and mind	p. 10
Paul on context and usage	p. 14
Variant voices	p. 16
Classifications of semantic change	p. 25
Main types of change	p. 26
Lower-level patterns	p. 31
Classificatory complexities	p. 35
Beyond historical-philological semantics	p. 42
Further sources for Chapter 1	p. 45
Structuralist Semantics	p. 47
The structuralist conception of meaning	p. 48
Arguing against historical-philological semantics	p. 49
Types of structuralist semantics	p. 52
Lexical field theory	p. 53
Trier's concept of lexical fields	p. 53
Lexical fields and syntagmatic relations	p. 57
Lexical fields and formal relations	p. 60
The discreteness of lexical fields	p. 65
Componential analysis	p. 70
Componential analysis in American ethnosemantics	p. 71
Componential analysis in European structuralist semantics	p. 74
Relational semantics	p. 80
Major sense relations	p. 82
Theoretical issues	p. 88
Beyond structuralist semantics	p. 91
Further sources for Chapter 2	p. 98
Generativist Semantics	p. 101
Katzian semantics	p. 102
Formal dictionary entries	p. 102
The emulation of structuralist semantics	p. 104
Tensions in generativist semantics	p. 106
Minimal or maximal semantics?	p. 106
Decompositional or axiomatic semantics?	p. 113
Beyond generativist semantics	p. 117
Further sources for Chapter 3	p. 122
Neostructuralist Semantics	p. 124
Elaborating the decompositional approach	p. 126
Natural Semantic Metalanguage	p. 127
Conceptual Semantics	p. 137
Two-Level Semantics	p. 142
Generative Lexicon	p. 147
Elaborating the relational approach	p. 156
WordNet	p. 158
Lexical functions	p. 161
Distributional corpus analysis	p. 165
Further sources for Chapter 4	p. 179
Cognitive Semantics	p. 182
Prototypicality and salience	p. 183
Prototypicality effects	p. 184
Radial networks and polysemy	p. 192
Basic levels and onomasiological salience	p. 199
Conceptual metaphor and metonymy	p. 203
Conceptual Metaphor Theory	p. 204
Mental spaces and blending	p. 210
Conceptual metonymy	p. 213
Idealized Cognitive Models and frames	p. 222
Idealized Cognitive Models	p. 224
Frame semantics and FrameNet	p. 225
Usage and change	p. 229
Invited inference and pragmatics	p. 230
Mechanisms and regularities	p. 233
Cognitive semantics in context	p. 239
Meaning in the mind	p. 240
Meaning in culture and society	p. 249
Meaning in text and discourse	p. 258
Further sources for Chapter 5	p. 267
Conclusion	p. 273
References	p. 288
Author Index	p. 328
Subject Index	p. 335
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.