Lexical semantics

Robert E. MacLaury
Table of contents

Lexical semantics is the analysis of linguistic meaning among words, affixes, and stock phrases, especially of the semantic relations that integrate such lexical items into a system, domain, conventional image, syntagma, or discourse. Herein we sketch the expansion of lexical semantic models during the maturation of this field, dividing labor with other accounts. McCarthy (1991) summarizes British approaches and the lexical semantics of syntagmatic collocation. Geeraerts (1988, 1994) traces roots of lexical semantics to psychologically oriented prestructuralist philology; he contrasts lexical semantic branches in terms of their views on language, choices of data, and principles of explanation. All of us together neglect certain contributors, for whom it would take a book to do justice.

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