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Lexical Semantics

Lexical Semantics. Fall 2004. Lexicon. Collection of Words Mental store of information about words and morphemes. Word. A Form-meaning pair Form: string of symbols Meaning: conceptual unit Defined within a cultural background Psychologically real

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Lexical Semantics

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  1. Lexical Semantics Fall 2004

  2. Lexicon • Collection of Words • Mental store of information about words and morphemes

  3. Word • A Form-meaning pair • Form: string of symbols • Meaning: conceptual unit • Defined within a cultural background • Psychologically real • Being Shaped and shaping the cognitive system • Universal vs. language-specific concepts

  4. Lexical Semantics Accounts for: • Polymorphic nature of language • Semanticality • Creative use of words • Co-compositional Representation

  5. Two assumptions • Appreciation of syntactic structure • Looking for syntactically relevant semantic features • Meanings of words reflect the deeper structure of conceptual system

  6. Three principles • Semantic well-formedness. • Richer representation than semantic role list • Complete study of all lexical categories, not just verbs

  7. Goal • To adequately classify the lexical items of a language into classes predictive of their syntactic and semantic expression

  8. Classes and Alternations • Verbs and Argument alternations • Transitive-intransitive alternation (1-6) • Conative construction (7-10) • Indefinite NP deletion (11-16) • Ditransitive-transitive shift (19-24) • Verbs and Situation Types • Activity with for-PP • Accomplishment with in-PP • Achievement with at-pp • State: individual-level vs. stage level

  9. Nouns • Mass vs. Count nouns • Individual vs. group nouns • Predicative vs. relational nouns

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