Lexical MeaningThe ideal introduction for students of semantics, Lexical Meaning fills the gap left by more general semantics textbooks, providing the teacher and the student with insights into word meaning beyond the traditional overviews of lexical relations. The book explores the relationship between word meanings and syntax and semantics more generally. It provides a balanced overview of the main theoretical approaches, along with a lucid explanation of their relative strengths and weaknesses. After covering the main topics in lexical meaning, such as polysemy and sense relations, the textbook surveys the types of meanings represented by different word classes. It explains abstract concepts in clear language, using a wide range of examples, and includes linguistic puzzles in each chapter to encourage the student to practise using the concepts. 'Adopt-a-Word' exercises give students the chance to research a particular word, building a portfolio of specialist work on a single word. |
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absolute adjectives actress adjectives Adopt-a-word antonyms argument structure aspects atelic bird called chapter cheddar cheese closed-class words componential approaches Conceptual Semantics conflate context contrast corpus count nouns countability definition denotative meaning describe determine dictionary discussed English speakers entailment EVENT GO THING example explication expressions figure furniture gradable grammatical happen height homonymy hyponym image schemas indicates individual instance interpretation involve Jackendoff kind language lexeme lexical entry lexical meaning lexical semantics lexicon linguistic look mass nouns mental lexicon modifiers morphemes morphological MOTION EVENT MOTION verbs Natural Semantic Metalanguage object ontological categories paint pairs particular PATH perfect phonological phrases plural polysemy predicate prepositions properties Puzzle QUALIA refer represent scalar scale semantic relations semantic representation semanticists sentence shoe SITUATION someone static Swedish synonyms synonymy tall teapots telic temporal time-stable types typical vague verb meaning verb senses Wierzbicka word classes word meanings word’s