Lexical semantics - Definition and Overview

Lexical semantics is a field in computer science and linguistics which deals mainly with word meaning. It covers various theories of the structure of words, the differences and similarities in lexical semantic structure between different languages, and the relationship of word meaning to sentence meaning and syntax. A question asked is if meaning is established by looking at the neighbourhood in the semantic net a word is part of and by looking at the other words it occurs with in natural sentences or if the meaning is already locally contained in a word. Another question is how words map to concepts. As tools, lexical relations like synonymy, antonymy (opposites), hyponymy and hypernymy are used in this field.

External links

• http://grouchy.cs.indiana.edu/l/www/classes/c661/words.html
• bibliography (http://linguistics.arizona.edu/hh/522/LexSemBiblio.html)
• Cornelia Maria Verspoor, Contextually-Dependent Lexical Semantics (http://www.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/~kversp/ftp_html/thesis.html), on-line PhD thesis