LING 200 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Lexicography, Polysemy, Medieval Commune
Document Summary
The study of the meaning of ling expressions: morphemes, words, phrases, sentence. The component of the language faculty concerned with the meaning of complex or simple expressions. Morphemes, lexical entries = sound meaning pairs. We could define lexical meaning in terms of semantic features. Word meanings are not the same as definitions (cid:1) (cid:1) (cid:1) (cid:1) Externalism: meaning = reference to things in the world, meaning is external to speaker"s mind. Internalism: meaning = ideas in our head, mental states, internal to speaker"s mind. Connotation: associative meaning of a word based on a speaker"s world knowledge or experience: not criterial to the meaning of given word, vary across speakers (cid:1) (cid:1) (cid:1) (cid:1) (cid:1) (cid:1) (cid:1) (cid:1) (cid:1) (cid:1) Semantic domains: sets of words that share semantic properties: trees: bitch, maple, oak, pine etc. Lexicography: the study of word meanings in terms of lexical- semantic domains and features. Homonyms: words that sound the same (homophonous) have different meanings.