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Lexicology is the branch of linguistics that analyzes the lexicon of a specific language. A word is the smallest meaningful unit of a language that can stand on its own, and is made up of small components called morphemes and even smaller elements known as phonemes, or distinguishing sounds. Lexicology examines every feature of a word – including formation, spelling, origin, usage, and definition.
Semantics is the study of linguistic meaning. It examines what meaning is, how words get their meaning, and how the meaning of a complex expression depends on its parts. Part of this process involves the distinction between sense and reference. Sense is given by the ideas and concepts associated with an expression while reference is the object to which an expression points. Semantics contrasts with syntax, which studies the rules that dictate how to create grammatically correct sentences, and pragmatics, which investigates how people use language in communication.
A synonym is a word, morpheme, or phrase that means exactly or nearly the same as another word, morpheme, or phrase in a given language. For example, in the English language, the words begin, start, commence, and initiate are all synonyms of one another: they are synonymous. The standard test for synonymy is substitution: one form can be replaced by another in a sentence without changing its meaning. Words are considered synonymous in only one particular sense: for example, long and extended in the context long time or extended time are synonymous, but long cannot be used in the phrase extended family. Synonyms with exactly the same meaning share a seme or denotational sememe, whereas those with inexactly similar meanings share a broader denotational or connotational sememe and thus overlap within a semantic field. The former are sometimes called cognitive synonyms and the latter, near-synonyms, plesionyms or poecilonyms.
In linguistics, homonyms are words which are either homographs—words that have the same spelling —or homophones—words that have the same pronunciation —or both. Using this definition, the words row, row and row are homonyms because they are homographs : so are the words see (vision) and sea, because they are homophones.
Polysemy is the capacity for a sign to have multiple related meanings. For example, a word can have several word senses. Polysemy is distinct from monosemy, where a word has a single meaning.
Lexical semantics, as a subfield of linguistic semantics, is the study of word meanings. It includes the study of how words structure their meaning, how they act in grammar and compositionality, and the relationships between the distinct senses and uses of a word.
Ethnolinguistics is an area of anthropological linguistics that studies the relationship between a language and the cultural behavior of the people who speak that language.
A word is a basic element of language that carries meaning, can be used on its own, and is uninterruptible. Despite the fact that language speakers often have an intuitive grasp of what a word is, there is no consensus among linguists on its definition and numerous attempts to find specific criteria of the concept remain controversial. Different standards have been proposed, depending on the theoretical background and descriptive context; these do not converge on a single definition. Some specific definitions of the term "word" are employed to convey its different meanings at different levels of description, for example based on phonological, grammatical or orthographic basis. Others suggest that the concept is simply a convention used in everyday situations.
In linguistics, linguistic competence is the system of unconscious knowledge that one knows when they know a language. It is distinguished from linguistic performance, which includes all other factors that allow one to use one's language in practice.
In linguistics, a word sense is one of the meanings of a word. For example, a dictionary may have over 50 different senses of the word "play", each of these having a different meaning based on the context of the word's usage in a sentence, as follows:
We went to see the playRomeo and Juliet at the theater.
The coach devised a great play that put the visiting team on the defensive.
The children went out to play in the park.
In linguistics, semantic analysis is the process of relating syntactic structures, from the levels of words, phrases, clauses, sentences and paragraphs to the level of the writing as a whole, to their language-independent meanings. It also involves removing features specific to particular linguistic and cultural contexts, to the extent that such a project is possible. The elements of idiom and figurative speech, being cultural, are often also converted into relatively invariant meanings in semantic analysis. Semantics, although related to pragmatics, is distinct in that the former deals with word or sentence choice in any given context, while pragmatics considers the unique or particular meaning derived from context or tone. To reiterate in different terms, semantics is about universally coded meaning, and pragmatics, the meaning encoded in words that is then interpreted by an audience.
In linguistics, a semantic field is a lexical set of words grouped semantically that refers to a specific subject. The term is also used in anthropology, computational semiotics, and technical exegesis.
Distributional semantics is a research area that develops and studies theories and methods for quantifying and categorizing semantic similarities between linguistic items based on their distributional properties in large samples of language data. The basic idea of distributional semantics can be summed up in the so-called distributional hypothesis: linguistic items with similar distributions have similar meanings.
Alexandre François is a French linguist specialising in the description and study of the indigenous languages of Melanesia. He belongs to Lattice, a research centre of the CNRS and École Normale Supérieure dedicated to linguistics.
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. Linguistics is based on a theoretical as well as a descriptive study of language and is also interlinked with the applied fields of language studies and language learning, which entails the study of specific languages. Before the 20th century, linguistics evolved in conjunction with literary study and did not employ scientific methods. Modern-day linguistics is considered a science because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language – i.e., the cognitive, the social, the cultural, the psychological, the environmental, the biological, the literary, the grammatical, the paleographical, and the structural.
In linguistics, an expression is semantically ambiguous when it can have multiple meanings. The higher the number of synonyms a word has, the higher the degree of ambiguity. Like other kinds of ambiguity, semantic ambiguities are often clarified by context or by prosody. One's comprehension of a sentence in which a semantically ambiguous word is used is strongly influenced by the general structure of the sentence. The language itself is sometimes a contributing factor in the overall effect of semantic ambiguity, in the sense that the level of ambiguity in the context can change depending on whether or not a language boundary is crossed.
Cognitive sociolinguistics is an emerging field of linguistics that aims to account for linguistic variation in social settings with a cognitive explanatory framework. The goal of cognitive sociolinguists is to build a mental model of society, individuals, institutions and their relations to one another. Cognitive sociolinguists also strive to combine theories and methods used in cognitive linguistics and sociolinguistics to provide a more productive framework for future research on language variation. This burgeoning field concerning social implications on cognitive linguistics has yet received universal recognition.
In natural language processing (NLP), a word embedding is a representation of a word. The embedding is used in text analysis. Typically, the representation is a real-valued vector that encodes the meaning of the word in such a way that the words that are closer in the vector space are expected to be similar in meaning. Word embeddings can be obtained using language modeling and feature learning techniques, where words or phrases from the vocabulary are mapped to vectors of real numbers.
Colexification, together with its associated verb colexify, are terms used in semantics and lexical typology. They refer to the ability, for a language, to express different meanings with the same word.
The usage-based linguistics is a linguistics approach within a broader functional/cognitive framework, that emerged since the late 1980s, and that assumes a profound relation between linguistic structure and usage. It challenges the dominant focus, in 20th century linguistics, on considering language as an isolated system removed from its use in human interaction and human cognition. Rather, usage-based models posit that linguistic information is expressed via context-sensitive mental processing and mental representations, which have the cognitive ability to succinctly account for the complexity of actual language use at all levels. Broadly speaking, a usage-based model of language accounts for language acquisition and processing, synchronic and diachronic patterns, and both low-level and high-level structure in language, by looking at actual language use.
References
- 1 2 Reid, Wallis (2004), "Monosemy, homonymy and polysemy", Cognitive and Communicative Approaches to Linguistic Analysis, Studies in Functional and Structural Linguistics, vol. 51, John Benjamins Publishing Company, pp. 93–129, doi:10.1075/sfsl.51.06rei, ISBN 9789027215604
- ↑ Ruhl, Charles (1999). On monosemy : a study in linguistic semantics. NetLibrary, Inc. ISBN 058506492X. OCLC 1053022622.
- ↑ Ruhl, Charles (2002), "Data, Comprehensiveness, Monosemy", Signal, Meaning, and Message, Studies in Functional and Structural Linguistics, vol. 48, John Benjamins Publishing Company, pp. 171–189, doi:10.1075/sfsl.48.11ruh, ISBN 9789027215574
- ↑ Ruhl, Charles (1999). On monosemy : a study in linguistic semantics. NetLibrary, Inc. pp. xii. ISBN 058506492X. OCLC 1053022622.
- 1 2 Wishart, Ryder A. “Monosemy: A Theoretical Sketch for Biblical Studies.” BAGL7 (2018) 107–39. http://bagl.org/files/volume7/BAGL_7-4_Wishart.pdf
- ↑ Reid, Wallis; Otheguy, Ricardo; Stern, Nancy. (2002). Signal, meaning, and message perspectives on sign-based linguistics. John Benjamins Pub. Co. ISBN 9027282234. OCLC 1109375613.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) - ↑ International Columbia School Conference on Linguistics (6th : 1999 : Rutgers University) (2004). Cognitive and communicative approaches to linguistic analysis. J. Benjamins. ISBN 1588115666. OCLC 56318193.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link) - ↑ Németh T., Enikö Bibok, Károly (2001). Pragmatics and the flexibility of word meaning. Elsevier Science, Ltd. ISBN 0080439713. OCLC 464060189.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) - ↑ Fewster, Gregory P. (2013). Creation language in Romans 8 : a study in monosemy. Brill. ISBN 9789004246485. OCLC 907619236.
- ↑ Porter, Stanley E., 1956- editor, writer of supplementary textual material. Fewster, Gregory P., editor, writer of supplementary textual material. Land, Christopher D., editor. (2016). Modeling Biblical Language : selected papers from the McMaster Divinity College Linguistics Circle. ISBN 9789004309265. OCLC 928615102.
{{cite book}}:|last=has generic name (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link) - ↑ Porter, Stanley E., 1956- , autor. (2015-03-17). Linguistic analysis of the Greek New Testament : studies in tools, methods, and practice. ISBN 978-0801049989. OCLC 1105263328.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link) - ↑ Lappenga, Benjamin J. Verfasser. (2015-10-08). Paul's Language of Zēlos : monosemy and the rhetoric of identity and practice. ISBN 9789004302457. OCLC 1024095071.
{{cite book}}:|last=has generic name (help) - ↑ Wishart, Ryder A. “Monosemy in Biblical Studies: A Critical Analysis of Recent Work.” BAGL6 (2017) 99–126. http://bagl.org/files/volume6/BAGL_6-5_Wishart.pdf
- ↑ Wishart, Ryder A (2018-08-10). "Hierarchical and Distributional Lexical Field Theory: A Critical and Empirical Development of Louw and Nida's Semantic Domain Model". International Journal of Lexicography. 31 (4): 394–419. doi: 10.1093/ijl/ecy015 . ISSN 0950-3846.
