Lexical Semantics

We know that words have fixed meanings that cannot be changed at one’s will. Although the relationship between the form of a word and its meaning is arbitrary, the meaning of the word is fixed. When we mean something like I saw a black cat, it cannot mean that I saw a white cat.

For example, when we hear the sentence “I saw a black cat.” We think of A, instead of B.

We store the words in our mental lexicon, and the lexicon is the vocabulary knowledge of a speaker about his/her language.

When we think of the words girl and woman, we can see they have some features in common: they both mean human and female. However, they differ in age. Girl means young woman means not that young. Thus, we can see that when we know a word, we can associate these pieces of information with the word.

We call these pieces of information semantic properties.

Leopard Leopardess Actor Actress

cat-like cat-like human human

male female male female

As we can see above, different words can share common semantic properties. For instance, both leopardess and actress are females. On the other hand, both actor and actress are humans.

We will see that every word is encoded in our lexicon with their semantic properties. Here we will learn the semantic features. Basically, if a word is associated with A, we will write +property A. If it’s not, we write -property A. Here is an example for you to understand clearly.

Leopardess

+cat-like

+female

-human

-male

Also, some properties are redundant. For example, in the example of the leopardess, if it’s +female, we understand that it is not male. Thus, it’s unnecessary to indicate -male in this example.

Lastly, we will mark ill-formed sentences with #. Even though a sentence is grammatical, it can still be ill-formed in the meaning if the wrong word is chosen.

For instance,

# The plane flies in the sea.

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