Lexical semantics

Lexical semantics studies how words and vocabulary express meaning, including relations among words and the ways word meanings vary with context.

Lexeme: A lexeme is an abstract vocabulary unit that includes its grammatical forms, such as RUN and runs. Lexical semantics analyzes meanings associated with lexemes rather than isolated word forms.
Compositionality: Compositionality is the principle that complex expressions derive meaning from their parts and the way those parts combine. It marks the boundary between word-level meaning and meaning built from larger expressions.
Distributional semantics: Distributional semantics represents word meaning through patterns of co-occurrence in language use. It provides computational models of lexical similarity based on words’ contexts.
Pragmatics: Pragmatics studies how context, speakers, and communicative purposes shape utterance interpretation. It focuses on inferred meaning beyond the meanings conventionally associated with words.
Polysemy: Polysemy is the coexistence of multiple related senses within one word. It shows how a single lexical item can have several connected meanings.
Semantic change: Semantic change is the historical alteration of a word’s meaning. Present-day lexical meanings often reflect changes in use across generations.
WordNet: WordNet is a lexical database that groups English words into synonym sets and records semantic relations. It makes relations such as hypernymy and synonymy explicit in a searchable resource.
Formal semantics: Formal semantics uses mathematical tools to model the meanings and truth conditions of linguistic expressions. It connects lexical meanings to compositional sentence interpretation and logical structure.
Homonymy: Homonymy is the coincidence of word forms that have unrelated meanings and distinct histories or lexical entries. It distinguishes unrelated meanings sharing a form from related senses of one word.
Contextual meaning: Contextual meaning is the interpretation an expression receives in a particular linguistic or situational setting. Context can select among a word’s senses or add information not encoded in the word.

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