[经济学]Towards a theory of lexical semantics.pptVIP

Towards a theory of lexical semantics Cogs3000 Week 7 Goals of a theory of lexical semantics A theory of lexical semantics needs not only to account for the meaning of individual words but how word meanings change in context with other words. Consider the meaning of good in the phrase good friend (loyal, reliable) Now consider the meaning of the same word in the phrase good lover or good meal. There is a chameleon-like quality to the meaning of some words, which needs to be accounted for. Lexical semantics and Pragmatic knowledge The meanings of words are said to be stored in the mental dictionary, along with their phonological and morpho-syntactic features. Lexical knowledge clearly varies from speaker to speaker. Languages also vary from one another in how they lexicalize our knowledge and perception of the world Hence, lexical semantics though intimately connected with pragmatics (knowledge of the world) is distinct from it. Lexical knowledge is confined to knowledge of word meanings and word usage. The problem of polysemy Dictionaries have multiple meanings listed for any given word and the more common the word, the more meanings it will typically have listed against it. Meanings of ‘show’ that are found in the pocket Oxford. The contexts have been scrambled. Semantic anomaly detection … Another way we might test the adequacy of a theory of lexical semantics. Another test … Ability of the system to generate acceptable paraphrases for individual words or phrasal expressions. To express commonalities and differences of meaning between verbal expressions that are semantically related. a bottle of wine versus a jug of whiskey A fundamental unresolved problem on how to approach the analysis of word and phrase meanings Whether semantic theory should be grounded in logic or in psychology; in some formalized propositional calculus of truth conditions for possible worlds, or in perceptual experience and its internal cognitive representation. The answer to this lo