Lexical Semantics for Terminology: An introduction explores the interconnections between lexical semantics and terminology. More specifically, it shows how principles borrowed from lexico-semantic frameworks and methodologies derived from them can help understand terms and describe them in resources. It also explains how lexical analysis complements perspectives primarily focused on knowledge. Topics such as term identification, meaning, polysemy, relations between terms, and equivalence are discussed thoroughly and illustrated with examples taken from various fields of knowledge. This book is an indispensable companion for those who are interested in words and work with specialized terms, e.g. terminologists, translators, lexicographers, corpus linguists. A background in terminology or lexical semantics is not required since all notions are defined and explained. This book complements other textbooks on terminology that do not focus on lexical semantics per se.

Why apply lexical semantics in terminology? -- Terminology -- Lexical semantics for terminology -- What is a term? -- Concepts, meaning and polysemy -- Predicative terms, participants and arguments -- Relations between concepts and terms -- Discovering structures in specialized domains -- Equivalence in terminology.

The ideal introduction for students of semantics, Lexical Meaning fills the gap left by more general semantics textbooks, providing the teacher and the student with insights into word meaning beyond the traditional overviews of lexical relations. The book explores the relationship between word meanings and syntax and semantics more generally. It provides a balanced overview of the main theoretical approaches, along with a lucid explanation of their relative strengths and weaknesses. After covering the main topics in lexical meaning, such as polysemy and sense relations, the textbook surveys the types of meanings represented by different word classes. It explains abstract concepts in clear language, using a wide range of examples, and includes linguistic puzzles in each chapter to encourage the student to practise using the concepts. 'Adopt-a-Word' exercises give students the chance to research a particular word, building a portfolio of specialist work on a single word.

Contrastive lexical semantics was the main topic of an International Workshop at the University of Münster in May, 1997. It was addressed from different perspectives, from the pragmatic perspective of a corpus-oriented approach as well as from the model-oriented perspective of sign theoretic linguistics. Whereas the rule-governed model-oriented approach is necessarily restricted to subsets of vocabulary, the pragmatic approach aims to analyse and describe the whole vocabulary-in-use. After the pragmatic turn, lexical semantics can no longer be seen as a discipline on its own but has to be developed as an integral part of a theory of language use. Essential features of individual languages can be discovered only by looking beyond the limits of our mother languages and including a contrastive perspective. Within a pragmatic, corpus-oriented approach essential new ideas are discussed, mainly the insight that single words can no longer be considered to be the lexical unit. It is the complex multi-word lexical unit a pragmatic approach has to deal with.

This collection of articles sketches the complexity of the subject of lexical-semantic relations and addresses semantic, lexicographic and computational issues on an array of meaning relations in different languages. It brings together a variety of linguistic studies on the contextualised construction of synonymy and antonymy in discourse. It shows that research on language and cognition calls for empirical evidence from different sources. This volume demonstrates how the internet, corpus data, as well as psycholinguistic methods contribute profitably to gain insights into the nature of the paradigmatics in actual language use. Furthermore, the volume is concerned with practical and application-oriented research on lexical databases, and it includes explorations of sense-related items in dictionaries from both a text-technological and lexicographic perspective.

This book fills a gap in studies of meaning by providing detailed case studies of attested corpus data on the meanings of words and phrases.

Theories of Lexical Semantics offers a comprehensive overview of the major traditions of word meaning research in linguistics. In spite of the growing importance of the lexicon in linguistic theory, no overview of the main theoretical trends in lexical semantics is currently available. This book fills that gap by charting the evolution of the discipline from the mid nineteenth century to the present day. It presents the main ideas, the landmark publications, and thedominant figures of five traditions: historical-philological semantics, structuralist semantics, generativist semantics, neostructuralist semantics, and cognitive semantics. The theoretical and methodological relationship between the approaches is a major point of attention throughout the text: going well beyond amere chronological enumeration, the book does not only describe the theoretical currents of lexical semantics, but also the undercurrents that have shaped its evolution.