exeunt

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What we’ll discuss in the class on lexicalization

Next time we’ll try to discuss lexicalization – a process that relates concepts to words, and implicitly to natural language semantics. Here are the main issues we’ll seek to shed some light on:
1. Lexicalization: what it is and how it is manifested in language.
Remember what has been said last time in class about the representational approach to semantics. If we adopt this view then we’ll describe meaning as a combination between a conceptual element (a component of our conceptual structure, a component of a way (a model) in which we conceptualize the world we live in) and the denotation of the linguistic element we use to express that conceptual element (namely the concept). To put it simply, the meaning of a noun would be the combination between its denotation (i.e. the object) and the concept it expresses. Analogously, the meaning of a verb would be the action it denotes and the concept it expresses.
If a concept corresponds to a word in a language, this means that that concept is lexicalized. Therefore, lexicalization is a process that makes concepts expressible in language i.e. a process through which we assign (linguistic) form to concepts (mental entities). Not all concepts we use are lexicalized; for instance, some concepts are expressed by phrases (can you think of examples?).

2. What are the reasons why (some) concepts are lexicalized?
Here I would like you to think of some possible reasons. A helpful starting point would be the part 2.4.2 “Concepts” from Saeed’s chapter “Meaning, Thought, and Reality” that we referred to last time. But we encourage you to think of other reasons than those mentioned in the chapter.

3. Last, we’ll be concerned with lexical relations. This is the main preoccupation of what is called lexical semantics. The goal of lexical semantics is to study word meaning. Among the descriptive aims of lexical semantics there is that of showing how meanings of word in a language are interconnected and how speakers become aware of that.
In other words, we’ll try to see how the relational nature of concepts is reflected in language by means of characterizing the relations in which words corresponding to concepts (expressing concepts) enter.
The lexical relations we’ll discuss are:
• Homonymy
• Synonymy
• Opposites
• Polysemy
• Hyponymy
• Meronymy
Can you explain what each of these lexical relations means? Use your own words and try to give examples, this will help a lot.
Briefly, this is the plan for the next class. I hope it’ll help you organise both your ideas and questions about the topic of the class that you’ll raise on next Friday.

Reading: In order to prepare for this class you should read the paper I gave you last week called “Exploring the Relationship between Lexical Behaviour and Concept Formation in Design Conversation”. You will see that this is rather a technical article and it reports and discuss the results of a computational linguistic analysis. You don’t have to worry that you’ll not be able to understand all that technical language. You should concentrate on the subparts called “Lexicalized concepts” and “A psycholinguistic model” (pp. 2-3) and “Discourse analysis” (pp. 7-10).