Synopses & Reviews
Semantic Relations and the Lexicon explores the many paradigmatic semantic relations between words, such as synonymy, antonymy and hyponymy, and their relevance to the mental organization of our vocabularies. Drawing on a century's research in linguistics, psychology, philosophy, anthropology and computer science, Lynne Murphy proposes a new, pragmatic approach to these relations. Whereas traditional approaches to the lexicon have claimed that paradigmatic relations are part of our lexical knowledge, Dr Murphy argues that they constitute metalinguistic knowledge, which can be derived through a single relational principle and may also be stored as part of our extra-lexical, conceptual representations of a word. Part I shows how this approach can account for the properties of lexical relations in ways that traditional approaches cannot, and Part II examines particular relations in detail. This book will serve as an informative handbook for all linguists and cognitive scientists interested in the mental representation of vocabulary.
Synopsis
This book explores how some word meanings are paradigmatically related to each other, for example, as opposites or synonyms, and how they relate to the mental organization of our vocabularies. Traditional approaches claim that such relationships are part of our lexical knowledge (our dictionary of mentally stored words) but Lynne Murphy argues that lexical relationships actually constitute our metalinguistic knowledge. The book draws on a century of previous research, including word association experiments, child language, and the use of synonyms and antonyms in text.
Synopsis
Handbook on semantic relations between words, and different approaches to how these are mentally represented.
About the Author
M. Lynne Murphy is Lecturer in Linguistics at the School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences, University of Sussex