Semantic Relations and the Lexicon Antonymy, Synonymy and other Paradigms

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.

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, M. Lynne Murphy proposes a pragmatic approach to these relations. Whereas traditional approaches 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.

Acknowledgements; Symbols and typographical conventions; Part I. Paradigmatic Relations, Generally: 1. Why lexical relations?; 2. A pragmatic approach to semantic relations; 3. Other approaches; Part II. Paradigmatic Relations, Specifically: 4. Synonymy and similarity; 5. Antonymy and contrast; 6. Hyponymy, meronymy and other relations; 7. Lexicon and metalexicon: implications and explorations; Appendix: relation elements; Notes; References; Index.

This book explores how some word meanings are paradigmatically related to each other, as opposites or synonyms, for example, and what these say about the mental organization of our vocabularies. The author argues for a pragmatic approach to lexical relations, as opposed to the traditional 'lexical' approach.

M. Lynne Murphy is Lecturer in Linguistics at the School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences, University of Sussex