Words and the Grammar of Context

Download or read book Words and the Grammar of Context written by Paul Kay and published by Center for the Study of Language and Information Publications. This book was released on 1997-02-13 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Research in linguistic semantics may be roughly divided into two broad traditions. Students concerned with lexical fields and lexical domains ('lexical semanticists') have interested themselves in the paradigmatic relations of contrast that obtain among related lexical items and the substantive detail of how particular lexical items map to the nonlinguistic objects they stand for. 'Formal semanticists' (those who study the combinatorial properties of word meanings) have been mostly unconcerned with these issues, concentrating rather on how the meanings of individual words, whatever their internal structure may be and however they may be paradigmatically related to one another, combine into the meanings of phrases and sentences (and recently, to some extent, texts).