LEXICAL

SEMANTICS

LE QUANG DUNG, PHD.

PRELIMINARY
• Code: LE325
• Credits: 2
• Theories: 17 hours
• Practice: 13 hours
• Prerequisite: ES212; ES222; ES232; ES242
• Assessment:
• Attendance: 10%
• Mid-term test: 30%
• Final test (assignment): 60%
• Teaching/learning: Hand-outs, lecturing & presentation
• Extra requirements: be on-time, be participated, camera on all the
time
WHAT IS LEXICAL SEMANTIC?
• Lexical semantics is the branch of linguistics which is concerned
with the systematic study of word meanings
• Two most fundamental questions addressed by lexical semanticists
• How to describe the meanings of words?
• How to account for the variability of meaning from context to context?
• The processes of selection from a range of permanently available
possibilities
• The creation of new meanings from old, by such means as metaphor
and metonymy, in response to contextual pressure.

• Cruse, D.A., (2001). International Encyclopedia of the Social &

Behavioral Sciences. James, D. Wright
 AREAS OF WORD STUDIES

WORD

STRUCTURE FUNCTION MEANING

COMPLEX
SIMPLE WORDS SET PHRASES
WORDS

LEXICAL SEMANTICS
LEXICAL SEMANTIC PERSPECTIVE

Teacher

STRUCTURE FUNCTION MEANING

teach -er doer/operator A person who receives

respect from others

SYNTACTIC PERSPECTIVE

Teacher

STRUCTURE FUNCTION MEANING

A single noun subject A person who does the

teaching for someone
BASIC CONCEPTS IN LEXICAL SEMANTICS
• Lexicology = Lexi (words) + lagos (learning) = The science of words
• (Lexicology is concerned with words, variable word-groups,
phraseological units, and with morphemes which make up words)
• Morphology: The study of word formation
• Etymology: The study of the origin and history of a word
• Lexical semantics: the study of word meaning
• Lexicon: is a collection of information about
words and similar linguistic expressions in a language
• Lexical item : A word considered as a lexical item or lexeme when it
denotes things, beings, events, abstract ideas and so on
• Mental lexicon: words stored in our mind (45.000 – 60.000)
• Orthographic word: a unit in the writing system
 UNIT 1
LEXICOLOGY
(WORD AND WORD FORMATION)
 WORDS VIEWED FROM DIFFERENT
PERSPECTIVES
• What is a word?
• Definition 1
word: a sequence of letters that we write consecutively, with no
spaces
• Definition 2
word: a sequence of sounds that we pronounce consecutively, with
no pauses.
• Definition 3
• word: an uninterrupted string of letters which is preceded by a blank
space and followed either by a blank space or a punctuation mark
• Definition 4 (final)
word: A combination of vocal sounds, or one such sound, used in a
language to express an idea (e.g. to denote a thing, attribute, or
relation), and constituting an ultimate minimal element of speech
having a meaning as such; a vocable.
 Semantic
Perspective

Syntactic Morphological
Perspective Perspective

WORD

Phonological Orthographic
Perspective Perspective
 WORD PROPERTIES
• Properties of words
• words are entities having a part of speech specification
• words are syntactic atoms
• words (usually) have one main stress
• words (usually) are indivisible units (no intervening material
possible)
• Words come from many sources
• …
WORDS AND LEXEME
• A lexeme is a theoretical construct that stands for the unitary meaning
and shared syntactic properties of a group of word forms.
• A lexeme is stripped of any inflectional endings.
•  Thus play, plays, played, and playing are all inflected forms of
the lexeme play.
• Although inflection creates forms of the same lexeme, derivation
creates new lexemes.
•  Thus, player is not a form of the lexeme play but is considered
a different lexeme; it has its own meaning and lexical category; it
is a noun.
• With respect to their morphology, lexemes can be either simple or
complex. For example, door is simple and lemon-tree is complex.
• With respect to their semantics, lexemes can be mono-semous or
polysemous.
ETYMOLOGY
What is Etymology?
The term traditionally used for the study of the origins and history of the form
and meaning of words
• Coinage: the invention of totally new terms; kleenex, teflon, tylenol
and xerox.
• Eponyms: New words based on the name of a person or a place;
fahrenheit (from the German, Gabriel Fahrenheit); jeans (from the Italian
city of Genoa where the type of cloth was first made) …
• Borrowing: the taking over of words from other languages; dope (Dutch),
lilac (Persian), piano (Italian), sofa (Arabic), tattoo (Tahitian), tycoon
(Japanese), yogurt (Turkish) and zebra (Bantu).
• Compounding: a joining of two separate words to produce a single form;
bookcase, doorknob, fingerprint, sunburn, textbook, wallpaper,
wastebasket
• Blending: taking only the beginning of one word and joining it to the end
of the other word; brunch. Chunnel; modem (modulator/demodulator)
• Clipping: a word of more than one syllable is reduced to a shorter form;
(facsimile) fax, exam, gym, lab, math,
ETYMOLOGY
• Conversion: A change in the function of a word, as for example when
a noun comes to be used as a verb: we bottled the home-brew last
night; Someone has to chair the meeting
• Acronyms: Acronyms are new words formed from the initial letters of
a set of other words; NATO, NASA or UNESCO, ATM, PIN …
• Derivation: words with prefixes and suffixes
• Infixes: There is a third type of affix, not normally used in English, but
found in some other languages.; Absogoddamlutely!
Unfuckinbelievable! Singabloodypore
ETYMOLOGY
• Neologisms: Neologisms are newly coined words or phrases that
may be commonly used in everyday life
DRILLS
Identify the different word-formation processes involved in producing each
of the underlined words in these sentences?

acronym
coinage
infixes
conversion
compound
clipping

compound
MORPHOLOGY
• Morphology: the study of the structure of words and of the grammatical
categories realized by morphemes
• E.g. trickster consists of the stem trick and the suffix –ster indicating
an agent
• Morpheme versus morph
• Morph (hình tố): the concrete realization of a morpheme, or the actual
segment of a word as it is spoken or pronounced.
• Morphs are represented by phonetic forms. We must introduce the
concept of the morph distinct from the morpheme because sometimes
although we know that a morpheme exists, it has no concrete realization
(i.e, it is silent and has no spoken or written form). In such cases, we
speak of a zero morph
• For example, plural fish consists of the morphemes {fish} + {pl},
but the plural morpheme has no concrete realization (i.e. the singular
and plural forms of fish are both pronounced /fi∫/)
MORPHOLOGY
• We say that a morpheme is “realized” as a morph
• The importance of the distinction between morph and morpheme is that
there is not always a one-to-one correspondence between morph and
morpheme. We can thus analyze words in two different ways
• into morphs following formal or structural divisions, or
• into morphemes, recognizing the abstract units of meaning present.
MORPHOLOGY
MORPHOLOGY
• Morphemes (hình vị): the smallest meaningful units of language, so a
word is one morpheme if it is not built out of smaller meaningful parts
• E.g. language is a single morpheme: if we try to divide it into
smaller parts (like l and anguage or langu and age), we don‘t get
meaningful parts of English.
• sentimentally is composed of three morphemes: the noun
sentiment and the suffixes -al (which is added to nouns to make
adjectives and could be glossed as ‗marked by‘) and -ly (which
turns an adjective into an adverb: ‗in a certain manner‘)
• Suffixes, prefixes, and other bits of language that always attach to
other morphemes are called bound morphemes
• Words, on the other hand, are free morphemes (words can
be arranged and rearranged to make new phrases); unputdownable
or pseudoscientifically
MORPHOLOGY
• Derivational and inflectional morphemes
• Bound morphemes can also be divided into two types
• Derivational morphemes: We use these bound morphemes to
make new words or to make words of a different grammatical
category from the stem; good  goodness, fool  foolish
• Inflectional morphemes: These are not used to produce new
words in the language, but rather to indicate aspects of the
grammatical function of a word; like  likes, laugh  laughing
• A derivational morpheme can change the grammatical category of a
word. Teach (v)  teacher (n)
• An inflectional morpheme never changes the grammatical category
of a word; old  older (adj); teach  teaching (verb)
MORPHOLOGY
MORPHEME FLOW CHART
MORPHOLOGY
MORPHOLOGY
MORPHOLOGY ANALYSIS IN SENTENCES

The child‘s wildness shocked the teachers.

MORPHOLOGY TREE

A word develops in the order of morphemic combination, and you can illustrate a
word‘s hierarchical organization in a morphology tree.

An example of the word irreplaceableness

The morphology tree of unforgettableness
NOUN

Noun Suffix
ADJ

Verb Adj Suffix

Prefix Stem

Un forget able ness

 DRILLS
Draw a tree diagram for each of the following words

misfortune
terrorism
carelessness,
disagreement
ineffective
unfaithful
prepackaged
biodegradable
reincarnation
decentralization
DRILLS