Questions tagged [lexical-semantics]
A branch of semantics, the study of the meaning of words, affixes and compounds too.
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Why do similar concepts group differently across languages?
I noticed something interesting: in Chinese, the words 蠕虫 (rúchóng), 昆虫 (kūnchóng), and 虫 (chóng) are quite close in meaning, but in English they correspond to three distinct words: worm, insect, and ...
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Besides "make", what notions colexify with "do"?
In many languages the abstract notion "do, be engaged in some activity" is expressed by the same verb as the more concrete notion "make, create". Cross-linguistically, what other ...
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Is there a linguistic term for a term in a language refering to a specific technology, outliving said technology?
In language, phrases and various semantic expressions referring to technologies often make their way into the language, even if that technology is mostly obsolete.
Examples of this could include "...
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Is there any mathematically studied ontology space?
I am considering “ontology generation”. I have not yet read the specifics of these techniques.
Still, the point must surely be to identify some kind of cooccurrences / associations between words. ...
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Is there an English dictionary of morphemes?
I'm currently working on a project that that's aimed at helping people find words that match their feelings and thoughts, as opposed to looking for words in a traditional dictionary. It would begin ...
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Troponym vs hyponym vs hypernym
I came across following table in Jurafsky's book:
Note that it calls noun subordinate as "hyponym" and verb subordinate as "troponym". But it names both noun superordinate and ...
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What is morphological analysis of words to estimate their meaning called?
Is there a word for this?
I'll use an example to show what I mean:
Let's say you don't know what sepsis means, which is bacterial infection of blood. So, you start thinking. You break the word up into ...
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Do older adults perceive words in different ways than young adults?
Do you agree that older adults perceive words differently from young adults, and learn more innuendos and double meanings?
I read a science article that stated that adults continue to learn words and ...
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Why do some abstract concepts get described as a liquid in English?
For example, work is completely abstract but we talk about workflows, which is something pertaining to fluids. Why does this happen?
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Is it possible to infer the meaning of a word of a language based on corpus analysis, without prior knowledge of the language?
If I am totally foreign to a language, are there corpus analysis methodologies and theories that I can employ to figure out the meaning of a word in a corpus based on that language?
If yes, do point ...
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How can one describe the relation between concepts, nouns, verbs and other word classes
In Wikidata, we describe concepts (Q items) and lexemes (L items), where the lexemes may be nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc.
It is usually straightforward to describe the relation from noun lexemes to ...
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Etymological Fallacy
What is actually wrong with using Etymology to infer a word's meaning?
I mean other than semantics( or more subtle meaning, nuance) of what other use could studying etymology be.
I cannot see the ...
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What are the reasons to justify that some text is in X language?
Let us say that I am in a library alone and I have a text that I think that is in X language, for example, this fragment of the 9th chapter of the 2nd part of the novel 1984 by George Orwell, that I ...
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"but" usage (redundancy of "but")
We all know that "but" is used to replace "except" or indicate that the first clause is contrastive to the second in a way, or the logic these two sentences bear is somewhat contradictory. But, I see ...
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How to understand semelfactive aspect of a verb? How is it varied/similar to iterative aspect?
How semelfactive aspect of a verb that represents a single occasion of an event like knock,hit etc..is perfective and moment defined.
whereas,iterative aspect is event that is repeated on single ...
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How relevant is WordNet nowadays?
How relevant is WordNet (both the original Princeton's and all other WordNets) as a tool for researchers now, decades later?
Do researchers consider it valuable?
And does the general research ...
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How can the Arabic word "Hijr" be translated as "perception" or "understanding" or "intellect" [closed]
The sentence I mention is from Quran (written at least 14 centuries ago) verse 89:5.
Full phrase is : هل في ذلك قسم لذي حجر
And this is translated as:
Sahih International: Is there [not] in [all] ...
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Is there a word in which the concept and its complement is expressed?
Is there a word in which the concept and its complement is expressed, for example if I would like to express "the dichotomy of truth and falsehood" in one word. Obviously, the construction need not ...
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How to apply TF-IDF on my bows after generating frequencies
I'm working on document similarity using WordNet, though I have no idea how to apply the IDF weighting at this point in my code. I'm sure this weighting is one of the most simple things out there, but ...
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Algorithm for identifying "secondary roots"
In machine learning on text data (aka natural language processing), it's common to apply a stemming or lemmatization algorithm to the text.
However, sometimes you want to go a step further. For ...
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Definition of "concept" and "conceptual field in cognitive linguistics
I am writing a Master's thesis dedicated to the conception field "business" in Modern English Language. The definition of "concept" and "conceptional field" is greatly discussed by Russian linguists, ...
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'sibling-in-law' constructions: Why the polysemy/vagueness?
A holds the 'sibling-in-law' relation to B only in the case when:
(1) A is a sibling of C and C is married to B; or
(2) A is married to C and C is a sibling of B.
What is common to (1) and (2) is ...
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Help with distributional analysis of verb phrases
For my semantics homework we are asked to test different verb phrases in different environments. I am asked to categorize the different verb phrases (on the basis of their distributions. I am not ...
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4 or 5: is thumb a finger? Distribution across languages
Researching the origins of counting systems, I came across the question I cannot seem to find an answer for: what is the typological distribution of languages that consider thumb a finger (5 fingers ...
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What is the source of knowledge/discovery for the semantics? Automation of semantic science?
Natural sciences observe facts and make models. Mathematics more or less arbitrarly generates axioms and investigates all the possible consquences of them. What is the source of semantic knowledge (e....
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