Murphy M. Lynne. Lexical Meaning

Cambridge University Press, 2010. — xvii, 256 pages. — (Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics). ISBN: 0521860318, 0521677645.Учебник содержит списки рекомендуемой литературы, загадки с ответами и упражнения.The ideal introduction for students of semantics, Lexical Meaning fills the gap left by more general semantics textbooks, providing the teacher and the student with insights into word meaning beyond the traditional overviews of lexical relations. The book explores the relationship between word meanings and syntax and semantics more generally. It provides a balanced overview of the main theoretical approaches, along with a lucid explanation of their relative strengths and weaknesses. After covering the main topics in lexical meaning, such as polysemy and sense relations, the textbook surveys the types of meanings represented by different word classes. It explains abstract concepts in clear language, using a wide range of examples, and includes linguistic puzzles in each chapter to encourage the student to practise using the concepts. 'Adopt-a-Word' exercises give students the chance to research a particular word, building a portfolio of specialist work on a single word.Meaning and the lexicon
The lexicon – some preliminaries
Overview
What is a lexicon?
What is a word?
How to research words and their meanings
Structure of this book
What do we mean by meaning?
Overview
The boundaries of lexical semantics
The nature of denotative meaning
Are senses “images in the mind”?
Meaning and concepts
Summary and conclusions[.i]
Components and prototypes
[i]Overview
Senses as definitions: Classical Theory
An early componential approach – Katz
Against the classical approach: prototypes
Summary
Modern componential approaches – and some alternatives
Overview and questions
Jackendoff: Conceptual Semantics
Pustejovsky: the Generative Lexicon
Wierzbicka: Natural Semantic Metalanguage
Alternatives to componential approaches
Summary and conclusion
Relations among words and senses
Meaning variation: polysemy, homonymy, and vagueness
Overview
Polysemy, homonymy, vagueness
Meaning variation and language change
Approaches to polysemy
Summary and conclusion
Lexical and semantic relations
Overview
Paradigmatic relations: synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy
Two approaches to relations and the lexicon
Summary and conclusion
Word classes and semantic types
Ontological categories and word classes
Overview
Ontological categories and semantic types
Word class prototypes
Ontological categories and lexical semantics: some conclusions
Nouns and countability
Overview
Thinking about nouns and things
Nouns and number: grammar and semantics
Variation in countability: the Conceptual Semantics approach
Mass nouns as plurals
Cultural habits and countability: the NSM approach
Summary and conclusions
Predication: verbs, events, and states
Overview
The semantics of verbs
States and events
Motion verbs
Non-verb predicates
Summary and conclusion
Verbs and time
Overview
Tense, aspect, and Aktionsart
Aktionsart categories
Vendler classes
Boundedness and telicity
Semantic relations among verbs
Summary and conclusion
Adjectives and properties
Overview
Adjectives and the nouns they modify
Absolute adjectives
Gradable adjectives and semantic scales
Properties of scales and types of scalar adjectives
Summary and conclusion