Introducing English Linguistics

Lexical semantics
English words: Structure and meaning
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their ultimate goal is to sell dictionaries, and their methodologies have
drawn little upon modern theories of lexical semantics.
This attitude, Kay (2000: 54) continues, has a historical explanation: the
creation of dictionaries is “an ancient craft,” one that pre-dates work in
semantics by centuries. As a result, the methodology for creating diction-
aries has developed quite independently of any direct influences from lin-
guistics. In addition, because dictionaries are reader-based, they have
design considerations about which semanticists need not be concerned.
Landau (2001: 153–4) characterizes lexicography as “not a theoretical exer-
cise to increase the sum of human knowledge but practical work to put
together text that people can understand.” But despite having different
goals, semanticists and lexicographers have been conducting research in
recent years that is more mutually beneficial, particularly in the areas of
cognitive linguistics and corpus linguistics. Kay (2000: 57–62), for
instance, describes how the cognitive notion of prototype helped in the
classification of words and meanings in the Historical Corpus of English.
Most modern dictionaries use large corpora as sources for definitions and
citations. The Oxford English Corpus is a two-billion-word corpus (as of
spring 2006) containing various kinds of written texts (e.g. fiction, news,
blogs) from which information has been drawn that will assist in the cre-
ation of dictionaries by Oxford University Press (www.askoxford.com/oec/
?view
uk, accessed September 7, 2007).
Because both lexicographers and semanticists have been concerned
with the study of lexical semantics, this section will focus on the various
ways that they have studied lexical meaning. The section opens with a
description of the practice of lexicography as it has been applied in the
creation of English-language dictionaries, with a particular emphasis on
how lexicographers determine word meaning from citation slips. It con-
cludes with an overview of the various approaches that semanticists have
taken in developing theories for explaining lexical meaning and describ-
ing the ways that new words are added to English.