Questions tagged [lexical-semantics]

A branch of semantics, the study of the meaning of words, affixes and compounds too.

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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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'Literally' non-literally

There has been a recent popularization over the questionable use of the word 'literally' as an intensifier rather than as a marker of non-figurative, especially since it seems to be used non-literally ...
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How polysemic on average were Chinese words around the time of the creation of Chinese characters?

If you look up a Chinese character and its meaning in classical Chinese, there is a good chance you get a long list with many different semantically unrelated meanings. Take 而 for instance, that bears ...
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Are there languages with separate words for 'mouth opening' and 'mouth cavity'?

I am looking for languages which have separate words for the visible opening of the mouth (the external part, including or not including the lips), and the cavity (the internal part). Put another way, ...
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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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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 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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What books to read about lexical semantics?

I want to have a systematic understanding on semantic field, lexical semantics, and semantic change. Skimming at Kate Kearns' Semantics, it seems that its focus is more about formal semantics, with ...
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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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How to extract Subject, Object, Verb through a parser

For my project, I need to extract Subject, Object and Verb from the sentence. I have read that, LFG F structure is what I need. I am using Stanford NLP package. I couldnt find out how to do that in ...
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On the search for an example sentence from a German textbook

Once I read three sentences build of made-up words with correct German declination and conjugation, so you were able to parse this sentence although it beared no semantic meaning. It was something ...
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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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Semantical and functional morphemes

I have this idea in my head that when it comes to morphemes, there are two divisions at the top: "semantical morphemes" and "functional morphemes". Semantical morphemes are those ...
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Morphology to generate hyponyms or hypernyms

Is there a natural/constructed language which allows us to express hyponyms from hypernyms or hypernyms to hyponyms. For example, pigeon to bird or bird to pigeon, both don't have any relation to them ...
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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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Word with separate translations in another language

Is there a name for the linguistic phenomenon of a word in language or dialect X with two or multiple meanings that have individual translations in language or dialect Y? For example, escada in ...
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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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Name of the theory of lexical semantics that distinguishes consonants by the values "up" and "down"?

I'm reading "Cognitive interpretation of Czech verse" by Pavel Jiráček about a way to analyze poetry by reading how the consonants, syllables and words conotate "up" and "down". What is the best ...
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Entailments Relations

I have problem understanding the entailment logic on these examples and would like some help. Here's my answers: Sally works together with Polly. Sally works. => I think one entails other, but not ...
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Word ageing: what reliable bibliographical references can be recommended?

I have encountered the notion of "word ageing". Lexemes (unless and until replaced through internal or external innovation) grow older and older, and with time they tend to (1) acquire some additional ...
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Some discrepancies in WordNet symmetric relations

I have extracted the number of each relation in WordNet as you can see below. Some relations, such as hypernym and hyponym, are not in the same size. What is wrong with it? "count(*)" "link" "89172"...
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How to check the distance beween comparative adjectives?

It is known that distances (intervals) between (I could be wrong in the choice of words) "very bad", "bad", "not bad", "good", "very good" are approximately equal. Such equality of intervals was used ...
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Is there a term for sets of words that have the same sense relation between them?

Sense relations are apparently semantic relationships between words and/or predicates. We learn more about this at Glottopedia.org. "A sense relation is a paradigmatic relation between words or ...
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Hyponymy and hypernymy for adjectives

Would the concepts of hyponymy and hypernymy be used for adjectives? Hyponymy and hypernymy are usually used for nouns. And for verbs the WordNet people have created the concept troponymy for a manner ...
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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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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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davidsonian semantics

I hope everyone is fine. I was wondering if you could help me with some suggestions about which book(s) should I start with to learn the Davidsonian semantics, so that I will be able to read and write ...
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What's the relationship between lexical change and word-formation?

Do both the lexical change(invention, blending, abbreviation, acronym, etc) and derivation belong to word-formation?
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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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