Semiotic Principles In Semantic Theory

Semiotic Principles in Semantic Theory

This study represents a contribution to the theory of meaning in natural language. It proposes a semantic theory containing a set of regular relational principles. These principles enable semantic theory to describe connections from the lexical reading of a word to its figurative contextual reading, from one variant reading of a polysemous lexical item to another, from the idiomatic to its literal reading or to the literal reading(s) of one or more of its component lexical items. Semiotic theory provides a foundation by supplying principles defining motivated expression-content relations for signs generally. The author argues that regular semantic relational principles must dervive from such semiotic principles, to ensures the psychological reality and generality of the semantic principles.

Semiotic principles in semantic theory

Theories of Lexical Semantics

Theories of Lexical Semantics offers a comprehensive overview of the major traditions of word meaning research in linguistics. In spite of the growing importance of the lexicon in linguistic theory, no overview of the main theoretical trends in lexical semantics is currently available. This book fills that gap by charting the evolution of the discipline from the mid nineteenth century to the present day. It presents the main ideas, the landmark publications, and thedominant figures of five traditions: historical-philological semantics, structuralist semantics, generativist semantics, neostructuralist semantics, and cognitive semantics. The theoretical and methodological relationship between the approaches is a major point of attention throughout the text: going well beyond amere chronological enumeration, the book does not only describe the theoretical currents of lexical semantics, but also the undercurrents that have shaped its evolution.