Introduction to Lexical Semantics

Introduction to basic concepts and issues in the linguistic study of word meaning. We explore grammatical regularities in word meaning and the relation between word meaning and the conceptual realm. The questions we address include the following. How is the meaning of a word determined from its internal structure?  How can simple words have complex meanings?  What is a possible word?  How does a word's meaning determine the word's syntactic distribution and what kind of reasoning does it support? What kind of information belongs to the lexical entry of a word?  The course will show that the investigation of the linguistic and semantic structure of words draws on the full resources of linguistic theory and methodology. Prerequisites: Symsys 1, Linguist 35, or equivalent or permission of the instructor. Linguist 130A is not a prerequisite for this course.