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In this contribution, I offer a summary of my 2014 Ph.D. dissertation from the University of Patras on headedness in word formation and lexical semantics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This experiment examined the item-level relationship between 7-year-olds’ ability to read words aloud and their knowledge of the same words in the oral domain. Two types of knowledge were contrasted: familiarity with the phonological form of the word (lexical phonology), measured by auditory lexical decision, and semantic knowledge, measured by a definitions task. Overall, there was a robust relationship between word knowledge and reading aloud success. The association was stronger when words contained irregular spelling–sound correspondences. There was no evidence that a deeper or more semantic knowledge of words was more closely related to reading aloud success beyond the association between reading success and familiarity with the phonological form of the same words. This finding is not compatible with models that see semantics as contributing directly to the reading aloud process, at least during the relatively early stages of reading development. More critical was whether or not a word was considered a lexical item, as indexed by auditory lexical decision performance. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The view of pattern grammar is that syntactic structures and lexical items are co-selected and that grammatical categories begin to align very closely with semantic distinctions. While this is certainly a valid position when analysing the phenomenon of collocation, it does not really solve the problem for open choice issues. Not all language use can be subsumed under the idiom principle. The noun hatred, for instance, can co-occur with any discourse object for which hatred can be expressed. It can also co-occur with other lexical items standing for various circumstantial aspects. The grammatical structure itself often does not tell us whether we find expressed the object of hatred or some circumstantial aspect, as these structures tend to have more than one reading. Lexicogrammar, or local grammar, is more than equating a syntactic structure with a semantic pattern. We have to be aware of the different functions or readings a given grammatical structure can have. The framework of valency/dependency grammar can help us to make the necessary distinctions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article talks about universal semantic primitives as a basis for lexical semantics. It notes that the semantic system of a language is like a set of Lego blocks, of different shapes and sizes. The meanings of words are like objects constructed out of various Lego blocks. The purpose of lexical semantics is to study such objects, to deconstruct them into their constitutive building blocks, and to seek generalizations about the different types of building blocks and different ways of putting them together. The main difficulty of lexical semantics is that while it needs a solid foundation in the form of well justified semantic primitives, no set of such primitives is given at the outset, rather, the primitives themselves must be found through large-scale lexicographic investigations, both monolingual and cross-linguistic. This double task of finding the primitives via lexicographic description and basing lexicographic description on the primitives may seem self-contradictory and thus impossible to accomplish.

This paper explores how adults acquire a new lexical item, and how they integrate it into their overall lexical knowledge. It suggests that the findings are relevant both to lexical semantics, and 10 studies of the mental lexicon. In particular, the paper examines how the word wimp and its derivatives (mainly wimpish, wimpishness, and wimp out) have become widely-known in British English in a time-span of around ten years. Wimp-usage predated entry into standard dictionaries, so dictionary consultation is unlikely to have played an important role. This paper therefore analyses a corpus of over 500 occurrences of wimp-words from British newspapers 1990–3, mainly from The Times and Sunday Times, on the assumption that word learning can occur from reading. and that newspaper usage overlaps with ‘normal’ usage. It shows that over 80% of wimp-word tokens contain information on their meaning in the immediate surrounding text. This involved one or more of the following: reference to the sex of the wimp (usually male), collocation with a word indicating feebleness (e.g. ‘paihetic wimp’), contrast with a ‘strong’ non-wimp (e.g. ‘From wimps to warriors’), overt negative evaluation (e.g. ‘reviles as a wimp’). covert negative evaluation (e.g. ‘Who needs an enclosed cockpit? Wimps’). Finally, it argues that ‘the wimp effect’ reinforces the idea that a desirable male is one who is a belligerent action-man, and so promotes and sustains cultural stereotypes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]