Semantics

138 BASIC SEMANTICS
We have also seen in the previous lesson how the available options in
a sentence can all belong to the same syntactic category but that not all
of them are semantically acceptable. In Cruse’ example (the girl ran across
the field/ the girl sat across the field /the smell ran across the field), he explains
that it is the combination of verb and prepositional phrase (e.g. sat and
across the field) which causes oddness, whereas it is the combination of
subject and verb (e.g. the smell and run) that clashes.
Another way of approaching this is by breaking down the meaning of
all these words into separate components and identifying incompatibilities.
This is what we do when we use componential analysis to describe the
meaning of words.
Using this kind of analysis, we have also seen how for a sentence to
be semantically acceptable there must not be incoherence in the meaning
of the syntagmatic components of a string of words. In other words, there
must be some kind of semantic compatibility between the meaning
components of the elements of a sentence.
Part of the interest in the organization of the lexicon has its origin in
psychology, where there are two sources of interest in the organization
of the lexicon. One of them is related to the lexicalization of concepts
and the other involves studies of the mental lexicon, language processing,
and lexical retrieval. Scholars in computer science, artificial intelligence,
and computational linguistics are interested in the organization of the
lexicon because lexical items are a convenient starting point for analyzing
and parsing natural language texts. Psychologists, on the other hand, see
lexical organization as a tool to a better understanding of the organization
of the mind.
6.1.1. Types of organization in semantic fields
Semantic fields, word fields, semantic nets, etc., are all terms for a
basically similar construct. They refer to a set (of lexemes) which covers
a particular conceptual area and which shows, certain semantic relations
between them. Whatever the label used, what all of them have in common
is the idea that words applicable to a common conceptual domain are
structured one way or another. That is, they are organized within a
semantic field by relations of affinity and contrast (e.g. synonymy,
hyponymy, incompatibility, antonymy, etc.).
Hierarchical structuring is one possible way of organizing meaning.
One of the most important types of paradigmatic structure in the lexicon
is the branching hierarchy. It includes two types of relations: