Semantic Relations and the Lexicon explores the many paradigmatic semantic relations between words, such as synonymy, antonymy and hyponymy, and their relevance to the mental organization of our vocabularies. Drawing on a century's research in linguistics, psychology, philosophy, anthropology and computer science, M. Lynne Murphy proposes a pragmatic approach to these relations. Whereas traditional approaches have claimed that paradigmatic relations are part of our lexical knowledge, Dr Murphy argues that they constitute metalinguistic knowledge, which can be derived through a single relational principle, and may also be stored as part of our extra-lexical, conceptual representations of a word. Part I shows how this approach can account for the properties of lexical relations in ways that traditional approaches cannot, and Part II examines particular relations in detail. This book will serve as an informative handbook for all linguists and cognitive scientists interested in the mental representation of vocabulary.

In this study, a purpose-built corpus, containing both child-produced and child-directed speech, is used to conduct a longitudinal examination of antonym use among children from the age of two to five years old. Previous research has tended to approach antonym acquisition using either elicitation techniques or corpora of printed adult language. In contrast, this research focuses on the speech of preschool children in naturally-occurring interactions. The discourse functions of antonymy in child-produced and child-directed language are quantified and compared with those identified in adult, written English (Jones 2002). Despite its complexity, Ancillary Antonymy is found to be most common in child-produced speech, even from the age of two, perhaps because of its particular usefulness in structuring ideas and discourse. This study presents a detailed inter-corpus comparison, assesses the discourse functions of antonymy at different stages of childhood, and discusses the correlation between antonym use in child-directed and child-produced speech.

This article presents two studies based on a corpus of American English speech by and to five children from 2 to 5 years old. The first study investigates frequency of antonym co-occurrence in speakers' turns. The second examines the discourse-functional properties of those co-occurrences, with comparison to adult-directed adult English. We find: (1) children know/use antonyms at earlier ages than experimental studies have shown; (2) children use antonyms for mostly the same discursive purposes as adults do; (3) children can be categorized as being either 'heavy' or 'light' antonym users, and 'heaviness' of antonym use seems to correlate to other aspects of antonym behaviour.

Jones (2002) identified several discourse functions of antonymy, each of which is loosely associated with a number of contrastive constructions in written English. Subsequent work (Jones, 2006;Jones and Murphy, 2005;Murphy and Jones, 2008) demonstrated that these functions are found in other modalities/registers of English, albeit with some differences in distribution. This article takes a first step in exploring discourse functions of antonymy in a language other than English. Because binary contrast has the potential to interact in different ways with the values and thought patterns of different cultures, we hypothesized that other languages differ from English in the ways in which antonyms are used in discourse.In this study of antonyms in Swedish, translational near-equivalents of pairs used by Jones were searched in the Swedish Parole corpus, and more than 4300 instances of co-occurring antonyms were found and analyzed in their sentential contexts. While the same range of antonym discourse functions is found in English and Swedish, the proportions of those functions differ significantly between the two languages. This paper both describes their functions (and the form of the functions) in Swedish and reflects on the similarities and differences with English. We ascribe some of the differences to the idiomaticity of certain componential expressions and discuss the possibility that certain cultural values affect some categories. #

The ideal introduction for students of semantics, Lexical Meaning fills the gap left by more general semantics textbooks, providing the teacher and the student with insights into word meaning beyond the traditional overviews of lexical relations. The book explores the relationship between word meanings and syntax and semantics more generally. It provides a balanced overview of the main theoretical approaches, along with a lucid explanation of their relative strengths and weaknesses. After covering the main topics in lexical meaning, such as polysemy and sense relations, the textbook surveys the types of meanings represented by different word classes. It explains abstract concepts in clear language, using a wide range of examples, and includes linguistic puzzles in each chapter to encourage the student to practise using the concepts. 'Adopt-a-Word' exercises give students the chance to research a particular word, building a portfolio of specialist work on a single word.