International Summer School on
Language Documentation and Description

School of Oriental and African Studies, London

22 June - 3 July 2009

Lexical Semantics

This course consists of two parts. The first part (lectures 1-3) focuses on three core areas of lexical semantics, which are introduced through extensive field-based data or case studies. These serve as selective illustrations of central topics in lexical semantics such as universal and language-specific patterns of lexical organisation, the relations between word meaning and sentence meaning, the division of labour between semantics and pragmatics, and the interaction between cognition and language. The three areas covered are basic colour terms, ideophones and sound symbolic words, and states, events and their participants. The lecture on basic colour terms introduces Berlin & Kay’s classic study on the typology of colour term inventories across languages as well as follow-up research and critiques. It discusses hotly debated theoretical issues arising from the study – universalist assumptions on the relationship between language and cognition vs. linguistic relativity or determinism as well as methodological questions arising from the experimental setup used. The lecture on ideophones and sound symbolism investigates this fascinating area of language, in which the arbitrariness of the association between sound and meaning does not hold. It looks at types of sound symbolism and at the grammatical and phonological properties of sound symbolic words as well as the difficult question of their meaning. Special emphasis is laid on the notoriously difficult collection of ideophones in the field, an issue that partly explains their marginality in field-based descriptive accounts. The third lecture, on states, events and their participants examines how different types of events are realised in clauses, how verbs and noun phrases interact to build clausal meaning, what their relevant temporal and causal properties are and what diagnostics can be used in order to distinguish types of events (for instance the famous Vendlerian aktionsart types states, activities, accomplishments and achievements) and types of participants (thematic roles like agent, patient, instrument, etc.). The second part (lecture 4) offers an introduction to three software programs commonly used in the creation and management of lexical databases: Toolbox, Lexique Pro, and WeSay.