Lexical field of a word

Lexical fields

Based on research in historical semantics, Jost Trier (1931) introduced the term lexical field (or semantic field) that he defined as a set of semantically related words whose meanings delimit each other. Thus, the meaning of a word can only be fully determined in terms of contrasts in which it stands with other words in the field. From a diachronic perspective, this means that any change in the meaning of one word affects the meaning of other words to which it is related. According to Trier, the members of a field cover a whole conceptual or objective domain without any gaps or overlaps, i.e. the boundaries of a lexical field can be clearly delimited. Criticism of this conception of lexical fields brought about differentiations and modifications of lexical field theory and led in the development of componential analysis.

Ello

From such notions I take the question to relate to the delineation of sets of related words. Let us see how far we can get. I will not burden my readers with tedious examples of the various -nym terms.

There are at least three relevant themes to examine and I do so only briefly in the hope that others may add and criticize constructively:

The Word, Hypernyms and Hyponyms

In the set of all words is the word we are interested in. I refer to it as Word. Hyponyms are a subset of the meanings of Word. Word is a subset of the words in its hypernyms. At their simplest, these relations are easily represented in a Venn diagram of the sets:

 

Antonyms and Synonyms

It is useful to introduce the concept of mapping.

Ideally, a synonym means exactly the same as Word; there is a perfect mapping of one to the other. Antonym means the exact opposite as Word; there is a perfect mapping from {not Word} to the antonym.

This ideal is rarely realised in language, where we must often recognize that our words and sets are not as clearly defined as this ideal or as in the previous paragraph. Our sets are fuzzy, with ill-defined boundaries.

No word is common to the sets of antonyms and synonyms but there are shades of meaning on the set boundaries where a word is not exactly synonymous or antonymous with Word. The mappings are imperfect.

Meromyns

Meronyms merit a little extra analysis. The meronyms may be seen as the mapping of the meaning of Word onto one or more other words, the set of meronyms. To find meronyms we have to find these mappings, subtle, complicated, obscure as they might be.

Summary

The first question asks us how words relating to Word may be found from the set of all words. It asks if there are other sets above the relevant sets of hypo-, hyper-, syno-, anto-, and meronyms. On first sight, and consistent with my analysis above, these might be assumed to cover all relevant sets; indeed, as I write I cannot think of another useful set to include.

I do not deal with the second exemplary question about Strasbourg.

As to the third question, I argue from the set approach that the search for any of the words in these sets - perhaps especially the meronyms, antonyms and synonyms - is beset with difficulties of meanings and definitions that may only be overcome in a case-by-case manner. Words do not come with definitive tags that allow them to be sorted or classified uniquely into the sorts of sets, fuzzy sets or mapped sets that I have outlined. There is therefore no mechanistic or algorithmic way to find words related to Word from the set of all words.