# Lexical semantics Compositional semantics: - studies how meanings of phrases are constructed out of the meaning of individual words - principle of compositionality: meaning of each whole phrase derivable from meaning of its parts - sentence structure conveys some meaning: obtained by syntactic representation Lexical semantics: - studies how the meanings of individual words can be represented and induced What is lexical meaning? We don't really know how brains process meaning. However, recent results in psychology and cognitive neuroscience gives us some clues. Different representations are proposed, eg. - [[Formal Semantics]] representations based on logic - or, taxonomies relating words to each other like [[Prototype Theory]] - or, [[Distributional Semantics]] representations in statistical NLP But none of the representations give us a complete account of lexical meaning. --- ## References 1. Chapter 19, Jurafsky and Martin, 2019