The chapter opens with an overview of basic categories within the field of study of lexical semantics. It next presents fundamental concepts related to the lexicon, especially the lexeme as the basic unit of lexicology. It also analyzes the concept of lexical meaning and provides a brief overview of some of the approaches adopted in the study of denotation and connotation. The central part of the chapter describes polysemy and its basic mechanisms – metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche. The examples feature Serbian and other Slavic lexemes exhibiting the richest polysemy. The next section tackles syntagmatic lexical relations, the notion of collocation and the role of context in the study of lexical meaning. Paradigmatic lexical relations are also observed, especially synonymy and antonymy, both true and contextual or quasi-.

In diachronic development and contemporary structure of Slavic lexicons, we see influences of universal semantic mechanisms and specific historical processes, of language development, and of language contact. Old Church Slavonic played a role in forming Slavic vocabulary, especially in Russian, where specific or colloquial synonyms contrast with abstract or formal (golova ‘head as body part’ vs. glava ‘head as top in a hierarchy’). Semantic divergence of Proto-Slavic roots creates inter-lingual enantiosemy (e.g., Rus. čerstvyj ‘stale’ vs. Cze. čerstvý ‘fresh’). To compare languages we use regular abstract semantic relations, e.g. synonymy, antonymy, or lexical functions Magn, Oper. Linguistic expressions may differ, but we find similar semantic oppositions and derivation mechanisms. The languages share the same types of antonymy, albeit using different prefixes. Semantic bleaching patterns also agree: adjectives meaning ‘scary’ develop to mean ‘high degree’. Motion verbs such as ‘go’ come to mean process or result. We give case studies of lexical relations: Polish synonyms honor vs. cześć, Russian pravda vs. istina.

Geneviève Calbris’ semiotic study of French gestures began in the 1970s and shows how gestural signs interface between the concrete and the abstract. Created by analogical links originating in physical experience of the world via processes of mimesis and metonymy, they are activated by contexts of use and constitute diverse semantic constructions: Gesture is able to evoke several notions alternatively (polysemy) or simultaneously (polysign). As expressions of perceptual schemas extracted from physical experience, they prefigure concepts. A Saussurean perspective brings to light relations between physical features of gestures (signifiers) and the notions (signifieds) they are apt to evoke; it reveals signifiers that are common to different gestures (paradigmatic axis of substitution) and how signifiers interweave in gestural sequencing (syntagmatic axis of combination). Gesture expresses, animates, explains, synthesizes information, and anticipates speech. We highlight its utterance functions, its simultaneous multireferentiality, the gestural anticipation of verbal information, and the interplay of tension-relaxation between conversation partners that this can create.

This chapter first considers the functional and semantic overlap between discourse connectives and discourse markers, where the latter is presented as including the former. Since the two categories share most protypical features, the fuzzy boundaries between the two categories are explained in terms of partial overlap.

We then show that the description of connectives’ meanings and functions can proceed following an onomasiological as well as a semasiological approach. The latter has given rise to numerous case studies in a variety of languages aiming to come to a fine-grained semantic description of specific connectives. Strenghts and weaknesses of such studies are presented. Onomasiological approaches focus on a set connectives that are categorized together on the basis of shared semantic properties, trying to disentangle their similarities and differences, within and across languages. In the final section, we turn to one of the most described features of discourse connectives namely its polysemy and polyfunctionality, and how contextual cues may help solve this ambiguity, and how polysemy is a key explaining factor in the (frequency) distribution of connectives.

Chapter 6 focuses on polysemy, a common linguistic phenomenon in which a single form is associated with two or more distinct but related senses, as shown in the relatedness of baseball cap and pen cap. Polysemy is a result of meaning extension, which can be triggered by mechanisms such as metaphorical mappings, experiential correlation, or inference. The principled polysemy model proposed by Tyler and Evans (2003) posits that the distinct senses associated with a particular lexical form are related to each other in a systematic and motivated way and are organized around a central or primary sense. Because polysemy is pervasive, the fact that many words have a large number of different senses magnifies the challenge of vocabulary learning. The chapter advocates for L2 instructional approaches that introduce the different senses of a word not in a piecemeal fashion but as a sequence of related meanings starting from the primary sense and continuing to extended senses. Different CL-based pedagogical methods and tasks are presented to showcase how to enable learners to attend to the systematic relationships that exist among the various senses of a lexical form.

Historical linguists investigate those contexts that are considered to be most relevant to language change, given the theoretical approach adopted and the phenomena to be investigated. The topic of this chapter is usage-based perspectives on language-internal change, especially as conceptualized in the frameworks of research on grammaticalization, semantic-pragmatic change, and diachronic construction grammar. Contexts may be immediate, local “co-texts” or wider linguistic discourse contexts. Contexts tend to be wide and discursive as change begins to occur and local after it has occurred. I discuss the roles in enabling change of ambiguity, of pragmatic inferencing, and of “assemblies of discursive uses” such as have been proposed in work on constructionalization. With respect to contexts for “actualization,” the step-by-step language-internal spread (or loss) of a change that has occurred, focus is on host-class expansion and on the often analogy-driven changes across contexts, especially as revealed in corpus work.

This chapter presents a detailed examination of the theory of language put forward in the Babylonian cosmogony, Enuma elish. This poem locates the origin of language at the very beginnings of the cosmos’ formation, even before the gods came to be. Accordingly, language is one of the first principles on which the world is founded. Thus, just as there is a temporal and spatial dimension of existence, there is also a linguistic one that is beyond the human and the divine. The poem futher explores this idea in using wordplay and etymology of sacred places, divine objects, and gods. In this context, the patron god of Babylon, Marduk, is conceptualized as a polyonymous cosmic divinity who incorporates into his persona the names of other gods.

The chapter is concerned with a commitment of the logical pluralist: if there are at least two correct logics, then these logics will either involve different logical vocabulary or they will assign different meanings to the shared vocabulary. A central question is how this plurality in meaning can be implemented within a pluralist framework. Pluralists typically endorse claims to the effect that (i) the connectives of the logics have different meanings or (ii) that the notion of validity employed by one logic may be relevantly different from the one employed by the other. A further important question is whether the plurality of meanings is confined to the theoretical level only or whether a corresponding plurality is postulated regarding the extra-systematic counterparts of the logical vocabulary of correct logics. I argue that both connectives pluralism and consequence pluralism are implausible when construed as pluralistic theories. Meta-contextualism–the view that the question of whether the meaning of the logical terminology is the same or different in different contexts is itself subject to semantic variability–is shown to have exceedingly radical implications.

While existing scholarship is correct in stressing that policymakers pursue their interests on the global stage, the overall result is definitely not one of Pareto-optimizing rational design. We argue that global policies form protean patchworks of governance practices and competing universal value claims. Governance practices can be defined as socially meaningful patterns of action that are constitutive of the policymaking process, including its shifting playing field. Values, which capture the ideological dimension of policymaking, refer to the normative beliefs that inform the definition of global problems and the formulation of solutions. We use preliminary evidence to illustrate the value of our framework. We then offer methodological advice to assist in the empirical study and operationalization of governance practices and universal value debates. By identifying prevalent practices, our framework captures the dialectics of inclusion and exclusion, while also making sense of historical shifts in dominant modes of global governance. When it comes to value debates, our framework illuminates the persistence of social conflict as the normal and expected condition of global policymaking. Normative patchworks are generated by global governors out of multidimensional ideological cleavages.

When learners have mastered the 2,000–3,000 high frequency words of general usefulness in English, it is often efficient to direct vocabulary learning to more specialised areas depending on the aims of the learners. It is possible to specialise by learning the shared vocabulary of several fields of study, for example, academic vocabulary, or the vocabulary of the hard sciences or soft sciences. It is also possible to specialise by focusing on the specialised vocabulary of one particular field or part of that field, that is, technical vocabulary. There are several lists of academic vocabulary including the Academic Word List, the Academic Vocabulary List, the Academic Spoken Word List, the Hard Science Spoken Word, List and the Soft Science Spoken Word List. Technical word lists usually consist of one or two thousand words, but some specialist areas like medicine, botany, or zoology have very large technical vocabularies. The chapter looks at how academic and technical vocabulary can be learned. It also looks at the various roles that vocabulary plays in texts.

This paper discusses the ways in which formal or model theoretic semantics has difficulty addressing questions of lexical semantics, specifically questions that arise in accounting for the pervasive polysemy of deverbal nominalizations like German Bemalung (painting) and English blending. Formal or model theoretic semantics has largely neglected issues in which analysis of complex words comes to the fore. I briefly review the history of model theoretic semantics and its relation to lexical semantics and illustrate the tendency for conceptual semantics to be quietly integrated into referential semantics, as, for example, in a recent article by Pross (2019). I conclude with a brief sketch of how Lieber’s (2004, 2016) Lexical Semantic Framework treats the polysemy of deverbal nominalizations.