Upon successful completion of this course, each student should be able to:
- describe the subject matter of lexical semantics,
- characterize and illustrate the following foundational notions: utterance, sentence, word, morpheme, lexeme, content word, function word, lexical meaning, grammatical meaning,
- define and exemplify basic lexical relations, including homonymy, synonymy, polysemy, metaphor, metonymy, hyponymy, vagueness and inheritence,
- characterize and distinguish among ambiguity, vagueness and polysemy,
- define argument structure and event structure,
- define compositionality and mention basic challenges to it,
- contrast the classical view of categorization with the prototypes view,
- provide a basic classification of event types,
- state the linking problem in verb semantics,
- characterize different approaches to polyfunctionality,
- state how transformational and monostratal models of grammar differ in approaching the lexicon
- explain the notions of 'coercion' and 'cocomposition' in Pustejovsky's generative lexicon.