Pretty much everybody I spoke to who has any exposure to linguistics said the lexical semantics of verbs is a rather small area of focus. Truthfully, the class consisted of a lot of words apparently said in no particular order. Ha! I guess some people may have understood some of it.
Basically---what I gathered, at least---to study the lexical semantics of verbs, you are trying to pull the verb out of a sentence and by observing its behavior determine its meaning or the meaning of its component parts that make it behave in a certain way. Since I didn't have a general introduction to lexical semantics in the first place, I may be way off the mark. Unfortunately, I really know nothing about semantics, either, but I didn't see how it would be useful to try to determine the function of a component of a sentence outside of the sentence. It's like pulling a leaf off a plant to see how it works; once you have it off, it doesn't work because it's made to work with the plant. I guess you may be able to garner some helpful information (take, for instance, cadaver dissection) in looking at a dead thing to learn how the living thing functions. But it seemed like taking a dead thing and trying to find life in it apart from what makes it alive.
More on this later! I have my floundering statistics class to attend!
1 comment:
semantics is what lawyers use a lot
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