Lexicology

Lexicology is the part of linguistics that studies words. This may include their nature and function as symbols, their meaning, the relationship of their meaning to epistemology in general, and the rules of their composition from smaller elements (morphemes such as the English -ed marker for past or un- for negation; and phonemes as basic sound units).Lexicology also involves relations between words, which may involve semantics (for example, love vs. affection), derivation (for example, fathom vs. unfathomably), use and sociolinguistic distinctions (for example, flesh vs. meat), and any other issues involved in analyzing the whole lexicon of a language. Lexicology is the part of linguistics that studies words. This may include their nature and function as symbols, their meaning, the relationship of their meaning to epistemology in general, and the rules of their composition from smaller elements (morphemes such as the English -ed marker for past or un- for negation; and phonemes as basic sound units).Lexicology also involves relations between words, which may involve semantics (for example, love vs. affection), derivation (for example, fathom vs. unfathomably), use and sociolinguistic distinctions (for example, flesh vs. meat), and any other issues involved in analyzing the whole lexicon of a language. The term first appeared in the 1970s, though there were lexicologists in essence before the term was coined. Computational lexicology is a related field (in the same way that computational linguistics is related to linguistics) that deals with the computational study of dictionaries and their contents. An allied science to lexicology is lexicography, which also studies words, but primarily in relation with dictionaries – it is concerned with the inclusion of words in dictionaries and from that perspective with the whole lexicon. Sometimes lexicography is considered to be a part or a branch of lexicology, but properly speaking, only lexicologists who actually write dictionaries are lexicographers. Some consider this a distinction of theory vs. practice. The word 'lexicology' derives from the Greek λεξικόν lexicon, neut. of λεξικός lexikos, 'of or for words', from λέξις lexis, 'speech', 'word' (in turn from λέγω lego 'to say', 'to speak') and -λογία -logia, 'the study of', a suffix derived from λόγος logos, amongst others meaning 'speech, oration, discourse, quote, study, calculation, reason', in turn also from λέγω. Semantic relations between words are of many kinds, for example homonymy, antonymy, meronymy, and paronymy. Semantics as specifically involved in lexicological work is called lexical semantics. Lexical semantics is somewhat different from the semantics of larger units such as phrases, sentences, and complete texts (or discourses), because it does not involve the same degree of compositional semantics complexities; however, the notion of 'word' can be extremely complex, particularly in agglutinative languages. Outside but related to linguistics, other forms of semantics are studied, such as cultural semantics and computational semantics (the latter may refer either to computational lexicology or mathematical logic. Lexical semantics may not be understood without a brief exploration of its history. Semantics as a linguistic discipline has its beginning in the middle of the 19th century, and because linguistics at the time was predominantly diachronic, thus lexical semantics was diachronic too – it dominated the scene between the years of 1870 and 1930. Diachronic lexical semantics was interested without a doubt in the change of meaning with predominantly semasiological approach, taking the notion of meaning in a psychological aspect: lexical meanings were considered to be psychological entities), thoughts and ideas, and meaning changes are explained as resulting from psychological processes. With the rise of new ideas after the ground break of Saussure's work, prestructuralist diachronic semantics was considerably criticized for the atomic study of words, the diachronic approach and the mingle of nonlinguistics spheres of investigation. The study became synchronic, concerned with semantic structures and narrowly linguistic structures.