Semantic Relations and the Lexicon

This book explores how some word meanings are paradigmatically related to each other for example as opposites or synonyms and how they relate to the mental organization of our vocabularies. Traditional approaches claim that such relationships are part of our lexical knowledge (our dictionary of mentally stored words) but Lynne Murphy argues that lexical relationships actually constitute our metalinguistic knowledge. The book draws on a century of previous research including word association experiments child language and the use of synonyms and antonyms in text.