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What is the meaning of a word? Is it some unanalyzable blob that you
simply memorize, or is it broken down into more basic pieces? If so,
what are those pieces, which are unique to each word and which are
shared across words, and how are those pieces put together to make up
the full meaning of a word? Are any combinations of pieces ruled out,
i.e. is there any such thing as an impossible word? And how does a
word's meaning determine how it's used in the grammar of a language?
Lexical semantics is the study of all of these questions, and in this
talk I survey various case studies --- mostly drawn from the study of
verbs --- that justify that word meanings are broken down into pieces
and that a theory of what those pieces are is necessary as part of a
larger theory of language, and I explore what some of the most basic
and widely accepted ingredients of such a theory are. By the end of
the talk we will have set the stage for exploring some central aspects
of lexical semantic theory in more depth in the following lectures.