This course is designed to introduce students to the fascinating field of lexical semantics, the study of the interaction of syntactic behavior and semantic properties. Lexical semantics can be approached from different perspectives with different concerns and the class is meant to introduce the major approaches that have shed important light on the study of lexical knowledge and representations. Lectures and class discussions will focus on the major theoretical frameworks and their applications. Each theoretical framework will be illustrated with representative works that show the basic constructs of the theory and how the approach can be applied to the analysis of a linguistic issue. After the theories are introduced, a case study will be provided to show it may relate to recent works on Chinese or English lexical semantic issues. The ultimate goal of this class is to provide students with a broad range of background knowledge that will enable the students to carry out meaningful research in lexical semantics.

Continuous Assessment: 100%