The Sphere of Lexicons and Knowledge

Located at the intersection of semantics and lexicology, lexical semantics focuses on the meaning of words and their variations. This chapter focuses on the forms of extension of lexical meaning, the paradigmatic relations between words and the main theories concerning lexical meaning. The figurative use of lexical items occurs in different forms. The chapter discusses these forms in detail. Several automatic natural language processing applications use structured lexical resources in the treatment process. Often created in the form of some kind of database, these resources are intended to provide easy access to information related to words, especially their morphology and semantics. Formalisms to represent knowledge were developed to create ontologies. The main difference between an ontology and knowledge is that an ontology is independent of language, it is generic, it can be enriched and it is available in a digital format that is easy to manipulate with a computer.