Sense relations

While native speakers are often able to offer clear and unambiguous judgements of form (e.g. ‘“I have readed” isn’t English’, ‘“They are big ones” is correct but “they are bigs ones” isn’t’), they are less confident (and less likely to agree) on judgements of word meaning, or lexical semantics. To understand word meaning, therefore, we need to look at the concrete evidence provided by the sense relationships into which lexemes enter. An important distinction needs to be drawn here between denotation, or the relationship between a lexical item and the world, and sense, its relationship with other lexemes. Thus starling denotes a subset of the set defined by bird and having the properties of being small, black and speckled in appearance, and enters into sense relations with words such as robin, sparrow, bird and so on.