A Cognitive Linguistic Study in Lexical Semantic Relations: Oppositeness as a Case Study

Although most research in Cognitive Linguistics has focused on polysemy and metaphor, the study of Lexical Semantic Relations has not received much interest in cognitive linguistics. However, the current study attempts to investigate how a cognitive linguistic approach can account for different sense relations such as antonymy, complementaries, synonymy and hyponymy from both cognitive and corpus-driven perspectives.
The term lexical semantic relations and sense relations are used interchangeably. In addition to the main theoretical principles of Cognitive Linguistics, the Dynamic Construal approach to sense relations of Croft and Cruse (2004) and Paradis’s (2005) model of Lexical Meaning as Ontologies and Construals are applied in the current study to investigate the cognitive-semantic properties of sense relations. In addition, a corpus-driven approach is used in the current study to analyze the occurrences and frequencies of sense relations of oppositeness in large corpora to analyze their occurrences and frequencies.
The current study shows that words do not contain fixed meanings, as largely claimed in Cognitive Linguistics, instead, words are used as instructions to construct the meaning. The relations are not between words but between the construals of words.