ENGLISH LEXICOLOGY

2.4 Semantic, or Lexical, Fields

 

The term lexical field was first introduced by the German linguist Jost Trier. He noted that fields are living realities intermediate between individual words and the totality of the vocabulary; as a part of the whole, they share with words the property of being integrated in a large structure and with the vocabulary the property of being structured in terms of smaller units (as quoted in Ullman, 1951, p. 157; Lyons, 1977, p. 253). A set of lexemes which are related in meaning share a lexical, or semantic, field, so semantic fields are classifications of words associated by their meanings. David Crystal defines a semantic field as “a named area of meaning in which lexemes interrelate and define each other in specific ways” (1995, p. 157). This task may make it look easy to group, for example, all the vegetables under the lexical field “vegetables”: cucumber, carrot, and cabbage; and to group all the pieces of furniture under the lexical field of “furniture”: stool, chair, bed, table wardrobe, sideboard, and bookshelf. Nevertheless, it is not so straightforward. Crystal notes that some lexemes belong to the fields which are difficult to define or vague, e.g., noise or difficult. Some lexemes may belong to more than one field, such as orange. Does it belong to the field of color or fruit? He admits that even if there are some difficulties in arranging the lexemes according to their semantic fields, grouping lexemes by subject matter will be beneficial to the learners of English as a second language as well as young children.