Lexical semantics today

International audienceLexical semantics is the study of what words mean. In particular, lexical semantics as opposed to formal semantics involves the study of open class words like adjectives, common nouns and verbs, as opposed to functional class words, which contribute to the logical structure of the language – quantifiers, connectives and many adverbs. The latter have been studied in compositional semantics, which uses formal languages like higher-order logic and the lambda calculus to formalize the composition of meaning and the meanings of functional words