Predictable meaning shift: Some linguistic properties of Lexical Implication Rules

Abstract

Drawing on a growing database of systematic relationships between word-senses, the authors argue that a significant class of these represent Lexical Implication Rules, a set of formal rules within the domain of lexical semantics; these they distinguish from other types of semantic relation more closely dependent on metaphor and world-knowledge. Some formal properties of Lexical Implication Rules are proposed, as evidence of their linguistic, rather than real-world, nature.