AMU Faculty member delivers keynote address

Aligarh : Prof M J Warsi, Chairman, Department of Linguistics, Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) delineated themes in lexical semantic research such as nature of mental lexicon, lexical relations, and the decomposition of words into grammatically relevant semantic features.

He was delivering the keynote address on ‘Encoding Lexical Semantics’ in the three-day international webinar on ‘Current Trends in Lexical Semantics’ of the Department of Linguistics, University of Kerala. Dr R Bindu, Minister for Higher Education, Government of Kerala inaugurated the programme.

Prof Warsi discussed notions prevailing in lexical semantics and its important theories like the ‘structuralist semantics’.

Explaining semantics as the study of how language is used to represent meaning, he pointed out that semantics and lexical semantics provide a framework for analysing and understanding texts, and allow scientists and academicians to link language to other disciplines.

Prof Warsi discussed how to describe the meanings of words, and how to account for the variability of meaning in different contexts.

He outlined the relation between words and their meanings, connotations of words learnt and stored, words communicated and understood by language users and why word meanings change.

Prof Warsi highlighted fundamental theoretical assumptions and commitments which underlie different theories of lexical semantics, and how they form the basis for various methodological priorities and explanations for word meanings.

He also spoke on the study of word meaning which has occupied philosophers for centuries, while explaining words as meaningful units, assumptions on which the meanings of sentences depend, lexical relation and important areas of lexical semantics.

Prof Warsi elaborated lexicons of grammar and ways to encode the information associated with words in a language.