Words and the Grammar of Context

Research in linguistic semantics may be roughly divided into two broad traditions. Students concerned with lexical fields and lexical domains have interested themselves in the paradigmatic relations of contrast that obtain among related lexical items and the substantive detail of how particular lexical items map to the nonlinguistic objects they stand for. Formal semanticists have been mostly unconcerned with these issues, concentrating rather on how the meanings of individual words, whatever their internal structure may be and however they may be paradigmatically related to one another, combine into the meanings of phrases and sentences. Combinatorial semanticists have naturally been more concerned with syntax, especially as the leading idea of formal semantics has been the specific combinatorial hypothesis of Fregean compositionality.