Lexical Functions in Lexicography and Natural Language Processing (Studies in Language Companion Series)

It seems natural to introduce LF relations along de Saussure's dichotomy of

paradigmatic vs. syntagmatic relations (see also Mel'cuk and Alonso Ramos

& Tutin, this volume). Due to the strong influence of Trier's semantic field

studies, most of the research activities on lexical semantic relations have

a long time been almost exclusively paradigmatic (see Lipka, 1992:160 for

a detailed discussion). In contrast, the research on institutionalized lexical

relations in the broadest sense has been more balanced. Thus, both

syntagmatic and paradigmatic lexical relations received extensive attention

since the sixties in the framework of MTT, especially by Apresjan, l'ču,

and Zolkovskij. Syntagmatic lexical relations have also been a central topic

within the British Contextualism—a linguistic tradition originally put forward

by Firth in the fifties and continued nowadays in the same spirit, for

example, by J. Sinclair and M.A.K. Halliday, to name just its most prominent

representatives. In the seventies, Hausmann brought up the issue of

the representation of syntagmatic lexical relations in practical dictionaries.

This enumeration could be continued up to recent proposals both in

traditional and computational lexicography.