Dirk Geeraerts
Word Meaning Research, Its Scope and Development
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Dirk Geeraerts
Dirk Geeraerts
Dirk Geeraerts is professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of Leuven. He studied Germanic languages (Dutch and English), and also holds a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy. He received his PhD from the University of Leuven in 1981.
From 1977 to 1985, he worked at the Instituut voor Nederlandse Lexicologie in Leiden (The Netherlands). After an interlude at the department of Dutch of the University of Leiden, he taught Dutch linguistics at the Kortrijk campus of the University of Leuven from 1986 to 1993. Since 1993 he taught theoretical linguistics in Leuven, where he founded the research group Quantitative Lexicology and Variational Linguistics at the turn of the millennium.
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Dirk Geeraerts
Word Meaning Research, Its Scope and Development
Lexical semantics has changed considerably in the past three decades, not least because of the emergence of Cognitive Semantics. To put those changes in the right perspective, this talk will describe the main stages in the development of word meaning research in modern linguistics: from historical semantics in the 19th century, over structuralist semantics in the middle of the 20th century, to neostructuralist and cognitive approaches in the late 20th and early 21st century. This evolution will be described from three perspectives: the theoretical one (what are the conflicting or converging assumptions of the approaches?), a descriptive one (what are the phenomena that word meaning research has focused on?), and a methodological one (is there an evolution in the methods of lexical semantics?).