Lexical field theory, or ''word-field theory'', was introduced on March 12, 1931, by the German linguist

Jost Trier Jost Trier (15 December 1894 – 15 September 1970) was a German philologist who was Chair of German Philology at the University of Münster from 1932 to 1961. Biography Jost Trier was born in Schlitz, Hesse, Germany on 15 December 1894, the so ...

. He argued that words acquired their meaning through their relationships to other words within the same word-field. An extension of the sense of one word narrows the meaning of neighboring words, with the words in a field fitting neatly together like a mosaic. If a single word undergoes a

semantic change Semantic change (also semantic shift, semantic progression, semantic development, or semantic drift) is a form of language change regarding the evolution of word usage—usually to the point that the modern meaning is radically different from ...

, then the whole structure of the lexical field changes. The lexical field is often used in English to describe terms further with use of different words. Trier's theory assumes that lexical fields are easily definable closed sets, with no overlapping meanings or gaps. These assumptions have been questioned and the theory has been modified since its original formulation.

Example

This is given by Trier himself. In early 20th century Germany, there were three different scales of school grades: Consequently, knowing that a grade is "''mangelhaft''" depends on which grading scale is used. If in scale A, then it is the worst possible grade. If in scale B or C, then it is merely the second-worst possible grade. However, in scale B, since there are only 5 grades, being the second-worst is somewhat better than being the second-worst in scale C, which has 6 grades.

References

Bibliography

* Bussmann, Hadumod (1996), ''Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics'', London: Routledge, s.v. lexical field theory. * Grzega, Joachim (2004), ''Bezeichnungswandel: Wie, Warum, Wozu? Ein Beitrag zur englischen und allgemeinen Onomasiologie'', Heidelberg: Winter. *Lehrer, Adrienne (1974), ''Semantic Fields and Lexical Structure'', Amsterdam: Benjamins. * Trier, Jost (1931), ''Der deutsche Wortschatz im Sinnbezirk des Verstandes'', Ph.D. diss. Bonn.

Example

References

Bibliography

See also