Semantics as a linguistic discipline has its beginning in the middle of the 19th century, and because linguistics at the time was predominantly semasiological approach, taking the notion of meaning in a psychological aspect : lexical meanings were considered to be psychological entities ), thoughts and ideas, and meaning changes are explained as resulting from psychological processes.
42.
They rely too much on the dictionary, on the meanings of words being understood before the grammatical function can be given, and too little on the formal signs and structures by which we recognise the relationships of words without necessarily knowing the words meanings indeed, signs by which we often are aided to guess the lexical meanings.
43.
Lexical reorientation, according to Matras, is defined as " the conscious shifting of the linguistic field that is responsible for encoding meaning or conceptual representations away from the language in which linguistic interaction is normally managed, organised, and processed : speakers adopt in a sense one linguistic system to express lexical meaning ( or symbols, in the Buhlerian sense of the term ) and another to organize the relations among lexical symbols, as well as within sentences, utterances, and interaction.
44.
Clearly, this criterion should not be used to define the term'infinitive'in a general theory of language . ) Given this distinction, a term like'verb'may be " defined " by means of word-or sentence-semantic criteria; the syntactic nature of the corresponding categories in individual idiolect systems is still guaranteed by the fact that the categories can be " identified " by resort to the syntactic means of the idiolect systems ( morphological marking, word order, intonation ) and, possibly, properties of lexical meanings.
