ABSTRACT
The perspectives on meaning that we have explored so far include the referential relation between a word and an entity in the world, and sense relations between words within the structure of vocabulary. Componential analysis applied essentially to referential meaning, though with some relevance to sense relations, e.g. in the explanation of synonymy, antonymy and hyponymy. We have been viewing words by and large either as individual items or as substitutes for one another. In this chapter we turn our attention to the lexical and semantic relations that a word has with other words that accompany it in the stream of speech or writing: its syntagmatic lexical relations. This is a different study from that of syntax in grammar: grammatical syntax is about the structure of sentences in terms of classes of words (e.g. nouns as a class, verbs as a class) and their combinations. Syntagmatic lexical relations (i.e. arising from combination in structures like phrases and sentences) are concerned with individual lexemes and the meaning relations they enter into with other accompanying lexemes. We begin by looking at the meanings that arise from what is called collocation.
