An analysis of lexical meaning in Edwin Muir’s “The Combat”

Abstract EN

The lexicon of a language can be viewed as the compendium of all its words.

Words, which are also called lexical items or lexemes, are the main components of every text.

The branch of semantics which deals with word meaning, called lexical semantics, is used in the present research.

Lexical semantics examines the relationships among word meaning.

The questions are: what do language users mean when they say, for example; a cat is a type of mammal? Do „small‟ and „big‟ have the same relationship with each other like the pair „dark‟ and „light‟? Is there a difference between the relationship of „always and never‟ and „often and seldom‟? Lexical semantics investigates such problems.

It is the study of how the lexicon is organized and how the meaning of lexical items is interrelated.

The goal of lexical semantics is to build up a model for the structure of the lexicon by categorizing the types of relationships between words.

Keeping in mind the above entry, the aim of the present research is to show the linguistic meaning in the poem “The Combat” written by Edwin Muir (1887-1959).

There are several types of lexical analyses like: denotation, connotation, ambiguity, antonym, synonymy, and so on.

The present research analyzes the lexical meanings in the selected poem, but the analysis mainly includes some of the poetic features only.

This will be exposed in the lexical discussions of the words and lexemes composing the collocations as well.

This research paper achieves its objectives of lexical investigation by tackling the following sections: Literary Competence, Poetry and Deviated discourse, “The Combat” as a poem, Collocations in “The Combat”, The Lexical Meanings in the poem, and the Conclusions.

The last section is the list of the books consulted.