Lexical field theory, or ''word-field theory'', was introduced on March 12, 1931 by the German linguist Jost Trier. 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, 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 In geometry, topology, and related branches of mathematics, a closed set is a Set (mathematics), set whose complement (set theory), complement is an open set. In a topological space, a closed set can be defined as a set which contains all its lim ...

, with no overlapping meanings or gaps. These assumptions have been questioned and the theory has been modified since its original formulation.Richard M. Hogg, Norman Francis Blake, R. W. Burchfield, Suzanne Romaine, Roger Lass, John Algeo, ''The Cambridge History of the English Language: The beginnings to 1066'', Cambridge University Press, 1992, p403.

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.

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