Jost Trier
Jost Trier (December 15, 1894 in Schlitz, Hesse – September 15, 1970 in Bad Salzuflen) was a German Germanic linguist (Altgermanist).
He taught as a professor at Münster University (1932-).
In 1968 he was awarded the Konrad-Duden-Preis.
Lexical field theory, or word-field theory, was introduced on March 12, 1931 by the German linguist Jost Trier. Trier 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 neighbouring 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. Trier's theory assumes that lexical fields are easily definable closed sets,[1] with no overlapping meanings or gaps. These assumptions have been questioned and the theory has been modified since its original formulation.[2]
References
- ^ David Kronenfeld and Gabriella Rundblad in Regine Eckardt, Klaus von Heusinger, Christoph Schwarze, Words in Time, Walter de Gruyter, 2003, p68. ISBN 3-11-017675-0
Jump up ^ 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. ISBN 0-521-26474-X
Literary works
- Der deutsche Wortschatz im Sinnbezirk des Verstandes, 1931
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