Semantic Domains and Linguistic Theory

This paper is about the relations between the concept of Semantic Domain and the “Theory of Semantic Fields”, a structural model for lexical semantics proposed by Jost Trier at the beginning of the last century. The main limitation of the Trier’s notion is that it does not provide an objective criterion to aggregate words around fields, making the overall model too vague, and then unuseful for computational purposes. The notion of Semantic Domain improves that of Semantic Field by providing such a criterion. In particular, the structuralist approach in semantics has been connected to the Wittgenstein’s meaning-isuse assumption, providing an objective criterion to infer Semantic Domains from corpora relying on a lexical coherence assumption. The task based evaluation we did for our claims shows that the notion of Semantic Domains is effective because it allows to define an uniform methodology to deal with many different Natural Language Processing tasks. In the paper we discuss the epistemological issues concerning the possibility of adopting a task based methodology to support linguistic theory, showing the case study of Semantic Domains in Computational Linguistics as a paradigmatic example for our claims.