The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Lexical Meaning

the meaning of a word that is inherent only in a given lexical unit, as opposed to the grammatical meaning of whole classes and categories of words. The lexical content of most autonomous lexemes is heterogeneous and represents a sense structure, a hierarchical collateral subordination of the individual meanings, or from another standpoint, the lexical-semantic variants of a word. This organizational property of lexical semantics is called polysemy, or the semantic variation of a word. Depending on the object and notional relationship of a word, meanings can be literal and metaphorical; depending on the degree of contextual conditionality, meanings can be free, phraseologically bound, or constructively conditioned.

REFERENCES

Akhmanova, O. S. Ocherki po obshchei i russkoi leksikologii. Moscow, 1957.
Katsnel’son, S. D. Soderzhanie slova, inachenie i oboznachenie. Moscow-Leningrad, 1965.
Schmidt, W. Lexikalische und aktuelle Bedeutnng, 4th ed. Berlin, 1967.
Ufimtseva, A. A. Slovo v leksiko-semanticheskoi sisteme iazyka. Moscow, 1968.
Ullmann, S. Semantics: An Introduction to the Science of Meaning. Oxford, 1964.
Vinogradov, V. V. “Osnovnye tipy leksicheskikh znachenii slova.” Voprosy iazykoznaniia, 1953, no. 5.

A. A. UFIMTSEVA

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