Abstract
This article explores the definition and interpretation of the traditional paradigmatic sense relations such as hyponymy, synonymy, meronymy, antonymy, and syntagmatic relations such as selectional restrictions. A descriptive and critical overview of the relations is provided in section 1 and in section 2 the relation between sense relations and different theories of word meaning is briefly reviewed. The discussion covers early to mid twentieth century structuralist approaches to lexical meaning, with its concomitant view of the lexicon as being structured into semantic fields, leading to more recent work on decompositional approaches to word meaning. The latter are contrasted with atomic views of lexical meaning and the capturing of semantic relations through the use of meaning postulates.
