KOL Lexicology

Francis (フランシス) Bond (凡土) and Markéta Dančová: 2026.

Thursday 9:45-11:15 (KC-2.04)

This is the course notes for the first part of KOL/LEXI Lexicon.

The aim of the course is to acquaint students with several basic approaches to the issue of lexical meaning. In particular, we will look at how words convey meanings and how they can be combined to express richer meaning.

We will use concrete examples taken from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories and Karel Čapek's Válka s Mloky "War with the Newts". The course considers meaning from the smallest levels of words and morphemes, up through sentences to the stories as a whole.

Course Content

This part of the course introduces basic skills in semantic analysis, such as:

Course Page: https://bond-lab.github.io/Semantics/lexicology.html.

There are two text books, but extra material may be covered in the lectures. As a result, you need to actually come to the lectures. General guidelines to the course are given in the first lecture. You must read one story, and will carry out detailed analysis of the meaning at various levels — this course has homework. However, it is designed to be as interesting as possible, and the stories are some of the most popular in the world.

Course Outline

LectureContent (click to download) Tutorial Reading Assessment
1
02-12		 Introduction, Organization: Main Issues
I saw a kid ️🪚🐐 / ️👀🧒 		Tute 1 Saeed 1
2
02-19		 Word Meaning and Semantic Relations
What is a dog-cart? 		Tute 2 Saeed 3 Annotation Task
3
02-26		 Words in Combination: Idioms and Composition
the windows were blocked by old-fashioned shutters		 Tute 3 Sag et al. 2002
4
03-05		 Conceptual Metaphor and Metonymy
the house , which is itself crushed under a heavy mortgage		 Tute 4 Saeed 11.4
⛓ ChainNet		 Finish Phase 1 by 03-09 (midnight)
5
03-12		 Sentence Meaning and Participants
He seized the poker, and bent it into a curve		 Tute 5 Saeed 5&6 Comparison Task
6
03-19		 Components and Distribution
kindly put your revolver in your pocket 		Tute 6
6+ Submit Write up
Due: 2026-03-31 23:59 (Tue)

Text Books

Story

Other Resources

Assessment

My mind rebels at stagnation, give me problems, give me work! The Sign of Four

At the start of the semester you will be given a short passage from one of the stories that will be used by you throughout the course to study meaning. In the projects you will examine and annotate different levels of meaning using on-line tools provided. This may be slightly harder if you are not a native speaker of English, but we will try to link to translations of the stories in as many languages as possible.

Project 1: Disambiguation (individual work)

Identify and annotate word meaning for your own passage of one of the stories using wordnet as the sense inventory.

Project 2: Comparison (group work)

Compare and contrast your annotations with other annotators; re-annotate based on your discussion and write a short paper.

You must satisfactorily compelte the assignment to attempt the exam.

Tutorials

I would like to use the results of your analysis in the projects to help further in research on meaning. If you would like me not to use your input, you may email me at any time up to one week after you get your results for this semester. If you do so, I will discard your input. Otherwise, I will use it to find out more about meaning, and you will be credited as 'students of KOL Lexikon'. I will also make it available for others to use under the same license as the materials I create (CC BY 4.0).

Creative Commons License
Course materials created by us are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License and are available at https://github.com/bond-lab/Semantics/.

Newt icon by parkjisun from Noun Project (CC BY 3.0)

Course adapted from Detecting Meaning with Sherlock Holmes.

Francis Bond <bond@ieee.org>
Computational Linguistics Lab
Palacký University, Olomouc