betekenisspectrum

Betekenisspectrum is a concept in lexical semantics used to describe the full range of meanings that a word or expression can convey across different contexts. The term treats meaning as a continuum, from a core or prototypical sense to peripheral, metaphorical, historical, and context-specific interpretations. It is often used to analyze polysemous words whose senses share a common core but diverge in usage.

The concept emphasizes that meanings are distributed rather than listed as discrete entries. In practice, researchers construct a spectrum by mapping senses along dimensions such as concreteness, politeness, domain, or semantic relatedness to the core sense. Data sources include sense inventories, corpora, dictionaries, and crowdsourced annotations. Metrics such as spectrum width, density, and centrality describe how broad or concentrated a meaning profile is for a given word.

Illustration: the word bank may have a core financial institution sense, a peripheral sense meaning the land beside a river, and extended senses in phrases like bank on, bank account, riverbank erosion, etc. The betekenisspectrum framework helps distinguish rapid semantic change from stable polysemy by tracking shifts in spectrum shape over time.

Applications include lexicography, natural language processing, linguistic pedagogy, and historical linguistics, where the spectrum informs sense disambiguation, sense inventory design, and interpretation of diachronic changes. Critics note that spectrum construction can be subjective and language-dependent, and that delimiting senses remains contentious across theories.

See also: semantic spectrum, polysemy, sense disambiguation, lexical semantics, semantic field, semantic change.