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It is enough to take up some single leading grammatical relation. I select for this purpose the verb as the most important part of speech, with which most of the others come into relation, and which completes the formation of the sentence, the grammatical purpose of all language.—Wilhelm von Humboldt (1885)

The claim that lexical knowledge is organized into semantic fields has been supported by semantic investigations in several languages. We have accepted this claim as a basis for formulating our hypotheses about structures within fields; it is therefore a general part of every specific hypothesis. Since it partitions the lexicon into manageable fields and subfields, this general claim greatly simplifies lexical research. But in our enthusiasm for its convenience in dealing with lexical diversity we should not overlook the difficulties it poses. One difficulty with an approach to the lexicon via the hypothesis of semantic …