Abstract: Taking the Spanish verb babear as an example, this paper shows the relevance of analyzing lexical meaning as a multidimensional linguistic reality which cannot be explained from a strictly synchronic point of view. If lexical meaning can be divided into several specific meanings, it seems necessary to take into account the fact that, as a result of a constant process of transformation and adjustment, these meanings are related in different ways and are located at different distances from each other along the semantic axis. Moreover, word meanings reorganize their relations with other word meanings through time, and these relations are more complex than we could have expected, since, in addition to morphological, paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations, it is advisable to consider other less traditional ones, such as syntactic-semantic relations.
