![]() There is another angle of analysing linguistic meaning: denotation. Instead, they ask more general questions like: “What lexical meaning patterns do we see across different words?”, “What semantic classes of nouns, verbs, and adjectives are there?”, “What is the nature of lexical meaning in the lexicon?”, “How is lexical meaning represented in our minds?”, “How are lexical entries organised in our lexicon?”, and “How does lexical meaning relate to cognition?”. Generally, lexical semanticists are not interested in “pinning down” the exact meaning of any particular word. What about the word care? What does it actually mean for someone to care about something? What’s the different between a jacket and a coat? Are hotdogs sandwiches? If we focused on the sense of a specific word, we could write a whole book on it! Sense is fun to think about, but if we focus too much on a single word, we can lose sight of the bigger picture. Much of this is still on-going research in linguistics.Īlthough words like pencil have a somewhat articulable meaning, there are other words like sour whose sense is actually quite hard to characterise, except that it’s, well… that sour taste. Some linguists have proposed that word meaning encodes things like what parts it has (e.g., a pencil is something consists of graphite or a similar substance), what its purpose is (e.g., a pencil is something that is used for writing), and how it came into being (e.g., pencils are man-made, not found in nature) (Pustejovsky 1995). Similarly, we know that the lexical semantics of pencil says that it’s a count noun, but what makes a pencil a pencil? You may still be wondering, “but what does it mean for something to be sour, exactly, though?”. If we ask right now what the sense of the adjective sour was, our best approximation would be ‘ x is sour to degree d ‘. What we’ve done is identify some major patterns in word senses, but this of course doesn’t fully answer the question “what do words mean?”. Some adjectives have a degree argument, some do not.Adjectives specify whether it’s stage-level (bounded) or individual-level (unbounded).Nouns specify whether it’s count (bounded) or mass (unbounded).Verbs (and other predicates) specify how many arguments it takes, and what role these arguments play.It’s probably tied to concepts in some way.It’s probably not just a list of necessary and sufficient conditions.Let’s take a look at a summary of what we have been able to figure out about word senses so far. ![]() The sense of a word is what that word expresses you store the sense of listemes in your mental lexicon.įiguring out the sense of any given word is a difficult task. In doing so, we have been analysing meaning in term of the sense of the linguistic expressions. So far in this chapter, we have spent a lot of time on lexical meaning: the meaning of words and other linguistic expressions you store in your mental lexicon. ![]()
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