Another such case, raised by Searle (1995), is apointin a game. The idea behind points is that they are abstract units
that you acquire in the course of a game, and in order to win you need more of them than the other player at the end
ofthegame. How you getpoints depends on therules of thegame; your reasons for wanting them make sense only in
the context of understanding games and what it means to win or lose them. In other words, the conceptual structure
ofpointcannot be constructed independently of its embedding in a whole elaborate social frame.
A third example, from Fillmore and Atkins (1992.), is the semantics ofrisk. This word has multiple argument
structures and is thus polysemous in the sense of section 11.3. (31) gives four of the many frames in which it occurs.
(31) a.We decided to risk going into the jungle.
b. We risked our lives by going into the jungle.
c. We risked getting sick by going into the jungle.
d. There's quite a bit of risk in going into the jungle.On Fillmore and Atkins's analysis, all these uses advert to a common conceptual frame: the subject is choosing an
actionwhichinturnleads toa chanceofeither benefitor harm; thesubjectofcourse hopes togetthebenefit.In(31a),
going into the junglerefers to the chosen action; in (31b),our livesis the thing potentiallyharmed; in (31c)getting sickis the
harmfulactionitself. Inallofthese,riskisa verbthatappears torefer tothemaking oftheriskychoice.In(31d),riskis
a nounthatappearstorefer tothechanceofhar mversusbenefit.Thepointisthatallthesemeanings aredifferent,but
theyare relatedbyvirtueofpicking outdifferentparts ofthecommonconceptual frame.Henceagaina wordmeaning
cannot be explicated without making use of a larger implicit frame of related circumstances.
I think a larger implicit frame of reference is also necessary to understand proper names offictional characters.Santa
Clausis understoodproperlyonly in thecontext ofthe“Santa Claus legend”of reindeer,going down thechimneywith
presents, and so forth;Hamletmakes sense only in the context of the play.
My inclination is to think that these examples are just the tipof the iceberg and that there is a great deal more
complexity to be explored in word meanings. One may be tempted to shrug all this off as“encyclopedic”meaning,
hence not part of linguistics. However, as Chapter 9 argued, on the one hand there is no principled dividing line
between linguistic and encyclopedic meaning, and on the other handsomeonehas to study these more complex aspects
of meaning eventually. So why not linguists?