Delahunty and Garvey
of figures of speech, especially of metaphor.
How do we know words have meaning?
By posing this question, we do not intend to cast doubt on the proposition
that words have meanings. Rather, we want to spell out some good reasons
to believe it. In our chapter on Concepts of Language, we observed that our
linguistic competence allows us to do many things. (Recall that competence is
unconscious linguistic knowledge, which includes knowledge of the meanings
of words; examples such as the ones below tell us only that such knowledge
must exist, not what it actually is.) Our competence enables us to distinguish
between well- and ill-formed strings of words and to detect grammatical struc-
ture. Crucially for our current discussion, it enables us to detect meaning
relations among expressions, including, whether an expression has a coher-
ent meaning or not (1a), whether expressions paraphrase each other, that is,
whether they are synonymous (1b), whether words are related by hyponymy
(1c), partonymy (1d), antonymy (1e), whether a word (fan) is ambiguous
(1f), and whether a word is used metaphorically (1g), as well as all the other
meaning relations we identified above. These abilities are strong evidence that
word meanings are real and not just figments of linguists’ imaginations.
(1) a. Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
b. groundhog—woodchuck
c. lizard—reptile
d. elbow—arm
e. big—small; above—below; open—closed
f. That fan is very annoying.
g. I’ll dig with it.
Sentence (1g) is from Seamus Heaney’s poem “Digging.” In the minimal
context given in (1g), it would probably be understood as a spade or some
other such implement, and dig would be interpreted as turning over soil in
a garden or the like. However, in the larger context of the entire poem, it re-
fers to a pen in the poet’s hand and dig must be interpreted metaphorically;
consequently, the sentence is ambiguous between a literal and a metaphori-
cal meaning.
Examples such as those in (1) could easily be multiplied, but these few
should make clear a simple idea: linguistic competence includes an unconscious
knowledge of the literal meanings of words. While this conclusion might seem
trivial, it conceals several less-than-obvious points. First, it suggests that