Word Meaningspeakers carry around in their minds something like a dictionary of their
language. However, there is good evidence that speakers’ mental dictionaries
are quite different from the book dictionaries of a language. For instance,
no book dictionary will tell you that the words idea and sleep cannot literally
be combined as subject and predicate. (Linguists often use the terms lexicon
or mental lexicon to refer to this aspect of our linguistic competence and to
emphasize its difference from written dictionaries.) In fact, the nature of
the mental lexicon is still unclear; we will explore some of its characteristics
below.
Second, you should not confuse knowing the meaning of a word with
being able to give it a satisfactory definition. Definition-stating is a learned
ability and is only marginally necessary in most communication; it is also far
beyond the normal capacities of people. The eminent lexicographer Sidney
Landau expresses the point simply (by “general definer,” he means one versed
in common, rather than technical, vocabulary):
It is difficult to find highly skilled general definers. Such people are about
as rare as good poets... there are probably fewer than a hundred experi-
enced general definers in the whole of the United States. (Landau 1984:
235)Exercise
Without consulting a dictionary, state the meaning(s) of the words be-
low:
a. situation
b. pong (as in “ping-pong ball”)
c. if
d. of
e. vacillate
What problems did you run into? How did you solve them?
Third, whatever the nature of the mental lexicon, it clearly must show that
words are related to one another. To put it negatively, words are not just listed
in our competence, in alphabetical or any other simple order. Rather, they
are, as we have seen, interconnected in complex ways. These interconnec-
tions determine which words can and cannot occur together in grammatical
constructions—e.g., as in (1a). Interconnections relate families of words re-
lated by polysemy, synonymy, meronymy, antonymy, and other sense relations.