Chapter 11 Lexical Semantics
11.1 Boundary conditions on theories of lexical meaning
Back to the trenches. An overall framework for studying meaning is not enough: an important part of its value lies in
the opportunities it offers for understanding the gritty details of language. Accordingly, this chapter discusses a
potpourri of issues concerning the concepts associated with words; the next chapter turns to larger linguistic units.
The mentalist stance of generative grammar, as extended to meaning in the past twochapters, leads us immediatelyto
three important boundary conditions on a theory of lexical concepts—concepts that for mthe conceptual structure
component of lexical items. First, since lexical items must be stored in long-term memory (Chapter 6), so must lexical
concepts. As emphasized in the previous chapter, this precludes explicating word meanings in terms of the extension
of sets to whichthe speaker has no access, for example treatingthe conceptual structure ofdogas the set of all dogs in
all possible worlds. Rather, the meaning ofdoghas to be specified in terms of a set of conditions or features that
speakers of English use to distinguish dogs fro mother entities.
A second boundaryconditiononthetheoryof lexicalconceptsis thattheymustsomehowgetintolong-term memory.
Almost everyone who thinks about it takes it for granted that lexical concepts are learned—though many recognize
that this presents formidable problems (section 4.7).
A third boundary condition on a theory of lexical concepts concerns their contribution to the meanings of sentences.
The contextualized understanding of a novelsentence (perceivedor produced!) has to be composed online in working
memory (Chapters 6 and 7). It must be built from the following sources:
- The meanings of its words (the lexical concepts).
- Conceptual structure conveyed by the grammatical structure of the sentence.
- Overall conditions on composed conceptual structure: Is the structure well-formed? Is it plausible?
- Conceptual structure derived fro mcontext.