Linguistics An Introduction

So far, we have not attempted to develop any analytic account of the semantic representations which appear in lexical entries. Indeed, in the examples in (115) (section 10), what we see under the heading ‘semantics’ is taken directly from an ordinary dictionary. Whether such dictionary definitions can be regarded as supplying the meanings of words for the purposes of linguistic analysis is something we shall briefly consider later in this section after we have introduced some basic ideas.

As well as being concerned with the contents of lexical entries, a further matter which will arise in this section is that of the overall structure of the lexicon. In the Introduction (p. 4), we talked about the lexicon as a list of lexical entries, but it is at least conceivable that it has a more interesting structure than this. To say that the lexicon is no more than a list is to accept that there is no reason why items which are similar to each other in some linguistically relevant way are ‘close’ to each other in the mental lexicon. As we shall see, similarity of meaning is a rather rich notion, and as subsequent sections of this part of the book will show, it seems to play an important role in human cognitive processing. In such circumstances, it is important for our model of the lexicon to represent this notion properly.