The dictionary view
المؤلف:
Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green
المصدر:
Cognitive Linguistics an Introduction
الجزء والصفحة:
C7-P207
2025-12-21
22
The dictionary view
The traditional view in semantic theory holds that meaning can be divided into a dictionary component and an encyclopaedic component. According to this view, it is only the dictionary component that properly constitutes the study of lexical semantics: the branch of semantics concerned with the study of word meaning. In contrast, encyclopaedic knowledge is external to linguistic knowledge, falling within the domain of ‘world knowledge’. Of course, this view is consistent with the modularity hypothesis adopted within formal linguistics, which asserts that linguistic knowledge (e.g. knowing the meaning of a word like shoelaces) is specialised to language, and distinct in nature from other kinds of ‘world’ or ‘non-linguistic’ knowledge (like knowing how to tie your shoelaces, or that you can usually buy them in the supermarket). From this per spective, then, dictionary knowledge relates to knowing what words mean, and this knowledge represents a specialised component, the ‘mental dictionary’ or lexicon. While this component is mainly concerned with word meaning, formal theories differ quite considerably on the issue of what other kinds of information might also be represented in the lexicon, such as grammatical information relating to word class and so on. However, a common assumption within formal theories is that the word meanings stored in our minds can be defined, much as they appear in a dictionary.
In the componential analysis or semantic decomposition approach, which is one version of the dictionary model, word meaning is modelled in terms of semantic features or primitives. For instance bachelor is represented as [ MALE, ADULT, MARRIED], where each of these binary features represents a conceptual primitive that can also contribute to defining other words, such as man [ MALE, ADULT], girl[ MALE, ADULT], wife[ MALE, ADULT, MARRIED], and so on. Early examples of this approach are presented in Katz and Postal (1964) and Katz (1972). Another more recent variant of this approach is represented in the work of Anna Wierzbicka (1996), who takes the position that words are comprised of universal innate semantic primitives or primes, in terms of which other words can be defined. We consider these componential approaches in more detail below. According to the dictionary view, the core meaning of a word is the information contained in the word’s definition (for example that bachelor means ‘unmarried adult male’), and this is the proper domain of lexical semantics.
A number of dichotomies follow from the dictionary view of word meaning. Firstly, the core meaning of a word (sense), which is contained in the mental dictionary, stands in sharp contradistinction to what that word refers to in the outside world (reference). This distinction is inherited from referential theories of meaning dating back to Plato’s (fourth century BC) Cratylus Dialogue: The Realm of Ideas and Truth. Referential theories hold that word meaning arises from a direct link between words and the objects in the world that they refer to. As the philosopher Frege (1892 [1975]) argued, however, it is possible for a word to have meaning (sense) without referring to a real object in the world (e.g. dragon, unicorn), hence the distinction between sense and reference.
The second dichotomy that arises from the dictionary view of meaning is the distinction between semantics and pragmatics. As we saw above, the dictionary view assumes a sharp distinction between knowledge of word meaning (semantics), and knowledge about how contextual factors influence linguistic meaning (pragmatics).
Thirdly, the dictionary view treats knowledge of word meaning as distinct from cultural knowledge, social knowledge (our experience of and interaction with others) and physical knowledge (our experience of interaction with the world). As we have seen, a consequence of this view is that semantic knowledge is autonomous from other kinds of knowledge, and is stored in its own mental repository, the mental lexicon. Other kinds of knowledge belong outside the language component, represented in terms of principles of language use (such as Grice’s 1975 Cooperative Principle and its associated maxims, which represent a series of statements summarising the assumptions that speakers and hearers make in order to communicate successfully). This dichotomy between knowledge of language and use of language, where only the former is modelled within the language component, is consistent with the emphasis within formal approaches on the mental representation of linguistic knowledge rather than situated language use. Table 7.1 summarises the dictionary view.
It is worth mentioning here that word meaning is only ‘half’ of what traditional semantics is about. While lexical semantics is concerned with describing the meanings of individual words as well as the relationships between them: lexical relations or sense relations such as synonymy, antonymy and homonymy (see Murphy 2003 for an overview), the other ‘half’ of semantics involves sentence meaning or compositional semantics. This relates to the study of the ways in which individual lexical items combine in order to produce sentence meaning. While the two areas are related (words, after all, contribute to the meaning of sentences), the two ‘halves’ of traditional semantics are often seen as separate subdisciplines, with many linguists specialising in one area or the other. We return to a discussion of the formal approach to sentence meaning in Chapter 13. In cognitive semantics, the distinction between lexical and compositional semantics is not seen as a useful division. There are a number of reasons for this, which we will return to shortly (section 7.1.3).
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