Rethinking the Lexicon

old_uid873
titleRethinking the Lexicon
start_date2006/03/17
schedule11h-13h
onlineno
summaryLexical semantics is crucial to understanding the semantics of clauses and discourse. Nevertheless, despite a wealth of descriptive studies concerning the meanings of words, the outlines of a general theory of lexical meaning are not at all clear and philosophical issues concerning lexical meaning left over from the ghost of Quine remain unresolved. To highlight some of these issues, I will look at the phenomenon of copredication, which is an important test in distinguishing words whose multiple senses are in some way conceptually related to each other (as in (1) below) from words whose multiple senses are just an accident of orthography (as in (2) below). (1) Lunch was delicious but lasted forever. (2) The bank specializes in IPOs but is muddy and slippery. I will look at several proposals for understanding words with conceptually related senses and then propose an approach of my own.
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