Meaning, the cognitive dependency of lexical meaning
Seuren, P. A. M.
(2006). Meaning, the cognitive dependency of lexical meaning. In K. Brown (
Ed.),
Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (vol. 7) (pp. 575-577). Amsterdam: Elsevier.
There is a growing awareness among theoretical linguists and philosophers of language that the linguistic definition of lexical meanings, which must be learned when one learns a language, underdetermines not only full utterance interpretation but also sentence meaning. The missing information must be provided by cognition – that is, either general encyclopedic or specific situational knowledge. This fact crucially shows the basic insufficiency of current standard model-theoretic semantics as a paradigm for the analysis and description of linguistic meaning.
Publication type
Book chapter
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