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
Publication date
2006

Share this page