Milestones in the history of lexical theory A tabular summary, by Patrick Hanks Philosophy of Language and Logic Linguistics and Psychology Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC) interested in concepts rather than words; treated language as a vehicle for organizing concepts, not as an object for study in itself l Genus term (e.g. tree) vs. specific (e.g. oak). l Essential properties (e.g. all men have backbones) vs. accidental properties (e.g. some men are bald) l Syllogisms (e.g. Socrates was human; all humans have backbones; therefore Socrates had a backbone) Ancient Greek grammarians l Inflections and morphology l Parts of speech Roman rhetoricians Quintilian (1^st century AD) interested in figures of speech such as metaphor—but not in the theory of word meaning Roman grammarians Varro (1^st century BC) Aelius Donatus (4^th cent AD) Priscian (6^th century AD) Founded modern grammatical theory Medieval Europe Important developments in theology and logic—but no advances in understanding words and meanings Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) l Shared Wilkins' desire to 'improve' language l Necessary and sufficient conditions A necessary condition: If it's a triangle, it will have exactly three sides. A sufficient condition: It has three sides, so it must be a triangle. [Word meaning in natural language does not really work like this – see Wittgenstein, Rosch below – but many people think that it does, or that it should] John Wilkins (1614-1672) Tried to invent a 'perfect' universal language – his “real character” – for clear scientific thinking and international communication l arranged words in a hierarchical ontology [Forerunner of Roget's Thesaurus, 1852] l “groping towards the modern concept of hypertext” (Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language [1995]) C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards l The Meaning of Meaning (1923) l Words relate to objects in the world by mediation in the thoughts of a speaker —the relationship is indirect Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) l Langue vs. parole l Diachronic vs. synchronic l Word relations: paradigmatic vs. syntagmatic l Signified and signifier Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) l Word meaning as a chain of family resemblances, e.g. the meaning of 'game' l Rejects the traditional view [of Leibniz, Frege, and Russell] that sentence meaning is compositional (i.e. that it is put together out of building blocks like a child's Lego set) —because word meanings are not static entities like Lego blocks Structuralism and word meaning: see John Lyons' summary. Semantic field theorists l Jost Trier (1894-1970): varying terms for knowledge and understanding (wisheit, kunst, list) in Middle High German l Helmut Gipper: Sessel oder Stuhl l Eugene Coseriu (1921-2002): Conceptual structure varies over time independently of lexical structure Hilary Putnam (b. 1926) l Attack on definition by necessary and sufficient conditions l 'The division of linguistic labor' – I may not be able to define gold, but there must be someone in the linguistic community who can Saul Kripke (b. 1940) l Causal theory of reference l Rigid designators: Even if Jonah never went to Nineveh, he is still Jonah Even if you sit on a table or use it for firewood, it's still a table Eleanor Rosch (b. 1938) anthropologist and psychologist l Prototype theory: To use and understand terms in ordinary language, people rely on comparisons with a cognitive prototype, rather than on Leibnizian definitions Anna Wierzbicka (b. 1938) l “A Natural Semantic Metalanguage” —based on 64 semantic primitives, which can define all words in all languages (she says) l Lexicographers should “seek the invariant” l Wants to preserve the Leibnizian “Lego-set” view of word meaning —thus, she disagrees with Wittgenstein Igor Mel'čuk (b. 1932) l Meaning<—>text theory l Explanatory and combinatorial dictionary l Lexical functions: —a finite set of functions that govern the relation of each word to its collocates l Believes in necessary and sufficient conditions for word meaning Charles Fillmore (b. 1929) l Frame Semantics l Construction grammar George Lakoff (b. 1941) l Metaphors we live by (with M. Johnson,1981) l Conceptual metaphor: —our ordinary cognitive processes (thought) are fundamentally metaphorical in nature l Metaphor is not just decoration James Pustejovsky computational linguist The Generative Lexicon (1995) (GL) l The meaning of a word is a “lexical conceptual paradigm” —it has many facets —governed, in part, by “qualia” l Context affects meaning: — “co-compositionality” John Sinclair (1933-2007) l The corpus revolution “Explain what is there, not what might be there” “Every different is sense is associated with a difference in form” l Statistical study of collocations l An utterance is a sequence of choices by a speaker or writer —governed by tension between the idiom principle and the open choice principle