Problems with the dictionary view
المؤلف:
Vyvyan Evans and Melanie Green
المصدر:
Cognitive Linguistics an Introduction
الجزء والصفحة:
C7-P210
2025-12-21
19
Problems with the dictionary view
According to the perspective adopted in cognitive semantics, the strict separation of lexical knowledge from ‘world’ knowledge is problematic in a number of ways. To begin with, the dictionary view assumes that word meanings have a semantic ‘core’, the ‘essential’ aspect of a word’s meaning. This semantic core is distinguished from other non-essential aspects of the word’s meaning, such as the associations that a word brings with it (recall our discussion of bachelor). Indeed, this distinction is axiomatic for many semanticists, who distinguish between a word’s denotation (the set of entities in the world that a word can refer to) and its connotation (the associations evoked by the word). For example, the denotation of bachelor is the set of all unmarried adult males, while the connotations evoked by bachelor relate to cultural stereotypes concerning domestic habits and so on. Let’s consider another example. Most speakers would agree that the words bucket and pail share the same denotation: the set of all cylindrical vessels with handles that can be used to carry water. These words share the same denotation because they are synonyms. Thus either of these lexical items could refer to the entity depicted in Figure 7.1.
However, while bucket and pail have the same (or at least very similar) denotations, for speakers who have both these words in their dialects they have very different connotations. For these speakers, a pail can be metal or wooden but not plastic, and it is associated with vessels of a certain size (for example, a child’s small bucket used for making sandcastles on the beach could not be described as a pail). It follows from this that pail also shows a different linguistic distribution from its synonym. For example, it does not participate in the same collocational expressions as bucket: we can say bucket and spade but not pail and spade. Given these observations, cognitive linguists argue that the decision to exclude certain kinds of information from the ‘core’ meaning or denotation of a word, while including other kinds information, is arbitrary: on what basis is it decided that a particular piece of information is ‘core’ or ‘non-core’?
The second way in which cognitive linguists argue that the dictionary view is problematic relates to background knowledge. The dictionary view assumes that words, although related to other words by lexical relations like synonymy and so on, can nevertheless be defined in a context-independent way. In contrast, a number of scholars, such as Fillmore (1975, 1977, 1982, 1985a and Fillmore and Atkins 1992) and Langacker (1987) have presented persuasive arguments for the view that words in human language are never represented independently of context. Instead, these linguists argue that words are always understood with respect to frames or domains of experience.
As we will see in detail below, a frame or domain represents a schematisation of experience (a knowledge structure), which is represented at the conceptual level and held in long-term memory, and which relates elements and entities associated with a particular culturally-embedded scene, situation or event from human experience. According to Fillmore and Langacker, words (and grammatical constructions) are relativised to frames and domains so that the ‘meaning’ associated with a particular word (or grammatical construction) cannot be understood independently of the frame with which it is associated. For example, the word aorta relates to a particular lexical concept, but this lexical concept cannot be understood without the frame of the MAMMALIAN CIRCULATORY SYSTEM. We explore these ideas in detail below (section 7.2–7.3).
The third problem that cognitive linguists identify with the dictionary view is the dichotomy between sense and reference. As we have seen, this view restricts linguistic meaning to a word’s sense. From the perspective of the usage-based approach adopted in cognitive linguistics (recall Chapter 4), this dichotomy is problematic because a word’s sense, what we have called coded meaning, is a function of language use or pragmatic meaning. In other words, the usage-based view holds that a word only comes to be meaningful as a consequence of use. This view stands in direct opposition to the dictionary view, which holds that a word’s meaning or sense is primary and determines how it can be used.
Cognitive semanticists argue that the division of linguistic meaning into semantics (context-independent meaning) and pragmatics (context-dependent meaning) is also problematic. This dichotomy arises for historical as well as theoretical reasons. The discipline of semantics originated with the ancient Greek philosophers and was only recognised as a subdiscipline of linguistics as recently as the nineteenth century. Until this point linguists had concerned themselves mainly with describing the observable structural properties of language (grammar and phonology). Indeed, as recently as the twentieth century the famous American linguist Leonard Bloomfield (1933: 140) described the study of semantics as ‘the weak point in language study’. The ‘mentalist’ approach to linguistics pioneered by Chomsky gave rise to a new interest in linguistic meaning as part of the competence of the native speaker, but due to the historical development of the discipline within the philosophical tradition, the resulting formal models tended to emphasise only those aspects of meaning that could be ‘neatly packaged’ and modelled within the truth-conditional paradigm (see Chapter 13), hence the predominance of the dictionary view. Meanwhile,in the 1950s and 1960s, the natural language philosopherssuch as Austin and Grice, who argued that the truth-conditional model was artificially limiting the study of linguistic meaning, began to focus attention on the principles that governed the use of language in interactive contexts. For this reason, pragmatics emerged as a largely independent approach, and has often been seen as peripheral with respect to the concerns of formal linguistics, which relate to modelling knowledge of language rather than use of language, or competence rather than performance. An important exception to this generalisation is the Relevance Theory model, developed by Sperber and Wilson (1995). We will consider this approach in Chapter 13.
As many linguists have argued, imposing a principled distinction between semantics and pragmatics results in a rather artificial boundary between the two types of meaning. After all, context of use is often critical to the meaning associated with words, and some linguistic phenomena cannot be fully explained by either a semantic or a pragmatic account in isolation. For example, Saeed (2003) makes this point in relation to deictic expressions: words like bring and take, and today and tomorrow. These expressions clearly have ‘semantic’ content, yet their meaning cannot be fully determined in isolation from context. Levinson (1983: 55) provides a revealing example. Imagine you are on a desert island and you find this message in a bottle washed up on the beach. The message reads Meet me here a week from now with a stick about this big. This example illustrates the dependence of deictic expressions on contextual information. Without knowing the person who wrote the message, where the note was written or the time at which it was written, you cannot fully interpret me, here or a week from now. Observe that we also rely upon visual signals to interpret expressions like this big, where the speaker would hold his or her hands a certain distance apart to indicate the size of the object being described. Such expressions are not fully meaningful in the absence of this visual information. It is the deictic or context-dependent properties of expressions like these that also explain why it is less than helpful for a shopkeeper to go out for lunch and leave a sign on the door reading Back in an hour!
In view of these observations, cognitive semanticists argue that the dichotomy between semantics and pragmatics represents an arbitrary distinction: linguistic knowledge cannot be separated in a principled way from ‘world’ knowledge, nor can ‘semantic’ knowledge be separated from ‘pragmatic’ knowledge. From the cognitive perspective, the kinds of knowledge subsumed under these headings constitute a continuum. The encyclopaedic view adopted within cognitive semantics assumes that there are no principled distinctions of the kind discussed here, but that any apparent distinctions are simply a matter of degree. In other words, while there are conventional meanings associated with words (the coded meanings we discussed in Chapter 4), these are abstracted from the range of contexts of use associated with any given lexical item. Furthermore, words are sometimes used in ways that are only partially sanctioned by these coded meanings: language use is often partly innovative, for the reasons laid out in Chapter 4. Moreover, the degree to which any given usage of a coded meaning is innovative varies according to contextual factors.
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