Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

To take a simplistic view, the bare essentials for a language are, first, a set of basic units, and second, a set of rules for combining them into larger, more complex units like phrases and sentences. A list of the basic units constitutes the lexicon of the language; a specification of the combinatory rules constitutes the grammar. The basic units must have both a form and a meaning (in the broadest sense); the entries in the lexicon must specify these, together with information necessary for the proper application of the grammatical rules. The combinatory rules will tell us not only what complex forms are allowed in the language, but also how their meanings are to be computed. What are the units that are listed in the lexicon? The obvious answer is that they are words, and that is what we shall take them to be (although the matter is not quite so straightforward as it might at first seem). To the layperson, probably the most important thing about a word is what it means; this chapter has a similar bias, being chiefly about words and their meanings. We begin by looking at what sort of things words are, as a linguist sees them. It is notoriously difficult to frame a definition of a word which is satisfactory for all languages, and even for everything word-like in a particular language. We shall assume that, as in Wittgenstein's famous example of game , no succinct definition applicable ... log in or subscribe to read full text