Abstract
That words express a conceptual content is uncontroversial. This does not entail that their content should break down neatly into a grammatical part, relevant for language and to be analyzed in linguistic terms, and a conceptual part, relevant for cognition and to be analyzed in psychological terms. Various types of empirical evidence are reviewed, showing that the conceptual content of words cannot be isolated from their linguistic properties, because it is affected and shaped by them. The view of words as labels or containers for a non-linguistic conceptual content stems from a naive disregard of the complex and structured nature of lexical knowledge. On the contrary, knowledge of language is shown not just to organize and categorize conceptual content in a way not reducible to non-linguistic cognition, but also to affect its scope, as the range of verbalized concepts is both limited by abstract templates and expanded by productive word formation. This suggests that lexical knowledge is a distinctively linguistic dimension of conceptualization, and that words do not so much label or package concepts, as provide an inner form for conceptual knowledge.
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Notes
Nouns like jewellery feature prominently in the literature on countability, precisely because they clearly display the misalignment between language-internal categorization as ‘mass’ (a cover term for a number of phenomena relating semantics and morphosyntax) and language-external intuitions about atomicity and distinctness. Among the most important discussions are Gillon (1992), Moltmann (1997), Chierchia (1998a,b) (who introduced the label ‘fake mass’), Barner and Snedeker (2005, 2006), Bale and Barner (2009), Chierchia (2010), and Rothstein (2010). The work by Barner and Snedeker is particularly relevant as it strongly suggested that terms like jewellery side with count nouns, despite their mass syntax, when it comes to assessing comparative quantity (subjects decided on the basis of the number of items and not on their cumulative size).
A reviewer suggests that coisa ‘thing’ can be mass in Brazilian Portuguese. The argument in the text is that, given that the English thing may be true of unbounded substances and abstractions, one would expect it to fit a mass context as well as a count one; the conclusion that denotation does not determine countability stands even if a term synonymous with thing can be used as mass in another language. That this is indeed the case is confirmed by examples like há mais coisa em jogo ‘there’s more [thing] at play’ (from www.corpusdoportugues.org). It may or may not be relevant that Portuguese (as Spanish) routinely allows “massified” uses of singular count nouns as in muito carro / mucho coche ‘a lot of car’. Clearly, the behaviour of the counterparts of thing in other languages is well worth investigating, if only to establish how far this interesting lexicalized notion extends beyond Standard Average European.
As a reviewer notes, writing systems seem to have arisen in the first instance as methods for recording stock and commercial transactions: social constructs like money or other conventions underlying exchanges of goods are real enough and important enough to have inspired such a major cultural revolution.
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I would like to thank the editors and two anonymous reviewers, whose constructive critical appraisal has made the paper better. Any shortcomings are my own responsibility.
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Acquaviva, P. Word meaning: a linguistic dimension of conceptualization. Synthese 200, 427 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03910-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03910-9