Sortal information in lexical concepts

Abstract

Words are linguistic concepts whose definitions depend on specific semantic interests within a certain scope of linguistic description; relative to more or less controversial conceptions of words there furthermore exist different views on what word meanings are. However, there is a classical dead end in pure linguistic argumentation, namely the form-meaning problem of linguistic symbols, particularly of words. Cognitive arguments offer the possibility to decompose the question of a word's meaning into separable factors, each of them describable on the grounds of specific regularities, while being functional only in their interaction.

In this article a distinction is made between two different kinds of lexical concepts: (i) meaning representations of context-free lexicon words and (ii) meaning representations of words uttered in a discourse. Concepts that are linked with words conceived as part of the vocabulary are called word concepts, while concepts that are connected with words conceived as elements of an actual discourse are reference concepts. Since word concepts function as input for the generation of reference concepts, a closer look at the latter is necessary to develop ideas about the internal structure of the former. It will be evident that a reference concept requires not only specifications of a word's linguistic environment but also specifications of the relevant non-linguistic referential background. Taking this into account, sortal concepts play a crucial role in that they integrate world knowledge on both levels of lexical representation.