Analogy and Lexical Semantics

Abstract

Linguistic semantics of the past twenty-five years has been governed by a certain picture. Some people might say that linguistic semantics has been held captive by that picture, in Wittgenstein’s pejorative phrase; some might even contend in addition that the picture is viciously false. The basic elements of the picture--hereafter, “Lexical Atomism”--are as follows.

• (A) [A strong form of the compositionality assumption] The meaning of a sentence is entirely determined by the atomic meanings of that sentence’s individual component words (really morphemes) together with the syntactic rules and correctively the semantic rules according to which the relevant morphemes are combined and arranged into well-formed sentences.

• (B) The atomic morpheme-meanings can be given by individual entries in a definitive dictionary of some sort--preferably clauses in a truth-definition either extensional or intensional. These meanings are fixed, by tacit convention, prior to any syntactical combination of the morphemes into longer constructions.

• (C) There are only finitely and manageably many morpheme-meanings underlying any single natural language, or for that matter underlying the totality of all extant natural languages, primarily because any single morpheme-meaning in a natural language must be learned individually by any human speaker of that language in a determinate chunk of real time.

• (D) Lexical ambiguity in a natural language is neatly limited. Of course a word may have more than one sense, but the several senses it has may be crisply captured in a short, discrete list and treated by linguistic semantics as brutely homonymous or equivocal (otherwise its separate uses could not have been learned in so short a time by speakers).

• (E) In addition to its ordinary literal meaning or meanings, a word might have some figurative--particularly metaphorical--uses as well. But although both philosophers and linguistics rightly count it a great mystery how nonliteral meaning is derived from real meaning, figurative meaning is not only derivative but nearly negligible from the viewpoint of current active linguistic theory. Semantics proper studies literal meaning, though we would all admit under pressure that philosophy of language taken more broadly comprehends the question of how nonliteral meanings are generated from literal ones (and how they are related to literal truth-conditions). Metaphor especially is a surd in language that will need very special and arcane explanation once the more straightforward theory of literal meaning or “literal propositional content” has been straigtened out.