12 - Disturbances of lexical semantic representation

Summary

The term “lexical semantics” refers to the meaning of individual words. It can be argued that the whole edifice of language is built upon the individual word. It is the individual word which, in a sense, makes primary contact with the real world. A simple word like “cat” somehow designates an object in the world – namely, the species of cats; a word like “pull” designates an action; a word like “large” designates an attribute. It is true, as we shall see in later chapters, that language does far more than simply designate items, actions, and attributes. For instance, it establishes the actors and recipients of an action, and it indicates which attributes are assigned to which items. However, it accomplishes these semantic tasks, and many others, only if what many people have taken to be the basic feature of language – having words for individual items, actions, and attributes in the real world – is accomplished. Researchers and theoreticians as different in their outlooks as the philosopher Hilary Putnam and the neurologist Norman Geschwind, whose views on the subject we reviewed in Chapter 5, all place the ability of the individual word to refer to items, and to carry meaning, at the center of the language system. And indeed, when one stands back and considers it, the ability to utter a simple sound and thereby designate an item or a class of items in the real world is an astonishing ability, available in the extensive form that we know of only to man.