The lexicon and lexemes

The lexicon is the mental word bank in which we store lexemes, together with their form, meaning, syntactic properties and any specific features not predictable by grammatical rule.

Lexemes may consist of single words, or full phrases where the meaning cannot be reduced to that of its component parts. For example, the colloquial expression to kick the bucket may be viewed as a phrasal lexeme or idiom by virtue of the fact that its meaning cannot be reduced to that of its component parts – taken together, this idiom means ‘to die’.

What do we mean by ‘meaning’? Philosophers and linguists agree that the concept is extraordinarily difficult to pin down:

The statement of meanings is therefore the weak point in language study, and will remain so until human knowledge advances very far beyond its present state.

Nearly eight decades later, Paul Elbourne seems equally pessimistic:

Despite 2,400 years or so of trying, it is unclear that anyone has ever come up with an adequate definition of any word whatsoever, even the simplest.

There are a number of reasons why meaning seems less clearly structured and less susceptible to scientific investigation than other areas of language. Firstly, Bloomfield claimed that our knowledge of the world was quite simply deficient, and not readily susceptible to the scientific analysis he craved:

Actually our knowledge of the world in which we live is so imperfect that we can rarely make accurate statements about the meaning of a speech-form. The situations (A) which lead to an utterance, and the hearer's responses (C), include many things that have not been mastered by science.

He also notes the very rough-and-ready way in which meanings are often learned. In some cases a definition will work, but in other cases it proves impractical. Rather than attempt to define, say, the word apple to a child, for example, we are likely simply to reach for an apple, show it to the child and hope that he/ she can extrapolate from that example what all apples have in common and, more importantly, what distinguishes them from pears, grapes, plums and so on. This is often the only way to explain word meanings – young children cannot after all reach for the Oxford English Dictionary or equivalent for their definitions – and generally it seems to work.

But if meanings are often acquired by little more than supported guesswork, how can we be sure that the meaning of a given lexeme as stored by one individual is identical to that of another? The short, and easy, answer to that question is that if our internalized meanings were radically different, then communication would be impossible: I might be talking perhaps about ‘soccer’ and imagining a game involving 22 players and a round ball, while another person would hear that term and understand what I mean by ‘blue cheese’, and yet another would access my meaning of ‘saucepan’. That clearly does not happen, as any attempt to communicate ideas would be futile. But we cannot be sure that our internalized meanings correspond exactly: is my definition of cup the same as yours, for example? At what point does cup become mug for you, and is that point the same for me?

For some philosophers, notably Wittgenstein, the meaning of any word eludes abstract definition and is entirely dependent on its use. It is therefore constantly modified and reshaped by its users. The word colour, for example, has a very different meaning for a painter and a snooker player: for the latter it contrasts with red and includes black, but not white, whereas no such restrictions apply for the former. In Part I of his Philosophical Investigations (1953), Wittgenstein argues that any attempt to find a common meaning for the word game in all its uses ultimately ends in failure. He observes that not all games have a competitive element (compare chess and solitaire); some, but not all, involve the amusement of children (catch, ring-a-ring-o’-roses); while some involve skill (tennis, chess) and others chance (dice). Our knowledge of the ‘meaning’ of the word game is therefore based not on some idealized notion of what a ‘game’ is, but on our ability to use the word in different contexts. Others would argue that a common ‘core’ meaning can be identified which is shared in all contexts (I know of no one who doesn’t think cups can contain liquids, for example), but that there is a significant amount of ‘fuzziness’ or semantic indeterminacy around that core. Indeterminacy is particularly evident with new lexemes, whose meanings are often contested.