Wednesday, February 04, 2015

Words? what words?

LCCM Theory [Lexical Concepts, Cognitive Models] advances the potentially controversial claim that words do not in fact have meaning. Meaning is held to be a function of an utterance, rather than a given mental representation associated with a word, or other linguistic (i.e., symbolic) unit. That is, meaning results from situated acts of communication, in which language plays a part, rather than being a discrete "thing" which can be assembled and manipulated.— How Words Mean, page 84

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