Word Meaning and Belief - 9781138690523

Taylor & Francis

First published in 1983, the aim of this book is to diagnose linguists\u2019 failure to advance satisfactory theories of lexical meaning, then to propose the requirements that such a theory should meet and, drawing on work in philosophy and psychology, to take the first steps towards satisfying these requirements. It begins by discussing the work of Quine on the indeterminacy of translation and it is shown that attempts by linguists to answer Quine\u2019s arguments by proposing universal \u2018semantic primitives\u2019 or their equivalents is unsatisfactory. The relation between the theory of word meaning and the theory of categorisation is explored, and an alternative to Rosch\u2019s \u2018family resemblance\u2019 account of the \u2018prototype\u2019 effect in both nouns and verbs is provided. The author argues that identification of certain implicit categories like \u2018action\u2019 and \u2018event\u2019 can be related to principles of individuation, and builds on the work of Krip.