Do Word Meanings Exist?
Do Word Meanings Exist?
This chapter examines what words mean, how word meaning relates to word use, and whether words do in fact have meaning at all. It argues that, strictly speaking, words in isolation have meaning potential rather than meaning and views actual meanings as events which only materialize when people use words and put them together in clauses and texts. The chapter examines the contexts that activate different components of a word's meaning potential within the framework of corpus linguistics, which makes it possible to build an inventory of prototypical phraseology and relate meanings to the prototypes. It also discusses the importance of vagueness and redundancy in natural language processing, Ockham's razor, incompatible components of the meaning of nouns, and meaning events and meaning potentials.
Keywords: words, word meaning, word use, corpus linguistics, phraseology, natural language, Ockham's razor, nouns, meaning events, meaning potentials
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