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Chapter 2 Word, Dictionary

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152 views2 pages

Chapter 2 Word, Dictionary

Uploaded by

anggi
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Words, dictionaries, and the mental lexicon

2.1 Introduction
On the one hand, when we ask “what’s a word?
Morphologists, however, have the luxury of being more precise: we can define a word as a
sequence of one or more morphemes that can stand alone in a language. But in doing so, we have
not exhausted what’s interesting about our question

2.2 Why not check the dictionary?


1. Which dictionary?
Dictionaries come in all shapes and sizes, for all sorts of intended audiences.And
makers of dictionaries – lexicographers – are of course human; what gets
into dictionaries has historically been subject to the individual foibles of
lexicographers, not to mention the mores of society. If you grew up when
I did, it was typical for dictionaries not to have taboo words like fuck, much
less its derivatives fucking, fuck up, fuckable, fuck all, and fucker, all of which
can be found today in the Concise Oxford English Dictonary; but until the
1970s, dictionaries avoided words that might offend. It is perhaps safe to
say that individual or societal foibles play less of a role in dictionarymaking today, but it’s
still a good idea to keep in mind that neither lexicographers nor the dictionaries they create
are infallible.

2. Nonces, mistakes, and mountweazels


Further, sometimes we find items in dictionaries that we might hesitate
to call words – even if they do occur in the dictionary. Among these items
are words that are labeled as ‘nonce’, meaning that they’ve been found just
once, often in the writing of someone important, but that nevertheless
don’t seem to occur anywhere else. The OED On-line, for example, lists as
a nonce the word agreemony, which they define as ‘agreeableness’.

3. And the problem of complex words


The conclusion that we are inexorably led to is that we cannot rely
on dictionaries to answer the question “Is xyz a word?” On the one hand,
dictionaries don’t list all the words of any language. They can’t list all
derivatives with living prefixes and suffixes, or all technical, scientific,
regional, or slang words. And on the other hand, they sometimes include
words used only once whose meanings are completely unknown. They
occasionally even include purposely made-up words to guard their own
copyrights.
2.3 The mental lexicon
1 How many words?
Psycholinguists estimate that the average English-speaking six-year-old knows 10,000 words,
and the average high-school graduate around 60,000 words. Paul Bloom describes how this
estimate can be made (2000: 5)
2 The acquisition of lexical knowledge
Psycholinguists have devised experiments to try to learn how children and adults are able to
acquire words so easily. You might think that the learning of new words is a simple matter of
association: someone points at something and says “flurge” and you learn that that something
is called a flurge. This may be the way that we learn some words, but surely not the way we
learn the majority of words in our mental lexicons. For one thing, not everything for which we
have a word can be pointed at
3. The organization of the mental lexicon: storage versus rules
now that we know something about the English past tense rule, we can return to the question
of how the mental lexicon is organized. It might be plausible to assume that speakers of
English use the past tense rule when they are creating the past tenses of novel verbs, but
simply store the past tense forms of words they have already heard. In other words, we might
assume that once a past tense has been formed, it is entered whole in our mental lexicon, and
we retrieve it whole just as we would the present tense form. This hypothesis, however, may
not be correct.
4 Evidence from aphasia
Studies of aphasics – people whose language faculty has been impaired due to stroke or other
brain trauma – show that there must be a past tense rule that speakers use for regular forms –
even very frequent ones – and that irregular forms are stored whole, probably in a different
part of the brain.
5 Evidence from imaging studies
that there are parts of the brain that are activated when subjects are askedto read regularly
inflected past tenses that are distinct from those activated in reading or producing irregular
past tenses.

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