100 Defining the meaning of words

analysis, which is dealt with in the following chapter. But it should be clear that traditional lexicographidal practice has been strongly influenced by the classical, or Aristotelian, theory of definition in terms of the essential properties of things.

Rejection of the traditional view of lexical definition has also led many linguists to reject the no less traditional distinction between a dictionary and an encyclopaedia: to put it in psycho­logical terms, between two kinds of knowledge, linguistic and non-linguistic. It is easy enough to draw this distinction in the abstract, especially in psychological terms. One can say that knowing the meaning of a word is a part of linguistic com­petence (in the Chomskyan sense of 'competence': see section 1.4) and is stored in the brain, in what is commonly referred to in the current literature of psycholinguistics as the mental lexicon, whereas non-linguistic, encyclopaedic, knowledge is stored elsewhere in the brain, may be qualitatively different as knowledge, and, unlike linguistic knowledge, may vary from individual to individual. The problem is that, although a cer­tain amount of progress has been made by psycholinguists in the study of the mental lexicon in recent years, it is still by no means clear whether linguistic knowledge is qualitatively dif­ferent from other kinds of knowledge (or belief) and stored, neurophysiologically, in another part of the brain.

As to other ways of drawing a distinction between a dictionary and an encyclopaedia that have been proposed in lexical seman­tics, they too must be treated with caution. Everything that has been said so far in Part 2 of this book tends to support the view that one's knowledge of language and one's knowledge of the world (including the culture in which the language operates) are interdependent. We can draw a distinction, as far as descrip­tive meaning is concerned, between sense and denotation. We can also say. legitimately, that the former is more definitely lin­guistic in that it is wholly language-internal, whereas the latter relates the language to the world. In doing so, we can accept that the lexical linkage of languages to the world, at least for some kinds of words, may very well involve knowledge (or belief) about the world. If we are guided by lexicographical practice, rather than simply by linguistic or psycholinguistic theory, we

3.4 Semantic prototypes 101

shall certainly take this view. As we have seen in our discussion of typical dictionary definitions for the natural - kind noun 'dog', it is not only dictionaries that are explicitly described as encyclo­paedic which supply what might be described as encyclopaedic information about what such words (prototypically) denote. It may be added that many conventional reference dictionaries provide for such words pictures of what they (prototypically) denote (as well as definitions which, as was noted above, derive historically from the classical theory of definition); and that those who consult dictionaries of this kind usually find the pic­tures helpful, if not essential. Theories of lexical meaning that invoke the notion of natural (and cultural) kinds, and more espe­cially those that also invoke the notion of prototypes, can be seen as providing philosophical and psycholinguistic support for this part of traditional lexicographical practice.

In what follows, we shall leave on one side the question whether the distinction between linguistic and non-linguistic (encyclopaedic) meaning is viable (as far as the denotation of all words that have denotation is concerned). We shall concen­trate instead on the way in which the language-internal part of lexical meaning has been handled in recent linguistic semantics: we shall concentrate on sense, rather than denotation; on word-to-word, rather than word-to-world relations.