88 Defining the meaning of words

words might be more basic than others in that they can be used to define a greater proportion of the total vocabulary or can be used to construct a more elegant and systematic set of inter­connected definitions. And they might be thought to be more directly associated with what Leibniz and other seventeenth-century philosophers have thought of as atomic concepts: the building blocks, as it were, of the conceptual system which guides and constrains all thinking and rational discourse. This is the sense of 'basic', or 'primary', that is dominant in the philo­sophical tradition, though Russell and, others frequently talk as if the two senses will determine much the same class of expres­sions. It is also this second sense of 'basic' that has been domi­nant, as we shall see in Chapter 4, in a good deal of recent theorizing in linguistic semantics. There is no reason to believe that the two senses of 'basic' should be applicable to exactly the same lexemes. But it is perhaps reasonable to assume that many of the lexemes in the vocabularies of all natural languages should be basic in both senses. We shall keep this point in mind in our discussion of natural kinds and semantic prototypes.

In this section, I have deliberately introduced and empha­sized some philosophical ideas which are rarely mentioned in introductions to semantics written by linguists. I have done this because, in my view, it is impossible to evaluate even the most down-to-earth and apparently unphilosophical works in descriptive semantics unless one has some notion of the general philosophical framework within which they are written. This holds true regardless of whether the authors themselves are aware of the philosophical origins or implications of their work­ing principles.

It remains to add that the empiricist traditipn has been immensely important in the development of modern formal semantics and continues to influence the thinking of many who declare themselves to be rationalists and are most vociferous in their rejection of empiricism. Empiricist philosophers have always tended to give priority to the phenomenal attributes of entities in their discussion of denotation: i.e., to those attributes that can be known or perceived through the senses. We must be careful not to accept this point of view uncritically, simply

3.3 Natural (and cultural) kinds 89

because it has been passed on to us, often no less uncritically, by tradition. The functional attributes - those attributes that make things useful to us for particular purposes - are no less important in the determination of what is, or might be, basic in the vocabulary of human languages. For example, edibility is likely to be as important as colour or shape, and just as likely to serve as one of the properties which we recognize as'criteria! In establishing the denotation of whole sets of lexemes; and edibility for human beings is not only biologically, but also culturally, determined. I have chosen edibility as an example because edibility - i.e., culturally determined edibility – demonstrably serves as a major determinant of the lexical structure of all natural languages. '

It may also be added, though I will not go into this here, that edibility, together with shape, size, animacy, sex, etc., is often grammatically (or semi-grammatically) encoded in the classifiers or genders of languages that have such categories. One can hardly discuss the question of basic and non-basic expres­sions in natural languages properly without doing so in relation to what is grammaticalized, as well as lexicalized, in particular languages.