Seeing clearly: Frame Semantic, Psycholinguistic, and Cross ...

CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 11
1980:10-12), based on Reddy 1979), which runs something like this: ideas are objects, and
language is a means of transmitting them from speaker to hearer. The forms of language
are containers (\packaging") for ideas; the speaker takes some of her ideas, wraps them up
in words and sends them to the hearer, who opens the package and \takes out" the ideas,
thus coming into possession of them. This implies that the container (language) and the
contents (ideas) are functionally distinct, and that (barring a failure of transmission), the
hearer, by a relatively simple process, \takes out" exactly the same ideas that the speaker
\put in".
There also exists a di erent folk theory of lexical semantics (which mayeven con-
ict sometimes with the communication is object exchange metaphor), which runs
like this: words are linguistic objects connected with conceptual objects (ideas, meanings);
there are proper words to use for each meaning, possibly more than one word per meaning
(synonymy); producing language consists of putting together a string of words that corre-
sponds to to one's ideas, and understanding language consists of recovering the meanings
attached to the words one hears or reads. Like thecommunication is object exchange
metaphor, this metaphor implies that the hearer comes into possession of the identical ideas
that the speaker has, but the conventional connection between words and meanings is em-
phasized; there is some limited number of words to express each idea. The converse relation,
that a word might express more than one idea (i.e. homonymy and polysemy), is usually
not considered very much by most people, if only because the process of disambiguation
while understanding one's native language(s) is, under normal circumstances, unconscious.
On those occasions when the question arises of what ideas a word might properly
express, a dictionary may be consulted, which obliges with a list of appropriate de nitions for
eachword, sometimes with examples of use; this list is usually assumed to be unquestionably
accurate and complete. Two of the most likely reasons for consulting a dictionary de nition
are to settle an argument about whether a particular word can be appropriately used with a
given sense, and to nd the meaning of an unfamiliar word encountered (usually in reading).
For the rst purpose, if one of the de nitions listed corresponds with the idea in question,
then the word is appropriate; otherwise, it is not. For the second purpose, if one of the
de nitions in the dictionary ts in the context of the unknown word, then the user concludes
that that sense must be the one intended. In either case, each de nition tends to be regarded
as a discrete, more or less independent entity, without much attention to the lexicographer's
attempts to express the relations between them using devices such asahierarchical system