Lexical Pragmatics - Journal of Semantics

Reinhard Blutner 125the structure of the (mental) lexicon may be derived. As an example for thiskind of research I refer to seminal work of Caramazza & Grober (1977).These authors investigated twenty-six senses of the word line. Clusteringand scaling analyses revealed five major groupings of these senses for whichclear descriptions can be given. Distinguishing a core meaning level fromthe level of conceptually salient senses, Caramazza & Grober have proposedEXTENSION as the underlying abstract core meaning of line and they havepresumed 'instruction rules' of the form REALIZE X AS Y (where X and Ycorrespond to semantic representations) in order to produce the abstractmeanings of the five clusters. Thereafter, the application of subsequentinstructions produce the senses realized in specific contexts. As an exampleof how the instruction rules might work, Caramazza & Grober (1977)consider the derivation of the sense of line in draw a line under the title of thebook. The 'linguistic dictionary' correlates the sound part of line with its coremeaning EXTENSION. Using the instruction REALIZE EXTENSIONAS UNIDIMENSIONAL EXTENSION, an output corresponding to acertain cluster of concrete senses would be realized. Applying a furtherinstruction, say REALIZE UNIDIMENSIONAL EXTENSION AS VISUALPERCEPTIBLE, would help to isolate the intended surface sense.Though investigations of that kind may be extremely instructive andinteresting from a psycholinguistic point of view, they leave an importantpoint out of consideration: the isolated investigation of singular lexical unitscloses one's eyes to certain regularities and restricting conditions that mayarise alone from investigating the semantic relations between different butin some aspects similar lexical units.The lexicologist must show the relationships between all the senses of a lexical item (a taskwhich conventional dictionaries have done well) and also the relationships of related sensesof different lexical items (a task which recently linguists have begun doing), but few studiesattempt to do both of these tasks (Lehrer 1978: 95).Following this methodological insight, Lehrer has investigated cookingwords (Lehrer 1968), temperature words (Lehrer 1970), and sensory wordsfor taste, smell, feel (Lehrer 1978), and she has suggested the followinghypothesis:Downloaded from http://jos.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on September 12, 2014If there is a set of words that have semantic relationship in a semantic .field (where suchrelationships are described in terms of synonymy, autonymy, hyponymy, etc., and if one ormore items pattern in another semantic field, then the other items in the first field areavailable for extension to the second semantic field. Perceived similarity is not necessary(Lehrer 1978: 96).As a necessary condition on semantic transfer—the transfer of words with ameaning in one domain to another—this principle is certainly interesting.However, as Lehrer suggested herself, not each potential transfer of