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The Mapping between the Mental and the Public Lexicon

Sperber, Dan and Wilson, Deirdre (1998) The Mapping between the Mental and the Public Lexicon. [Book Chapter]

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Abstract

We argue that the presence of a word in an utterance serves as starting point for a relevance guided inferential process that results in the construction of a contextually appropriate sense. The linguistically encoded sense of a word does not serve as its default interpretation. The cases where the contextually appropriate sense happens to be identical to this linguistic sense have no particular theoretical significance. We explore some of the consequences of this view. One of these consequences is that there may be many more mentally represented concepts than there are linguistically encoded concepts.

Item Type:Book Chapter
Keywords:cognition, communication, languge of thought, lexicon, linguistics, mind, philosophy, pragmatics, psychology, relevance, relevance theory
Subjects:Linguistics > Pragmatics
Philosophy > Philosophy of Language
Philosophy > Philosophy of Mind
ID Code:2280
Deposited By: Sperber, Dan
Deposited On:18 Jun 2002
Last Modified:11 Mar 2011 08:54

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