11.1
A MIND FULL OF WORDS
We shall now conclude the book by bringing together the different issues that have been raised about
words. Seemingly abstract points considered in preceding chapters that may have looked purely theoretical
will be used now in our exploration of the nature of the MENTAL LEXICON—the representation of words
in the mind. There are some obvious similarities between the contents of the mental lexicon and the more
familiar lexicographer’s dictionaries sold in bookstores. Both must contain information about the meaning,
grammatical properties, pronunciation (and orthographic representation) of an enormous number of words
(cf.
Chapter 6
).
The focus in this chapter is on how that information is handled in the mental lexicon. How do we store
thousands and thousands of words in the mind? How do we manage to retrieve them correctly and so
effortlessly, most of the time in speech, both as speakers and as hearers? How do we manage to correctly
associate sound with meaning? (We will restrict ourselves to speech and exclude a detailed discussion of
written language so as to keep this chapter within manageable proportions.) This is an achievement that
makes finding a needle in the proverbial haystack look like child’s play.
In speech, the matching of sound with meaning is essential for communication to happen. There would be
very little successful communication if the speaker chose a word to express a certain meaning but had no
idea of its pronunciation. Conversely, comprehension would not take place if the listener decoded the
sounds of a word correctly but had no idea what they meant. But, by itself, a successful match of sound with
meaning is not enough. It is equally important for the speaker to be able to associate the word chosen with
the right set of morpho-syntactic properties (e.g. noun, feminine, singular, present tense, past tense, definite,
indefinite, etc.) and for the hearer to be able to recognise information about those grammatical properties on
hearing the words. It is important, for instance, to know whether the speaker said ‘He feared the dog’ or ‘He
fears dogs’
. The tense, definiteness and number differences between the two sentences are important. We
cannot arrive at the right interpretation if they are not grasped.
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