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22 Etymology

Philip Durkin is Deputy Chief Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. He has led the OED’s team of specialist etymology editors since the late 1990s. His research interests include etymology, the history of the English language and of the English lexicon, language contact, medieval multilingualism, and approaches to historical lexicography. His publications include The Oxford Guide to Etymology (OUP 2009) and Borrowed Words: A History of Loanwords in English (OUP 2014).

• Published: 03 March 2014
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Etymology is an essential tool in tracing the origin and development of individual words. It is also indispensable for identifying, from a diachronic perspective, what the individual words of a language are, e.g. whether file ‘type of metal tool’ and file ‘set of documents’ share a common history or show different origins. However, words do not develop in isolation from one another. In extreme cases, complete lexical merger or lexical split can occur; such events can challenge the identification of words as entities with a single, discrete history. Etymological method depends on an interaction between arguments based on word form and word meaning. Regular sound changes are a cornerstone of etymology. Analysis of regular sound correspondences between languages, resulting from the operation of sound changes earlier than the surviving written records, is at the heart of the historical comparative method, by which proto-languages such as Indo-European have been identified.

22.1 Introduction: etymology and words

A topic that is crucial to any study of words is how we decide whether we are dealing with two different words or with a single word. Essentially, this is a matter of distinguishing between homonymy and polysemy. For instance, do file ‘type of metal tool’ and file ‘set of documents’ show two meanings of a single word (i.e. polysemy) or two different words which happen to be identical in pronunciation and spelling (i.e. homonymy)? This question will be approached differently depending on whether we adopt a synchronic or a diachronic perspective. From a synchronic perspective, what matters is whether we perceive a semantic link between the two words. Psycholinguistic experiments may even be conducted in order to measure the degree of association felt by speakers. Such approaches are outside the scope of this chapter. 1 From a diachronic perspective, what we most want to know is whether these two words of identical form share a common history, and if not, whether any influence of one word upon the other can be traced. These questions are answered by the application of etymology. In this particular example, the answer is quite categorical: the two words are of entirely separate origin (one is a word of native Germanic origin, the other a loanword from French; see further section 22.2 ), and there is no reason to suspect that either has exercised any influence on the other.

This chapter will look to give an overview of the core methods of etymology, i.e. how it is that we establish the separate histories of file ‘type of metal tool’ and file ‘set of documents’. It will also look closely at those areas where etymology can ask difficult questions about words as units in the diachronic study of the lexicon. Some words show a fairly simple linear progression from one stage in the history of a language to another, and there is no difficulty in saying that a word at one stage in the history of a language is the direct ancestor of a word in a later historical stage of the same language. In other cases things are much less simple. A single word in contemporary use may have resulted from multiple inputs from different sources, or a single word in an earlier stage in language history may have shown a process of historical split, giving rise ultimately to two quite distinct words in a later stage of the same language. Such phenomena, and the causes by which they arise, present many challenges for the assumption that we can always speak with confidence about ‘the history of a word’, and hence they will merit particular attention in this chapter.

22.2 A practical introduction to the core methods of etymology, through two short examples

Section 22.1 introduced the examples of modern English file ‘type of metal tool’ and file ‘set of documents’, and stated that from a diachronic perspective they are definitely two quite separate words: the first is part of the inherited Germanic vocabulary of English, while the second reflects a borrowing from French in the 16th century. It can further be stated that there is definitely no relationship between the Germanic word and the French one, and there are no grounds for supposing that the two English words have had any influence on one another during their history in English. All of this is established by applying the core methods of etymology, which this section will introduce by looking briefly at the histories of these two words. 2

Modern English file ‘type of metal tool’ has a well-documented and very simple history in English. The word existed already as fīl in the same meaning (though features of the referent may have changed, due to technological changes) in the earliest documented stage of the English language, Old English, and is also well attested in the Middle English period ( c .1150 –c .1500) and throughout the Modern English period (1500–). The word would have been pronounced /fiːl/ in Old English and Middle English; the modern diphthongal pronunciation /fʌɪl/ (with minor variation in different varieties of English) results from a regular sound change that affected /iː/ late in the Middle English period or very early in the Modern English period. This sound change is one of a series of changes in the pronunciation of vowels and diphthongs in English in this period, known collectively as the Great Vowel Shift (see further section 22.3 ).

The history of Modern English file ‘set of documents’ is a little more complicated, because semantic change as well as change in word form is involved. The word is first recorded in English in the early 16th century. It shows a borrowing of Middle French fil . The modern pronunciation shows that it must have been borrowed early enough to participate in the same development from /fiːl/ to /fʌɪl/ that is shown by the homonym file ‘type of metal tool’. The core meaning of the French word is ‘thread’ or sometimes ‘wire’. The earliest use of the word in English that is recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary refers to a wire, but specifically one on which papers and documents are strung for preservation and reference; the earliest example, from 1525, reads ‘Thapothecaries shall kepe the billis that they serue, vpon a fyle’, i.e. the apothecaries are to keep on a length of wire written records of the prescriptions that they have administered. From this beginning in English, the meaning of file developed by a process of metonymy from the wire on which a collection of records was kept (in later use, especially legal ones), to the set of records itself. This also explains why documents are described as being kept on file , or in earlier use upon (a) file .

22.3 Teasing out core etymological methods from these examples

The examples of file ‘type of metal tool’ and file ‘set of documents’ show the two main concerns of etymology: detecting and explaining change in word form, and detecting and explaining change in meaning. The histories of both words that I have set out here are well documented, but it is important to note that the historical narrative only emerges from interplay between the historical documents and etymology.

The word fīl exists in Old English and Middle English with the same meaning that file has in Modern English. A large mass of comparative and historical data tells us that Old English and Middle English fīl was pronounced /fiːl/. Observation of hundreds if not thousands of similar word histories tells us that as a result of one of the collection of changes we know as the Great Vowel Shift, a word that has /iː/ in Middle English will have /ʌɪ/ in contemporary (British) English pronunciation. The Great Vowel Shift consisted of a number of interrelated changes in the vowel system of English which extended from roughly the 15th century to the 18th, and which can be represented schematically as in Fig. 22.1 . (In fact, the modern quality of the diphthong in file probably results from later changes, but the initial diphthongization of /iː/ is a result of the Great Vowel Shift.) 3

The Great Vowel Shift (simplified).

Regular sound change of this type, affecting all sounds in a similar phonetic environment within a particular time period, is the most powerful explanatory tool available to an etymologist. Because of what we know about the history of English, based on etymological investigation of all of its lexis, we know that a word pronounced /fiːl/ in Old English and Middle English should be pronounced /fʌɪl/ in modern English. If it were not, we would have a problem with our historical account. Since it is, we do not. (See more on this issue below.)

As already explained, the same regular sound change that accounts for file ‘type of metal tool’ also accounts for the pronunciation history of file ‘set of documents’. This word additionally shows a rather dramatic semantic change, from ‘wire’ to ‘set of documents’. Because of our rich historical documentation for English, we can observe what has happened in detail. The explanation remains a hypothesis, but one about which there can be no reasonable doubt, because we can see all of the stages in the semantic history illustrated in contemporary documents, and because the semantic changes involved are well-known types: 4

Semantic Narrowing, From a Wire to Specifically a Wire on Which Paper Documents are Strung;

and then metonymy, from the wire on which a collection of records is kept, to the collection of records kept on the wire, and then semantic change mirroring technological change, as the records come to be stored by means other than hanging on a wire, and the word file comes to refer to any collection of paper documents;

and then further semantic change mirroring technological change, as the meaning becomes extended to documents (or now more typically a single document) in electronic form.

Precisely the same explanatory methods are used in attempts to construct etymological hypotheses where we have less data, and also for hypotheses that attempt to bridge large gaps in the historical record, or to project word histories back beyond the limits of the historical record. Regular sound change is by far the strongest explanatory tool in the armoury of an etymologist, because it tells us that a particular change should have occurred in a particular language (or dialect) at a particular time. The question of just how much regularity is shown by regular sound changes is a central one in historical linguistics, and one that has profound implications for etymology. Normally, most etymologists work with the assumption that the less data is available about a particular word history, the more important it is to ensure that general rules and tendencies apply. It is very poor methodology to hypothesize that a single word history may have shown a number of undocumented exceptions to otherwise regular sound changes in order to get from stage A to stage B.

Change in meaning is rather more of a problem for etymological reconstruction. General tendencies, such as metaphor, metonymy, narrowing, broadening, pejoration, or amelioration can be traced in countless word histories. The problem is that these changes rarely affect groups of words together. Certainly, we do not have any regular, period-specific changes such as ‘general late Middle English or Early Modern English semantic narrowing’, analogous to ‘late Middle English or Early Modern English diphthongization of /iː/’ which we can assume will have affected all words in a particular class in a particular period. For this reason, hypothesizing semantic histories is generally much more difficult than hypothesizing the form histories of words. In the case of file , we can get easily from the meaning ‘thread or wire’ to ‘set of documents’ because known tendencies in semantic change explain what we can see reflected in the historical record. Without the intervening historical record, if we knew only that fil means ‘thread or wire’ in Middle French and that file means ‘set of documents’ in modern English, it would be a brave and daring step to hypothesize a borrowing followed by this set of changes in order to explain this word history.

22.4 Comparison and reconstruction

The examples discussed so far have all been restricted to the history of English, except that in the case of file ‘set of documents’ it is assumed that Middle French fil ‘thread or wire’ was borrowed into late Middle English or Early Modern English. In this case, we are dealing with borrowing between two well-attested languages. We can see that fil ‘thread’ extends back into Old French (and clearly shows the continuation of a word in the parent language, Latin), and we can see that there is no earlier history of file ‘thread or wire’ in English; we also know that French and English were in close contact in this period, and that many words were borrowed. The situation becomes rather different if we push the history of both file ‘type of metal tool’ and file ‘set of documents’ back a little further. 5

As well as establishing word histories within languages, etymology can be employed to establish connections between words in different languages. These may be connections involving borrowing, as just illustrated, or they may be connections involving cognacy. This concept needs some explanation. One of the major findings of historical linguistics is that many present-day or historically documented languages can be identified as common descendants from earlier languages. Thus, French, Italian, Spanish, and the other Romance languages can all be traced as descendants from a common ancestor, Latin. Since Latin is amply attested in historical documents, the stages in the development can be traced in detail. The history of the Roman empire also gives us a crucial historical context in which to understand the circumstances of the wide geographical spread of Latin, and gives us some important hints about other languages that Latin was in contact with in different parts of the Empire. To focus on the level of an individual word, French fil can be seen to show the reflex, or direct linear development, of Latin fīlum ‘thread’. The same is true of Italian filo and Spanish hilo , and thus these are said to be cognates of French fil , showing a common descent from Latin fīlum . By contrast, French choisir ‘to choose’ does not show the reflex of a Latin word, but rather reflects a direct borrowing into French (or perhaps into the ancestor form of Vulgar Latin spoken in Gaul) from a Germanic language, probably in the context of the Frankish invasions of Gaul; the word is ultimately related to English choose .

By the application of what is termed the historical comparative method, many other such relationships of common descent have been identified. For instance, English can be identified as showing common descent with Frisian, Dutch, Low German, and High German; collectively they form the West Germanic branch of the Germanic language family. The relationships between the major members of the Germanic family can be reconstructed as in Fig. 22.2 . Proto-Germanic sits at the head of the Germanic languages, just as Latin sits at the head of the Romance languages. It is not directly attested, unlike Latin, but a great deal of its vocabulary, and of its phonology, morphology, and (to a lesser extent) its syntax can be reconstructed by comparison of its attested descendants. A great deal more information, and confirmation of much of what can be hypothesized from comparison within Germanic, comes from comparing the evidence of Germanic with the evidence for the much wider language family, Indo-European, to which it in turn belongs. Scholars working on Indo-European are very lucky, in that many separate branches have been identified, and some of them include languages that have very early surviving documentation (especially Hittite and Luvian), while others (especially Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin) have recorded histories that both go back a long way and extend over a very long period, with copious historical records. However, there are still limitations to how much of the vocabulary of proto-Indo-European can be reconstructed, and with what degree of confidence. 6 (Attempts to link Indo-European with other language families, in order to establish a shared linguistic descent from a common ancestor, are highly controversial, and not regarded as successful by most linguists working today.)

The major Germanic languages.

It is by application of this sort of methodology that we can be certain that some pairs of words, such as English care and Latin cūra ‘care’, or Latin deus and Greek theós ‘god’, are not related, in spite of their identical meaning and superficial similarity in form. Conversely, some pairs of words which show little formal or semantic similarity, such as English head and French chef ‘leader, boss’, can be shown to share a common origin.

In a small but very important set of cases, whole words can be clearly identified as direct reflexes of a single word in proto-Indo-European, rather than as developments from a shared root. For instance, father has a wide set of cognates in Germanic, including Old Frisian feder, fader , Old Saxon fadar , Old High German fater , Old Icelandic faðir , Gothic fadar (although, interestingly, this is a very rare word in Gothic, in which the more usual word for ‘father’ is atta ). Unlike in the case of file , we can also identify cognate words meaning ‘father’ in a wide range of languages from other branches of Indo-European, for instance Latin pater , ancient Greek πατήρ ( patḗr ), Sanskrit pitár -, Early Irish athir , Old Persian pitā , Tocharian A pācar . (Tocharian A and the related Tocharian B are the most easterly Indo-European languages, preserved in documents discovered in western China.) On the basis of these attested word forms, an Indo-European word meaning ‘father’ of approximately the form * ph 2 tér - is commonly reconstructed (the h 2 in the reconstruction represents a laryngeal sound assumed to have existed in Indo-European, which in this position can be understood as giving rise to the sound /ə/, hence probably /pəˈter/). The various attested forms can all be explained as arising from this same starting point, allowing for what is assumed about sound change in the pre-history of each language, and for assumptions about the morphology of Indo-European. Thus, the initial consonant /f/ in the English word again reflects the Grimm’s Law change * p > * f in the common ancestor of the Germanic languages. (The history of the medial consonant is rather more complex, involving a further change known as Verner’s Law, the discovery of which was itself an important stage in the development of the notion of regular sound change, since it explained a set of apparent exceptions to Grimm’s Law.)

Similarly, for ‘mother’, English mother has cognates in West Germanic and North Germanic (not though in Gothic, which has aiþei ), including: Old Frisian mōder , Old Saxon mōdar , Old High German muoter , Old Icelandic móðir . Cognates in other branches of Indo-European include: classical Latin māter , ancient Greek μήτηρ , Sanskrit mātar -, Early Irish māthir , Avestan mātar -, Tocharian A mācar . On the basis of these attested word forms, an Indo-European word meaning ‘mother’ of approximately the form * máh 2 ter - or perhaps * méh 2 ter - is commonly reconstructed.

It is almost certainly not accidental that the reconstructed words meaning ‘father’ and ‘mother’ have the sequence of sounds - ter - in common. This is found also in the reconstructed Indo-European forms assumed to lie ultimately behind English brother and daughter (but not sister , in which the - t- is of later origin, perhaps by analogy with the other words). Most scholars are therefore happy to recognize the existence of an element - ter - involved in forming words denoting kinship relationships, although opinions differ on the origin of this element and its possible connections with other suffixes in Indo-European. This leaves open the question of what the etymologies of the first elements of mother and father are. One suggestion is that both words may originate as forms suffixed in - ter - on the syllables /ma/ or /pa/ that are typical of infant vocalization, and which are probably reflected by English mama and papa , as well as forms in a wide variety of languages worldwide. However, there are other viable suggestions to explain the origin of both words.

This discussion has pushed several words back far beyond the limits of the historical record. This is is possible because we have a rich and early historical record for so many Indo-European languages. The historical record for many languages is much less rich, and this can impose severe limits on etymological research (although there have been significant achievements in areas such as the study of proto-Bantu). In addition, there are many languages that cannot be linked with large language families like Indo-European; some languages are (to the best of present knowledge) complete isolates (e.g., in the view of most scholars, Basque or Korean), while many others can only be linked securely with one or two other languages (e.g. Japanese and the related languages of the Ryukyu Islands). Of course, this does not mean that the whole of the lexis of such languages is necessarily unrelated to words found in other languages; the lexis of Japanese, for instance, contains large numbers of loanwords, including a very large contribution from Chinese during the medieval period, and a large recent contribution from English, such as terebi ‘television’ or depāto ‘department store’. Both of these words show accommodation to the phonological system of Japanese, as well as clipping (i.e. shortening of the word form), which is common in such loanwords. Such words or clipped elements of such words may also form new words in Japanese; for instance the second element of the word karaoke is a clipping of ōkesutara , borrowed from English orchestra (the first element is Japanese kara ‘empty’).

22.5 Words of unknown or uncertain etymology

As already seen, English has a richly documented and well-studied history and belongs to an extended language family many members of which are unusually well documented over a very long history. However, even in English there are many words that defy satisfactory etymological explanation. Some words go back to Old English, but no secure connections can be established with words in other Germanic languages, nor can a donor be identified for a loanword etymology. Some examples (all investigated recently for the new edition of the Oxford English Dictionary ) include adze, neap (tide), to quake (which could just be an expressive formation), or (all first attested in late Old English) plot, privet , or dog, hog, pig (these last three probably bear some relationship to one another, but exactly what is less clear). Some words of unknown etymology first recorded in Middle English include badge, big, boy, girl, nape, nook, to pore, to pout, prawn . Some more recent examples include to prod (first attested 1535), quirk (1565), prat (1567), quandary (1576), to puzzle ( c. 1595), pimp (1600), pun (1644). 7 For some of these words numerous etymological explanations have been suggested, but none has yet met with general acceptance.

In each of these cases there is relatively little doubt that we are dealing with a single coherent word history, but we are simply unable to explain its ulterior history. A slightly different kind of case is exemplified by queer . This is recorded from 1513 in the meaning defined by OED as ‘strange, odd, peculiar, eccentric’, and there is little doubt that most current senses developed from this beginning, including the modern use in the meaning ‘homosexual’. Its origin is uncertain; borrowing from German quer ‘transverse, oblique, crosswise, at right angles’ is a possibility, but the semantic correspondence is not exact, and figurative uses of the German word, such as ‘(of a person) peculiar’, are first attested much later than the English word. The interesting further complication in the case of queer is that in contemporary English queer also occurs in criminals’ slang in the meaning ‘of coins or banknotes: counterfeit, forged’. This may seem an unsurprising or at least plausible semantic development from ‘strange, odd’, but the difficulty is that this use (first recorded in 1740) seems to have developed from a meaning ‘bad; contemptible, worthless; untrustworthy; disreputable’, that is first recorded in 1567, and in early use this always shows spellings of the type quire . It therefore seems that in the 16th century there may have been two distinct words, queer ‘strange, odd, peculiar, eccentric’ and (in criminals’ slang) quire ‘bad; contemptible, worthless; untrustworthy; disreputable’. The one may have originated as a variant of the other, but there appears to be no formal overlap in the first century or so of co-existence of the two words. In the late 17th century, quire ‘bad; contemptible, worthless; untrustworthy; disreputable’ begins to appear in the spelling queer , suggesting a lowered vowel that is confirmed by the modern pronunciation. This change in form may well be the result of formal association with queer ‘strange, odd, peculiar, eccentric’, on the grounds of similarity of form and semantic proximity (what is odd often being deemed bad, etc.). A very difficult question is whether modern English has one word or two: quire , later queer ‘bad; contemptible, worthless; untrustworthy; disreputable’ seems the direct antecedent of queer ‘of coins or banknotes: counterfeit, forged’, but, if association with queer ‘strange, odd, peculiar, eccentric’ is what has caused an irregular change in word form from quire to queer , can we be certain that the two words have not become completely conflated for modern English speakers? An idiom such as as queer as a nine bob note may be construed by some speakers as simply showing the meaning ‘peculiar’ rather than specifically ‘counterfeit’. Certainly, the case is much more difficult than that of file ‘type of metal tool’ and file ‘set of documents’, where the intuition that there are two unrelated meanings, hence homonymy, coincides perfectly with the historical perspective. 8

The remainder of this chapter will look at some other types of scenario in which careful investigation of word histories by etymological methods presents tensions for the conception of the lexicon as consisting of a set of entirely discrete words with separate histories. By careful application of etymology, it is often possible to detect the grey areas, where lexical split or merger is in progress, either diachronically between different stages in the historical development of a language, or synchronically between different varieties of language.

22.6 Lexical merger and lexical split, and other types of ‘messiness’ in the histories of words

Proving that lexical merger has occurred can present difficulties for etymological-historical methodology. For instance, Old English has two distinct verbs in the meanings (intransitive) ‘to melt, become liquid’ and (transitive) ‘to cause to melt, to make liquid’. The first is a strong verb, meltan , with principal parts: present stem melt -, past tense (1st and 3rd person singular) mealt , past tense (plural) multon , and past participle gemolten . The second is a weak verb, of which the infinitive is either meltan or mieltan in different dialects of Old English, but which has past tense and past participle formed by a dental suffix. The forms of this verb that are actually recorded in Old English typically show syncopation of the dental suffix, e.g. past tense (1st and 3rd person singular) mielte and past participle mielt , but forms without syncopation of the dental suffix are also found, e.g. past participle gemælted . The two words are ultimately developed from the same Germanic base, and are ultimately cognate with words in other branches of Indo-European, the most direct correspondence being with ancient Greek μέλδειν ( méldein ) ‘to melt’. In modern English both sets of meanings are realized by a regular, weak verb, melt , with past tense and past participle melted . (A descendant of the original strong past participle survives, however, in specialized meaning as the adjective molten designating liquefied metal or glass.) Modern English melt is clearly the descendant of either Old English meltan (strong) or meltan, mieltan (weak), but describing quite what has happened is a little more difficult. Many verbs that were strong in Old English have switched to showing weak inflections in later English; thus modern English melt could in formal terms show the direct descendant of meltan (strong), with change in declensional class. On the other hand, many verbs that typically showed syncope of the dental suffix after a stem ending in a dental consonant have become regularized to show final -ed in later English; hence modern English melt could equally show the direct descendant of meltan, mieltan (weak). We could hypothesize that the strong and weak verbs have merged in the later history of English, giving one merged modern English verb melt in both transitive and intransitive uses. However, proving that this has happened purely by etymological methodology is difficult: from the data I have presented so far, we may infer from semantic similarity that melt in the meanings (intransitive) ‘to melt’ and (transitive) ‘to cause to melt’ shows a single polysemous lexeme, but etymological methodology alone does not rule out the alternative scenario where there is a continuous history of two verbs, melt 1 (intransitive) ‘to melt’ and melt 2 (transitive) ‘to cause to melt’ which have simply become homonyms in modern English. Since English has a particularly richly documented history, we can look at what sort of verbal morphology is found in Middle English. Here, as well as uses of weak forms such as melted in meanings of the old strong verb meltan (intransitive) ‘to melt’, we also find historically strong forms in transitive meanings, e.g. from Caxton ‘Saturne … malte and fyned gold and metalles’. In fact, the historical evidence when taken all together suggests a general confusion of forms in Middle English and Early Modern English: thus, in a 16th-century text we find ‘The Jewes when they molted a golden calfe … did neuer thinke that to be God’, with a past tense form molted that shows the weak past tense ending - ed but the stem vowel of the old strong past participle, used in a transitive meaning where the weak verb would have been expected historically. Thus the detailed historical data suggests strongly that merger has taken place; but without this level of detail the hypothesis of merger would be harder to support by historical methods alone. 9

Close study of word histories from historically well-attested languages suggests that processes of merger are in fact not uncommon. Reduction in the overall level of morphological variety, as shown for instance by the English verb system diachronically, is one common cause, as exemplified by melt . Another is where borrowing is found from more than one donor language. For instance, in the Middle English period English was in close contact with both French and Latin. Specifically, in the late Middle English period, English came to be used increasingly as a written language in contexts where either French or Latin or both had previously been used over a long period of time. In this context, many loanwords occur in English that could on formal grounds be from either French or Latin, and which show a complex set of borrowed meanings, which again could be explained by borrowing from either language. Examples include add, animal, information, problem, public . In some cases, particular form variants point strongly to input from one language rather than the other, or a particular meaning is found in French but not in Latin, or vice versa. Sometimes a particular meaning is attested earliest in a text that is translated directly from the one language, but it may be found a few years later in a text translated from the other. In most instances, the likeliest scenario seems to be that there has been input from both languages, reflecting multiple instances either of direct word borrowing or of semantic influence on an earlier loan; over time, multiple inputs have coalesced, to give semantically complex, polysemous words in modern English. 10

Demonstrating that lexical splits have occurred is generally a simpler task for etymological methodology, although pinpointing the precise point at which a split has occurred can be more difficult, especially since fine-grained historical data suggests that splits tend to diffuse gradually through a speaker group. For instance, modern English has two distinct words, ordinance and ordnance . The first is typically found in the meaning ‘an authoritative order’, and the second in specialized military meanings such as ‘artillery’ and ‘branch of government service dealing especially with military stores and materials’. Both words show the same starting point, Middle English ordenance, ordinance, ordnance , a borrowing from French, showing a wide range of meanings such as ‘decision made by a superior’, ‘ruling’, ‘arrangement in a certain order’, ‘provisions’, ‘legislative decree’, ‘machinery, engine’, ‘disposition of troops in battle’. In Middle English the forms with and without a medial vowel could be used in any of these meanings: the formal variation does not pattern significantly with the semantic variation. In course of time, the form without a medial vowel, ordnance , became usual in military senses, while the form ordinance became usual in general senses. Possibly what we have here is a situation where a pool of variants existed, and speakers in different social groups have selected different forms from within that pool of variants, ordnance having been the form that became usual within the military, but ordinance in most other groups using this word. Very gradually, as some meanings have fallen out of use and others have come to be used more or less exclusively with one word form or the other, a complete split has occurred, with ordinance and ordnance becoming established as distinct lexemes with different meanings. The time-frame over which this occurred appears to have been very long: the OED ’s evidence suggests that it is not complete before the 18th century, and even in contemporary English ordinance may occasionally be found in the military senses, although in formal use it is likely to be regarded as an error.

Similar splits may also be found that affect only the written form of a word, particularly in modern standard languages with well-established orthographic norms. For instance, modern English flour originated as a spelling variant of flower ; flour was perceived metaphorically as the ‘flower’ or finer portion of ground meal. The word flower is a Middle English borrowing from French, and it is found in the meaning ‘flour’ already in the 13th century; both meanings still appear under the single spelling flower in Johnson’s dictionary in 1755, although by this point some other written sources already distinguish clearly between the spellings flower and flour in the two meanings.

There are, however, instances of lexical split that are much less categorical. One such instance is shown by the modern English reflex(es) of Middle English poke ‘bag, small sack’. The word survives in this meaning in modern Standard English only in fossilized form in the idiom a pig in a poke (referring to something bought or accepted without prior inspection), but it remains in more general use in some regional varieties of English. Various other semantic developments ultimately from the same starting point survive in certain varieties of English. From the meaning ‘small bag or pouch worn on the person’ the narrowed meaning ‘a purse, a wallet, a pocketbook’ developed, although this is labelled by OED as being restricted to North American criminals’ slang; a further metonymic development from this, ‘a roll of banknotes; money; a supply or stash of money’, is labelled by OED as belonging to more general slang use. Metaphorical uses recorded as still current in different varieties of English included (in Scottish English) ‘a bag-shaped fishing net, a purse-net’, (in Scottish English and in the north of England) ‘an oedematous swelling on the neck of a sheep’, (in North America, chiefly in whaling) ‘a bag or bladder filled with air, used as a buoy or float’. Running alongside this splintering in meaning there are interesting patterns of formal variation: for instance, in Scottish English the form types pock and pouk occur as well as poke (reflecting phonological developments that are familiar from other words of similar shape), although these form variants do not appear to have become associated exclusively with particular meanings. In this instance, we can see that the etymological principle in use in a historical dictionary can effectively group all of this material together under a single dictionary headword poke , as showing a single point of origin, without any definitive split into different word forms employed in different meanings. However, what poke denotes will differ radically for different speakers of English depending on their membership of different speaker groups, and it is likely that if an individual speaker happens to be familiar with the meanings ‘money’ and ‘a bag or bladder filled with air’ he will be very unlikely to perceive any relationship between them, any more than between historically unrelated homonyms such as file ‘type of metal tool’ and file ‘set of documents’.

22.7 Conclusions

Etymology is an essential tool in tracing the historical origin and development of individual words, and in establishing word histories. Indeed, this could serve as a definition of etymology, broadly conceived. 11 Etymological method depends on an interaction between arguments based on word form and arguments based on word meaning. Regular sound changes are a cornerstone of etymological argument, especially when attempts are made to trace word histories far beyond the limits of the surviving written record. In a historical perspective, how we identify distinct word histories is heavily dependent on the application of etymology. As such, etymology can pose provocative questions about whether we can always identify complex words as coherent entities with a single, discrete history.

For discussion of these issues see Koskela (forthcoming) , and also Klepousniotou (2002) , Beretta et al. (2005) .

For fuller treatment of etymological methodology see Durkin (2009) . For some different perspectives see (with examples drawn chiefly from German) Seebold (1981) , (focussing purely on issues to do with the history and pre-history of English) Bammesberger (1984) , (focussing particularly on Romance languages and their coverage in etymological dictionaries) Malkiel (1993) , or (targeted at a more popular audience) Liberman (2005) .

On this and other sound changes discussed in this chapter see Durkin (2009) and further references given there. For a more detailed account of the Great Vowel Shift and an overview of the extensive literature on this topic see especially Lass (1999) .

For types of semantic change, see Geeraerts , this volume.

The etymologies presented in this chapter all draw on documentation from the standard etymological and historical dictionaries for each language involved. Listing all of the dictionaries concerned would be beyond the scope of this article. The etymological dictionary is one of the major outlets for etymological research; as well as advancing new ideas, etymological dictionaries typically summarize the main earlier hypotheses, taking note of data from the other major outlet for etymological research, articles in scholarly journals. On the typology and structure of etymological dictionaries see Buchi (forthcoming) and Malkiel (1975 , 1993 ).

For an excellent introduction to the Indo-European languages see Fortson (2009) . On the methodology for establishing the family see especially Clackson (2007) . For a very useful overview of some of the core reconstructed vocabulary of Indo-European see Mallory and Adams (2006) .

The frequency of words beginning with certain initial letters in these lists of examples reflects the fact that they have been drawn from the new edition of the OED currently in progress, in which the alphabetical sequence M to R is the largest continuous run of entries so far published.

For fuller discussion of this example see Durkin (2009 : 216–18).

For further discussion of this and of the examples of lexical split discussed later in this section, and for further examples, see Durkin (2009 : 79–88).

On words of this type see Durkin (2002) , Durkin (2008) , Durkin (forthcoming a).

On definitions of etymology see Alinei (1995) , Durkin (2009) .

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Definition of 'assignment'

assignment in British English

Assignment in american english, examples of 'assignment' in a sentence assignment, cobuild collocations assignment, trends of assignment.

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Understanding Assignments

What this handout is about.

The first step in any successful college writing venture is reading the assignment. While this sounds like a simple task, it can be a tough one. This handout will help you unravel your assignment and begin to craft an effective response. Much of the following advice will involve translating typical assignment terms and practices into meaningful clues to the type of writing your instructor expects. See our short video for more tips.

Basic beginnings

Regardless of the assignment, department, or instructor, adopting these two habits will serve you well :

• Read the assignment carefully as soon as you receive it. Do not put this task off—reading the assignment at the beginning will save you time, stress, and problems later. An assignment can look pretty straightforward at first, particularly if the instructor has provided lots of information. That does not mean it will not take time and effort to complete; you may even have to learn a new skill to complete the assignment.
• Ask the instructor about anything you do not understand. Do not hesitate to approach your instructor. Instructors would prefer to set you straight before you hand the paper in. That’s also when you will find their feedback most useful.

Assignment formats

Many assignments follow a basic format. Assignments often begin with an overview of the topic, include a central verb or verbs that describe the task, and offer some additional suggestions, questions, or prompts to get you started.

An Overview of Some Kind

The instructor might set the stage with some general discussion of the subject of the assignment, introduce the topic, or remind you of something pertinent that you have discussed in class. For example:

“Throughout history, gerbils have played a key role in politics,” or “In the last few weeks of class, we have focused on the evening wear of the housefly …”

The Task of the Assignment

Pay attention; this part tells you what to do when you write the paper. Look for the key verb or verbs in the sentence. Words like analyze, summarize, or compare direct you to think about your topic in a certain way. Also pay attention to words such as how, what, when, where, and why; these words guide your attention toward specific information. (See the section in this handout titled “Key Terms” for more information.)

“Analyze the effect that gerbils had on the Russian Revolution”, or “Suggest an interpretation of housefly undergarments that differs from Darwin’s.”

Additional Material to Think about

Here you will find some questions to use as springboards as you begin to think about the topic. Instructors usually include these questions as suggestions rather than requirements. Do not feel compelled to answer every question unless the instructor asks you to do so. Pay attention to the order of the questions. Sometimes they suggest the thinking process your instructor imagines you will need to follow to begin thinking about the topic.

“You may wish to consider the differing views held by Communist gerbils vs. Monarchist gerbils, or Can there be such a thing as ‘the housefly garment industry’ or is it just a home-based craft?”

These are the instructor’s comments about writing expectations:

“Be concise”, “Write effectively”, or “Argue furiously.”

Technical Details

These instructions usually indicate format rules or guidelines.

“Your paper must be typed in Palatino font on gray paper and must not exceed 600 pages. It is due on the anniversary of Mao Tse-tung’s death.”

The assignment’s parts may not appear in exactly this order, and each part may be very long or really short. Nonetheless, being aware of this standard pattern can help you understand what your instructor wants you to do.

Interpreting the assignment

Ask yourself a few basic questions as you read and jot down the answers on the assignment sheet:

Why did your instructor ask you to do this particular task?

Who is your audience.

• What kind of evidence do you need to support your ideas?

What kind of writing style is acceptable?

• What are the absolute rules of the paper?

Try to look at the question from the point of view of the instructor. Recognize that your instructor has a reason for giving you this assignment and for giving it to you at a particular point in the semester. In every assignment, the instructor has a challenge for you. This challenge could be anything from demonstrating an ability to think clearly to demonstrating an ability to use the library. See the assignment not as a vague suggestion of what to do but as an opportunity to show that you can handle the course material as directed. Paper assignments give you more than a topic to discuss—they ask you to do something with the topic. Keep reminding yourself of that. Be careful to avoid the other extreme as well: do not read more into the assignment than what is there.

Of course, your instructor has given you an assignment so that they will be able to assess your understanding of the course material and give you an appropriate grade. But there is more to it than that. Your instructor has tried to design a learning experience of some kind. Your instructor wants you to think about something in a particular way for a particular reason. If you read the course description at the beginning of your syllabus, review the assigned readings, and consider the assignment itself, you may begin to see the plan, purpose, or approach to the subject matter that your instructor has created for you. If you still aren’t sure of the assignment’s goals, try asking the instructor. For help with this, see our handout on getting feedback .

Given your instructor’s efforts, it helps to answer the question: What is my purpose in completing this assignment? Is it to gather research from a variety of outside sources and present a coherent picture? Is it to take material I have been learning in class and apply it to a new situation? Is it to prove a point one way or another? Key words from the assignment can help you figure this out. Look for key terms in the form of active verbs that tell you what to do.

Key Terms: Finding Those Active Verbs

Here are some common key words and definitions to help you think about assignment terms:

Information words Ask you to demonstrate what you know about the subject, such as who, what, when, where, how, and why.

• define —give the subject’s meaning (according to someone or something). Sometimes you have to give more than one view on the subject’s meaning
• describe —provide details about the subject by answering question words (such as who, what, when, where, how, and why); you might also give details related to the five senses (what you see, hear, feel, taste, and smell)
• explain —give reasons why or examples of how something happened
• illustrate —give descriptive examples of the subject and show how each is connected with the subject
• summarize —briefly list the important ideas you learned about the subject
• trace —outline how something has changed or developed from an earlier time to its current form
• research —gather material from outside sources about the subject, often with the implication or requirement that you will analyze what you have found

Relation words Ask you to demonstrate how things are connected.

• compare —show how two or more things are similar (and, sometimes, different)
• contrast —show how two or more things are dissimilar
• apply—use details that you’ve been given to demonstrate how an idea, theory, or concept works in a particular situation
• cause —show how one event or series of events made something else happen
• relate —show or describe the connections between things

Interpretation words Ask you to defend ideas of your own about the subject. Do not see these words as requesting opinion alone (unless the assignment specifically says so), but as requiring opinion that is supported by concrete evidence. Remember examples, principles, definitions, or concepts from class or research and use them in your interpretation.

• assess —summarize your opinion of the subject and measure it against something
• prove, justify —give reasons or examples to demonstrate how or why something is the truth
• evaluate, respond —state your opinion of the subject as good, bad, or some combination of the two, with examples and reasons
• support —give reasons or evidence for something you believe (be sure to state clearly what it is that you believe)
• synthesize —put two or more things together that have not been put together in class or in your readings before; do not just summarize one and then the other and say that they are similar or different—you must provide a reason for putting them together that runs all the way through the paper
• analyze —determine how individual parts create or relate to the whole, figure out how something works, what it might mean, or why it is important
• argue —take a side and defend it with evidence against the other side

More Clues to Your Purpose As you read the assignment, think about what the teacher does in class:

• What kinds of textbooks or coursepack did your instructor choose for the course—ones that provide background information, explain theories or perspectives, or argue a point of view?
• In lecture, does your instructor ask your opinion, try to prove their point of view, or use keywords that show up again in the assignment?
• What kinds of assignments are typical in this discipline? Social science classes often expect more research. Humanities classes thrive on interpretation and analysis.
• How do the assignments, readings, and lectures work together in the course? Instructors spend time designing courses, sometimes even arguing with their peers about the most effective course materials. Figuring out the overall design to the course will help you understand what each assignment is meant to achieve.

Now, what about your reader? Most undergraduates think of their audience as the instructor. True, your instructor is a good person to keep in mind as you write. But for the purposes of a good paper, think of your audience as someone like your roommate: smart enough to understand a clear, logical argument, but not someone who already knows exactly what is going on in your particular paper. Remember, even if the instructor knows everything there is to know about your paper topic, they still have to read your paper and assess your understanding. In other words, teach the material to your reader.

Aiming a paper at your audience happens in two ways: you make decisions about the tone and the level of information you want to convey.

• Tone means the “voice” of your paper. Should you be chatty, formal, or objective? Usually you will find some happy medium—you do not want to alienate your reader by sounding condescending or superior, but you do not want to, um, like, totally wig on the man, you know? Eschew ostentatious erudition: some students think the way to sound academic is to use big words. Be careful—you can sound ridiculous, especially if you use the wrong big words.
• The level of information you use depends on who you think your audience is. If you imagine your audience as your instructor and they already know everything you have to say, you may find yourself leaving out key information that can cause your argument to be unconvincing and illogical. But you do not have to explain every single word or issue. If you are telling your roommate what happened on your favorite science fiction TV show last night, you do not say, “First a dark-haired white man of average height, wearing a suit and carrying a flashlight, walked into the room. Then a purple alien with fifteen arms and at least three eyes turned around. Then the man smiled slightly. In the background, you could hear a clock ticking. The room was fairly dark and had at least two windows that I saw.” You also do not say, “This guy found some aliens. The end.” Find some balance of useful details that support your main point.

You’ll find a much more detailed discussion of these concepts in our handout on audience .

The Grim Truth

With a few exceptions (including some lab and ethnography reports), you are probably being asked to make an argument. You must convince your audience. It is easy to forget this aim when you are researching and writing; as you become involved in your subject matter, you may become enmeshed in the details and focus on learning or simply telling the information you have found. You need to do more than just repeat what you have read. Your writing should have a point, and you should be able to say it in a sentence. Sometimes instructors call this sentence a “thesis” or a “claim.”

So, if your instructor tells you to write about some aspect of oral hygiene, you do not want to just list: “First, you brush your teeth with a soft brush and some peanut butter. Then, you floss with unwaxed, bologna-flavored string. Finally, gargle with bourbon.” Instead, you could say, “Of all the oral cleaning methods, sandblasting removes the most plaque. Therefore it should be recommended by the American Dental Association.” Or, “From an aesthetic perspective, moldy teeth can be quite charming. However, their joys are short-lived.”

Convincing the reader of your argument is the goal of academic writing. It doesn’t have to say “argument” anywhere in the assignment for you to need one. Look at the assignment and think about what kind of argument you could make about it instead of just seeing it as a checklist of information you have to present. For help with understanding the role of argument in academic writing, see our handout on argument .

What kind of evidence do you need?

There are many kinds of evidence, and what type of evidence will work for your assignment can depend on several factors–the discipline, the parameters of the assignment, and your instructor’s preference. Should you use statistics? Historical examples? Do you need to conduct your own experiment? Can you rely on personal experience? See our handout on evidence for suggestions on how to use evidence appropriately.

Make sure you are clear about this part of the assignment, because your use of evidence will be crucial in writing a successful paper. You are not just learning how to argue; you are learning how to argue with specific types of materials and ideas. Ask your instructor what counts as acceptable evidence. You can also ask a librarian for help. No matter what kind of evidence you use, be sure to cite it correctly—see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial .

You cannot always tell from the assignment just what sort of writing style your instructor expects. The instructor may be really laid back in class but still expect you to sound formal in writing. Or the instructor may be fairly formal in class and ask you to write a reflection paper where you need to use “I” and speak from your own experience.

Try to avoid false associations of a particular field with a style (“art historians like wacky creativity,” or “political scientists are boring and just give facts”) and look instead to the types of readings you have been given in class. No one expects you to write like Plato—just use the readings as a guide for what is standard or preferable to your instructor. When in doubt, ask your instructor about the level of formality they expect.

No matter what field you are writing for or what facts you are including, if you do not write so that your reader can understand your main idea, you have wasted your time. So make clarity your main goal. For specific help with style, see our handout on style .

Technical details about the assignment

The technical information you are given in an assignment always seems like the easy part. This section can actually give you lots of little hints about approaching the task. Find out if elements such as page length and citation format (see the UNC Libraries citation tutorial ) are negotiable. Some professors do not have strong preferences as long as you are consistent and fully answer the assignment. Some professors are very specific and will deduct big points for deviations.

Usually, the page length tells you something important: The instructor thinks the size of the paper is appropriate to the assignment’s parameters. In plain English, your instructor is telling you how many pages it should take for you to answer the question as fully as you are expected to. So if an assignment is two pages long, you cannot pad your paper with examples or reword your main idea several times. Hit your one point early, defend it with the clearest example, and finish quickly. If an assignment is ten pages long, you can be more complex in your main points and examples—and if you can only produce five pages for that assignment, you need to see someone for help—as soon as possible.

Tricks that don’t work

Your instructors are not fooled when you:

• spend more time on the cover page than the essay —graphics, cool binders, and cute titles are no replacement for a well-written paper.
• use huge fonts, wide margins, or extra spacing to pad the page length —these tricks are immediately obvious to the eye. Most instructors use the same word processor you do. They know what’s possible. Such tactics are especially damning when the instructor has a stack of 60 papers to grade and yours is the only one that low-flying airplane pilots could read.
• use a paper from another class that covered “sort of similar” material . Again, the instructor has a particular task for you to fulfill in the assignment that usually relates to course material and lectures. Your other paper may not cover this material, and turning in the same paper for more than one course may constitute an Honor Code violation . Ask the instructor—it can’t hurt.
• get all wacky and “creative” before you answer the question . Showing that you are able to think beyond the boundaries of a simple assignment can be good, but you must do what the assignment calls for first. Again, check with your instructor. A humorous tone can be refreshing for someone grading a stack of papers, but it will not get you a good grade if you have not fulfilled the task.

Critical reading of assignments leads to skills in other types of reading and writing. If you get good at figuring out what the real goals of assignments are, you are going to be better at understanding the goals of all of your classes and fields of study.

You may reproduce it for non-commercial use if you use the entire handout and attribute the source: The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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Word Meaning

Word meaning has played a somewhat marginal role in early contemporary philosophy of language, which was primarily concerned with the structural features of sentence meaning and showed less interest in the nature of the word-level input to compositional processes. Nowadays, it is well-established that the study of word meaning is crucial to the inquiry into the fundamental properties of human language. This entry provides an overview of the way issues related to word meaning have been explored in analytic philosophy and a summary of relevant research on the subject in neighboring scientific domains. Though the main focus will be on philosophical problems, contributions from linguistics, psychology, neuroscience and artificial intelligence will also be considered, since research on word meaning is highly interdisciplinary.

1.1 The Notion of Word

1.2 theories of word meaning, 2.1 classical traditions, 2.2 historical-philological semantics, 3.1 early contemporary views, 3.2 grounding and lexical competence, 3.3 the externalist turn, 3.4 internalism, 3.5 contextualism, minimalism, and the lexicon, 4.1 structuralist semantics, 4.2 generativist semantics, 4.3 decompositional approaches, 4.4 relational approaches, 5.1 cognitive linguistics, 5.2 psycholinguistics, 5.3 neurolinguistics, other internet resources, related entries.

The notions of word and word meaning are problematic to pin down, and this is reflected in the difficulties one encounters in defining the basic terminology of lexical semantics. In part, this depends on the fact that the term ‘word’ itself is highly polysemous (see, e.g., Matthews 1991; Booij 2007; Lieber 2010). For example, in ordinary parlance ‘word’ is ambiguous between a type-level reading (as in “ Color and colour are spellings of the same word”), an occurrence-level reading (as in “there are thirteen words in the tongue-twister How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood? ”), and a token-level reading (as in “John erased the last two words on the blackboard”). Before proceeding further, let us then elucidate the notion of word in more detail ( Section 1.1 ), and lay out the key questions that will guide our discussion of word meaning in the rest of the entry ( Section 1.2 ).

We can distinguish two fundamental approaches to the notion of word. On one side, we have linguistic approaches, which characterize the notion of word by reflecting on its explanatory role in linguistic research (for a survey on explanation in linguistics, see Egré 2015). These approaches often end up splitting the notion of word into a number of more fine-grained and theoretically manageable notions, but still tend to regard ‘word’ as a term that zeroes in on a scientifically respectable concept (e.g., Di Sciullo & Williams 1987). For example, words are the primary locus of stress and tone assignment, the basic domain of morphological conditions on affixation, clitization, compounding, and the theme of phonological and morphological processes of assimilation, vowel shift, metathesis, and reduplication (Bromberger 2011).

On the other side, we have metaphysical approaches, which attempt to pin down the notion of word by inquiring into the metaphysical nature of words. These approaches typically deal with such questions as “what are words?”, “how should words be individuated?”, and “on what conditions two utterances count as utterances of the same word?”. For example, Kaplan (1990, 2011) has proposed to replace the orthodox type-token account of the relation between words and word tokens with a “common currency” view on which words relate to their tokens as continuants relate to stages in four-dimensionalist metaphysics (see the entries on types and tokens and identity over time ). Other contributions to this debate can be found, a.o., in McCulloch (1991), Cappelen (1999), Alward (2005), Hawthorne & Lepore (2011), Sainsbury & Tye (2012), Gasparri (2016), and Irmak (forthcoming).

For the purposes of this entry, we can rely on the following stipulation. Every natural language has a lexicon organized into lexical entries , which contain information about word types or lexemes . These are the smallest linguistic expressions that are conventionally associated with a non-compositional meaning and can be articulated in isolation to convey semantic content. Word types relate to word tokens and occurrences just like phonemes relate to phones in phonological theory. To understand the parallelism, think of the variations in the place of articulation of the phoneme /n/, which is pronounced as the voiced bilabial nasal [m] in “ten bags” and as the voiced velar nasal [ŋ] in “ten gates”. Just as phonemes are abstract representations of sets of phones (each defining one way the phoneme can be instantiated in speech), lexemes can be defined as abstract representations of sets of words (each defining one way the lexeme can be instantiated in sentences). Thus, ‘do’, ‘does’, ‘done’ and ‘doing’ are morphologically and graphically marked realizations of the same abstract word type do . To wrap everything into a single formula, we can say that the lexical entries listed in a lexicon set the parameters defining the instantiation potential of word types in sentences, utterances and inscriptions (cf. Murphy 2010). In what follows, unless otherwise indicated, our talk of “word meaning” should be understood as talk of “word type meaning” or “lexeme meaning”, in the sense we just illustrated.

As with general theories of meaning (see the entry on theories of meaning ), two kinds of theory of word meaning can be distinguished. The first kind, which we can label a semantic theory of word meaning, is a theory interested in clarifying what meaning-determining information is encoded by the words of a natural language. A framework establishing that the word ‘bachelor’ encodes the lexical concept adult unmarried male would be an example of a semantic theory of word meaning. The second kind, which we can label a foundational theory of word meaning, is a theory interested in elucidating the facts in virtue of which words come to have the semantic properties they have for their users. A framework investigating the dynamics of semantic change and social coordination in virtue of which the word ‘bachelor’ is assigned the function of expressing the lexical concept adult unmarried male would be an example of a foundational theory of word meaning. Likewise, it would be the job of a foundational theory of word meaning to determine whether words have the semantic properties they have in virtue of social conventions, or whether social conventions do not provide explanatory purchase on the facts that ground word meaning (see the entry on convention ).

Obviously, the endorsement of a given semantic theory is bound to place important constraints on the claims one might propose about the foundational attributes of word meaning, and vice versa . Semantic and foundational concerns are often interdependent, and it is difficult to find theories of word meaning which are either purely semantic or purely foundational. According to Ludlow (2014), for example, the fact that word meaning is systematically underdetermined (a semantic matter) can be explained in part by looking at the processes of linguistic negotiation whereby discourse partners converge on the assignment of shared meanings to the words of their language (a foundational matter). However, semantic and foundational theories remain in principle different and designed to answer partly non-overlapping sets of questions.

Our focus in this entry will be on semantic theories of word meaning, i.e., on theories that try to provide an answer to such questions as “what is the nature of word meaning?”, “what do we know when we know the meaning of a word?”, and “what (kind of) information must a speaker associate to the words of a language in order to be a competent user of its lexicon?”. However, we will engage in foundational considerations whenever necessary to clarify how a given framework addresses issues in the domain of a semantic theory of word meaning.

2. Historical Background

The study of word meaning became a mature academic enterprise in the 19 th century, with the birth of historical-philological semantics ( Section 2.2 ). Yet, matters related to word meaning had been the subject of much debate in earlier times. We can distinguish three major classical approaches to word meaning: speculative etymology, rhetoric, and classical lexicography (Meier-Oeser 2011; Geeraerts 2013). We describe them briefly in Section 2.1 .

The prototypical example of speculative etymology is perhaps the Cratylus (383a-d), where Plato presents his well-known naturalist thesis about word meaning. According to Plato, natural kind terms express the essence of the objects they denote and words are appropriate to their referents insofar as they implicitly describe the properties of their referents (see the entry on Plato’s Cratylus ). For example, the Greek word ‘ anthrôpos ’ can be broken down into anathrôn ha opôpe , which translates as “one who reflects on what he has seen”: the word used to denote humans reflects their being the only animal species which possesses the combination of vision and intelligence. For speculative etymology, there is a natural or non-arbitrary relation between words and their meaning, and the task of the theorist is to make this relation explicit through an analysis of the descriptive, often phonoiconic mechanisms underlying the genesis of words. More on speculative etymology in Malkiel (1993), Fumaroli (1999), and Del Bello (2007).

The primary aim of the rhetorical tradition was the study of figures of speech. Some of these concern sentence-level variables such as the linear order of the words occurring in a sentence (e.g., parallelism, climax, anastrophe); others are lexical in nature and depend on using words in a way not intended by their normal or literal meaning (e.g., metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche). Although originated for stylistic and literary purposes, the identification of regular patterns in the figurative use of words initiated by the rhetorical tradition provided a first organized framework to investigate the semantic flexibility of words, and laid the groundwork for further inquiry into our ability to use lexical expressions beyond the boundaries of their literal meaning. More on the rhetorical tradition in Kennedy (1994), Herrick (2004), and Toye (2013).

Finally, classical lexicography and the practice of writing dictionaries played an important role in systematizing the descriptive data on which later inquiry would rely to illuminate the relationship between words and their meaning. Putnam’s (1970) claim that it was the phenomenon of writing (and needing) dictionaries that gave rise to the idea of a semantic theory is probably an overstatement. But the inception of lexicography certainly had an impact on the development of modern theories of word meaning. The practice of separating dictionary entries via lemmatization and defining them through a combination of semantically simpler elements provided a stylistic and methodological paradigm for much subsequent research on lexical phenomena, such as decompositional theories of word meaning. More on classical lexicography in Béjoint (2000), Jackson (2002), and Hanks (2013).

Historical-philological semantics incorporated elements from all the above classical traditions and dominated the linguistic scene roughly from 1870 to 1930, with the work of scholars such as Michel Bréal, Hermann Paul, and Arsène Darmesteter (Gordon 1982). In particular, it absorbed from speculative etymology an interest in the conceptual mechanisms underlying the formation of word meaning, it acquired from rhetorical analysis a taxonomic toolkit for the classification of lexical phenomena, and it assimilated from lexicography and textual philology the empirical basis of descriptive data that subsequent theories of word meaning would have to account for (Geeraerts 2013).

On the methodological side, the key features of the approach to word meaning introduced by historical-philological semantics can be summarized as follows. First, it had a diachronic and pragmatic orientation. That is, it was primarily concerned with the historical evolution of word meaning rather than with word meaning statically understood, and attributed great importance to the contextual flexibility of word meaning. Witness Paul’s (1920 [1880]) distinction between usuelle Bedeutung and okkasionelle Bedeutung , or Bréal’s (1924 [1897]) account of polysemy as a byproduct of semantic change. Second, it looked at word meaning primarily as a psychological phenomenon. It assumed that the semantic properties of words should be defined in mentalistic terms (i.e., words signify “concepts” or “ideas” in a broad sense), and that the dynamics of sense modulation, extension, and contraction that underlie lexical change correspond to broader patterns of conceptual activity in the human mind. Interestingly, while the classical rhetorical tradition had conceived of tropes as marginal linguistic phenomena whose investigation, albeit important, was primarily motivated by stylistic concerns, for historical-philological semantics the psychological mechanisms underlying the production and the comprehension of figures of speech were part of the ordinary life of languages, and engines of the evolution of all aspects of lexical systems (Nerlich 1992).

The contribution made by historical-philological semantics to the study of word meaning had a long-lasting influence. First, with its emphasis on the principles of semantic change, historical-philological semantics was the first systematic framework to focus on the dynamic nature of word meaning, and established contextual flexibility as the primary explanandum for a theory of word meaning (Nerlich & Clarke 1996, 2007). This feature of historical-philological semantics is a clear precursor of the emphasis placed on context-sensitivity by many subsequent approaches to word meaning, both in philosophy (see Section 3 ) and in linguistics (see Section 4 ). Second, the psychologistic approach to word meaning fostered by historical philological-semantics added to the agenda of linguistic research the question of how word meaning relates to cognition at large. If word meaning is essentially a psychological phenomenon, what psychological categories should be used to characterize it? What is the dividing line separating the aspects of our mental life that constitute knowledge of word meaning from those that do not? As we shall see, this question will constitute a central concern for cognitive theories of word meaning (see Section 5 ).

3. Philosophy of Language

In this section we shall review some semantic and metasemantic theories in analytic philosophy that bear on how lexical meaning should be conceived and described. We shall follow a roughly chronological order. Some of these theories, such as Carnap’s theory of meaning postulates and Putnam’s theory of stereotypes, have a strong focus on lexical meaning, whereas others, such as Montague semantics, regard it as a side issue. However, such negative views form an equally integral part of the philosophical debate on word meaning.

By taking the connection of thoughts and truth as the basic issue of semantics and regarding sentences as “the proper means of expression for a thought” (Frege 1979a [1897]), Frege paved the way for the 20 th century priority of sentential meaning over lexical meaning: the semantic properties of subsentential expressions such as individual words were regarded as derivative, and identified with their contribution to sentential meaning. Sentential meaning was in turn identified with truth conditions, most explicitly in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus logico-philosophicus (1922). However, Frege never lost interest in the “building blocks of thoughts” (Frege 1979b [1914]), i.e., in the semantic properties of subsentential expressions. Indeed, his theory of sense and reference for names and predicates may be counted as the inaugural contribution to lexical semantics within the analytic tradition (see the entry on Gottlob Frege ). It should be noted that Frege did not attribute semantic properties to lexical units as such, but to what he regarded as a sentence’s logical constituents: e.g., not to the word ‘dog’ but to the predicate ‘is a dog’. In later work this distinction was obliterated and Frege’s semantic notions came to be applied to lexical units.

Possibly because of lack of clarity affecting the notion of sense, and surely because of Russell’s (1905) authoritative criticism of Fregean semantics, word meaning disappeared from the philosophical scene during the 1920s and 1930s. In Wittgenstein’s Tractatus the “real” lexical units, i.e., the constituents of a completely analyzed sentence, are just names, whose semantic properties are exhausted by their reference. In Tarski’s (1933) work on formal languages, which was taken as definitional of the very field of semantics for some time, lexical units are semantically categorized into different classes (individual constants, predicative constants, functional constants) depending on the logical type of their reference, i.e., according to whether they designate individuals in a domain of interpretation, classes of individuals (or of n -tuples of individuals), or functions defined over the domain. However, Tarski made no attempt nor felt any need to represent semantic differences among expressions belonging to the same logical type (e.g., between one-place predicates such as ‘dog’ and ‘run’, or between two-place predicates such as ‘love’ and ‘left of’). See the entry on Alfred Tarski .

Quine (1943) and Church (1951) rehabilitated Frege’s distinction of sense and reference. Non-designating words such as ‘Pegasus’ cannot be meaningless: it is precisely the meaning of ‘Pegasus’ that allows speakers to establish that the word lacks reference. Moreover, as Frege (1892) had argued, true factual identities such as “Morning Star = Evening Star” do not state synonymies; if they did, any competent speaker of the language would be aware of their truth. Along these lines, Carnap (1947) proposed a new formulation of the sense/reference dichotomy, which was translated into the distinction between intension and extension . The notion of intension was intended to be an explicatum of Frege’s “obscure” notion of sense: two expressions have the same intension if and only if they have the same extension in every possible world or, in Carnap’s terminology, in every state description (i.e., in every maximal consistent set of atomic sentences and negations of atomic sentences). Thus, ‘round’ and ‘spherical’ have the same intension (i.e., they express the same function from possible worlds to extensions) because they apply to the same objects in every possible world. Carnap later suggested that intensions could be regarded as the content of lexical semantic competence: to know the meaning of a word is to know its intension, “the general conditions which an object must fulfill in order to be denoted by [that] word” (Carnap 1955). However, such general conditions were not spelled out by Carnap (1947). Consequently, his system did not account, any more than Tarski’s, for semantic differences and relations among words belonging to the same semantic category: there were possible worlds in which the same individual a could be both a married man and a bachelor, as no constraints were placed on either word’s intension. One consequence, as Quine (1951) pointed out, was that Carnap’s system, which was supposed to single out analytic truths as true in every possible world, “Bachelors are unmarried”—intuitively, a paradigmatic analytic truth—turned out to be synthetic rather than analytic.

To remedy what he agreed was an unsatisfactory feature of his system, Carnap (1952) introduced meaning postulates , i.e., stipulations on the relations among the extensions of lexical items. For example, the meaning postulate

• (MP) \(\forall x (\mbox{bachelor}(x) \supset \mathord{\sim}\mbox{married} (x))\)

stipulates that any individual that is in the extension of ‘bachelor’ is not in the extension of ‘married’. Meaning postulates can be seen either as restrictions on possible worlds or as relativizing analyticity to possible worlds. On the former option we shall say that “If Paul is a bachelor then Paul is unmarried” holds in every admissible possible world, while on the latter we shall say that it holds in every possible world in which (MP) holds . Carnap regarded the two options as equivalent; nowadays, the former is usually preferred. Carnap (1952) also thought that meaning postulates expressed the semanticist’s “intentions” with respect to the meanings of the descriptive constants, which may or may not reflect linguistic usage; again, today postulates are usually understood as expressing semantic relations (synonymy, analytic entailment, etc.) among lexical items as currently used by competent speakers.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Montague (1974) and other philosophers and linguists (Kaplan, Kamp, Partee, and D. Lewis among others) set out to apply to the analysis of natural language the notions and techniques that had been introduced by Tarski and Carnap and further developed in Kripke’s possible worlds semantics (see the entry on Montague semantics ). Montague semantics can be represented as aiming to capture the inferential structure of a natural language: every inference that a competent speaker would regard as valid should be derivable in the theory. Some such inferences depend for their validity on syntactic structure and on the logical properties of logical words, like the inference from “Every man is mortal and Socrates is a man” to “Socrates is mortal”. Other inferences depend on properties of non-logical words that are usually regarded as semantic, like the inference from “Kim is pregnant” to “Kim is not a man”. In Montague semantics, such inferences are taken care of by supplementing the theory with suitable Carnapian meaning postulates. Yet, some followers of Montague regarded such additions as spurious: the aims of semantics, they said, should be distinguished from those of lexicography. The description of the meaning of non-logical words requires considerable world knowledge: for example, the inference from “Kim is pregnant” to “Kim is not a man” is based on a “biological” rather than on a “logical” generalization. Hence, we should not expect a semantic theory to furnish an account of how any two expressions belonging to the same syntactic category differ in meaning (Thomason 1974). From such a viewpoint, Montague semantics would not differ significantly from Tarskian semantics in its account of lexical meaning. But not all later work within Montague’s program shared such a skepticism about representing aspects of lexical meaning within a semantic theory, using either componential analysis (Dowty 1979) or meaning postulates (Chierchia & McConnell-Ginet 2000).

For those who believe that meaning postulates can exhaust lexical meaning, the issue arises of how to choose them, i.e., of how—and whether—to delimit the set of meaning-relevant truths with respect to the set of all true statements in which a given word occurs. As we just saw, Carnap himself thought that the choice could only be the expression of the semanticist’s intentions. However, we seem to share intuitions of analyticity , i.e., we seem to regard some, but not all sentences of a natural language as true by virtue of the meaning of the occurring words. Such intuitions are taken to reflect objective semantic properties of the language, that the semanticist should describe rather than impose at will. Quine (1951) did not challenge the existence of such intuitions, but he argued that they could not be cashed out in the form of a scientifically respectable criterion separating analytic truths (“Bachelors are unmarried”) from synthetic truths (“Aldo’s uncle is a bachelor”), whose truth does not depend on meaning alone. Though Quine’s arguments were often criticized (for recent criticisms, see Williamson 2007), and in spite of Chomsky’s constant endorsement of analyticity (see e.g. 2000: 47, 61–2), within philosophy the analytic/synthetic distinction was never fully vindicated (for an exception, see Russell 2008). Hence, it was widely believed that lexical meaning could not be adequately described by meaning postulates. Fodor and Lepore (1992) argued that this left semantics with two options: lexical meanings were either atomic (i.e., they could not be specified by descriptions involving other meanings) or they were holistic , i.e., only the set of all true sentences of the language could count as fixing them.

Neither alternative looked promising. Holism incurred in objections connected with the acquisition and the understanding of language: how could individual words be acquired by children, if grasping their meaning involved, somehow, semantic competence on the whole language? And how could individual sentences be understood if the information required to understand them exceeded the capacity of human working memory? (For an influential criticism of several varieties of holism, see Dummett 1991; for a review, Pagin 2006). Atomism, in turn, ran against strong intuitions of (at least some) relations among words being part of a language’s semantics: it is because of what ‘bachelor’ means that it doesn’t make sense to suppose we could discover that some bachelors are married. Fodor (1998) countered this objection by reinterpreting allegedly semantic relations as metaphysically necessary connections among extensions of words. However, sentences that are usually regarded as analytic, such as “Bachelors are unmarried”, are not easily seen as just metaphysically necessary truths like “Water is H 2 O”. If water is H 2 O, then its metaphysical essence consists in being H 2 O (whether we know it or not); but there is no such thing as a metaphysical essence that all bachelors share—an essence that could be hidden to us, even though we use the word ‘bachelor’ competently. On the contrary, on acquiring the word ‘bachelor’ we acquire the belief that bachelors are unmarried (Quine 1986); by contrast, many speakers that have ‘water’ in their lexical repertoire do not know that water is H 2 O. The difficulties of atomism and holism opened the way to vindications of molecularism (e.g., Perry 1994; Marconi 1997), the view on which only some relations among words matter for acquisition and understanding (see the entry on meaning holism ).

While mainstream formal semantics went with Carnap and Montague, supplementing the Tarskian apparatus with the possible worlds machinery and defining meanings as intensions, Davidson (1967, 1984) put forth an alternative suggestion. Tarski had shown how to provide a definition of the truth predicate for a (formal) language L : such a definition is materially adequate (i.e., it is a definition of truth , rather than of some other property of sentences of L ) if and only if it entails every biconditional of the form

• (T) S is true in L iff p ,

where S is a sentence of L and p is its translation into the metalanguage of L in which the definition is formulated. Thus, Tarski’s account of truth presupposes that the semantics of both L and its metalanguage is fixed (otherwise it would be undetermined whether S translates into p ). On Tarski’s view, each biconditional of form (T) counts as a “partial definition” of the truth predicate for sentences of L (see the entry on Tarski’s truth definitions ). By contrast, Davidson suggested that if one took the notion of truth for granted, then T-biconditionals could be read as collectively constituting a theory of meaning for L , i.e., as stating truth conditions for the sentences of L . For example,

• (W) “If the weather is bad then Sharon is sad” is true in English iff either the weather is not bad or Sharon is sad

states the truth conditions of the English sentence “If the weather is bad then Sharon is sad”. Of course, (W) is intelligible only if one understands the language in which it is phrased, including the predicate ‘true in English’. Davidson thought that the recursive machinery of Tarski’s definition of truth could be transferred to the suggested semantic reading, with extensions to take care of the forms of natural language composition that Tarski had neglected because they had no analogue in the formal languages he was dealing with. Unfortunately, few of such extensions were ever spelled out by Davidson or his followers. Moreover, it is difficult to see how, giving up possible worlds and intensions in favor of a purely extensional theory, the Davidsonian program could account for the semantics of propositional attitude ascriptions of the form “A believes (hopes, imagines, etc.) that p ”.

Construed as theorems of a semantic theory, T-biconditionals were often accused of being uninformative (Putnam 1975; Dummett 1976): to understand them, one has to already possess the information they are supposed to provide. This is particularly striking in the case of lexical axioms such as the following:

• (V1) Val( x , ‘man’) iff x is a man;
• (V2) Val(\(\langle x,y\rangle\), ‘knows’) iff x knows y .

(To be read, respectively, as “the predicate ‘man’ applies to x if and only if x is a man” and “the predicate ‘know’ applies to the pair \(\langle x, y\rangle\) if and only if x knows y ”). Here it is apparent that in order to understand (V1) one must know what ‘man’ means, which is just the information that (V1) is supposed to convey (as the theory, being purely extensional, identifies meaning with reference). Some Davidsonians, though admitting that statements such as (V1) and (V2) are in a sense “uninformative”, insist that what (V1) and (V2) state is no less “substantive” (Larson & Segal 1995). To prove their point, they appeal to non-homophonic versions of lexical axioms, i.e., to the axioms of a semantic theory for a language that does not coincide with the (meta)language in which the theory itself is phrased. Such would be, e.g.,

• (V3) Val ( x , ‘man’) si et seulement si x est un homme.

(V3), they argue, is clearly substantive, yet what it says is exactly what (V1) says, namely, that the word ‘man’ applies to a certain category of objects. Therefore, if (V3) is substantive, so is (V1). But this is beside the point. The issue is not whether (V1) expresses a proposition; it clearly does, and it is, in this sense, “substantive”. But what is relevant here is informative power: to one who understands the metalanguage of (V3), i.e., French, (V3) may communicate new information, whereas there is no circumstance in which (V1) would communicate new information to one who understands English.

In the mid-1970s, Dummett raised the issue of the proper place of lexical meaning in a semantic theory. If the job of a theory of meaning is to make the content of semantic competence explicit—so that one could acquire semantic competence in a language L by learning an adequate theory of meaning for L —then the theory ought to reflect a competent speaker’s knowledge of circumstances in which she would assert a sentence of L , such as “The horse is in the barn”, as distinct from circumstances in which she would assert “The cat is on the mat”. This, in turn, appears to require that the theory yields explicit information about the use of ‘horse’, ‘barn’, etc., or, in other words, that it includes information which goes beyond the logical type of lexical units. Dummett identified such information with a word’s Fregean sense. However, he did not specify the format in which word senses should be expressed in a semantic theory, except for words that could be defined (e.g., ‘aunt’ = “sister of a parent”): in such cases, the definiens specifies what a speaker must understand in order to understand the word (Dummett 1991). But of course, not all words are of this kind. For other words, the theory should specify what it is for a speaker to know them, though we are not told how exactly this should be done. Similarly, Grandy (1974) pointed out that by identifying the meaning of a word such as ‘wise’ as a function from possible worlds to the sets of wise people in those worlds, Montague semantics only specifies a formal structure and eludes the question of whether there is some possible description for the functions which are claimed to be the meanings of words. Lacking such descriptions, possible worlds semantics is not really a theory of meaning but a theory of logical form or logical validity. Again, aside from suggesting that “one would like the functions to be given in terms of computation procedures, in some sense”, Grandy had little to say about the form of lexical descriptions.

In a similar vein, Partee (1981) argued that Montague semantics, like every compositional or structural semantics, does not uniquely fix the intensional interpretation of words. The addition of meaning postulates does rule out some interpretations (e.g., interpretations on which the extension of ‘bachelor’ and the extension of ‘married’ may intersect in some possible world). However, it does not reduce them to the unique, “intended” or, in Montague’s words, “actual” interpretation (Montague 1974). Hence, standard model-theoretic semantics does not capture the whole content of a speaker’s semantic competence, but only its structural aspects. Fixing “the actual interpretation function” requires more than language-to-language connections as encoded by, e.g., meaning postulates: it requires some “language-to-world grounding ”. Arguments to the same effect were developed by Bonomi (1983) and Harnad (1990). In particular, Harnad had in mind the simulation of human semantic competence in artificial systems: he suggested that symbol grounding could be implemented, in part, by “feature detectors” picking out “invariant features of objects and event categories from their sensory projections” (for recent developments see, e.g., Steels & Hild 2012). Such a cognitively oriented conception of grounding differs from Partee’s Putnam-inspired view, on which the semantic grounding of lexical items depends on the speakers’ objective interactions with the external world in addition to their narrow psychological properties.

A resolutely cognitive approach characterizes Marconi’s (1997) account of lexical semantic competence. In his view, lexical competence has two aspects: an inferential aspect, underlying performances such as semantically based inference and the command of synonymy, hyponymy and other semantic relations; and a referential aspect, which is in charge of performances such as naming (e.g., calling a horse ‘horse’) and application (e.g., answering the question “Are there any spoons in the drawer?”). Language users typically possess both aspects of lexical competence, though in different degrees for different words: a zoologist’s inferential competence on ‘manatee’ is usually richer than a layman’s, though a layman who spent her life among manatees may be more competent, referentially, than a “bookish” scientist. However, the two aspects are independent of each another, and neuropsychological evidence appears to show that they can be dissociated: there are patients whose referential competence is impaired or lost while their inferential competence is intact, and vice versa (see Section 5.3 ). Being a theory of individual competence, Marconi’s account does not deal directly with lexical meanings in a public language: communication depends both on the uniformity of cognitive interactions with the external world and on communal norms concerning the use of language, together with speakers’ deferential attitude toward semantic authorities.

Since the early 1970s, views on lexical meaning were revolutionized by semantic externalism. Initially, externalism was limited to proper names and natural kind words such as ‘gold’ or ‘lemon’. In slightly different ways, both Kripke (1972) and Putnam (1970, 1975) argued that the reference of such words was not determined by any description that a competent speaker associated with the word; more generally, and contrary to what Frege may have thought, it was not determined by any cognitive content associated with it in a speaker’s mind (for arguments to that effect, see the entry on names ). Instead, reference is determined, at least in part, by objective (“causal”) relations between a speaker and the external world. For example, a speaker refers to Aristotle when she utters the sentence “Aristotle was a great warrior”—so that her assertion expresses a false proposition about Aristotle, not a true proposition about some great warrior she may “have in mind”—thanks to her connection with Aristotle himself. In this case, the connection is constituted by a historical chain of speakers going back to the initial users of the name ‘Aristotle’, or its Greek equivalent, in baptism-like circumstances. To belong to the chain, speakers (including present-day speakers) are not required to possess any precise knowledge of Aristotle’s life and deeds; they are, however, required to intend to use the name as it is used by the speakers they are picking up the name from, i.e., to refer to the individual those speakers intend to refer to.

In the case of most natural kind names, it may be argued, baptisms are hard to identify or even conjecture. In Putnam’s view, for such words reference is determined by speakers’ causal interaction with portions of matter or biological individuals in their environment: ‘water’, for example, refers to this liquid stuff, stuff that is normally found in our rivers, lakes, etc. The indexical component ( this liquid, our rivers) is crucial to reference determination: it wouldn’t do to identify the referent of ‘water’ by way of some description (“liquid, transparent, quenches thirst, boils at 100°C, etc.”), for something might fit the description yet fail to be water, as in Putnam’s (1973, 1975) famous Twin Earth thought experiment (see the entry on reference ). It might be remarked that, thanks to modern chemistry, we now possess a description that is sure to apply to water and only to water: “being H 2 O” (Millikan 2005). However, even if our chemistry were badly mistaken (as in principle it could turn out to be) and water were not, in fact, H 2 O, ‘water’ would still refer to whatever has the same nature as this liquid. Something belongs to the extension of ‘water’ if and only if it is the same substance as this liquid, which we identify—correctly, as we believe—as being H 2 O.

Let it be noted that in Putnam’s original proposal, reference determination is utterly independent of speakers’ cognition: ‘water’ on Twin Earth refers to XYZ (not to H 2 O) even though the difference between the two substances is cognitively inert, so that before chemistry was created nobody on either Earth or Twin Earth could have told them apart. However, the label ‘externalism’ has been occasionally used for weaker views: a semantic account may be regarded as externalist if it takes semantic content to depend in one way or another on relations a computational system bears to things outside itself (Rey 2005; Borg 2012), irrespective of whether such relations affect the system’s cognitive state. Weak externalism is hard to distinguish from forms of internalism on which a word’s reference is determined by information stored in a speaker’s cognitive system—information of which the speaker may or may not be aware (Evans 1982). Be that as it may, in what follows ‘externalism’ will be used to mean strong, or Putnamian, externalism.

Does externalism apply to other lexical categories besides proper names and natural kind words? Putnam (1975) extended it to artifactual words, claiming that ‘pencil’ would refer to pencils— those objects—even if they turned out not to fit the description by which we normally identify them (e.g., if they were discovered to be organisms, not artifacts). Schwartz (1978, 1980) pointed out, among many objections, that even in such a case we could make objects fitting the original description; we would then regard the pencil-like organisms as impostors, not as “genuine” pencils. Others sided with Putnam and the externalist account: for example, Kornblith (1980) pointed out that artifactual kinds from an ancient civilization could be re-baptized in total ignorance of their function. The new artifactual word would then refer to the kind those objects belong to independently of any beliefs about them, true or false. Against such externalist accounts, Thomasson (2007) argued that artifactual terms cannot refer to artifactual kinds independently of all beliefs and concepts about the nature of the kind, for the concept of the kind’s creator(s) is constitutive of the nature of the kind. Whether artifactual words are liable to an externalist account is still an open issue (for recent discussions see Marconi 2013; Bahr, Carrara & Jansen 2019; see also the entry on artifacts ), as is, more generally, the scope of application of externalist semantics.

There is another form of externalism that does apply to all or most words of a language: social externalism (Burge 1979), the view on which the meaning of a word as used by an individual speaker depends on the semantic standards of the linguistic community the speaker belongs to. In our community the word ‘arthritis’ refers to arthritis—an affliction of the joints—even when used by a speaker who believes that it can afflict the muscles as well and uses the word accordingly. If the community the speaker belongs to applied ‘arthritis’ to rheumatoids ailments in general, whether or not they afflict the joints, the same word form would not mean arthritis and would not refer to arthritis. Hence, a speaker’s mental contents, such as the meanings associated with the words she uses, depend on something external to her, namely the uses and the standards of use of the linguistic community she belongs to. Thus, social externalism eliminates the notion of idiolect: words only have the meanings conferred upon them by the linguistic community (“public” meanings); discounting radical incompetence, there is no such thing as individual semantic deviance, there are only false beliefs (for criticisms, see Bilgrami 1992, Marconi 1997; see also the entry on idiolects ).

Though both forms of externalism focus on reference, neither is a complete reduction of lexical meaning to reference. Both Putnam and Burge make it a necessary condition of semantic competence on a word that a speaker commands information that other semantic views would regard as part of the word’s sense. For example, if a speaker believes that manatees are a kind of household appliance, she would not count as competent on the word ‘manatee’, nor would she refer to manatees by using it (Putnam 1975; Burge 1993). Beyond that, it is not easy for externalists to provide a satisfactory account of lexical semantic competence, as they are committed to regarding speakers’ beliefs and abilities (e.g., recognitional abilities) as essentially irrelevant to reference determination, hence to meaning. Two main solutions have been proposed. Putnam (1970, 1975) suggested that a speaker’s semantic competence consists in her knowledge of stereotypes associated with words. A stereotype is an oversimplified theory of a word’s extension: the stereotype associated with ‘tiger’ describes tigers as cat-like, striped, carnivorous, fierce, living in the jungle, etc. Stereotypes are not meanings, as they do not determine reference in the right way: there are albino tigers and tigers that live in zoos. What the ‘tiger’-stereotype describes is (what the community takes to be) the typical tiger. Knowledge of stereotypes is necessary to be regarded as a competent speaker, and—one surmises—it can also be considered sufficient for the purposes of ordinary communication. Thus, Putnam’s account does provide some content for semantic competence, though it dissociates it from knowledge of meaning.

On an alternative view (Devitt 1983), competence on ‘tiger’ does not consist in entertaining propositional beliefs such as “tigers are striped”, but rather in being appropriately linked to a network of causal chains for ‘tiger’ involving other people’s abilities, groundings, and reference borrowings. In order to understand the English word ‘tiger’ and use it in a competent fashion, a subject must be able to combine ‘tiger’ appropriately with other words to form sentences, to have thoughts which those sentences express, and to ground these thoughts in tigers. Devitt’s account appears to make some room for a speaker’s ability to, e.g., recognize a tiger when she sees one; however, the respective weights of individual abilities (and beliefs) and objective grounding are not clearly specified. Suppose a speaker A belongs to a community C that is familiar with tigers; unfortunately, A has no knowledge of the typical appearance of a tiger and is unable to tell a tiger from a leopard. Should A be regarded as a competent user ‘tiger’ on account of her being “part of C ” and therefore linked to a network of causal chains for ‘tiger’?

Some philosophers (e.g., Loar 1981; McGinn 1982; Block 1986) objected to the reduction of lexical meaning to reference, or to non-psychological factors that are alleged to determine reference. In their view, there are two aspects of meaning (more generally, of content): the narrow aspect, that captures the intuition that ‘water’ has the same meaning in both Earthian and Twin-Earthian English, and the wide aspect, that captures the externalist intuition that ‘water’ picks out different substances in the two worlds. The wide notion is required to account for the difference in reference between English and Twin-English ‘water’; the narrow notion is needed, first and foremost, to account for the relation between a subject’s beliefs and her behavior. The idea is that how an object of reference is described (not just which object one refers to) can make a difference in determining behavior. Oedipus married Jocasta because he thought he was marrying the queen of Thebes, not his mother, though as a matter of fact Jocasta was his mother. This applies to words of all categories: someone may believe that water quenches thirst without believing that H 2 O does; Lois Lane believed that Superman was a superhero but she definitely did not believe the same of her colleague Clark Kent, so she behaved one way to the man she identified as Superman and another way to the man she identified as Clark Kent (though they were the same man). Theorists that countenance these two components of meaning and content usually identify the narrow aspect with the inferential or conceptual role of an expression e , i.e., with the aspect of e that contributes to determine the inferential relations between sentences containing an occurrence of e and other sentences. Crucially, the two aspects are independent: neither determines the other. The stress on the independence of the two factors also characterizes more recent versions of so-called “dual aspect” theories, such as Chalmers (1996, 2002).

While dual theorists agree with Putnam’s claim that some aspects of meaning are not “in the head”, others have opted for plain internalism. For example, Segal (2000) rejected the intuitions that are usually associated with the Twin-Earth cases by arguing that meaning (and content in general) “locally supervenes” on a subject’s intrinsic physical properties. But the most influential critic of externalism has undoubtedly been Chomsky (2000). First, he argued that much of the alleged support for externalism comes in fact from “intuitions” about words’ reference in this or that circumstance. But ‘reference’ (and the verb ‘refer’ as used by philosophers) is a technical term, not an ordinary word, hence we have no more intuitions about reference than we have about tensors or c-command. Second, if we look at how words such as ‘water’ are applied in ordinary circumstances, we find that speakers may call ‘water’ liquids that contain a smaller proportion of H 2 O than other liquids they do not call ‘water’ (e.g., tea): our use of ‘water’ does not appear to be governed by hypotheses about microstructure. According to Chomsky, it may well be that progress in the scientific study of the language faculty will allow us to understand in what respects one’s picture of the world is framed in terms of things selected and individuated by properties of the lexicon, or involves entities and relationships describable by the resources of the language faculty. Some semantic properties do appear to be integrated with other aspects of language. However, so-called “natural kind words” (which in fact have little to do with kinds in nature, Chomsky claims) may do little more than indicating “positions in belief systems”: studying them may be of some interest for “ethnoscience”, surely not for a science of language. Along similar lines, others have maintained that the genuine semantic properties of linguistic expressions should be regarded as part of syntax, and that they constrain but do not determine truth conditions (e.g., Pietroski 2005, 2010). Hence, the connection between meaning and truth conditions (and reference) may be significantly looser than assumed by many philosophers.

“Ordinary language” philosophers of the 1950s and 1960s regarded work in formal semantics as essentially irrelevant to issues of meaning in natural language. Following Austin and the later Wittgenstein, they identified meaning with use and were prone to consider the different patterns of use of individual expressions as originating different meanings of the word. Grice (1975) argued that such a proliferation of meanings could be avoided by distinguishing between what is asserted by a sentence (to be identified with its truth conditions) and what is communicated by it in a given context (or in every “normal” context). For example, consider the following exchange:

• A: Will Kim be hungry at 11am?
• B: Kim had breakfast.

Although B does not literally assert that Kim had breakfast on that particular day (see, however, Partee 1973), she does communicate as much. More precisely, A could infer the communicated content by noticing that the asserted sentence, taken literally (“Kim had breakfast at least once in her life”), would be less informative than required in the context: thus, it would violate one or more principles of conversation (“maxims”) whereas there is no reason to suppose that the speaker intended to opt out of conversational cooperation (see the entries on Paul Grice and pragmatics ). If the interlocutor assumes that the speaker intended him to infer the communicated content—i.e., that Kim had breakfast that morning , so presumably she would not be hungry at 11—cooperation is preserved. Such non-asserted content, called ‘implicature’, need not be an addition to the overtly asserted content: e.g., in irony asserted content is negated rather than expanded by the implicature (think of a speaker uttering “Paul is a fine friend” to implicate that Paul has wickedly betrayed her).

Grice’s theory of conversation and implicatures was interpreted by many (including Grice himself) as a convincing way of accounting for the variety of contextually specific communicative contents while preserving the uniqueness of a sentence’s “literal” meaning, which was identified with truth conditions and regarded as determined by syntax and the conventional meanings of the occurring words, as in formal semantics. The only semantic role context was allowed to play was in determining the content of indexical words (such as ‘I’, ‘now’, ‘here’, etc.) and the effect of context-sensitive structures (such as tense) on a sentence’s truth conditions. However, in about the same years Travis (1975) and Searle (1979, 1980) pointed out that the semantic relevance of context might be much more pervasive, if not universal: intuitively, the same sentence type could have very different truth conditions in different contexts, though no indexical expression or structure appeared to be involved. Take the sentence “There is milk in the fridge”: in the context of morning breakfast it will be considered true if there is a carton of milk in the fridge and false if there is a patch of milk on a tray in the fridge, whereas in the context of cleaning up the kitchen truth conditions are reversed. Examples can be multiplied indefinitely, as indefinitely many factors can turn out to be relevant to the truth or falsity of a sentence as uttered in a particular context. Such variety cannot be plausibly reduced to traditional polysemy such as the polysemy of ‘property’ (meaning quality or real estate), nor can it be described in terms of Gricean implicatures: implicatures are supposed not to affect a sentence’s truth conditions, whereas here it is precisely the sentence’s truth conditions that are seen as varying with context.

The traditionalist could object by challenging the contextualist’s intuitions about truth conditions. “There is milk in the fridge”, she could argue, is true if and only if there is a certain amount (a few molecules will do) of a certain organic substance in the relevant fridge (for versions of this objection, Cappelen & Lepore 2005). So the sentence is true both in the carton case and in the patch case; it would be false only if the fridge did not contain any amount of any kind of milk (whether cow milk or goat milk or elephant milk). The contextualist’s reply is that, in fact, neither the speaker nor the interpreter is aware of such alleged literal content (the point is challenged by Fodor 1983, Carston 2002); but “what is said” must be intuitively accessible to the conversational participants ( Availability Principle , Recanati 1989). If truth conditions are associated with what is said—as the traditionalist would agree they are—then in many cases a sentence’s literal content, if there is such a thing, does not determine a complete, evaluable proposition. For a genuine proposition to arise, a sentence type’s literal content (as determined by syntax and conventional word meaning) must be enriched or otherwise modified by primary pragmatic processes based on the speakers’ background knowledge relative to each particular context of use of the sentence. Such processes differ from Gricean implicature-generating processes in that they come into play at the sub-propositional level; moreover, they are not limited to saturation of indexicals but may include the replacement of a constituent with another. These tenets define contextualism (Recanati 1993; Bezuidenhout 2002; Carston 2002; relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson 1986) is in some respects a precursor of such views). Contextualists take different stands on nature of the semantic contribution made by words to sentences, though they typically agree that it is insufficient to fix truth conditions (Stojanovic 2008). See Del Pinal (2018) for an argument that radical contextualism (in particular, truth-conditional pragmatics) should instead commit to rich lexical items which, in certain conditions, do suffice to fix truth conditions.

Even if sentence types have no definite truth conditions, it does not follow that lexical types do not make definite or predictable contributions to the truth conditions of sentences (think of indexical words). It does follow, however, that conventional word meanings are not the final constituents of complete propositions (see Allot & Textor 2012). Does this imply that there are no such things as lexical meanings understood as features of a language? If so, how should we account for word acquisition and lexical competence in general? Recanati (2004) does not think that contextualism as such is committed to meaning eliminativism, the view on which words as types have no meaning; nevertheless, he regards it as defensible. Words could be said to have, rather than “meaning”, a semantic potential , defined as the collection of past uses of a word w on the basis of which similarities can be established between source situations (i.e., the circumstances in which a speaker has used w ) and target situations (i.e., candidate occasions of application of w ). It is natural to object that even admitting that long-term memory could encompass such an immense amount of information (think of the number of times ‘table’ or ‘woman’ are used by an average speaker in the course of her life), surely working memory could not review such information to make sense of new uses. On the other hand, if words were associated with “more abstract schemata corresponding to types of situations”, as Recanati suggests as a less radical alternative to meaning eliminativism, one wonders what the difference would be with respect to traditional accounts in terms of polysemy.

Other conceptions of “what is said” make more room for the semantic contribution of conventional word meanings. Bach (1994) agrees with contextualists that the linguistic meaning of words (plus syntax and after saturation) does not always determine complete, truth-evaluable propositions; however, he maintains that they do provide some minimal semantic information, a so-called ‘propositional radical’, that allows pragmatic processes to issue in one or more propositions. Bach identifies “what is said” with this minimal information. However, many have objected that minimal content is extremely hard to isolate (Recanati 2004; Stanley 2007). Suppose it is identified with the content that all the utterances of a sentence type share; unfortunately, no such content can be attributed to a sentence such as “Every bottle is in the fridge”, for there is no proposition that is stably asserted by every utterance of it (surely not the proposition that every bottle in the universe is in the fridge, which is never asserted). Stanley’s (2007) indexicalism rejects the notion of minimal proposition and any distinction between semantic content and communicated content: communicated content can be entirely captured by means of consciously accessible, linguistically controlled content (content that results from semantic value together with the provision of values to free variables in syntax, or semantic value together with the provision of arguments to functions from semantic types to propositions) together with general conversational norms. Accordingly, Stanley generalizes contextual saturation processes that are usually regarded as characteristic of indexicals, tense, and a few other structures; moreover, he requires that the relevant variables be linguistically encoded, either syntactically or lexically. It remains to be seen whether such solutions apply (in a non- ad hoc way) to all the examples of content modulation that have been presented in the literature.

Finally, minimalism (Borg 2004, 2012; Cappelen & Lepore 2005) is the view that appears (and intends) to be closest to the Frege-Montague tradition. The task of a semantic theory is said to be minimal in that it is supposed to account only for the literal meaning of sentences: context does not affect literal semantic content but “what the speaker says” as opposed to “what the sentence means” (Borg 2012). In this sense, semantics is not another name for the theory of meaning, because not all meaning-related properties are semantic properties (Borg 2004). Contrary to contextualism and Bach’s theory, minimalism holds that lexicon and syntax together determine complete truth-evaluable propositions. Indeed, this is definitional for lexical meaning: word meanings are the kind of things which, if one puts enough of them together in the right sort of way, then what one gets is propositional content (Borg 2012). Borg believes that, in order to be truth-evaluable, propositional contents must be “about the world”, and that this entails some form of semantic externalism. However, the identification of lexical meaning with reference makes it hard to account for semantic relations such as synonymy, analytic entailment or the difference between ambiguity and polysemy, and syntactically relevant properties: the difference between “John is easy to please” and “John is eager to please” cannot be explained by the fact that ‘easy’ means the property easy (see the entry on ambiguity ). To account for semantically based syntactic properties, words may come with “instructions” that are not, however, constitutive of a word’s meaning like meaning postulates (which Borg rejects), though awareness of them is part of a speaker’s competence. Once more, lexical semantic competence is divorced from grasp of word meaning. In conclusion, some information counts as lexical if it is either perceived as such in “firm, type-level lexical intuitions” or capable of affecting the word’s syntactic behavior. Borg concedes that even such an extended conception of lexical content will not capture, e.g., analytic entailments such as the relation between ‘bachelor’ and ‘unmarried’.

4. Linguistics

The emergence of modern linguistic theories of word meaning is usually placed at the transition from historical-philological semantics ( Section 2.2 ) to structuralist semantics, the linguistics movement started at the break of the 20 th century by Ferdinand de Saussure with his Cours de Linguistique Générale (1995 [1916]).

The advances introduced by the structuralist conception of word meaning are best appreciated by contrasting its basic assumptions with those of historical-philological semantics. Let us recall the three most important differences (Lepschy 1970; Matthews 2001).

• Anti-psychologism . Structuralist semantics views language as a symbolic system whose properties and internal dynamics can be analyzed without taking into account their implementation in the mind/brain of language users. Just as the rules of chess can be stated and analyzed without making reference to the mental properties of chess players, so a theory of word meaning can, and should, proceed simply by examining the formal role played by words within the system of the language.
• Anti-historicism . Since the primary explanandum of structuralist semantics is the role played by lexical expressions within structured linguistic systems, structuralist semantics privileges the synchronic description of word meaning. Diachronic accounts of word meaning are logically posterior to the analysis of the relational properties statically exemplified by words at different stages of the evolution of the language.
• Anti-localism . Because the semantic properties of words depend on the relations they entertain with other expressions in the same lexical system, word meanings cannot be studied in isolation. This is both an epistemological and a foundational claim, i.e., a claim about how matters related to word meaning should be addressed in the context of a semantic theory of word meaning, and a claim about the dynamics whereby the elements of a system of signs acquire the meaning they have for their users.

The account of lexical phenomena popularized by structuralism gave rise to a variety of descriptive approaches to word meaning. We can group them in three categories (Lipka 1992; Murphy 2003; Geeraerts 2006).

• Lexical Field Theory . Introduced by Trier (1931), it argues that word meaning should be studied by looking at the relations holding between words in the same lexical field. A lexical field is a set of semantically related words whose meanings are mutually interdependent and which together spell out the conceptual structure of a given domain of reality. Lexical Field Theory assumes that lexical fields are closed sets with no overlapping meanings or semantic gaps. Whenever a word undergoes a change in meaning (e.g., its range of application is extended or contracted), the whole arrangement of its lexical field is affected (Lehrer 1974).
• Componential Analysis . Developed in the second half of the 1950s by European and American linguists (e.g., Pattier, Coseriu, Bloomfield, Nida), this framework argues that word meaning can be described on the basis of a finite set of conceptual building blocks called semantic components or features . For example, ‘man’ can be analyzed as [+ male ], [+ mature ], ‘woman’ as [− male ], [+ mature ], ‘child’ as [+/− male ] [− mature ] (Leech 1974).
• Relational Semantics . Prominent in the work of linguists such as Lyons (1963), this approach shares with Lexical Field Theory the commitment to a style of analysis that privileges the description of lexical relations, but departs from it in two important respects. First, it postulates no direct correspondence between sets of related words and domains of reality, thereby dropping the assumption that the organization of lexical fields should be understood to reflect the organization of the non-linguistic world. Second, instead of deriving statements about the meaning relations entertained by a lexical item (e.g., synonymy, hyponymy) from an independent account of its meaning, for relational semantics word meanings are constituted by the set of semantic relations words participate in (Evens et al. 1980; Cruse 1986).

The componential current of structuralism was the first to produce an important innovation in theories of word meaning: Katzian semantics (Katz & Fodor 1963; Katz 1972, 1987). Katzian semantics combined componential analysis with a mentalistic conception of word meaning and developed a method for the description of lexical phenomena in the context of a formal grammar. The mentalistic component of Katzian semantics is twofold. First, word meanings are defined as aggregates of simpler conceptual features inherited from our general categorization abilities. Second, the proper subject matter of the theory is no longer identified with the “structure of the language” but, following Chomsky (1957, 1965), with speakers’ ability to competently interpret the words and sentences of their language. In Katzian semantics, word meanings are structured entities whose representations are called semantic markers . A semantic marker is a hierarchical tree with labeled nodes whose structure reproduces the structure of the represented meaning, and whose labels identify the word’s conceptual components. For example, the figure below illustrates the sense of ‘chase’ (simplified from Katz 1987).

Katz (1987) claimed that this approach was superior in both transparency and richness to the analysis of word meaning that could be provided via meaning postulates. For example, in Katzian semantics the validation of conditionals such as \(\forall x\forall y (\textrm{chase}(x, y) \to \textrm{follow}(x,y))\) could be reduced to a matter of inspection: one had simply to check whether the semantic marker of ‘follow’ was a subtree of the semantic marker of ‘chase’. Furthermore, the method incorporated syntagmatic relations in the representation of word meanings (witness the grammatical tags ‘NP’, ‘VP’ and ‘S’ attached to the conceptual components above). Katzian semantics was favorably received by the Generative Semantics movement (Fodor 1977; Newmeyer 1980) and boosted an interest in the formal representation of word meaning that would dominate the linguistic scene for decades to come (Harris 1993). Nonetheless, it was eventually abandoned. As subsequent commentators noted, Katzian semantics suffered from three important drawbacks. First, the theory did not provide any clear model of how the complex conceptual information represented by semantic markers contributed to the truth conditions of sentences (Lewis 1972). Second, some aspects of word meaning that could be easily represented with meaning postulates could not be expressed through semantic markers, such as the symmetry and the transitivity of predicates (e.g., \(\forall x\forall y (\textrm{sibling}(x, y) \to \textrm{sibling}(y, x))\) or \(\forall x\forall y\forall z (\textrm{louder}(x, y) \mathbin{\&} \textrm{louder}(y, z) \to \textrm{louder}(x, z))\); see Dowty 1979). Third, Katz’s arguments for the view that word meanings are intrinsically structured turned out to be vulnerable to objections from proponents of atomistic views of word meaning (see, most notably, Fodor & Lepore 1992).

After Katzian semantics, the landscape of linguistic theories of word meaning bifurcated. On one side, we find a group of theories advancing the decompositional agenda established by Katz. On the other side, we find a group of theories fostering the relational approach originated by Lexical Field Theory and relational semantics. Following Geeraerts (2010), we will briefly characterize the following ones.

The basic idea of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach (henceforth, NSM; Wierzbicka 1972, 1996; Goddard & Wierzbicka 2002) is that word meaning is best described through the combination of a small set of elementary conceptual particles, known as semantic primes . Semantic primes are primitive (i.e., not decomposable into further conceptual parts), innate (i.e., not learned), and universal (i.e., explicitly lexicalized in all natural languages, whether in the form of a word, a morpheme, a phraseme, and so forth). According to NSM, the meaning of any word in any natural language can be defined by appropriately combining these fundamental conceptual particles. Wierzbicka (1996) proposed a catalogue of about 60 semantic primes, designed to analyze word meanings within so-called reductive paraphrases. For example, the reductive paraphrase for ‘top’ is a part of something; this part is above all the other parts of this something . NSM has produced interesting applications in comparative linguistics (Peeters 2006), language teaching (Goddard & Wierzbicka 2007), and lexical typology (Goddard 2012). However, the approach has been criticized on various grounds. First, it has been argued that the method followed by NSM in the identification of semantic primes is insufficiently clear (e.g., Matthewson 2003). Second, some have observed that reductive paraphrases are too vague to be considered adequate representations of word meanings, since they fail to account for fine-grained differences between semantically neighboring words. For example, the reductive paraphrase provided by Wierzbicka for ‘sad’ (i.e., x feels something; sometimes a person thinks something like this: something bad happened; if i didn’t know that it happened i would say: i don’t want it to happen; i don’t say this now because i know: i can’t do anything; because of this, this person feels something bad; x feels something like this ) seems to apply equally well to ‘unhappy’, ‘distressed’, ‘frustrated’, ‘upset’, and ‘annoyed’ (e.g., Aitchison 2012). Third, there is no consensus on what items should ultimately feature in the list of semantic primes available to reductive paraphrases: the content of the list is debated and varies considerably between versions of NSM. Fourth, some purported semantic primes appear to fail to comply with the universality requirement and are not explicitly lexicalized in all known languages (Bohnemeyer 2003; Von Fintel & Matthewson 2008). See Goddard (1998) for some replies and Riemer (2006) for further objections.

For NSM, word meanings can be exhaustively represented with a metalanguage appealing exclusively to the combination of primitive linguistic particles. Conceptual Semantics (Jackendoff 1983, 1990, 2002) proposes a more open-ended approach. According to Conceptual Semantics, word meanings are essentially an interface phenomenon between a specialized body of linguistic knowledge (e.g., morphosyntactic knowledge) and core non-linguistic cognition. Word meanings are thus modeled as hybrid semantic representations combining linguistic features (e.g., syntactic tags) and conceptual elements grounded in perceptual knowledge and motor schemas. For example, here is the semantic representation of ‘drink’ according to Jackendoff.

Syntactic tags represent the grammatical properties of the word under analysis, while the items in subscript are picked from a core set of perceptually grounded primitives (e.g., event, state, thing, path, place, property, amount ) which are assumed to be innate, cross-modal and universal categories of the human mind. The decompositional machinery of Conceptual Semantics has a number of attractive features. Most notably, its representations take into account grammatical class and word-level syntax, which are plausibly an integral aspect of our knowledge of the meaning of words. However, some of its claims about the interplay between language and conceptual structure appear more problematic. To begin with, it has been observed that speakers tend to use causative predicates (e.g., ‘drink’) and the paraphrases expressing their decompositional structure (e.g., “cause a liquid to go into someone or something’s mouth”) in different and sometimes non-interchangeable ways (e.g., Wolff 2003), which raises concerns about the hypothesis that decompositional analyses à la Jackendoff may be regarded as faithful representations of word meanings. In addition, Conceptual Semantics is somewhat unclear as to what exact method should be followed in the identification of the motor-perceptual primitives that can feed descriptions of word meanings (Pulman 2005). Finally, the restriction placed by Conceptual Semantics on the type of conceptual material that can inform definitions of word meaning (low-level primitives grounded in perceptual knowledge and motor schemas) appears to affect the explanatory power of the framework. For example, how can one account for the difference in meaning between ‘jog’ and ‘run’ without ut taking into account higher-level, arguably non-perceptual knowledge about the social characteristics of jogging, which typically implies a certain leisure setting, the intention to contribute to physical wellbeing, and so on? See Taylor (1996), Deane (1996).

The neat dividing line drawn between word meanings and general world knowledge by Conceptual Semantics does not tell us much about the dynamic interaction of the two in language use. The Two-Level Semantics of Bierwisch (1983a,b) and Lang (Bierwisch & Lang 1989; Lang 1993) aims to provide such a dynamic account. Two-Level Semantics views word meaning as the result of the interaction between two systems: semantic form (SF) and conceptual structure (CS). SF is a formalized representation of the basic features of a word. It contains grammatical information that specifies, e.g., the admissible syntactic distribution of the word, plus a set of variables and semantic parameters whose value is determined by the interaction with CS. By contrast, CS consists of language-independent systems of knowledge (including general world knowledge) that mediate between language and the world (Lang & Maienborn 2011). According to Two-Level Semantics, for example, polysemous words can express variable meanings by virtue of having a stable underspecified SF which can be flexibly manipulated by CS. By way of example, consider the word ‘university’, which can be read as referring either to an institution (as in “the university selected John’s application”) or to a building (as in “the university is located on the North side of the river”). Simplifying a bit, Two-Level Semantics explains the dynamics governing the selection of these readings as follows.

• Because ‘university’ belongs to the category of words denoting objects primarily characterized by their purpose, the general lexical entry for ‘university’ is \(\lambda x [\textrm{purpose} [x w]]\).
• Based on our knowledge that the primary purpose of universities is to provide advanced education, the SF of ‘university’ is specified as \(\lambda x [\textrm{purpose} [x w] \mathbin{\&} \textit{advanced study and teaching} [w]]\).
• The alternative readings of ‘university’ are a function of the two ways CS can set the value of the variable x in its SF, such ways being \(\lambda x [\textrm{institution} [x] \mathbin{\&} \textrm{purpose} [x w]]\) and \(\lambda x [\textrm{building} [x] \mathbin{\&} \textrm{purpose} [x w]]\).

Two-Level Semantics shares Jackendoff’s and Wierzbicka’s commitment to a descriptive paradigm that anchors word meaning to a stable decompositional template, all the while avoiding the immediate complications arising from a restrictive characterization of the type of conceptual factors that can modulate such stable decompositional templates in contexts. But there are, once again, a few significant issues. A first problem is definitional accuracy: defining the SF of ‘university’ as \(\lambda x [\textrm{purpose} [x w] \mathbin{\&} \textit{advanced study and teaching} [w]]\) seems too loose to reflect the subtle differences in meaning among ‘university’ and related terms designating institutions for higher education, such as ‘college’ or ‘academy’. Furthermore, the apparatus of Two-Level Semantics relies heavily on lambda expressions, which, as some commentators have noted (e.g., Taylor 1994, 1995), appears ill-suited to represent the complex forms of world knowledge we often rely on to fix the meaning of highly polysemous words. See also Wunderlich (1991, 1993).

The Generative Lexicon theory (GL; Pustejovsky 1995) takes a different approach. Instead of explaining the contextual flexibility of word meaning by appealing to rich conceptual operations applied on semantically thin lexical entries, this approach postulates lexical entries rich in conceptual information and knowledge of worldly facts. According to classical GL, the informational resources encoded in the lexical entry for a typical word w consist of the following four levels.

• A lexical typing structure , specifying the semantic type of w within the type system of the language;
• An argument structure , representing the number and nature of the arguments supported by w ;
• An event structure , defining the event type denoted by w (e.g., state, process, transition);
• A qualia structure , specifying the predicative force of w .

In particular, qualia structure specifies the conceptual relations that speakers associate to the real-world referents of a word and impact on the way the word is used in the language (Pustejovsky 1998). For example, our knowledge that bread is something that is brought about through baking is considered a Quale of the word ‘bread’, and this knowledge is responsible for our understanding that, e.g., “fresh bread” means “bread which has been baked recently”. GL distinguishes four types of qualia:

• constitutive : the relation between an object x and its constituent parts;
• formal : the basic ontological category of x ;
• telic : the purpose and the function of x ;
• agentive : the factors involved in the origin of x .

Take together, these qualia form the “qualia structure” of a word. For example, the qualia structure of the noun ‘sandwich’ will feature information about the composition of sandwiches, their nature of physical artifacts, their being intended to be eaten, and our knowledge about the operations typically involved in the preparation of sandwiches. The notation is as follows.

sandwich ( x ) const = {bread, …} form = physobj( x ) tel = eat(P, g , x ) agent = artifact( x )

Qualia structure is the primary explanatory device by which GL accounts for polysemy. The sentence “Mary finished the sandwich” receives the default interpretation “Mary finished eating the sandwich” because the argument structure of ‘finish’ requires an action as direct object, and the qualia structure of ‘sandwich’ allows the generation of the appropriate sense via type coercion (Pustejovsky 2006). GL is an ongoing research program (Pustejovsky et al. 2012) that has led to significant applications in computational linguistics (e.g., Pustejovsky & Jezek 2008; Pustejovsky & Rumshisky 2008). But like the theories mentioned so far, it has been subject to criticisms. A first general criticism is that the decompositional assumptions underlying GL are unwarranted and should be replaced by an atomist view of word meaning (Fodor & Lepore 1998; see Pustejovsky 1998 for a reply). A second criticism is that GL’s focus on variations in word meaning which depend on sentential context and qualia structure is too narrow, since since contextual variations in word meaning often depend on more complex factors, such as the ability to keep track of coherence relations in a discourse (e.g., Asher & Lascarides 1995; Lascarides & Copestake 1998; Kehler 2002; Asher 2011). Finally, the empirical adequacy of the framework has been called into question. It has been argued that the formal apparatus of GL leads to incorrect predictions, that qualia structure sometimes overgenerates or undergenerates interpretations, and that the rich lexical entries postulated by GL are psychologically implausible (e.g., Jayez 2001; Blutner 2002).

To conclude this section, we will briefly mention some contemporary approaches to word meaning that, in different ways, pursue the theoretical agenda of the relational current of the structuralist paradigm. For pedagogical convenience, we can group them into two categories. On the one hand, we have network approaches, which formalize knowledge of word meaning within models where the lexicon is seen as a structured system of entries interconnected by sense relations such as synonymy, antonymy, and meronymy. On the other, we have statistical approaches, whose primary aim is to investigate the patterns of co-occurrence among words in linguistic corpora.

The main example of network approaches is perhaps Collins and Quillian’s (1969) hierarchical network model, in which words are represented as entries in a network of nodes, each comprising a set of conceptual features defining the conventional meaning of the word in question, and connected to other nodes in the network through semantic relations (more in Lehman 1992). Subsequent developments of the hierarchical network model include the Semantic Feature Model (Smith, Shoben & Rips 1974), the Spreading Activation Model (Collins & Loftus 1975; Bock & Levelt 1994), the WordNet database (Fellbaum 1998), as well as the connectionist models of Seidenberg & McClelland (1989), Hinton & Shallice (1991), and Plaut & Shallice (1993). More on this in the entry on connectionism .

Finally, statistical analysis investigates word meaning by examining through computational means the distribution of words in linguistic corpora. The main idea is to use quantitative data about the frequency of co-occurrence of sets of lexical items to identify their semantic properties and differentiate their different senses (for overviews, see Atkins & Zampolli 1994; Manning & Schütze 1999; Stubbs 2002; Sinclair 2004). Notice that while symbolic networks are models of the architecture of the lexicon that seek to be psychologically adequate (i.e., to reveal how knowledge of word meaning is stored and organized in the mind/brain of human speakers), statistical approaches to word meaning are not necessarily interested in psychological adequacy, and may have completely different goals, such as building a machine translation service able to mimic human performance (a goal that can obviously be achieved without reproducing the cognitive mechanisms underlying translation in humans). More on this in the entry on computational linguistics .

5. Cognitive Science

As we have seen, most theories of word meaning in linguistics face, at some point, the difficulties involved in drawing a plausible dividing line between word knowledge and world knowledge, and the various ways they attempt to meet this challenge display some recurrent features. For example, they assume that the lexicon, though richly interfaced with world knowledge and non-linguistic cognition, remains an autonomous representational system encoding a specialized body of linguistic knowledge. In this section, we survey a group of empirical approaches that adopt a different stance on word meaning. The focus is once again psychological, which means that the overall goal of these approaches is to provide a cognitively realistic account of the representational repertoire underlying knowledge of word meaning. Unlike the approaches surveyed in Section 4 , however, these theories tend to encourage a view on which the distinction between the semantic and pragmatic aspects of word meaning is highly unstable (or even impossible to draw), where lexical knowledge and knowledge of worldly facts are aspects of a continuum, and where the lexicon is permeated by our general inferential abilities (Evans 2010). Section 5.1 will briefly illustrate the central assumptions underlying the study of word meaning in cognitive linguistics. Section 5.2 will turn to the study of word meaning in psycholinguistics. Section 5.3 will conclude with some references to neurolinguistics.

At the beginning of the 1970s, Eleanor Rosch put forth a new theory of the mental representation of categories. Concepts such as furniture or bird , she claimed, are not represented just as sets of criterial features with clear-cut boundaries, so that an item can be conceived as falling or not falling under the concept based on whether or not it meets the relevant criteria. Rather, items within categories can be considered more or less representative of the category itself (Rosch 1975; Rosch & Mervis 1975; Mervis & Rosch 1981). Several experiments seemed to show that the application of concepts is no simple yes-or-no business: some items (the “good examples”) are more easily identified as falling under a concept than others (the “poor examples”). An automobile is perceived as a better example of vehicle than a rowboat, and much better than an elevator; a carrot is more readily identified as an example of the concept vegetable than a pumpkin. If the concepts speakers associate to category words (such as ‘vehicle’ and ‘vegetable’) were mere bundles of criterial features, these preferences would be inexplicable, since they rank items that meet the criteria equally well. It is thus plausible to assume that the concepts associated to category words are have a center-periphery architecture centered on the most representative examples of the category: a robin is perceived as a more “birdish” bird than an ostrich or, as people would say, closer to the prototype of a bird or to the prototypical bird (see the entry on concepts ).

Although nothing in Rosch’s experiments licensed the conclusion that prototypical rankings should be reified and treated as the content of concepts (what her experiments did support was merely that a theory of the mental representation of categories should be consistent with the existence of prototype effects ), the study of prototypes revolutionized the existing approaches to category concepts (Murphy 2002) and was a leading force behind the birth of cognitive linguistics. Prototypes were central to the development of the Radial Network Theory of Brugman (1988 [1981]) and Lakoff (Brugman & Lakoff 1988), which proposed to model the sense network of words by introducing in the architecture of word meanings the center-periphery relation at the heart of Rosch’s seminal work. According to Brugman, word meanings can typically be modeled as radial complexes where a dominant sense is related to less typical senses by means of semantic relations such as metaphor and metonymy. For example, the sense network of ‘fruit’ features product of plant growth at its center and a more abstract outcome at its periphery, and the two are connected by a metaphorical relation). On a similar note, the Conceptual Metaphor Theory of Lakoff & Johnson (1980; Lakoff 1987) and the Mental Spaces Approach of Fauconnier (1994; Fauconnier & Turner 1998) combined the assumption that word meanings typically have an internal structure arranging multiple related senses in a radial fashion, with the further claim that our use of words is governed by hard-wired mapping mechanisms that catalyze the integration of word meanings across conceptual domains. For example, it is in virtue of these mechanisms that the expressions “love is war”, “life is a journey”) are so widespread across cultures and sound so natural to our ears. On the proposed view, these associations are creative, perceptually grounded, systematic, cross-culturally uniform, and grounded on pre-linguistic patterns of conceptual activity which correlate with core elements of human embodied experience (see the entries on metaphor and embodied cognition ). More in Kövecses (2002), Gibbs (2008), and Dancygier & Sweetser (2014).

Another major innovation introduced by cognitive linguistics is the development of a resolutely “encyclopedic” approach to word meaning, best exemplified by Frame Semantics (Fillmore 1975, 1982) and by the Theory of Domains (Langacker 1987). Approximating a bit, an approach to word meaning can be defined “encyclopedic” insofar as it characterizes knowledge of worldly facts as the primary constitutive force of word meaning. While the Mental Spaces Approach and Conceptual Metaphor Theory regarded word meaning mainly as the product of associative patterns between concepts, Fillmore and Langacker turned their attention to the relation between word meaning and the body of encyclopedic knowledge possessed by typical speakers. Our ability to use and interpret the verb ‘buy’, for example, is closely intertwined with our background knowledge of the social nature of commercial transfer, which involves a seller, a buyer, goods, money, the relation between the money and the goods, and so forth. However, knowledge structures of this kind cannot be modeled as standard concept-like representations. Here is how Frame Semantics attempts to meet the challenge. First, words are construed as pairs of phonographic forms with highly schematic concepts which are internally organized as radial categories and function as access sites to encyclopedic knowledge. Second, an account of the representational organization of encyclopedic knowledge is provided. According to Fillmore, encyclopedic knowledge is represented in long-term memory in the form of frames , i.e., schematic conceptual scenarios that specify the prototypical features and functions of a denotatum, along with its interactions with the objects and the events typically associated with it. Frames provide thus a schematic representation of the elements and entities associated with a particular domain of experience and convey the information required to use and interpret the words employed to talk about it. For example, according to Fillmore & Atkins (1992) the use of the verb ‘bet’ is governed by the risk frame, which is as follows:

In the same vein as Frame Semantics (more on the parallels in Clausner & Croft 1999), Langacker’s Theory of Domains argues that our understanding of word meaning depends on our access to larger knowledge structures called domains . To illustrate the notion of a domain, consider the word ‘diameter’. The meaning of this word cannot be grasped independently of a prior understanding of the notion of a circle. According to Langacker, word meaning is precisely a matter of “profile-domain” organization: the profile corresponds to a substructural element designated within a relevant macrostructure, whereas the domain corresponds to the macrostructure providing the background information against which the profile can be interpreted (Taylor 2002). In the diameter/circle example, ‘diameter’ designates a profile in the circle domain. Similarly, expressions like ‘hot’, ‘cold’, and ‘warm’ designate properties in the temperature domain. Langacker argues that domains are typically structured into hierarchies that reflect meronymic relations and provide a basic conceptual ontology for language use. For example, the meaning of ‘elbow’ is understood with respect to the arm domain, while the meaning of ‘arm’ is situated within the body domain. Importantly, individual profiles typically inhere to different domains, and this is one of the factors responsible for the ubiquity of polysemy in natural language. For example, the profile associated to the word ‘love’ inheres both to the domains of embodied experience and to the abstract domains of social activities such as marriage ceremonies.

Developments of the approach to word meaning fostered by cognitive linguistics include Construction Grammar (Goldberg 1995), Embodied Construction Grammar (Bergen & Chang 2005), Invited Inferencing Theory (Traugott & Dasher 2001), and LCCM Theory (Evans 2009). The notion of a frame has become popular in cognitive psychology to model the dynamics of ad hoc categorization (e.g., Barsalou 1983, 1992, 1999; more in Section 5.2 ). General information about the study of word meaning in cognitive linguistics can be found in Talmy (2000a,b), Croft & Cruse (2004), and Evans & Green (2006).

In psycholinguistics, the study of word meaning is understood as the investigation of the mental lexicon , the cognitive system that underlies the capacity for conscious and unconscious lexical activity (Jarema & Libben 2007). Simply put, the mental lexicon is the long-term representational inventory storing the body of linguistic knowledge speakers are required to master in order to make competent use of the lexical elements of a language; as such, it can be equated with the lexical component of an individual’s language capacity. Research on the mental lexicon is concerned with a variety of problems (for surveys, see, e.g., Traxler & Gernsbacher 2006, Spivey, McRae & Joanisse 2012, Harley 2014), that center around the following tasks:

• Define the overall organization of the mental lexicon, specify its components and clarify the role played by such components in lexical production and comprehension;
• Determine the internal makeup of single components and the way the information they store is brought to bear on lexical performance;
• Describe the interface mechanisms connecting the mental lexicon to other domains in the human cognitive architecture (e.g., declarative memory);
• Illustrate the learning processes responsible for the acquisition and the development of lexical abilities.

From a functional point of view, the mental lexicon is usually understood as a system of lexical entries , each containing the information related to a word mastered by a speaker (Rapp 2001). A lexical entry for a word w is typically modeled as a complex representation made up of the following components (Levelt 1989, 2001):

• A semantic form , determining the semantic contribution made by w to the meaning of sentences containing w ;
• A grammatical form , assigning w to a grammatical category (noun, verb, adjective) and regulating the behavior of w in syntactic environments;
• A morphological form , representing the morphemic substructure of w and the morphological operations that can be applied on w ;
• A phonological form , specifying the set of phonological properties of w ;
• An orthographic form , specifying the graphic structure of w .

From this standpoint, a theory of word meaning translates into an account of the information stored in the semantic form of lexical entries. A crucial part of the task consists in determining exactly what kind of information is stored in lexical semantic forms as opposed to, e.g., bits of information that fall under the scope of episodic memory or general factual knowledge. Recall the example we made in Section 3.3 : how much of the information that a competent zoologist can associate to tigers is part of her knowledge of the meaning of the word ‘tiger’? Not surprisingly, even in psycholinguistics tracing a neat functional separation between word processing and general-purpose cognition has proven a problematic task. The general consensus among psycholinguists seems to be that lexical representations and conceptual representations are richly interfaced, though functionally distinct (e.g., Gleitman & Papafragou 2013). For example, in clinical research it is standard practice to distinguish between amodal deficits involving an inability to process information at both the conceptual and the lexical level, and modal deficits specifically restricted to one of the two spheres (Saffran & Schwartz 1994; Rapp & Goldrick 2006; Jefferies & Lambon Ralph 2006; more in more in Section 5.3 ). On the resulting view, lexical activity in humans is the output of the interaction between two functionally neighboring systems, one broadly in charge of the storage and processing of conceptual-encyclopedic knowledge, the other coinciding with the mental lexicon. The role of lexical entries is essentially to make these two systems communicate with one another through semantic forms (see Denes 2009). Contrary to the folk notion of a mental lexicon where words are associated to fully specified meanings or senses which are simply retrieved from the lexicon for the purpose of language processing, in these models lexical semantic forms are seen as highly schematic representations whose primary function is to supervise the recruitment of the extra-linguistic information required to interpret word occurrences in language use. In recent years, appeals to “ultra-thin” lexical entries have taken an eliminativist turn. It has been suggested that psycholinguistic accounts of the representational underpinnigs of lexical competence should dispose of the largely metaphorical notion of an “internal word store”, and there is no such thing as a mental lexicon in the human mind (e.g., Elman 2004, 2009; Dilkina, McClelland & Plaut 2010).

In addition to these approaches, in a number of prominent psychological accounts emerged over the last two decades, the study of word meaning is essentially considered a chapter of theories of the mental realization of concepts (see the entry on concepts ). Lexical units are seen either as ingredients of conceptual networks or as (auditory or visual) stimuli providing access to conceptual networks. A flow of neuroscientific results has shown that understanding of (certain categories of) words correlates with neural activations corresponding to the semantic content of the processed words. For example, it has been shown that listening to sentences that describe actions performed with the mouth, hand, or leg activates the visuomotor circuits which subserve execution and observation of such actions (Tettamanti et al. 2005); that reading words denoting specific actions of the tongue (‘lick’), fingers (‘pick’), and leg (‘kick’) differentially activate areas of the premotor cortex that are active when the corresponding movements are actually performed (Hauk et al. 2004); that reading odor-related words (‘jasmine’, ‘garlic’, ‘cinnamon’) differentially activates the primary olfactory cortex (Gonzales et al. 2006); and that color words (such as ‘red’) activate areas in the fusiform gyrus that have been associated with color perception (Chao et al. 1999, Simmons et al. 2007; for a survey of results on visual activations in language processing, see Martin 2007).

This body of research originated so-called simulationist (or enactivist ) accounts of conceptual competence, on which “understanding is imagination” and “imagining is a form of simulation” (Gallese & Lakoff 2005). In these accounts, conceptual (often called “semantic”) competence is seen as the ability to simulate or re-enact perceptual (including proprioceptive and introspective) experiences of the states of affairs that language describes, by manipulating memory traces of such experiences or fragments of them. In Barsalou’s theory of perceptual symbol systems (1999), language understanding (and cognition in general) is based on perceptual experience and memory of it. The central claim is that “sensory-motor systems represent not only perceived entities but also conceptualizations of them in their absence”. Perception generates mostly unconscious “neural representations in sensory-motor areas of the brain”, which represent schematic components of perceptual experience. Such perceptual symbols are not holistic copies of experiences but selections of information isolated by attention. Related perceptual symbols are integrated into a simulator that produces limitless simulations of a perceptual component, such as red or lift . Simulators are located in long-term memory and play the roles traditionally attributed to concepts: they generate inferences and can be combined recursively to implement productivity. A concept is not “a static amodal structure” as in traditional, computationally-oriented cognitive science, but “the ability to simulate a kind of thing perceptually”. Linguistic symbols (i.e., auditory or visual memories of words) get to be associated with simulators; perceptual recognition of a word activates the relevant simulator, which simulates a referent for the word; syntax provides instructions for building integrated perceptual simulations, which “constitute semantic interpretations”.

Though popular among researchers interested in the conceptual underpinnings of semantic competence, the simulationist paradigm faces important challenges. Three are worth mentioning. First, it appears that imulations do not always capture the intuitive truth conditions of sentences: listeners may enact the same simulation upon exposure to sentences that have different truth conditions (e.g., “The man stood on the corner” vs. “The man waited on the corner”; see Weiskopf 2010). Moreover, simulations may overconstrain truth conditions. For example, even though in the simulations listeners typically associate to the sentence “There are three pencils and four pens in Anna’s mug”, the pens and the pencils are in vertical position, the sentence would be true even if they were lying horizontally in the mug. Second, the framework does not sit well with pathological data. For example, no general impairment with auditory-related words is reported in patients with lesions in the auditory association cortex (e.g., auditory agnosia patients); analogously, patients with damage to the motor cortex seem to have no difficulties in linguistic performance, and specifically in inferential processing with motor-related words (for a survey of these results, see Calzavarini, to appear; for a defense of the embodied paradigm, Pulvermüller 2013). Finally, the theory has difficulties accounting for the meaning of abstract words (e.g., ‘beauty’, ‘pride’, ‘kindness’), which does not appear to hinge on sensory-motor simulation (see Dove 2016 for a discussion).

Beginning in the mid-1970s, neuropsychological research on cognitive deficits related to brain lesions has produced a considerable amount of findings related to the neural correlates of lexical semantic information and processing. More recently, the development of neuroimaging techniques such as PET, fMRI and ERP has provided further means to adjudicate hypotheses about lexical semantic processes in the brain (Vigneau et al. 2006). Here we do not intend to provide a complete overview of such results (for a survey, see Faust 2012). We shall just mention three topics of neurolinguistic research that appear to bear on issues in the study of word meaning: the partition of the lexicon into categories, the representation of common nouns vs. proper names, and the distinction between the inferential and the referential aspects of lexical competence.

Two preliminary considerations should be kept in mind. First, a distinction must be drawn between the neural realization of word forms, i.e., traces of acoustic, articulatory, graphic, and motor configurations (‘peripheral lexicons’), and the neural correlates of lexical meanings (‘concepts’). A patient can understand what is the object represented by a picture shown to her (and give evidence of her understanding, e.g., by miming the object’s function) while being unable to retrieve the relevant phonological form from her output lexicon (Warrington 1985; Shallice 1988). Second, there appears to be wide consensus about the irrelevance to brain processing of any distinction between strictly semantic and factual or encyclopedic information (e.g., Tulving 1972; Sartori et al. 1994). Whatever information is relevant to such processes as object recognition or confrontation naming is standardly characterized as ‘semantic’. This may be taken as a stipulation—it is just how neuroscientists use the word ‘semantic’—or as deriving from lack of evidence for any segregation between the domains of semantic and encyclopedic information (see Binder et al. 2009). Be that as it may, in present-day neuroscience there seems to be no room for a correlate of the analytic/synthetic distinction. Moreover, in the literature ‘semantic’ and ‘conceptual’ are often used synonymously; hence, no distinction is drawn between lexical semantic and conceptual knowledge. Finally, the focus of neuroscientific research on “semantics” is on information structures roughly corresponding to word-level meanings, not to sentence-level meanings: hence, so far neuroscientific research has had little to say about the compositional mechanisms that have been the focus (and, often, the entire content) of theories of meaning as pursued within formal semantics and philosophy of language.

Let us start with the partition of the semantic lexicon into categories. Neuropsychological research indicates that the ability to name objects or to answer simple questions involving such nouns can be selectively lost or preserved: subjects can perform much better in naming living entities than in naming artifacts, or in naming animate living entities than in naming fruits and vegetables (Shallice 1988). Different patterns of brain activation may correspond to such dissociations between performances: e.g., Damasio et al. (1996) found that retrieval of names of animals and of tools activate different regions in the left temporal lobe. However, the details of this partition have been interpreted in different ways. Warrington & McCarthy (1983) and Warrington & Shallice (1984) explained the living vs. artifactual dissociation by taking the category distinction to be an effect of the difference among features that are crucial in the identification of living entities and artifacts: while living entities are identified mainly on the basis of perceptual features, artifacts are identified by their function. A later theory (Caramazza & Shelton 1998) claimed that animate and inanimate objects are treated by different knowledge systems separated by evolutionary pressure: domains of features pertaining to the recognition of living things, human faces, and perhaps tools may have been singled out as recognition of such entities had survival value for humans. Finally, Devlin et al. (1998) proposed to view the partition as the consequence of a difference in how recognition-relevant features are connected with one another: in the case of artifactual kinds, an object is recognized thanks to a characteristic coupling of form and function, whereas no such coupling individuates kinds of living things (e.g., eyes go with seeing in many animal species). For non-neutral surveys, see Caramazza & Mahon (2006) and Shallice & Cooper (2011).

On the other hand, it is also known that “semantic” (i.e., conceptual) competence may be lost in its entirety (though often gradually). This is what typically happens in semantic dementia. Empirical evidence has motivated theories of the neural realization of conceptual competence that are meant to account for both modality-specific deficits and pathologies that involve impairment across all modalities. The former may involve a difficulty or impossibility to categorize a visually exhibited object which, however, can be correctly categorized in other modalities (e.g., if the object is touched) or verbally described on the basis of the object’s name (i.e., on the basis of the lexical item supposedly associated with the category). The original “hub and spokes” model of the brain representation of concepts (Rogers et al. 2004, Patterson et al. 2007) accounted for both sets of findings by postulating that the semantic network is composed of a series of “spokes”, i.e., cortical areas distributed across the brain processing modality-specific (visual, auditory, motor, as well as verbal) sources of information, and that the spokes are two-ways connected to a transmodal “hub”. While damage to the spokes accounts for modality-specific deficits, damage to the hub and its connections explains the overall impairment of semantic competence. On this model, the hub is supposed to be located in the anterior temporal lobe (ATL), since semantic dementia had been found to be associated with degeneration of the anterior ventral and polar regions of both temporal poles (Guo et al. 2013). According to more recent, “graded” versions of the model (Lambon Ralph et al. 2017), the contribution of the hub units may vary depending on different patterns of connectivity to the spokes, to account for evidence of graded variation of function across subregions of ATL. It should be noted that while many researchers converge on a distributed view of semantic representation and on the role of domain-specific parts of the neural network (depending on differential patterns of functional connectivity), not everybody agrees on the need to postulate a transmodal hub (see, e.g., Mahon & Caramazza 2011).

Let us now turn to common nouns and proper names. As we have seen, in the philosophy of language of the last decades, proper names (of people, landmarks, countries, etc.) have being regarded as semantically different from common nouns. Neuroscientific research on the processing of proper names and common nouns concurs, to some extent. To begin with, the retrieval of proper names is doubly dissociated from the retrieval of common nouns. Some patients proved competent with common nouns but unable to associate names to pictures of famous people, or buildings, or brands (Ellis, Young & Critchley 1989); in other cases, people’s names were specifically affected (McKenna & Warrington 1980). Other patients had the complementary deficit. The patient described in Semenza & Sgaramella (1993) could name no objects at all (with or without phonemic cues) but he was able to name 10 out of 10 familiar people, and 18 out of 22 famous people with a phonemic cue. Martins & Farrayota‘s (2007) patient ACB also presented impaired object naming but spared retrieval of proper names. Such findings suggest distinct neural pathways for the retrieval of proper names and common nouns (Semenza 2006). The study of lesions and neuroimaging research both initially converged in identifying the left temporal pole as playing a crucial role in the retrieval of proper names, from both visual stimuli (Damasio et al. 1996) and the presentation of speaker voices (Waldron et al. 2014) (though in at least one case damage to the left temporal pole was associated with selective sparing of proper names; see Martins & Farrajota 2007). In addition, recent research has found a role for the uncinate fasciculus (UF). In patients undergoing surgical removal of UF, retrieval of common nouns was recovered while retrieval of proper names remained impaired (Papagno et al. 2016). The present consensus appears to be that “the production of proper names recruits a network that involves at least the left anterior temporal lobe and the left orbitofrontal cortex connected together by the UF” (Brédart 2017).

Furthermore, a few neuropsychological studies have described patients whose competence on geographical names was preserved while names of people were lost: one patient had preserved country names, though he had lost virtually every other linguistic ability (McKenna & Warrington 1978; see Semenza 2006 for other cases of selective preservation of geographical names). Other behavioral experiments seem to show that country names are closer to common nouns than to other proper names such as people and landmark names in that the connectivity between the word and the conceptual system is likely to require diffuse multiple connections, as with common nouns (Hollis & Valentine 2001). If these results were confirmed, it would turn out that the linguistic category of proper names is not homogeneous in terms of neural processing. Studies have also demonstrated that the retrieval of proper names from memory is typically a more difficult cognitive task than the retrieval of common nouns. For example, it is harder to name faces (of famous people) than to name objects; moreover, it is easier to remember a person’s occupation than her or his name. Interestingly, the same difference does not materialize in definition naming, i.e., in tasks where names and common nouns are to be retrieved from definitions (Hanley 2011). Though several hypotheses about the source of this difference have been proposed (see Brédart 2017 for a survey), no consensus has been reached on how to explain this phenomenon.

Finally, a few words on the distinction between the inferential and the referential component of lexical competence. As we have seen in Section 3.2 , Marconi (1997) suggested that processing of lexical meaning might be distributed between two subsystems, an inferential and a referential one. Beginning with Warrington (1975), many patients had been described that were more or less severely impaired in referential tasks such as naming from vision (and other perceptual modalities as well), while their inferential competence was more or less intact. The complementary pattern (i.e., the preservation of referential abilities with loss of inferential competence) is definitely less common. Still, a number of cases have been reported, beginning with a stroke patient of Heilman et al. (1976), who, while unable to perform any task requiring inferential processing, performed well in referential naming tasks with visually presented objects (he could name 23 of 25 common objects). In subsequent years, further cases were described. For example, in a study of 61 patients with lesions affecting linguistic abilities, Kemmerer et al. (2012) found 14 cases in which referential abilities were better preserved than inferential abilities. More recently, Pandey & Heilman (2014), while describing one more case of preserved (referential) naming from vision with severely impaired (inferential) naming from definition, hypothesized that “these two naming tasks may, at least in part, be mediated by two independent neuronal networks”. Thus, while double dissociation between inferential processes and naming from vision is well attested, it is not equally clear that it involves referential processes in general. On the other hand, evidence from neuroimaging is, so far, limited and overall inconclusive. Some neuroimaging studies (e.g., Tomaszewski-Farias et al. 2005, Marconi et al. 2013), as well as TMS mapping experiments (Hamberger et al. 2001, Hamberger & Seidel 2009) did find different patterns of activation for inferential vs. referential performances. However, the results are not entirely consistent and are liable to different interpretations. For example, the selective activation of the anterior left temporal lobe in inferential performances may well reflect additional syntactic demands involved in definition naming, rather than be due to inferential processing as such (see Calzavarini 2017 for a discussion).

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Synonyms of assignment

• as in lesson
• as in appointment
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Thesaurus Definition of assignment

Synonyms & Similar Words

• responsibility
• undertaking
• requirement
• designation
• appointment
• authorization
• installment
• installation
• destination
• emplacement
• investiture
• singling (out)

Antonyms & Near Antonyms

• dethronement

Synonym Chooser

How does the noun assignment contrast with its synonyms?

Some common synonyms of assignment are chore , duty , job , stint , and task . While all these words mean "a piece of work to be done," assignment implies a definite limited task assigned by one in authority.

When is it sensible to use chore instead of assignment ?

While the synonyms chore and assignment are close in meaning, chore implies a minor routine activity necessary for maintaining a household or farm.

When is duty a more appropriate choice than assignment ?

Although the words duty and assignment have much in common, duty implies an obligation to perform or responsibility for performance.

When might job be a better fit than assignment ?

The synonyms job and assignment are sometimes interchangeable, but job applies to a piece of work voluntarily performed; it may sometimes suggest difficulty or importance.

When could stint be used to replace assignment ?

In some situations, the words stint and assignment are roughly equivalent. However, stint implies a carefully allotted or measured quantity of assigned work or service.

When can task be used instead of assignment ?

The meanings of task and assignment largely overlap; however, task implies work imposed by a person in authority or an employer or by circumstance.

Thesaurus Entries Near assignment

assignments

Cite this Entry

“Assignment.” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus , Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/assignment. Accessed 23 May. 2024.

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Nglish: Translation of assignment for Spanish Speakers

Britannica English: Translation of assignment for Arabic Speakers

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Meaning of assignment in English

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• It was a plum assignment - more of a vacation really.
• He took this award-winning photograph while on assignment in the Middle East .
• His two-year assignment to the Mexico office starts in September .
• She first visited Norway on assignment for the winter Olympics ten years ago.
• He fell in love with the area after being there on assignment for National Geographic in the 1950s.
• act as something
• all work and no play (makes Jack a dull boy) idiom
• be at work idiom
• be in work idiom
• housekeeping
• in the line of duty idiom
• short-staffed
• undertaking

You can also find related words, phrases, and synonyms in the topics:

assignment | Intermediate English

Assignment | business english, examples of assignment, collocations with assignment.

These are words often used in combination with assignment .

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an occasion when a driver in a motor race stops in the pits (= area where cars are repaired)

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Glossary of Task Words

Understanding the meaning of words, especially task words, helps you to know exactly what is being asked of you. It takes you halfway towards narrowing down your material and selecting your answer.

Task words direct you and tell you how to go about answering a question. Here is a list of such words and others that you are most likely to come across frequently in your course.

Maddox, H 1967, How to Study , 2nd ed, Pan Books, London.

Marshall, L., & Rowland, F 1998, A guide to learning independently , Addison Wesley Longman, Melbourne.

Northedge, A 1997, The good study guide , Open University, Milton Keynes, UK.

Essay and assignment writing guide

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assignation (n.)

early 14c., assignacioun , "appointment by authority," from Old French assignacion (14c., Modern French assignation ), from Latin assignationem (nominative assignatio ) "an assigning, allotment," noun of action from past-participle stem of assignare / adsignare "to mark out, to allot by sign, assign, award," from ad "to" (see ad- ) + signare "make a sign," from signum "identifying mark, sign" (see sign (n.)).

The meaning "action of legally transferring" (a right or property) is from 1570s; that of "a meeting by arrangement, tryst" is from 1650s, especially for a love-affair; assignation-house (1849) was an old euphemism for "brothel."

Entries linking to assignation

early 13c., signe , "gesture or motion of the hand," especially one meant to express thought or convey an idea, from Old French signe "sign, mark," from Latin signum "identifying mark, token, indication, symbol; proof; military standard, ensign; a signal, an omen; sign in the heavens, constellation."

According to Watkins, literally "standard that one follows," from PIE *sekw-no- , from root *sekw- (1) "to follow." De Vaan has it from PIE *sekh-no- "cut," from PIE root *sek- "to cut" He writes: "The etymological appurtenance to seco 'to cut' implies a semantic shift of *sek-no- 'what is cut out', 'carved out' > 'sign'." But he also also compares Hebrew sakkin , Aramaic sakkin "slaughtering-knife," and mentions a theory that "both words are probably borrowed from an unknown third source."

It has ousted native token . By c. 1300 as "an indication of some coming event." The meaning "a visible mark or device having some special meaning" is recorded from late 13c.; that of "miraculous manifestation, a miracle demonstrating divine power" is from c. 1300. In reference to one of the 12 divisions of the zodiac, from mid-14c.

The sense of "inscribed board with a characteristic device attached to the front of an inn, shop, etc.," to distinguish it from others is recorded from mid-15c. The meaning "indicator, token or signal of some condition" (late 13c.) is behind sign of the times (1520s). The meaning "conventional mark or symbol in place of words" (in music, mathematics, etc., as in plus sign) is by 1550s. In some uses, the word probably is a shortening of ensign . 

word-forming element expressing direction toward or in addition to, from Latin ad "to, toward" in space or time; "with regard to, in relation to," as a prefix, sometimes merely emphatic, from PIE root *ad- "to, near, at."

Simplified to a- before sc- , sp- and st- ; modified to ac- before many consonants and then re-spelled af- , ag- , al- , etc., in conformity with the following consonant (as in affection , aggression ). Also compare ap- (1).

In Old French, reduced to a- in all cases (an evolution already underway in Merovingian Latin), but French refashioned its written forms on the Latin model in 14c., and English did likewise 15c. in words it had picked up from Old French. In many cases pronunciation followed the shift.

Over-correction at the end of the Middle Ages in French and then English "restored" the -d- or a doubled consonant to some words that never had it ( accursed , afford ). The process went further in England than in France (where the vernacular sometimes resisted the pedantic), resulting in English adjourn , advance , address , advertisement (Modern French ajourner , avancer , adresser , avertissement ). In modern word-formation sometimes ad- and ab- are regarded as opposites, but this was not in classical Latin.

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Dictionary entries near assignation

assignation

assimilable

assimilation

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Understanding your assignment questions: A short guide

• Introduction
• Breaking down the question

Directive or task words

Task works for science based essays.

• Further reading and references

It is really important to understand the directive or task word used in your assignment.

This will indicate how you should write and what the purpose of the assignment in. The following examples show some task words and their definitions.

However, it is important to note that none of these words has a fixed meaning. The definitions given are a general guide, and interpretation of the words may vary according to the context and the discipline.

If you are unsure as the exactly what a lecturer means by a particular task word, you should ask for clarification. 

Analyse : Break up into parts; investigate

Comment on : Identify and write about the main issues; give your reactions based on what you've read/ heard in lectures. Avoid just personal opinion. 

Compare : Look for the similarities between two things. Show the relevance or consequences of these similarities concluding which is preferable. 

Contrast : Identify the differences between two items or arguments. Show whether the differences are significant. Perhaps give reasons why one is preferable. 

Criticise : Requires an answer that points out mistakes or weaknesses, and which also indicates any favourable aspects of the subject of the question. It requires a balanced answer. 

Critically evaluate : Weigh arguments for and against something, assessing the strength of the evidence on both sides. Use criteria to guide your assessment of which opinions, theories, models or items are preferable. 

Define : Give the exact meaning of. Where relevant, show you understand how the definition may be problematic. 

Describe : To describe is to give an observational account of something and would deal with what happened, where it happened, when it happened and who was involved. Spell out the main aspects of an idea or topic or the sequence in which a series of things happened. 

Discuss : Investigate or examine by argument; sift and  debate; give reasons for and against; examine the implications. 

Evaluate : Assess and give your judgement about the merit, importance or usefulness of something using evidence to support your argument. 

Examine : Look closely into something

Explain : Offer a detailed and exact rationale behind an idea or principle, or a set of reasons for a situation or attitude. Make clear how and why something happens. 

Explore : Examine thoroughly; consider from a variety of viewpoints

Illustrate : Make something clear and explicit, give examples of evidence

Justify : Give evidence that supports and argument or idea; show why a decision or conclusions were made

Outline : Give the main points/features/general principles; show the main structure and interrelations; omit details and examples

State : Give the main features briefly and clearly

Summarise : Draw out the main points only; omit details and examples

To what extent... : Consider how far something is true, or contributes to a final outcome. Consider also ways in which it is not true.

Task Words:

How to write e.g., discuss, argue etc.

Subject Matter:

What you should be writing about.

Limiting Words:

May narrow or change the focus of your answer. (Important - they stop you from including irrelevant info)

Below are some examples of questions and tips on how you might think about answering them.

Compare acute and chronic pain in terms of pathophysiology and treatment

Compare  - Make sure you are comparing and not just describing the two things in isolation

Acute and chronic pain  - Subject matter

In terms of pathophysiology and treatment  - Important limiting phrase - focus ONLY on these things. Use them as a lens to highlight the differences between acute and chronic pain.

Tip : Assignments that ask you to compare two things can be structured in different ways. You may choose to alternate continually between the two things, making direct comparisons and organising your essay according to themes. Alternatively, you may choose to discuss one thing fully and then the next. If you choose the second approach, you must make the links and comparisons between the two things completely clear. 

With reference to any particular example enzyme, outline the key structural and functional properties of its active site

With reference to any particular example enzyme  - Important limiting phase - focus your answer on a specific example. Use this example to help demonstrate your understanding. 

Outline  - Factual description is needed. You must demonstrate your knowledge and understanding. 

The key structural and functional properties of its active site  - Subject matter

Tip : Assignments that ask you to outline or describe are assessing your understanding of the topic. You must express facts clearly and precisely, using examples to illuminate them. 

There is no convincing evidence for the existence of life outside our solar systems

There is  - Task words not so obvious this time. Try turning the title into a question: 'Is there any convincing evidence for...?'

Convincing  - Important limiting word- there may be evidence but you need to assess whether or not it is convincing. 

For the existence of life outside of our solar system  - Subject matter

Tip : Assignment titles that are on actually a question are often simply asking 'how true is this statement?' You must present reasons it could be true and reasons it might not be, supported by evidence and recognising the complexity of the statement. 

To what extent can nuclear power provide a solution to environmental issues?

Discuss  - Explore the topic from different angles, in a critical way (not purely descriptive)

Nuclear power  - Subject matter

Provide a solution to  - Limiting phrase: discuss ways it can and ways it can't- don't be afraid to take a position based on evidence.

Environmental issues  - Subject matter. Might be an idea to define/ discuss what could be meant by environmental issues? This might be important for your argument. 

Tip : If an assignment is asking a direct question, make sure your essay answers it. Address it directly in the introduction, make sure each paragraph contributes something towards your response to it, and reinforce your response in your conclusion. 

Discuss the issue of patient autonomy in relation to at least one case study 

The issue of patient autonomy  - Subject matter

In relation to at least one case study  - Important limiting phrase - don't just discuss the issue of patient autonomy in general; discuss it in the context of one or more case studies. You should use the case study to illustrate all of your points about patient autonomy. 

Tip : Assignments that ask you to discuss in relation to a case study, or to a placement or own experience, usually want to see a clear link between theory and practice (reality). 

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• Last Updated: Nov 13, 2023 4:28 PM
• URL: https://libguides.bham.ac.uk/asc/understandingassignments

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Definition of assignment noun from the Oxford Advanced American Dictionary

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Essays: task words

Written Assignments

Explore what different task words mean and how they apply to your assignments

You'll need to understand what your assignments are asking you to do throughout your studies. Your assessments use 'task words' that explain what you need to do in your work.  

Task words are the words or phrases in a brief that tell you what to do. Common examples of task words are 'discuss', 'evaluate', 'compare and contrast', and 'critically analyse'. These words are used in assessment marking criteria and will showcase how well you've answered the question.

None of these words have a fixed meaning. Your lecturers may have specific definitions for your subject or task so you should make sure you have a good idea of what these terms mean in your field. You can check this by speaking to your lecturer, checking your course handbook and reading your marking criteria carefully.

Task words and descriptions

• Account for : Similar to ‘explain’ but with a heavier focus on reasons why something is or is not the way it is.
• Analyse : This term has the widest range of meanings according to the subject. Make a justified selection of some of the essential features of an artefact, idea or issue. Examine how these relate to each other and to other ideas, in order to help better understand the topic. See ideas and problems in different ways, and provide evidence for those ways of seeing them. 
• Assess : This has very different meanings in different disciplines. Measure or evaluate one or more aspect of something (for example, the effectiveness, significance or 'truth' of something). Show in detail the outcomes of these evaluations.
• Compare : Show how two or more things are similar.
• Compare and contrast : Show similarities and differences between two or more things.
• Contrast : Show how two or more things are different.
• Critically analyse : As with analysis, but questioning and testing the strength of your and others’ analyses from different perspectives. This often means using the process of analysis to make the whole essay an objective, reasoned argument for your overall case or position.
• Critically assess : As with “assess”, but emphasising your judgments made about arguments by others, and about what you are assessing from different perspectives. This often means making the whole essay a reasoned argument for your overall case, based on your judgments.
• Critically evaluate : As with 'evaluate', but showing how judgments vary from different perspectives and how some judgments are stronger than others. This often means creating an objective, reasoned argument for your overall case, based on the evaluation from different perspectives.
• Define : Present a precise meaning. 
• Describe : Say what something is like. Give its relevant qualities. Depending on the nature of the task, descriptions may need to be brief or the may need to be very detailed.
• Discuss : Provide details about and evidence for or against two or more different views or ideas, often with reference to a statement in the title. Discussion often includes explaining which views or ideas seem stronger.
• Examine : Look closely at something. Think and write about the detail, and question it where appropriate.
• Explain : Give enough description or information to make something clear or easy to understand.
• Explore : Consider an idea or topic broadly, searching out related and/or particularly relevant, interesting or debatable points.
• Evaluate : Similar to “assess”, this often has more emphasis on an overall judgement of something, explaining the extent to which it is, for example, effective, useful, or true. Evaluation is therefore sometimes more subjective and contestable than some kinds of pure assessment.
• Identify : Show that you have recognised one or more key or significant piece of evidence, thing, idea, problem, fact, theory, or example.
• Illustrate : Give selected examples of something to help describe or explain it, or use diagrams or other visual aids to help describe or explain something.
• Justify : Explain the reasons, usually “good” reasons, for something being done or believed, considering different possible views and ideas.
• Outline : Provide the main points or ideas, normally without going into detail.
• Summarise : This is similar to 'outline'. State, or re-state, the most important parts of something so that it is represented 'in miniature'. It should be concise and precise.
• State : Express briefly and clearly. 

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Word through the times

Looking to the Past for Early Meanings of Nostalgia

Before it reminded us of the glory days, nostalgia was a medical condition involving severe homesickness.

By Sarah Diamond

In Word Through The Times, we trace how one word or phrase has changed throughout the history of the newspaper.

In 1898, The New York Times reported that an American soldier had died from a disease so rare that it caused “considerable comment among physicians”: nostalgia. According to a medical authority quoted in The Times, nostalgia was “a form of melancholy brought about by an unsatisfied longing for home.”

As a medical condition, nostalgia was likened to severe homesickness. Those suffering from it — often, soldiers — were consumed by sadness; some would lose their appetite; others would become weak or lethargic. Most accounts trace the word’s origin to 1688, when Johannes Hofer used it in his medical dissertation to describe an affliction affecting Swiss mercenaries . The term permeated continents and warfare over the next two centuries; much has been written about nostalgia during the Civil War.

Over the next few decades, according to Clay Routledge , a psychologist who studies nostalgia, the condition’s symptoms were folded into the diagnostic criteria of other mental health disorders, including depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.

By the 20th century, the definition of “nostalgia” had broadened to mean an everyday feeling of sentimentality or longing, the etymologist Grant Barrett said in an interview. He attributed this to “semantic weakening,” a process in which a word loses intensity.

Examples of this softer meaning began to appear in The Times. In 1933, an article considered a yearning for the Victorian Age: “A strange and inconsistent dualism is noted in the trend of today,” the article began. “Along with on-sweeping modernism is a looking backward, a nostalgia, for a bygone age.” In 1948, The Times published an article with the headline “Nickel Nostalgia,” which recalled memories of “the good old days,” when five cents were enough to buy “a good cigar.”

Nostalgia eventually became linked with happy memories. In 2006, when usage of the word peaked in the pages of The Times, a reader shared that she had read a Times recipe for macaroni and cheese “with pleasure and nostalgia,” as it reminded her of her childhood.

Over the decades, brands co-opted the fuzzy feeling of nostalgia. Articles in the 1970s explored the “business world of nostalgia,” which included “books about old movie stars,” and a company that put “Memory Lane” programing on the radio. This February, The Times reported that Volkswagen was “trying to tap some of that nostalgia” to increase sales of the Beetle and Microbus, both popular in the 1960s.

Sometimes, the past can look different through nostalgia’s lens. Last month, The Morning explored “voter nostalgia.” With a few years’ distance from Donald J. Trump’s presidency, some voters’ opinions of him had improved. This “nostalgia bump” was evident in recent polling.

While nostalgia was once a cause for concern, research from the past two decades suggests that it can actually be good for you. Studies conducted by Mr. Routledge and other researchers have found that people grow nostalgic when they face unpleasant emotional states. “From this perspective, nostalgia can be thought of as a psychological defense mechanism that we turn to when life gets difficult,” he said in an interview. During the early months of the coronavirus pandemic, for example, The Times reported that nostalgia acted as an “emotional pacifier.”

These days, swapping stories of the past and finding communal comfort in nostalgia is harmless. As Mr. Barrett put it, “No one is worried because Mom got out the yearbook.”

Sarah Diamond is a Times audio producer, based in New York. She also writes a biweekly column, Word Through The Times . More about Sarah Diamond

More From Forbes

Nyt ‘strands’ hints, spangram and answers for tuesday, may 21.

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Looking for Monday’s Strands hints, spangram and answers? You can find them here:

Tuesday has arrived and with it, one of the more tricky Strands puzzles I’ve seen. Even solving it, I’m still not 100% sure it makes sense, but I sort of get what they’re going for, at least. But first...

How To Play Strands

The New York Times’ Strands puzzle is a play on the classic word search. It’s in beta for now, which means it’ll only stick around if enough people play it every day.

There’s a new game of Strands to play every day. The game will present you with a six by eight grid of letters. The aim is to find a group of words that have something in common, and you’ll get a clue as to what that theme is. When you find a theme word, it will remain highlighted in blue.

You’ll also need to find a special word called a spangram. This tells you what the words have in common. The spangram links two opposite sides of the board. While the theme words will not be a proper name, the spangram can be a proper name. When you find the spangram, it will remain highlighted in yellow.

The Best Gaming Laptops Under $1,000: Boost Your Games For Less

Every letter is used once in one of the theme words and spangram. You can connect letters vertically, horizontally and diagonally, and it’s possible to switch directions in the middle of a word. If you’re playing on a touchscreen, double tap the last letter to submit your guess.

If you find three valid words of at least four letters that are not part of the theme, you’ll unlock the Hint button. Clicking this will highlight the letters that make up one of the theme words.

Be warned: You’ll need to be on your toes. Sometimes you’ll need to fill the missing word(s) in a phrase. On other days, the game may revolve around synonyms or homophones. The difficulty will vary from day to day, and the puzzle creators will try to surprise you sometimes.

What Is Today’s Strands Hint?

We will first begin with the official Strands hint for the day, and then I will craft one of my own, as I think you’re going to need some guidance for this one. The official hint today is:

And my own hint will be:

Non-alcoholic

That will make sense in a minute but I think it will at least avoid pointing you in the wrong direction.

What Are Today’s Strands Answers?

Now will we move on to the spoilery answer part of things, first with the spangram and then with the full list of answers below that. Again, this is a pretty weird one:

And this is where you will find that on the board:

And here is the list of answers that will wrap themselves around both sides of the spangram:

Alright so you get it now, these are all computer-based things, but they don’t really go together as you will find things like HISTORY for instance buried pretty deep inside the internet browser as it’s not on the top bar. stuff like EDIT and FILES are instead in like, a word document, not an internet browser. I can’t even remember what has WINDOW as an actual menu item on it.

What’s funny is that you could apply At the Bar and Menu Items to both computer stuff and food. I also thought At the Bar might apply to some sort of law-based clues, especially since the first one I found was FILES which would have made sense. But nope.

This was a tough one, and sort of weird based on the clue and spangram where some of these still don’t add up. As such, I used a ton of hits today.

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What is the meaning of the word 'eclipse'? Here is its origin ahead of April 8 event.

Where does a solar eclipse get its name? Why is it called an "eclipse"?

As Michiganders prepare for the viewing of the solar eclipse on April 8, 2024 - which is crossing a large swath of the United States, including a small sliver of southeast Michigan - let's delve into the etymology of the word "eclipse."

Why is it called an 'eclipse'?

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The term "eclipse" traces its roots to the Latin  “eclipsis,”  drawn from the Greek  “ekleipsis.”  That Greek noun is related to the verb  “ekleipein,”  consisting of  “ek”  (meaning “from”) and  “leipein”  (meaning “to leave”). So literally,  eclipse  means “to fail to appear” or “to abandon an accustomed place.”

The sun and moon are hidden from sight in lunar and solar eclipses.

More: Detroit's last total solar eclipse was more than 200 years ago: What the city was like then

The Greeks built on Babylonian astronomy to make their observations of eclipses, and the word  “ekleipsis”  appears as early as the fifth century B.C. in Thucydides’s history of the Peloponnesian War, according to the Wall Street Journal .

The noun and verb “eclipse” came to be used more metaphorically by the late 16th century, to describe someone or something being surpassed or overshadowed.

In other customs, early writings show evidence of people trying to make sense of eclipses around the world. In Chinese the term for eclipse is "shi," which translates to "eat," and correlates with the mythological explanation of a dragon eating the sun.

Eclipses also have inspired fear and awe among civilizations throughout history , from the Aztecs to the ancient Hindus. They're also associated with some major religious events, including the darkness that accompanied Jesus’ crucifixion in Christianity and, in Islam, the passing of the Prophet Muhammad’s son, Ibrahim.

What is a solar eclipse?

Solar eclipses occur when the moon passes directly between the sun and Earth’s orbits , creating an eclipse of Earth’s view of the sun.

The path of totality is the predicted path of the eclipse from Mexico, through the U.S. across Texas and North America to the coast of Newfoundland, Canada. The expected duration of totality is around 4 hours, starting around 11:07 a.m. PDT and ending around 5:16 NDT.

States  in the path of totality  for the 2024 solar eclipse include Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine.

In Michigan, a small sliver of southeast Monroe County is in the path of totality, meaning the sky will get dark as the moon crosses the sun.

USA TODAY contributed.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: What is the meaning of the word 'eclipse'? Here is its origin ahead of April 8 event.

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The Argentine star talks performing with Karol G, the importance of taking care of your mental health and more.

By Isabela Raygoza

Isabela Raygoza

Associate Editor, Billboard Español

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Omar Geles, Latin Grammy-Nominated Vallenato Singer, Dies at 57

Nathy peluso.

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“I wanted a word that had many meanings, something rough and strong that people could take ownership of, even redefine after listening to the album,” she adds. “Something that also seemed ironic to me, with a touch of humor, is that in Argentine slang, grasa means something very concrete and vulgar.”

This vision is evident throughout the album’s 16 tracks, which seamlessly blend elements of rap, salsa, soul and acoustic melodies. Her approach to creating it was driven by intuition and a desire to capture raw emotion. “The collaborations on this album came from the heart,” she explains. “I never strategize these things; it’s always about the connection and the feeling.”

This authenticity shines through in the ballad of “El Día Que Perdí Mi Juventud” featuring Blood Orange, and the glitchy, electronic-driven “Todo Roto” with Ca7triel & Paco Amoroso, where the synergy between artists enhances the impact of the music.

Beyond the collaborative efforts, Grasa holds a deeply personal significance for Peluso, who delves into themes of mental health with unapologetic honesty. “All humans have to take care of our minds,” she insists. “It is our pillar, what anchors us and what makes us be better every day.”

During her chat with Billboard, the artist also shares what it was like to perform with Karol G in during the Mañana Será Bonito Tour in Peluso’s native Argentina. “She is very generous. She invited me to play in Buenos Aires, which meant a lot to me,” she says. “[It was] the first time we sang ‘Gato malo,’ the song we have had together for years. We had never played it together in person, and it was super special.”

Watch the full interview above.

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Is Zionism patriotism or racism? Big disagreements over a word in use for 125 years

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In the many debates over language surrounding the war in Gaza, few words are as controversial as “Zionism.”

Its original, most basic definition is Jewish nationalism.

For many, that equates to the right of the Jewish people to have their own state and self-determination in an ancestral homeland after centuries of oppression and ostracism in much of the world. They view anti-Zionism as a fig leaf for bigotry and antisemitism .

For others, Zionism is a form of modern-day colonialism or racist manifest destiny — the attempt to justify the seizure of contested land in the name of God.

Here’s a review of the history of the word and how competing definitions are inflaming the debate over the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip.

Where did the term come from?

The term “Zionism” first came into use in the late 1800s. It built upon “Zion,” a biblical term for Israel and Jerusalem, and the name of a site in Jerusalem where the temple most historically revered in Judaism was constructed millennia ago.

Its use was championed by a Jewish Austro-Hungarian journalist, Theodor Herzl, at the turn of the 19th century. He made it the label of a movement to send European Jews to an area eventually known as British Mandate Palestine so they could begin forming a Jewish homeland.

Outraged by what he considered the dangerous and prejudicial treatment of fellow Jews in Vienna in the late 19th century, Herzl, trained as a lawyer and a prolific writer, established the Zionist Organization, which explored the mission of creating a Jewish state. The organization eventually had branches in several European cities and attempted to lobby the mostly royal rulers of the day to make the dream of statehood come true.

“Perhaps our ambitious young men, to whom every road of advancement is now closed, and for whom the Jewish state throws open a bright prospect of freedom, happiness, and honor, perhaps they will see to it that this idea is spread,” Herzl wrote in a pamphlet called “Der Judenstaat” (the Jewish State), which outlined his vision and led to his Zionist movement. It was published in 1896.

Considered the father of political Zionism, Herzl did not live to see a Jewish state. He died of heart disease in 1904.

Did Zionism always envision statehood for Jews in what is now Israel?

In the hearts of most early-day Zionists like Herzl, the ideal was to create their Jewish state in the land between what is now Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea. Yet there were other ideas.

In 1903, British colonial rulers in Africa floated the so-called Uganda plan, which would have offered a section of the East Africa Protectorate as a homeland for Jews. (The land would eventually become part of modern-day Kenya.) Some of Herzl’s followers were willing to consider this, but a visit to survey the land found it to be inhospitable.

The Soviet Union proposed a Soviet Jewish Republic in Crimea, Ukraine; Italian fascists proposed a settlement in Italian East Africa. The Nazis at one point proposed shipping Jews to Madagascar. All of those plans were rooted more in ridding the continent of Jews than in giving them a homeland.

In 1947, after World War II, the United Nations General Assembly officially partitioned British Mandate Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab one; the latter was never established. Arab powers in the region rejected the decision and not long after were at war with the new state of Israel.

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How did the concept of anti-Zionism evolve in Soviet Russia?

In the years after Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, many Russian Jews supported and participated in the country that became known as the Soviet Union. Initially, the Soviet Union was favorable to Zionism and the creation of an Israeli state.

But strains of anti-Jewish hatred that had long raged in Imperial Russia and led to waves of pogroms in the 18th and 19th centuries, as well as discriminatory residency and employment laws from Moscow to St. Petersburg, continued to permeate sectors of Soviet society.

As the years went on, and it became clear after World War II that the emerging Israel was going to hitch its wagon to the United States and the West, anti-Zionism became a more formal policy in the Soviet Union.

(The U.S. under President Truman was the first major power to recognize Israel, in 1948; Russia did the same, but Stalin reversed the decision within a year.)

Russia was home to tens of thousands of Jews, and for decades Soviet authorities refused to permit them to emigrate to Israel.

What was ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’?

One of the most notorious pieces of writing aimed at spreading hate and fear of Jews, “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” was published in Russia in the early 1900s.

It was a fake document that purported to prove that Jews were a cabal sneakily trying to control the world through financial institutions, media and other centers of power. Though the text has been soundly and repeatedly discredited, copies still exist, and some of its portrayals of Jews remain frequent antisemitic tropes today.

What did Zionism come to mean for Jewish people — then and now?

Zionism to many Jewish people means, essentially, patriotism: a political ideology rooted in the establishment — and, later, promotion — of a refuge for Jews who throughout history had to escape pogroms, then a Holocaust aimed at wiping them out.

The Anti-Defamation League defines the concept this way: “Zionism is the movement for the self-determination and statehood for the Jewish people in their ancestral homeland, the land of Israel. The vast majority of Jews around the world feel a connection or kinship with Israel, whether or not they explicitly identify as Zionists, and regardless of their opinions on the policies of the Israeli government.”

There is not consensus, however, among Jews today over the precise definition of Zionism.

For many, it underpins Israel’s right to exist. For the more extreme, such as settlers occupying the West Bank and East Jerusalem land claimed by Palestinians, it is used to justify Jewish control of all the land, including the West Bank and Gaza Strip .

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How do others view Zionism?

Over time, the definition and use of the word evolved and took on negative tones among critics of Israel. The U.N. formally declared Zionism a form of racism in a 1975 resolution, which it revoked 16 years later .

To Palestinians displaced by an emerging Israel, Zionism came to symbolize racism and exclusion from what they viewed as their homeland.

Is being anti-Zionist antisemitic?

On this question, there is abundant disagreement.

Many critics of Israel or Israeli government policy say opposing the expansion of the country’s control over land claimed by Palestinians is not an anti-Jewish or antisemitic position but one of fairness.

Yet many Jews would say denying their right to an unfettered homeland is indeed antisemitic. They say it is clear that the term “anti-Zionist” is being embraced by some anti-Israel demonstrators at U.S. college campuses as a politically correct cover for antisemitic intent.

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How has the term been used at campus protests?

At hundreds of pro-Palestinian protests on university campuses in recent weeks, the terms “Zionism” or “Zionist” have been hurled disparagingly against Jewish students and pro-Israel demonstrators.

At UCLA this month , demonstrators stopped Jewish students at checkpoints and demanded menacingly: “Are you a Zionist?” Some said protesters of any faith were welcome but not “Zionists”; one told The Times the word refers to those who adhere to “a very violent, genocidal political ideology that is actively endangering people in Gaza.”

A group of Jewish students at Columbia University — where demonstrations were intense and led to police being called onto the Manhattan campus to break up pro-Palestinian encampments — wrote an open letter this month expressing dismay at the way the term was being bandied about.

“We proudly believe in the Jewish people’s right to self-determination in our historic homeland as a fundamental tenet of our Jewish identity,” the letter, signed by several hundred students, stated. “Contrary to what many have tried to sell you — no, Judaism cannot be separated from Israel. Zionism is, simply put, the manifestation of that belief.

“We are proud to be Jews, and we are proud to be Zionists,” the students wrote.

In many cases, it seems that the competing definitions have made use of such a misunderstood word problematic.

Ned Lazarus, an international affairs professor at George Washington University in the nation’s capital, said “Zionism” is now used as a litmus test by both sides with an array of sometimes contradictory criteria and components, erupting into a war of narratives and becoming weaponized.

“It should be a question to open a conversation,” Lazarus said, “not shut it down.”

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Tracy Wilkinson covers foreign affairs from the Los Angeles Times’ Washington, D.C., bureau.

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