What is the lexical meaning of polemical terms
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21334937 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Antonin Thuns (0000-0002-9355-2132, Centre de recherche en linguistique LaDisco, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Bruxelles, Belgium, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 65 |
| Issue | 7 |
| Pages | 917-941 |
| Publication date | 2022-08-09 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Inquiry (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0020-174X • E-ISSN: 1502-3923 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/0020174x.2020.1801501 |
| OpenAlex | W3047163455 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 18 |
Polemical terms (democracy, semantics, pragmatics) constitute a special category of polysemous terms. Like all polysemous terms, their use evidences a plurality of conventionalised senses that are felt to be related to one another and, possibly, to a highly abstract core meaning. However, in contrast with ordinary polysemous terms such as rubbish or mouth, polemical terms have something ‘polemical’ about what counts as their primary sense, i.e. the one which is the most faithful to the ‘concept’ they express and to the ‘topic’ they pick out. This poses a challenge for theories that take speakers’ monosemic intuitions seriously and endorse the externalist thesis that it is speakers’ external environment that anchors word meaning in a univocal way. I consider Schroeter and Schroeter’s ‘connectedness model’, which offers an externalist dissociation between ‘concepts’ (taken to be aligned with word meanings) and the possibly diverging criteria used by speakers. I argue that the model can be adapted to tackle the problem of polemical terms, but only insofar as the assumption of alignment between externalistic concepts and lexical meanings is dropped. I submit that polemical terms do have an abstract core meaning, but of a more impressionistic than conceptual nature
Epistemology · Externalism · Linguistics · Meaning (existential) · Pragmatics · Semantics (computer science) · Computer Science · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Philosophy · Philosophy and Theoretical Science · Psychology · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
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Verbal Disputes
Individualism and the Mental
New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind
| Highly cited | No |
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