Do Word Meanings Exist

Abstract

1. IntroductionMy contribution to this discussion is to attempt to spread a little radical doubt.Since I have spent over 30 years of my life writing and editing monolingualdictionary definitions, it may seem rather odd that I should be asking, do wordmeanings exist? The question is genuine, though: prompted by some puzzling factsabout the data that is now available in the form of machine-readable corpora. Iam not the only lexicographer to be asking this question after studying corpusevidence. Sue Atkins, for example, has said “I don’t believe in word meanings”(personal communication).It is a question of fundamental importance to the enterprise of sensedisambiguation. If senses don’t exist, then there is not much point in tryingto ‘disambiguate’ them – or indeed do anything else with them. The veryterm disambiguate presupposes what Fillmore (1975) characterized as “checklisttheories of meaning.” Here I shall reaffirm the argument, on the basis of recentwork in corpus analysis, that checklist theories in their current form are at bestsuperficial and at worst misleading. If word meanings do exist, they do not exist asa checklist. The numbered lists of definitions found in dictionaries have helped tocreate a false picture of what really happens when language is used.Vagueness and redundancy – features which are not readily compatible with achecklist theory – are important design features of natural language, which mustbe taken into account when doing serious natural language processing. Wordsare so familiar to us, such an everyday feature of our existence, such an integraland prominent component of our psychological makeup, that it’s hard to see whatmysterious, complex, vague-yet-precise entities meanings are.2. Common SenseThe claim that word meaning is mysterious may seem counterintuitive. To take atime-worn example, it seems obvious that the nounbank has at least two senses:‘slope of land alongside a river’ and ‘financial institution’. But this line of argumentis a honeytrap. In the first place, these are not, in fact, two senses of a single word;