Lexical decomposition meets conceptual atomism

Abstract

Asking what can be a substantive word in natural language is closely related to asking what can be a basic lexical concept. However, studies on lexical concepts in cognitive psychology and philosophy and studies on the constitution of lexical items in linguistics have little contact with each other. We argue that current linguistic approaches that decompose lexical items into grammatical structures do not map naturally to plausible models of the corresponding concepts. In particular, we claim that roots, as the purported carriers of lexeme-specific content, cannot encapsulate the conceptual content of a lexical item. Instead, we distinguish syntactic from morphological roots: the former act as differential indices, and the latter are forms which may or may not correlate with a stable meaning. What expresses a lexical concept is a structure which can be of variable size. We explore the view that basic lexical items are syntactically complex but conceptually simplex, and that the structural meaning defined by a grammatical construction constrains the concept associated with it. This can lead to predictive hypotheses about the possible content of lexical items.