“Where is the bank?” or how to “find” different senses of a word

Abstract

This article highlights certain inconsistencies that exist in modern lexicography with respect to word meaning representation and proposes an alternative outlook on the nature of word meaning based on the principles of the functional linguo-anthropological theory. Through the case study of the lexeme bank, it has been demonstrated that word meaning can be presented as a more coherent structure if only the functional evaluative nature of language be taken into account more accurately while compiling a dictionary entry. The article defends the idea that the evaluative nature of human experience as a source of meaning in language determines the way lexical items behave in real texts and, therefore, demonstrates the necessity of abandoning basic principles of referential semantics (with its stress on objective features of referents as physical objects) in lexicographical descriptions.