How words mean: Lexical concepts, cognitive models, and meaning construction (review)

Vyvyan Evans writes in the preface that his book is intended for general linguists, cognitive scientists, cognitive linguists, and the educated lay reader. It is not entirely clear, however, how all of these constituencies can be addressed simultaneously, since the background and detail necessary for each group vary. In fact, the book tries to address all of these audiences and ends up, I suspect, satisfying none of them.

Although the book is not an introduction to cognitive linguistics (which E has published in another book), many chapters are devoted to reviewing and explaining, often repetitively, the principles, major figures, and, in excruciating detail, the theoretical terms and apparatus of cognitive linguistics. This is unfortunate, because I believe the readers most interested in the novel content of the book would be cognitive linguists who need no such review and might not get to the final chapters where the author's view of word meaning and interpretation is finally explained. For other cognitive scientists (another target group), the book is too detailed and ponderous in the early going for them to get through. Furthermore, it does not provide an overview of the phenomenon it is attempting to explain, although such an overview could have been of great interest to cognitive scientists. Finally, I suspect that the general linguist would be able to get through the book well enough but would find the amount of linguistic insight to be small compared to the time and effort of reading it. In sum, I think that there is a shorter, more focused potential book—or perhaps multiple potential books—inside the present one, trying to get out. Instead, the author seems to have been afraid of omitting anything important, thereby making the book less useful for most audiences.

The early chapters discuss the basic problem of meaning variation across context, but the review of this phenomenon is limited. There is no discussion of different types of polysemy or the intriguing problem that some sense extensions are possible but others are not. For example, it is common to refer to a building by virtue of the organization that uses it, as in My church is made of stone, but not by the name of the people who live in it (*The Smiths burned down). It is common to use an author's name to refer to his or her work but not the publisher's name (I have been reading Dickens/*Knopf). In a book-length treatment of how words take on different meanings in different contexts, one would expect some mention of the limits on this phenomenon. One must wonder whether E's theory has any account of these well-known restrictions on meaning extensions.

An issue central to polysemy is how to tell whether two uses of a word involve different senses. E frequently cites examples as having different senses without explaining why he believes this. When senses correspond to differences in lexical structure (as they do in his theory), the theory has to tell us how to know when senses require separate listings. Some authors argue that we should minimize senses to keep the lexicon simple, whereas others argue that distinctions should be explicitly represented. This issue is important because in tilting toward the fewer-senses side, one is thereby simplifying the lexicon but making the interpretation process more difficult. And as one tilts toward the more-meanings side, one is making the lexicon much larger (and complicating acquisition) but making subsequent interpretation easier (Murphy 2007).

E does not address the question of how to tell when word uses constitute different senses, even though the book makes numerous assertions about what senses specific words have, and even though his theory assumes that there are distinct lexical concepts corresponding to different senses. Readers can only guess how the author knows that two uses constitute different senses and whether it makes any difference if they were to disagree with his analysis.

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