[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

if it doesn t want to. In particular, it doesn t have to claim that the
Chaps. 5 & 6 11/3/97 1:10 PM Page 109
Prototypes and Compositionality 109
inferences which constitute a concept s content are defined over its
constituent structure.
There may be several motivations for separating the question whether
(and which) inferences constitute content from the question whether
typical lexical concepts are structurally complex. Some philosophers do so
because they want to hold on to intuitions of analyticity in face of the
mounting empirical evidence that lexical concepts generally behave like
atoms by either linguistic or psychological criteria. And there s an
independent, semantical argument as well; it s known in the lexical
semantics literature as the  residuum problem .
In the most familiar cases, lexically governed inferences are supposed to
follow from definitions by an analogue to simplification of conjunction.
Thus,  bachelor entails unmarried because its definition is  male and
unmarried and the  and works in the usual truth-conditional way. This
treatment fits naturally with the idea that concepts are bundles of semantic
features, each of which express a property of the (actual or possible) things
that the concept subsumes.
Now, it s natural to assume that if there is a property corresponding to
the feature bundle  F1, F2, . . ., Fn , then there should also be a property
corresponding to the bundle  F1, F2, . . ., Fn 1 . So, for example, what s left
when you take the unmarried out of the definition of  bachelor is the
definition of  male ; and what s left when you take the male out of the
definition of  bachelor is the definition of  unmarried . Just as the result
of simplifying a conjunctive predicate is always itself a predicate, so the
result of simplifying a feature bundle is always itself a feature bundle.
But there are cases of lexically governed entailment which appear not
to follow this model;  red �! colour is a paradigm. According to the
definition story, this inference should be the simplification of a complex
concept (the definition of  red ) which has the form:  F1, . . .,
COLOUR, . . . ; but, on reflection, it s hard to see what could go in for
the  F1 . A male is something that is just like a bachelor but not necessarily
married; but what is just like red but not necessarily a colour? If you take
the  COLOUR out of the definition of  red , what you re left with doesn t
seem to be a possible meaning; the residuum of  red �! coloured is
apparently a surd. Or, to put it the other way round, it looks like the only
thing that could combine with  COLOURED to mean red is  RED . That,
however, can t be what the lexical semanticist is proposing. To have  RED
in the definition of  red would make  COLOUR redundant, since if
 RED means red, it thereby entails  COLOUR . If the definition of  red
includes RED, that s all it includes, so in effect the proposal that it does
concedes the concept to atomism.
It might be possible to treat such cases as mere curiosities specific to
Chaps. 5 & 6 11/3/97 1:10 PM Page 110
110 Prototypes and Compositionality
sensory concepts. It s sometimes suggested that they illustrate the presence
of an  iconic element in concepts like RED (see the discussion above of
Jackendoff 1992). Maybe  red means something like  similar in respect of
colour to this where the  this ostensively introduces a red sample. The
trouble with taking this line, however, is that the pattern RED and the like
exemplify actually appears to be quite general: lots of lexical concepts for
which definitions are very hard to find nevertheless appear to enter into the
same sort of  one way entailments that hold between  red and  colour .
It s plausible that  dog means animal, but there doesn t seem to be any F
(except DOG) such that  F + ANIMAL means dog.  Chair means
furniture, but what and FURNITURE means chair? Notice that it won t
do to appeal to  iconic elements in these non-sensory cases. Maybe  red
means  similar in colour to this , but  dog doesn t mean  similar in X to
this for any X that I can think of except doghood. It appears that, contrary
to traditional Empiricist doctrine, many lexical items are not independent
but not definable either;  red entails  colour but can t be defined in terms
of it.
A natural way to accommodate the residuum problem is to allow that
some content-constitutive inferences don t arise from definitions after all.
It s not that RED entails COLOUR because the definition of  red is
COLOUR & F; rather, RED just entails COLOUR full stop. Following [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]