UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 9 (1997)
The mapping between the mental and the
public lexicon
DAN SPERBER & DEIRDRE WILSON
This paper considers the possible relations between mental concepts and public words, and
argues
that there are many more concepts in our minds than words in the language we speak. These
concepts may be both stable and communicable without being encoded in words. The concept
communicated by use of a word on a given occasion may go well beyond the concept
encoded.
We show how these facts provide evidence against a code theory of communication and in
favour
of an inferential theory (relevance theory) whose implications for lexical semantics and
pragmatics
are briefly explored.
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