5.2: Word meanings as construals of external reality

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Words give us a way to describe the world. However, our linguistic descriptions are never complete. In choosing a word to describe a particular thing or event, we choose to express certain bits of information and leave many others unexpressed. For example, suppose that I am holding a rag in my right hand and moving it back and forth across the surface of a table. If you ask me what I am doing, I might reply with either (1a) or (1b).

(1) a. I am wiping the table.
b. I am cleaning the table.
c. I wiped/⁇cleaned the table but it is no cleaner than before.
d. I cleaned/#wiped the table without touching it.

In this situation, both (1a) and (1b) would be true descriptions of the event, but they do not mean the same thing. By choosing the word clean, I would be specifying a certain change in the state of the table, but leaving the manner unspecified. By choosing the word wipe, I would be specifying a certain manner, but not asserting anything about a change of state. The different entailments associated with these two verbs can be demonstrated using examples like (1c–d).

To take a second example, suppose that you have a large quartz crystal on your desk, which you use as a paperweight. If I want to look more closely at this object, I could ask for it by saying: May I look at your paperweight?; or by saying: May I look at that quartz crystal? Clearly the words paperweight and quartz crystal do not mean the same thing; but in this context they can have the same referent. The lexical meaning of each word includes features which are true of this referent, but neither word encodes all of the properties of the referent. The choice of which word to use reflects the speaker’s construal of (or way of thinking about) the object, and commits the speaker to certain beliefs but not others concerning the nature of the object.

In analyzing word meanings, we are trying to account for linguistically coded information, rather than all the encyclopedic knowledge (or knowledge about the world) which may be associated with a particular word. For example, the fact that a quartz crystal sinks in water is a fact about the world, but probably not a linguistic property of the word quartz. But we need to be aware that this distinction between linguistic knowledge vs. knowledge about the world is often difficult to make.