Looking for Unity in a Dictionary Entry

Abstract

The lexicographer’s engagement with a word is fundamentally a search for unity: a search for the essential idea that holds together a group of things (referents, concepts, senses, etc) that may not be straightforwardly united in the modern mother tongue that provides our metalanguage and our default assumptions. This chapter approaches the problem with the help of perspectives from prototype theory, one of the richest areas in the relatively young discipline of cognitive linguistics. Typically, work in this field is presented as a contribution to the understanding of meaning as such, of the workings of the mental lexicon as an aspect of the human language faculty. The use of prototype theory here will be more limited, avoiding any claims to truth-value and treating it as a sounding-board for new possibilities in modelling and describing the behaviour of words.