Abstract
Different philosophical, linguistic, and cognitive accounts have been proposed to describe the structure of the mental lexicon. In particular, the question about how lexical meanings are mentally represented and computed has been controversially discussed. We believe that most accounts add valuable information for drawing a valid cognitive map, but favor in particular the constructionist account. We emphasize here that lexical meanings are constructed based on a schematic mental space, and as such the mental lexicon can be considered as a highly dynamic and interactive system. This approach matches well with lexical network models. They assume that lexical meanings are computed in a 3D mental space taking account of a variety of different context information including schematic and common sense knowledge representations. We conclude that lexical meanings can be best described as internal mental states.
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Hillert, D. (2014). Lexical Concepts. In: The Nature of Language. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-0609-3_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-0609-3_7
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