ABSTRACT
How do we represent the meaning of words? How do we organize our knowledge of the world? These are questions about the study of meaning, or semantics. In Chapter 10 we saw how the sentence-processing mechanism constructs a representation of the syntactic relations between words. Important as this stage might be, it is only an intermediate step towards the final goal of comprehension, which is constructing a representation of the meaning of the sentence that can be used for the appropriate purpose. Derivation of meaning is hence the ultimate goal of language processing-and meaning is the start of the production process. Having some effective means of being able to represent meaning is practically important, too: effective translation between languages depends on meaning, as does effective information storage and retrieval (as in intelligent search engines). In this chapter, I examine how the meanings of individual words are represented. In Chapter 12, we will see how we combine these meanings to form a representation of the meaning of the sentence and beyond.
