ABSTRACT
Lexical field theories 1 were thought to display the organization of the lexicon at least at the level of contrastive word selection. 2 But no generalized theory of networking lexical fields (semantic fields) 3 was proposed for the overall organization of natural languages lexically, or to explain the similarity of lexical fields (with somewhat divergent members) across noncognate languages (e.g., words for kinship), or to explain field differences among languages (e.g., differences of words for weather, or time). Lexical field theory was developed unpretentiously and may have untested potentialities. Yet, those versions that postulate parallelverbal and “mental” lexicons will suffer most from accumulating evidence that our conceptual competence, in various respects, subsists in our linguistic competence and is not separate from it, even though it can in some cases survive damage to the word-producing portions of the brain.
