ABSTRACT
The nature of the representation of concepts is a major issue in the cognitive sciences arena. Most, if not all, linguistic analyses of lexical concepts point to a decompositional view, based on distributional arguments and cross-linguistic data. Lexical-conceptual representations are thus said to be complex structures composed of semantic primitives and to be specified at some cognitively abstract (or linguistically "deep") level of representation (see, e.g., Jackendoff, 1990). Although this has been a pervasive assumption in the history of linguistics, there have been very few attempts to investigate it experimentally; and in all of them, researchers have failed to provide support for the decompositional approach (see Kintsch, 1974; Fodor, Fodor & Garrett, 1975; Fodor et al., 1980; Gergely & Bever, 1986).
