ABSTRACT
Selecting words allows us to distinguish different aspects of the world, but the relationship is not a simple one. It would be gratifying to believe that words reflect the form of language and that the world represents their content. The meaning of a word like thirst has the potential for yielding multiple Lexical Conceptual Structures (LCSs) only some of which might be relevant to its linguistic behavior. The LCS offers insight into the mapping between lexical representations and syntactic configurations. B. Boguraev talks about "The Definitional Power of Words," reflecting his work on building frames for knowledge representation from dictionary definitions. Judy Kegl addresses "The Boundary between Word Knowledge and World Knowledge." Her work entails applying linguistic knowledge to world knowledge to yield word knowledge. The world is complex and can be viewed from many different perspectives. Some of these will lend themselves well to the investigation of problems of word meaning, whereas others will only lead us into difficulties.
