The Words We Say

Why do we say what we say the way we say it?

This paper seeks answer to the question why exactly we say what we say the way we say it. Although Giora (1997, 2003) argued that cognitively prominent salient meanings, rather than literal meanings, play the most important role both in production and comprehension of language, most attention in pragmatics research has been focused on comprehension rather than production. This paper claims that...

we say what we mean and we mean what we say

[no abstract available]

What Homophones Say about Words

The number of potential meanings for a new word is astronomic. To make the word-learning problem tractable, one must restrict the hypothesis space. To do so, current word learning accounts often incorporate constraints about cognition or about the mature lexicon directly in the learning device. We are concerned with the convexity constraint, which holds that concepts (privileged sets of entitie...

What do we mean when we say an operation works?

At a conference the other day, while hotly debating the role of hip arthroscopic surgery in the management of osteoarthritis, a friend and colleague announced to the assembled throng, 'We know that hip arthroscopy doesn't work'. You would not have expected the Editor-in-Chief of this journal to remain silent at that moment and I certainly was not. However, what the statement did highlight, of c...

What Do We Mean When We Say "Collaboration"?