ions have universal value, still requires the aid of instances, analogies and metaphors. The fewness of these abstractions saves the linguistic situation. If we employed, say, a hundred radically different types of connections (still a small number) the task of limiting the misunderstandings due to the variety in our references would have proved impossible. The fundamental connections being thu...

The world is too complex to manage without radical functional simplification. Meaning appears to exist as the basis for such simplification. The meaning that guides functional simplification may be usefully considered as consisting of three classes. The first class consists of meanings of the determinate world. These are meanings based in motivation, emotion, and personal and social identity. F...

Abstract Is conceptual engineering feasible? Answering that question requires a theory of semantic change, which is sometimes thought elusive. Fortunately, much known about change as it occurs in the wild. While usage chaotic and complex, changes word’s use can produce its meaning. There are several under-appreciated empirical constraints on how meanings stem from following observation: word fi...

Coercion effects, including aspectual ones, appear to indicate a modular grammatical architecture, in which the process of composition may add meanings absent in the syntax in order to ensure that certain functors, e.g., the progressive operator, receive suitable arguments (Herweg 1991, Jackendoff 1997, De Swart 1998). In this paper, coercion effects are instead taken as evidence for the existe...