Word Meaning

To appear in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences, ed. by Patrick Hogan. — 13 p.Word meaning relates to the semantic value that is conventionally associated with individual lexical items, which is to say words. For instance, the English lexical form cat, which may have the phonetic realisation [kaet], is conventionally associated with a particular idea, namely an animate feline entity which has four legs, a tail, whiskers, and sounds miaow.