That's your personally biased belief. What any individual means is just that. There's no spooky action at a distance from the "community of fluent speakers" to tell you what word to use to mean what you want to mean. Otherwise, we couldn't show the creativity and inventiveness we do see in the use of words. Instead of your notion of meaning, there are individual meanings, each speaker more or less influenced by his personal experience in terms of linguistic interactions with other speakers. This views is good enough to explain how we use words. Your notion is a convenient fiction but it's a much less accurate representation of how things really work than the idea that a community of speech is just a group of people a liberty to interact linguistically and some memory.
EB
Hog...wash; hogwash!
Better than bull, eh.
No, the lexical definition reflects lexical meaning.
Poppycock.
Take the time to check with what dictionaries actually say before asserting poppycock.
Written definitions can be found in dictionaries.
Sure, and yet, different dictionaries, see a good example below, may disagree substantially, just as individual speakers may mean something different when they use a word.
Collins English Dictionary said:
lexical meaning n. (Linguistics) the meaning of a word in relation to the physical world or to abstract concepts, without reference to any sentence in which the word may occur. Compare grammatical meaning, content word
Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged, 12th Edition 2014 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2014
Webster's College Dictionary said:
lexical meaning n. the meaning of a base morpheme or word, independent of its use within a construction. Compare grammatical meaning. [1930–35]
Random House Kernerman Webster's College Dictionary, © 2010 K Dictionaries Ltd. Copyright 2005, 1997, 1991 by Random House, Inc. All rights reserved.
See?
Welcome to the real world.
And then the way you yourself use the expression "lexical meaning" is wrong.
The way you yourself use the expression "lexical meaning" isn't even in line with any of the two definitions above.
I think you are wrongly interpreting the term "lexical" in "lexical meaning" to connote "lexicon", when here it just connotes "words" ('items in a language").
The lexical meaning of a word is its root meaning as opposed to its meaning in context (or grammatical meaning). It's not a question that it is to be found in dictionaries.
You are also confusing the fact that dictionaries provide definitions meant to reflect usage with the idea that usage is what dictionaries say it is. But that's clearly not true as evidenced by the fact that different dictionaries can give substantially different definitions of the same word as in my example above.
You are also probably mistaking the expression "lexical meaning" with the expression "lexical definition", which seems to correspond to what you mean. See below:
Wiki "lexical definition" said:
The lexical definition of a term, also known as the dictionary definition, is the meaning of the term in common usage.
See?
If you want to learn what a word means, then you can be correctly taught how it's collectively used by fluent speakers, either by consulting a dictionary or someone who can relay how it's collectively used,
It necessarily wrong since words don't mean anything by themselves.
So all you will get in a dictionary is what the lexicographer believes how the word is used. But by whom is the word used? They don't say. If there is a bias, they won't tell you. And, there is necessarily a bias because dictionaries are commercial products, and they don't exist in a social or political vacuum. Look up old dictionaries. You'll see how biased they are.
not how Jimbob just so happens to use it and not by how you can use it similarly yet differently. I'm not denying individual usage, but individual usage in the here and now has no immediate bearing on lexical meaning.
You don't understand what I am saying.
I'm not saying that the correct meaning of a word is whatever John Doe will say it is. I dispute the fact that there is any correct meaning at all.
Different linguistic agents, from individuals to institutions, will influence the community of speakers as to how a word is used and since there is a multiplicity of agents, it is to be expected that the same word will be used substantially differently in various part of the community, down to individual speakers, but also by different institutions. To claim that individual speakers are always wrong is merely to side with the institutional power of the moment, which is both pathetic and mistaken. If you were correct, we wouldn't see any evolution in usage. We also wouldn't see the creativity and inventiveness people display in everyday use and yet understand each other well enough.
EB
