間 JH OUT culture, where the use ot dictionaries 1S WideSDread。many
people may have the impression that a word's meaning is simply its dictionary
definition.A little thought should show however, that there must be more to
meaning than this. It is true that when someone wants to find out what き
Word means, an easy and practical way to do it is to look the word up ina
dicionary. Most people in our caltare accept dictionaries as providing
unauestionably authoritative accounts of the meanings of the words they
define.
[2] Thenoleof dictionaries/ in our society as authorities on meaning
1eads many people to feel that the dicionary dehnition of a word more
accurately represents the word's meaning than does an individual speaker's
nderstanding of the word. Keep in mind/ however。 that the people who
write dictionaries arrive at their definitions by studying the ways speakers of
the language use different words. Some dictionaries are relatively
prescriptive\、 others more descriptive* but all must face the fact that a word
means what people use it to mean。 There simply is no higher authority than
the general community of native speakers of the language. This is obyiously
the position one must take in descriptive analysis、 but even in prescriptive
grammar, words cannot be given strange defimitions that dont correspond to
actual uses of those words by the speech community. A word's meaning is
determined by the people who use that word, not by a dictionary-
[3] The iqea that a dictionary definition is all there is to a word's
meaning runs into even more serious problems when one considers that im
order to understand the dictionary definition of a word, one must know the
meanings of the words used in that definition: For example. 下 the word
ecfo7xere is defined as 'a blastomere that develops into ectoderm'、one must
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