Pullum, The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. "We want words to do more than they can.Samuel Butler, The Note-Books of Samuel Butler, 1912 Nevertheless there they are we have got to live with them, and the wise course is to treat them as we do our neighbours, and make the best and not the worst of them." We try to do with them what comes to very much like trying to mend a watch with a pickaxe or to paint a miniature with a mop we expect them to help us to grip and dissect that which in ultimate essence is as ungrippable as shadow. looked at how using big words (a classic strategy for impressing others) affects perceived intelligence. Julie Beck, "How to Look Smart." The Atlantic, September 2014 Put another way: simpler writing seems smarter." Counter-intuitvely, grandiose vocabulary diminished participants' impressions of authors' cerebral capacity. "It is obvious that the fundamental means which man possesses of extending his orders of abstractions indefinitely is conditioned, and consists in general in symbolism and, in particular, in speech. Words, considered as symbols for humans, provide us with endlessly flexible conditional semantic stimuli, which are just as 'real' and effective for man as any other powerful stimulus. They are the wildest, freest, most irresponsible, most un-teachable of all things. Of course, you can catch them and sort them and place them in alphabetical order in dictionaries. But words do not live in dictionaries they live in the mind. If you want proof of this, consider how often in moments of emotion when we most need words we find none. Yet there is the dictionary there at our disposal are some half-a-million words all in alphabetical order. But can we use them? No, because words do not live in dictionaries, they live in the mind. There beyond a doubt lie plays more splendid than Antony and Cleopatra poems lovelier than the 'Ode to a Nightingale' novels beside which Pride and Prejudice or David Copperfield are the crude bunglings of amateurs. Finally, Hebrew verb roots are shown to have robust morphological properties that bear no relation to meaning and little to phonology, leaving room for morphemes within a lexeme-based framework, but not as the basic meaningful atoms of language.It is only a question of finding the right words and putting them in the right order. Next comes evidence against the claim that newly derived words diverge from compositionality only because they are stored in memory. ABSL shows that a language can emerge very quickly in which lexemes are basic. Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL) is a new language that is compositional down to its smallest pieces, in which these pieces are lexemes. This article supports that hypothesis with evidence from syntax, lexical semantics, and morphology. The classical lexicalist hypothesis holds instead that the central basic meaningful constituents of language are not morphemes but lexemes. Most believe that the meanings of words are similarly compositionally derived from the meanings of their constituent morphemes. All linguists assume that the meaning of a complex syntactic expression is determined by its structure and the meanings of its constituents.
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