Joe to Chet in a discussion with him and Dick about the draft paper
defending 'unreal' words:
>> Are you writing what you mean?  If by calling up a concept you mean
>> there is no syntax involved, only semantics, what is your evidence?
>
>I'm glad you asked this because I think it's impossible
>to call up only semantics. I can only imagine that, when
>you call up any lexicalized concept, you activate to a
>greater or lesser extent its syntactic information. A good
>example of this is that you can get Romance speakers to
>call up grammatical gender even if they're experiencing
>a tip-of-the-tongue state with regard to the actual word.
## How interesting. Is this published research?  But what you say can't be
literally true, can it? "it's impossible to call up only semantics".  My
view has always been that the sense of a word is just an ordinary concept
(e.g. Bicycle). What you say implies that we can't think Bicycle without
also thinking the word BICYCLE; e.g. if I see someone on a bike I
automatically activate the word. Maybe you mean you can't activate the
semantics when in speaking mode without also activating the word?



Richard (= Dick) Hudson

Phonetics and Linguistics, University College London,
Gower Street, London WC1E  6BT.
+44(0)20 7679 3152; fax +44(0)20 7383 4108;
http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/home.htm