Lev Lafayette wrote:
...........snipmy reading of popular books on the subject finds a frustrating lack of content. Most books on linguistics tend to concentrate on logical semantics of sentence structure. Yes ; I thought that was what I said The area that you're looking at is the pragmatics of meaning generation, I am not to fussed by the name; I coined the word 'ontolexics' from Gk. onto: 'essence' and lexics:' words of the language'; for this area .........snip
Much of this has historically fallen into philosophy Presumably ontology ? rather than linguistics, primarily in "ordinary language philosophy" and hermeneutics. What do you intend by "hermeneutics." ?
Some examples that I found useful:
John Austin, "How to Do Things With Words", 1962. Paul Grice, "Studies in the Way of Words", 1989 W. Hollway, "Subjectivity and Method in Psychology", 1989 John Searle, "Speech Acts", 1969.
Hope this helps, Well if you could summarise the answers to : ""What kind of thing (ontologically) is a word ?" " What kind of thing is the definition of a word ? " What kind of thing and what is the purpose of the dictionary definition of a word ?;" that you found in these publications; I might be more inclined to check them out. These are not naive questions; I have my own theories and standpoints in this area; which I believe constitute an objectively falsifiable basis for selection of dictionary definitions.
regards Rohan McLeod