The Description of Meaning and its Principles

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is twofold, to test actual descriptions of meaning and to reassess the principles that govern semantic description. Testing is carried out on natural language paraphrases as found in The Longman Dictionary of Idioms (T. H. Long and D. Summers) and The Longman Dictionary of Phrasal Verbs (R. Courtney) and, while it constitutes a way of assessing the relevance of theoretical principles, these are examined in their own right, as scientific claims made in the framework of a semantic theory, in an attempt to capture all aspects of meaning description.