7.15 Exercise your linguistics skills

Exercise 1. Basic; 7.5. Consider the category vehicle. List ten words that denote members of the vehicle category. Which ones are more prototypical, and which ones are less prototypical members of the category? Discuss what properties make something a more prototypical vehicle or a less prototypical vehicle. 

Exercise 2. Intermediate; 7.10. Imagine that someone said to you during a debate that drip to mean ‘style’ isn’t a “real word” because that kind of use isn’t found in the Oxford English Dictionary. How might you respond to them?

Exercise 3. Advanced; 7.4-7.9, 7.11. Discuss the pros and cons of each way of thinking about linguistic meaning.

1. Sense vs. denotation
2. “Lexical meaning as definitions in the lexicon” vs. “lexical meaning as concepts”