The ideal introduction for students of semantics, Lexical Meaning fills the gap left by more general semantics textbooks, providing the teacher and the student with insights into word meaning beyond the traditional overviews of lexical relations. The book explores the relationship between word meanings and syntax and semantics more generally. It provides a balanced overview of the main theoretical approaches, along with a lucid explanation of their relative strengths and weaknesses. After covering the main topics in lexical (...) meaning, such as polysemy and sense relations, the textbook surveys the types of meanings represented by different word classes. It explains abstract concepts in clear language, using a wide range of examples, and includes linguistic puzzles in each chapter to encourage the student to practise using the concepts. 'Adopt-a-Word' exercises give students the chance to research a particular word, building a portfolio of specialist work on a single word. (shrink)

Lexical Semantics is about the meaning of words. Although obviously a central concern of linguistics, the semantic behaviour of words has been unduly neglected in the current literature, which has tended to emphasize sentential semantics and its relation to formal systems of logic. In this textbook D. A. Cruse establishes in a principled and disciplined way the descriptive and generalizable facts about lexical relations that any formal theory of semantics will have to encompass. Among the topics covered in (...) depth are idiomaticity, lexical ambiguity, synonymy, hierarchical relations such as hyponymy and meronymy, and various types of oppositeness. Syntagmatic relations are also treated in some detail. The discussions are richly illustrated by examples drawn almost entirely from English. Although a familiarity with traditional grammar is assumed, readers with no technical linguistic background will find the exposition always accessible. All readers with an interest in semantics will find in this original text not only essential background but a stimulating new perspective on the field. (shrink)

This is a book about the meanings of words and how they can combine to form larger meaningful units, as well as how they can fail to combine when the ...

Lexical ambiguity—the phenomenon of a single word having multiple, distinguishable senses—is pervasive in language. Both the degree of ambiguity of a word (roughly, its number of senses) and the relatedness of those senses have been found to have widespread effects on language acquisition and processing. Recently, distributional approaches to semantics, in which a word's meaning is determined by its contexts, have led to successful research quantifying the degree of ambiguity, but these measures have not distinguished between the ambiguity of (...) words with multiple related senses versus multiple unrelated meanings. In this work, we present the first assessment of whether distributional meaning representations can capture the ambiguity structure of a word, including both the number and relatedness of senses. On a very large sample of English words, we find that some, but not all, distributional semantic representations that we test exhibit detectable differences between sets of monosemes (unambiguous words; N = 964), polysemes (with multiple related senses; N = 4,096), and homonyms (with multiple unrelated senses; N = 355). Our findings begin to answer open questions from earlier work regarding whether distributional semantic representations of words, which successfully capture various semantic relationships, also reflect fine‐grained aspects of meaning structure that influence human behavior. Our findings emphasize the importance of measuring whether proposed lexical representations capture such distinctions: In addition to standard benchmarks that test the similarity structure of distributional semantic models, we need to also consider whether they have cognitively plausible ambiguity structure. (shrink)

This book presents a collection of chapters on the nature, flexibility and acquisition of lexical categories. These long-debated issues are looked at anew by exploring the hypothesis of lexical polycategoriality –according to which lexical forms are not fully, or univocally, specified for lexical category– in a wide number of unrelated languages, and within different theoretical and methodological perspectives. Twenty languages are thoroughly analyzed. Apart from French, Arabic and Hebrew, the volume includes mostly understudied languages, spoken in (...) New Guinea, Australia, New Caledonia, Amazonia, Meso- and North America. Resulting from a long-standing collaboration between leading international experts, this book brings under one cover new data analyses and results on word categories from the linguistic and acquisitional point of view. It will be of the utmost interest to researchers, teachers and graduate students in different fields of linguistics (morpho-syntax, semantics, typology), language acquisition, as well as psycholinguistics, cognition and anthropology. (shrink)

Luthra, Peraza-Santiago, Beeson, Saltzman, Crinnion, and Magnuson (2021) present data from the lexically mediated compensation for coarticulation paradigm that they claim provides conclusive evidence in favor of top-down processing in speech perception. We argue here that this evidence does not support that conclusion. The findings are open to alternative explanations, and we give data in support of one of them (that there is an acoustic confound in the materials). Lexically mediated compensation for coarticulation thus remains elusive, while prior data from (...) the paradigm instead challenge the idea that there is top-down processing in online speech recognition. (shrink)

The present study investigated whether humans are more likely to trust people who are coordinated with them. We examined a well-known type of linguistic coordination, lexical entrainment, typically involving the elaboration of “conceptual pacts,” or partner-specific agreements on how to conceptualize objects. In two experiments, we manipulated lexical entrainment in a referential communication task and measured the effect of this manipulation on epistemic and practical trust. Our results showed that participants were more likely to trust a coordinated partner (...) than an uncoordinated one, but only when the latter broke previously established conceptual pacts. (shrink)

Lexical semantics has become a major research area within computational linguistics, drawing from psycholinguistics, knowledge representation, computer algorithms and architecture. Research programmes whose goal is the definition of large lexicons are asking what the appropriate representation structure is for different facets of lexical information. Among these facets, semantic information is probably the most complex and the least explored.Computational Lexical Semantics is one of the first volumes to provide models for the creation of various kinds of computerised lexicons (...) for the automatic treatment of natural language, with applications to machine translation, automatic indexing, and database front-ends, knowledge extraction, among other things. It focuses on semantic issues, as seen by linguists, psychologists, and computer scientists. Besides describing academic research, it also covers ongoing industrial projects. (shrink)

We argue against the dominant view in the literature that concepts are modulated in lexical modulation. We also argue against the alternative view that ‘grab bags’ of information that don’t determine extensions are the starting point for lexical modulation. In response to the problems with these views we outline a new model for lexical modulation that dispenses with the assumption that there is a standing meaning of a general term that is modified in the cases under consideration. (...) In applying general terms we intend to conform with our linguistic ancestors and in doing so we take facts about the referents of these terms for granted. In cases of lexical modulation we become aware of facts we took for granted and we need to change the facts we take for granted in order to see ourselves as continuing in a practice. These changes result in utterances of the general term referring to different properties. In general, concepts are neither the starting point for lexical modulation nor the standing meanings of words. (shrink)

Lexical alignment, a communication phenomenon where conversational partners adapt their word choices to become more similar, plays an important role in the development of language and social communication skills. While this has been studied extensively in the conversations of preschool‐aged children and their parents in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) communities, research in other pediatric populations is sparse. This study makes significant expansions on the existing literature by focusing on alignment in naturalistic conversations of school‐aged children from (...) a non‐WEIRD population across multiple conversational tasks and with different types of adult partners. Typically developing children aged 5 to 8 years (n = 45) engaged in four semi‐structured conversations that differed by task (problem‐solving vs. play‐based) and by partner (parent vs. university student), resulting in a corpus of 180 conversations. Lexical alignment scores were calculated and compared to sham conversations, representing alignment occurring at the level of chance. Both children and adults coordinated their conversational utterances by re‐using or aligning each other's word choices. This alignment behavior persisted across conversational tasks and partners, although the degree of alignment was moderated by the conversational context. These findings suggest that lexical alignment is a robust phenomenon in conversations between school‐age children and adults. Furthermore, this study extends lexical alignment findings to a non‐WEIRD culture, suggesting that alignment may be a coordination strategy employed by adults and children across diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds. (shrink)

Lexical innovations (e.g., zero-derivations coined on the fly by a speaker) seem to bear semantic content. Yet, such expressions cannot bear semantic content as a function of the conventions of meaning in force in the language, since they are not part of its lexicon. This is in tension with the commonplace view that the semantic content of lexical expressions is constituted by linguistic conventions. The conventionalist has two immediate ways out of the tension. The first is to preserve (...) the conventionalist assumption and deny that lexical innovations bear semantic content. The second is to dynamicize the conventionalist assumption, that is, argue that presentations of unattested expressions trigger an augmentation of the standing semantic resources of the language and instantiate content as a result of this underlying update. Building on a comparison with the production of novel onomatopoeic words, iconic pseudowords and pro-speech gestures, the paper argues that the issue is best addressed by suspending the conventionalist assumption, and describes the metasemantic implications of the claim. (shrink)

Lexical Semantics in Ancient Egyptian. Edited by Eitan Grossman; Stéphane Polis; and Jean Winand. Lingua Aegyptia Studia Monographica, vol. 9. Hamburg: Widmaier Verlag, 2012. Pp. vi + 486. €69.

Some theories of practical reasons incorporate a lexical priority structure, according to which some practical reasons have infinitely greater weight than others. This includes absolute deontological theories and axiological theories that take some goods to be categorically superior to others. These theories face problems involving cases in which there is a non-extreme probability that a given reason applies. In view of such cases, lexical-priority theories are in danger of becoming irrelevant to decision-making, becoming absurdly demanding, or generating paradoxical (...) cases in which each of a pair of actions is permissible yet the pair is impermissible. (shrink)

This study investigates the child‐directed speech (CDS) of four Russian‐, six German, and six English‐speaking mothers to their 2‐year‐old children. Typologically Russian has considerably less restricted word order than either German or English, with German showing more word‐order variants than English. This could lead to the prediction that the lexical restrictiveness previously found in the initial strings of English CDS by Cameron‐Faulkner, Lieven, and Tomasello (2003) would not be found in Russian or German CDS. However, despite differences between the (...) three corpora that clearly derive from typological differences between the languages, the most significant finding of this study is a high degree of lexical restrictiveness at the beginnings of CDS utterances in all three languages. (shrink)

Frames, i.e., recursive attribute-value structures, are a general format for the decomposition of lexical concepts. Attributes assign unique values to objects and thus describe functional relations. Concepts can be classified into four groups: sortal, individual, relational and functional concepts. The classification is reflected by different grammatical roles of the corresponding nouns. The paper aims at a cognitively adequate decomposition, particularly, of sortal concepts by means of frames. Using typed feature structures, an explicit formalism for the characterization of cognitive frames (...) is developed. The frame model can be extended to account for typicality effects. Applying the paradigm of object-related neural synchronization, furthermore, a biologically motivated model for the cortical implementation of frames is developed. Cortically distributed synchronization patterns may be regarded as the fingerprints of concepts. (shrink)

In a series of papers, Donald Davidson :3–17, 1984, The philosophical grounds of rationality, 1986, Midwest Stud Philos 16:1–12, 1991) developed a powerful argument against the claim that linguistic conventions provide any explanatory purchase on an account of linguistic meaning and communication. This argument, as I shall develop it, turns on cases of what I call lexical innovation: cases in which a speaker uses a sentence containing a novel expression-meaning pair, but nevertheless successfully communicates her intended meaning to her (...) audience. I will argue that cases of lexical innovation motivate a dynamic conception of linguistic conventions according to which background linguistic conventions may be rapidly expanded to incorporate new word meanings or shifted to revise the meanings of words already in circulation. I argue that this dynamic account of conventions both resolves the problem raised by cases of lexical innovation and that it does so in a way that is preferable to those who—like Davidson—deny important explanatory roles for linguistic conventions. (shrink)

This study aims to resolve contradictory conclusions on the relative importance of lexical and syntactic knowledge in second language (L2) listening with evidence from academic English. It was hypothesized that when lexical and syntactic knowledge is measured in auditory receptive tasks contextualized in natural discourse, the measures will be more relevant to L2 listening, so that both lexical and syntactic knowledge will have unique contributions to L2 listening. To test this hypothesis, a quantitative study was designed, in (...) which lexical and syntactic knowledge was measured via partial dictation, an auditory receptive task contextualized in a discourse context. Academic English listening was measured via a retired IELTS listening test. A group of 258 college-level native Chinese learners of English completed these tasks. Pearson correlations showed that both lexical and syntactic measures correlated strongly with English listening (r =.77 and r =.67 respectively). Hierarchical regression analyses showed that both measures jointly explained 62% of the variance in the listening score and that each measure had its unique contribution. These results demonstrated the importance of considering construct representation substantially and using measures that well reflect constructs in practical research. (shrink)

An important question in early bilingual first language acquisition concerns the development of lexical-semantic associations within and across two languages. The present study investigates the earliest emergence of lexical-semantic priming at 18 and 24 months in Spanish-English bilinguals and its relation to vocabulary knowledge within and across languages. Results indicate a remarkably similar pattern of development between monolingual and bilingual children, such that lexical-semantic development begins at 18 months and strengthens by 24 months. Further, measures of cross-language (...) lexical knowledge are stronger predictors of children’s lexical-semantic processing skill than measures that capture single-language knowledge only. This suggests that children make use of both languages when processing semantic information. Together these findings inform the understanding of the relation between lexical-semantic breadth and organization in the context of dual language learners in early development. (shrink)

Language acquisition may be one of the most difficult tasks that children face during development. They have to segment words from fluent speech, figure out the meanings of these words, and discover the syntactic constraints for joining them together into meaningful sentences. Over the past couple of decades, computational modeling has emerged as a new paradigm for gaining insights into the mechanisms by which children may accomplish these feats. Unfortunately, many of these models assume a computational complexity and linguistic knowledge (...) likely to be beyond the abilities of developing young children. This article shows that, using simple statistical procedures, significant correlations exist between the beginnings and endings of a word and its lexical category in English, Dutch, French, and Japanese. Therefore, phonetic information can contribute to individuating higher level structural properties of these languages. This article also presents a simple 2‐layer connectionist model that, once trained with an initial small sample of words labeled for lexical category, can infer the lexical category of a large proportion of novel words using only word‐edge phonological information, namely the first and last phoneme of a word. The results suggest that simple procedures combined with phonetic information perceptually available to children provide solid scaffolding for emerging lexical categories in language development. (shrink)

Following much work in linguistic theory, it is hypothesized that the language faculty has a modular structure and consists of two basic components, a lexicon of (structured) entries and a computational system of combinatorial operations to form larger linguistic expressions from lexical entries. This target article provides evidence for the dual nature of the language faculty by describing recent results of a multidisciplinary investigation of German inflection. We have examined: (1) its linguistic representation, focussing on noun plurals and verb (...) inflection (participles), (2) processes involved in the way adults produce and comprehend inflected words, (3) brain potentials generated during the processing of inflected words, and (4) the way children acquire and use inflection. It will be shown that the evidence from all these sources converges and supports the distinction between lexical entries and combinatorial operations. (shrink)

It has recently been argued that public linguistic norms are implicated in the epistemology of testimony by way of underwriting the reliability of language comprehension. This paper argues that linguistic normativity, as such, makes no explanatory contribution to the epistemology of testimony, but instead emerges naturally out of a collective effort to maintain language as a reliable medium for the dissemination of knowledge. Consequently, the epistemologies of testimony and language comprehension are deeply intertwined from the start, and there is no (...) room for grounding the one in terms of the other. (shrink)

In a 2010 paper Daley argues, contra Fodor, that several syntactically simple predicates express structured concepts. Daley develops his theory of structured concepts within Tichý’s Transparent Intensional Logic . I rectify various misconceptions of Daley’s concerning TIL. I then develop within TIL an improved theory of how structured concepts are structured and how syntactically simple predicates are related to structured concepts.

Saffran, Newport, and Aslin (1996a) found that human infants are sensitive to statistical regularities corresponding to lexical units when hearing an artificial spoken language. Two sorts of segmentation strategies have been proposed to account for this early word‐segmentation ability: bracketing strategies, in which infants are assumed to insert boundaries into continuous speech, and clustering strategies, in which infants are assumed to group certain speech sequences together into units (Swingley, 2005). In the present study, we test the predictions of two (...) computational models instantiating each of these strategies i.e., Serial Recurrent Networks: Elman, 1990; and Parser: Perruchet & Vinter, 1998 in an experiment where we compare the lexical and sublexical recognition performance of adults after hearing 2 or 10 min of an artificial spoken language. The results are consistent with Parser’s predictions and the clustering approach, showing that performance on words is better than performance on part‐words only after 10 min. This result suggests that word segmentation abilities are not merely due to stronger associations between sublexical units but to the emergence of stronger lexical representations during the development of speech perception processes. (shrink)

Lexical ambiguity is pervasive in language, and the nature of the representations of an ambiguous word's multiple meanings is yet to be fully understood. With a special focus on Chinese characters, the present study first established that native speaker's perception about a character's number of meanings was heavily influenced by the availability of its distinct word formations, while whether these meanings would be perceived to be closely related was driven by further conceptual analysis. These notions were operationalized as two (...) computed metrics, which assessed the degree of dispersion across individual word formations and the degree of propinquity across clusters of word formations, respectively, in a distributional semantic space. The observed correlations between the computed and the perceived metrics indicated that the utility of word formations to tap into meaning representations of Chinese characters was indeed cognitively plausible. The results have demonstrated the extent to which distributional semantics could inform about meaning representations of Chinese characters, which has theoretical implications for the representation of ambiguous words more generally. (shrink)

Legal translation between English and Arabic is under researched. However, the growing need for it, due to immigration and asylum seeking, among other reasons, necessitates the importance of more research. The asymmetry between English and Arabic poses many difficulties for legal translators, be they linguistic-based, culture-specific or system-based. The aim of this research is to discuss ways of translating lexical items between English and Arabic. In this current discussion I will present, exemplify and analyse the common difficult areas of (...) translating English/Arabic legal texts and suggest ways of dealing with them. These areas involve culture-specific and system-based terms, archaic terms, specialised terms and doublets and triplets. With this aim in mind, the paper answers the following research questions: 1.What are the common difficulties of translating legal texts between English and Arabic? 2.What are the common lexical difficulties between English and Arabic legal texts? 3.What are the procedures of translating lexical legal terms between English and Arabic? The paper concludes that translating the above-mentioned lexical terms requires expertise, professional training, robust knowledge of the linguistic and legal systems of languages, as well as up-to-date electronic dictionaries and well-defined parallel corpora. (shrink)

How does a child rapidly acquire and develop a structured mental organization for the vast number of words in the first years of life? How does a bilingual individual deal with the even more complicated task of learning and organizing two lexicons? It is only until recently have we started to examine the lexicon as a dynamical system with regard to its acquisition, representation, and organization. In this article, I outline a proposal based on our research that takes the dynamical (...) approach to the lexicon, and I discuss how this proposal can be applied to account for lexical organization, structural representation, and competition within and between languages. In particular, I provide computational evidence based on the DevLex model, a self‐organizing neural network model, and neuroimaging evidence based on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies, to illustrate how children and adults learn and represent the lexicon in their first and second languages. In the computational research, our goal has been to identify, through linguistically and developmentally realistic models, detailed cognitive mechanisms underlying the dynamic self‐organizing processes in monolingual and bilingual lexical development; in the neuroimaging research, our goal has been to identify the neural substrates that subserve lexical organization and competition in the monolingual and the bilingual brain. In both cases, our findings lead to a better understanding of the interactive dynamics involved in the acquisition and representation of one or multiple languages. (shrink)

I present two criticisms: (1) Merge is a model of performance in speech perception experiments but not an ecologically valid model integrating both word recognition and speech perception, and (2) Merge's implementation of the variability of lexical effects must be made more precise or the model is indistinguishable from its alternatives.

In developmental lexical–gustatory synesthesia, specific words can trigger taste perceptions and these synesthetic associations are generally stable. We describe a case of multilingual lexical–gustatory synesthesia for whom some synesthesias were bidirectional as some tastes also triggered auditory word associations. Evoked concurrents could be gustatory but also tactile sensations. In addition to words and pseudowords, many voices were effective inducers, suggesting increased connections between cortical taste areas and both voice-selective and language-selective areas. Lasting changes in some evoked tastes occurred (...) during childhood suggesting that some plasticity can be present after the initial learning of associations. Inducers were often linked to taste concurrents phonologically or semantically, but also through identifiable childhood episodes . Several inducers were phonologically linked to episodic inducers suggesting a process of secondary acquisition for many inducers. Implications of these observations are discussed. (shrink)

A comprehensive measure of organizational culture was developed using a lexical approach, a method typically employed within the study of personality. 1761 adjectives were narrowed down and factor analyzed, which resulted in the identification of a nine factor solution to organizational culture, including the dimensions of: Innovative, Dominant, Pace, Friendly, Prestigious, Trendy, Corporate Social Responsibility, Traditional, and Diverse. Comprised of 135 adjectives most frequently used in describing organizational culture by current employees of several hundred organizations, the Lexical Organizational (...) Culture Scale (LOCS) was found to predict employee commitment, job satisfaction, job search behaviors, and subjective fit better than earlier scales of organizational culture. The study demonstrates that organizational culture measured using a lexical approach such as LOCS was a significant improvement to measuring Organizational Culture using traditional anthropomorphic measures of organizational culture. Scales for each of the nine factors identified in the lexical study are developed and validated. (shrink)

Lexical ambiguity presents one of the most intractable problems for language processing studies and, not surprisingly, it is at the core of research in lexical semantics. Originally published as two special issues of the Journal of Semantics, this collection focuses on the problem of polysemy, from the point of view of practitioners of computational linguistics.

Recently, Derek Parfit has offered a novel solution to the “Repugnant Conclusion” that compared with the existence of many people whose quality of life would be very high, there is some much larger number of people whose existence would be better but whose lives would be barely worth living. On this solution, qualitative differences between two populations will often entail that the populations are merely “imprecisely” comparable. According to Parfit, this fact allows us to avoid the Repugnant Conclusion without violating (...) the transitivity of better than. In this paper, I argue that Parfit’s view nevertheless implies two objectionable conclusions. The first is an alternative version of the Repugnant Conclusion that, Parfit suggests, may not be all that repugnant. The second is a revised version of the first that is nearly identical to the Repugnant Conclusion. I conclude that Parfit’s view offers no escape from repugnance. (shrink)

Preparing words in speech production is normally a fast and accurate process. We generate them two or three per second in fluent conversation; and overtly naming a clear picture of an object can easily be initiated within 600 msec after picture onset. The underlying process, however, is exceedingly complex. The theory reviewed in this target article analyzes this process as staged and feedforward. After a first stage of conceptual preparation, word generation proceeds through lexical selection, morphological and phonological encoding, (...) phonetic encoding, and articulation itself. In addition, the speaker exerts some degree of output control, by monitoring of self-produced internal and overt speech. The core of the theory, ranging from lexical selection to the initiation of phonetic encoding, is captured in a computational model, called WEAVER++. Both the theory and the computational model have been developed in interaction with reaction time experiments, particularly in picture naming or related word production paradigms, with the aim of accounting for the real-time processing in normal word production. A comprehensive review of theory, model, and experiments is presented. The model can handle some of the main observations in the domain of speech errors (the major empirical domain for most other theories of lexical access), and the theory opens new ways of approaching the cerebral organization of speech production by way of high-temporal-resolution imaging. (shrink)

The use of lexical signs like ‘knowledge’ has consequences. Not only do they have direct psychological resonances, but people ascribe beliefs and act based on their semantics. This paper proposes that such consequences are up for negotiation, and introduces a formal framework from financial theory to suggest constraints on those negotiations and implications of those constraints. The upshot is that changing language will be easier sometimes than others, and philosophers’ projects of linguistic change should be aware of those conditions.

What are the effects of word-by-word predictability on sentence processing times during the natural reading of a text? Although information complexity metrics such as surprisal and entropy reduction have been useful in addressing this question, these metrics tend to be estimated using computational language models, which require some degree of commitment to a particular theory of language processing. Taking a different approach, this study implemented a large-scale cumulative cloze task to collect word-by-word predictability data for 40 passages and compute surprisal (...) and entropy reduction values in a theory-neutral manner. A separate group of participants read the same texts while their eye movements were recorded. Results showed that increases in surprisal and entropy reduction were both associated with increases in reading times. Furthermore, these effects did not depend on the global difficulty of the text. The findings suggest that surprisal and entropy reduction independently contribute to variation in reading times, as these metrics seem to capture different aspects of lexical predictability. (shrink)

The question of when and how bottom‐up input is integrated with top‐down knowledge has been debated extensively within cognition and perception, and particularly within language processing. A long running debate about the architecture of the spoken‐word recognition system has centered on the locus of lexical effects on phonemic processing: does lexical knowledge influence phoneme perception through feedback, or post‐perceptually in a purely feedforward system? Elman and McClelland (1988) reported that lexically restored ambiguous phonemes influenced the perception of the (...) following phoneme, supporting models with feedback from lexical to phonemic representations. Subsequently, several authors have argued that these results can be fully accounted for by diphone transitional probabilities in a feedforward system (Cairns et al., 1995; Pitt & McQueen, 1998). We report results strongly favoring the original lexical feedback explanation: lexical effects were present even when transitional probability biases were opposite to those of lexical biases. (shrink)

Lexical views in population axiology can avoid the Repugnant Conclusion without violating Transitivity or Separability. However, they imply a dilemma: either some good life is better than any number of slightly worse lives, or else the ‘at least as good as’ relation on populations is radically incomplete. In this paper, I argue that Archimedean views face an analogous dilemma. I thus conclude that the lexical dilemma gives us little reason to prefer Archimedean views. Even if we give up (...) on lexicality, problems of the same kind remain. (shrink)