Some Constraints on Possible Words

Abstract

This is based on a personal, archaic version of an analysis of word meaning using semantic primitives, one that is far from adequate, but, perhaps, suggestive: it is clear that there are constraints on what kinds of "meanings" words can have, and that there are reasons why, for instance, there is no verb of any human language with 9, or even 5 "arguments", etc. but there is still no consensus, in 2011, on most of the relevant questions.An attempt to formulate constraints on possible senses of certain English words, in a generative approach, such as the maximum depth of embedding of "semantic primes", number of arguments, etc