The boundary between word knowledge and world knowledge

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Abstract
I will focus my comments on linguistic considerations concerning the interrelation between words and world representation and will argue that word knowledge must be kept distinct from world knowledge. Knowing everything about a referent object or event with which a word is as- sociated is not enough to allow one to use a word appropriately. World knowledge must be sup- plemented and constrained by linguistic knowledge to yield an appropriate account of word knowledge. Let's start with a relatively straightforward example, one which is now so commonplace that I am unsure of who to cite for its introduction into the literature. Consider the word danceJdanser in both English and French. These cognates might at first glance appear to be al- most interchangeable glosses for one another. Certainly, when looking at the event we think of as dancing, both English and French speakers see and experience the same physical event. Details of the exact instantiation of dancing might vary from culture to culture, but I think we would agree that we all share the same concept of what constitutes a dancing event. Yet speakers of English and French do not use their "words" for this event in parallel ways. In English, for ex- ample, we use the verb dance to refer to both a translatory and a nontranslatory event (where translatory means to move along a path from one place to another). So, 'for example, the English sentence John and Mary danced across the room is ambiguous. It can mean either 'John and Mary went from one end of the room to the other while dancing' or 'John and Mary were located at the other end of the room dancing.' French, on the other hand, allows only the nontranslatory reading where John and Mary are at some location engaged in the act of dancing. French speak- ers have no problem describing the translatory event of dancing from one end of the room to the other, they just don't use the word danser in this context. They speak of crossing the room while dancing. Somewhere along the road between French and English world knowledge and word knowledge seem to have diverged. What's interesting about such examples is that this diver- gence isn't a freak occurrence. The divergence seen with dance and danser extends to a whole class of related verbs. In other words, the behavior of these verbs is a reflex of some language- specific regularities. However, even though there exists a considerable amount of freedom with regard to what as- pects of our world knowledge of an object or event are encoded in its linguistic alter ego (the word), the range of possibilities is still severely constrained. Not everything we know about an object or an event is a candidate for inclusion in its linguistic representation. For example, color is a salient property we associate with the objects around us, but no language in the world exhi- bits a linguistic classifier system based on color. Shape, solidity and flexibility, on the other hand, are at the heart of a large majority of the world's classifier systems. Time and space seem to have equal status in the world of conceptual knowledge, yet languages prefer to speak of time in spatial terms (at 6:00, from Tuesday to Thursday, toward evening, in 1976, Winter is fast ap-

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