Lexical Richness: How Variation Makes Meaning in Language

Abstract

The idea of “richness” from the work of John Dewey suggests how the occurrence and distribution of words in speech and in texts and the facts of word distributions work with our cognitive faculty to create meaning. Lexical richness is something that each of us experiences individually, but each of us experiences differently. The richness of words comes not just from the uniqueness of events in our individual experience, but from the cognitive resonance of those events. Lexical richness also comes from our experience of trying to share our thoughts and words with others, adding experience with words themselves to our experience with events in our process of creating meaning with language. Lexical richness exists not just for individuals but also at the level of the language. Lexical richness, then, including the ever-present fact of variation in how speakers use words, should be an essential part of our study of human speech.