DOYLC

Well, I had another day or so of thinking about the conceptual model I was developing - originally for stipulative and legislative definitions.  Actually, a few minutes rather than a whole day was what I had, but such is life when you have a job.  But even in that limited time I realized that I had not got the idea of communities in the model.  So I went back to the conceptual model and put in communities as shown in Figure 1. Figure 1: Relations of Concept and Term Speech Community: a group of individuals who share a vocabulary that describes a concept system.  [See Wikipedia for more - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_community - although it seems you have to belong to the Speech Community Speech Community to understand this entry.] Semantic Community: a group of individuals who share a common understanding of a set of concepts and relationships (a concept system), irrespective of the terms used to describe them. I understand that both of these definitions are preliminary and n

I was noodling around with stipulative and legislative definitions, and started to diagram out what I was finding.   It occurred to me that I have not really had a rethink about diagramming the relationships between the concepts involved in definition work for a while.    Pretty soon I found that I lacked some of the fundamentals, and had to get them sorted out before I could deal with stipulative and legislative definitions. The result of that effort is the cartoon shown in Figure 1.  I am calling it a "cartoon" because I have not had time yet to work it up in some formal notation, such as conceptual graph.  I also realize it is incomplete.  For instance, I have not had time to figure out where to put Nominal Definition. Figure 1: Relations of Concept and Term In Figure 1 all supertype-subtype relations are indicated by solid lines, with the label "is genus of", indicating how the superordinate genus is related to the subordinate genus.  This is to distinguish the