Les mots et les savoirs : complexité

The contribution addresses a topic discussed since the 17th century by philosophers, logicians and lexicographers: to what extent does the semantic complexity of certain words convey knowledge of the extralinguistic world? What influence does this knowledge have on the coherence of a text? Conversely, another type of complexity must be taken into account as well, the one starting from things: what linguistic devices are adopted to express this complexity in an efficient way? The relationship between the complexity types and knowledge has been investigated by different strands of research in the humanities and is becoming a focus of multidisciplinary research.