Cognitive p r i n c i p l e s underlying the (re-)construction of word meaning and/or world knowledge structures are poorly understood yet. In a rather sharp departure from more orthodox lines of introspective acquisition of s t r u c t u r a l data on meaning and knowledge representation in cognitive science, an empirical approach is explored that analyses natural language data s t a t i s t i c a l l y , represents i t s numerical findings fuzzy-set t h e o r e t i c a.