Words and Roots – Polysemy and Allosemy – Communication and Language

Most substantive (content-bearing) words are polysemous, but polysemy is cross-categorial; for instance, the lexical forms ‘stone’ and ‘front’ are associated with families of interrelated senses and these senses are spread across their manifestations as three words, noun, verb and adjective. So, the ultimate unit underpinning polysemy is not a word but the categoryless root of the related words, which must, in some sense, track the interrelated families of senses. The main topic of this paper is the vexed question of the meaning of roots and the backdrop is a view of words as delineated syntactic domains which allow assignment of atomic content (non-compositional meaning), and whose actual meanings are, in the first instance, pragmatically inferred in the throes of communication, some of them subsequently becoming established, so stored in a lexicon and directly retrieved in comprehension. Three different positions on the meanings of roots are outlined, and their merits and shortcomings are discussed: (a) inherent underspecified meanings; (b) meanings conditioned by grammatical context (allosemy); (c) meaninglessness. I argue that, overall, the current state of the evidence favours the third position: roots are categoryless, meaningless (perhaps phonological) indices

Metaphor and the \u27Emergent Property\u27 Problem: A Relevance-Theoretic Approach

The interpretation of metaphorical utterances often results in the attribution of emergent properties; these are properties which are neither standardly associated with the individual constituents of the utterance in isolation nor derivable by standard rules of semantic composition. For example, an utterance of ‘Robert is a bulldozer’ may be understood as attributing to Robert such properties as single-mindedness, insistence on having things done in his way, and insensitivity to the opinions/feelings of others, although none of these is included in the encyclopaedic information associated with bulldozers (earth-clearing machines). An adequate pragmatic account of metaphor interpretation must provide an explanation of the processes through which emergent properties are derived. In this paper, we attempt to develop an explicit account of the derivation process couched within the framework of relevance theory. The key features of our account are: (a) metaphorical language use is taken to lie on a continuum with other cases of loose use, including hyperbole; (b) metaphor interpretation is a wholly inferential process, which does not require associative mappings from one domain (e.g. machines) to another (e.g. human beings); (c) the derivation of emergent properties involves no special interpretive mechanisms not required for the interpretation of ordinary, literal utterances

Contextual Effects on Explicature: Optional Pragmatics or Optional Syntax?

The debate between advocates of free pragmatic enrichment and those who maintain that any pragmatic contribution to explicature is mediated by a covert linguistic indexical took a new turn with the claim that these covert elements may be optional (Martí 2006). This prompted the conclusion (Recanati 2010b) that there is no longer any issue of substance between the two positions, as both involve optional elements of utterance meaning, albeit registered at different representational levels (conceptual or linguistic). We maintain, on the contrary, that the issue remains substantive and we make the case that, for a theory of the processes involved in utterance comprehension, the free pragmatic enrichment account is indispensable. We further argue that the criticism of free enrichment that motivates at least some indexicalist accounts rests on a mistaken assumption that it is the semantic component of the grammar (linguistic competence) that is responsible for delivering truth-conditional content (explicature)

The principles of communicative language use

The paper aims to overview some typical principles of communicative language use in a cognitive pragmatic approach applying a reductionist method in order to demonstrate that the well-known principles can be reduced to a very general rationality (economy) principle. After briefly reviewing the principles the paper re-evaluates them and provides a new classification of them relying on the definition of ostensive-inferential communication. The principles which can be divided into rationality and interpersonality principles are really principles of effective information transmission on objects and selves. They refer to two kinds of language use: informative and communicative ones. The only principles valid for only communicative language use are the communicative principle of relevance and the principle of communicative intention suggested in the present article. Finally, the paper reduces all rationality and interpersonality principles to a very general rationality principle, i.e., the cognitive principle of relevance

How much syntax is there in Metalinguistic Negation?

This paper explores the syntax of unambiguous metalinguistic negation (MN) markers in European Portuguese (EP) with the main goal of demonstrating the syntactic import of MN. Taking the EP facts as a means to gain insight into the grammatical encoding of MN in natural language, the paper shows that unambiguous MN markers split into two types: peripheral and internal. This split is confirmed by their contrasting behavior with respect to different syntactic tests, e.g.: availability in isolation and nominal fragments; ability to take scope over negation and emphatic/contrastive high constituents; compatibility with VP Ellipsis. Peripheral MN markers respond positively to all the tests, whereas internal ones respond negatively. These facts are derived from a syntactic analysis where CP plays a central and unifying role. It is proposed that while the cross-linguistically pervasive peripheral MN markers directly merge into Spec,CP, the more unusual sentence-internal MN markers are rooted in the TP domain and reach Spec,CP by movement. The centrality of the CP field is motivated by elaborating on Farkas and Bruce’s (2010) model of polarity features. Under the hypothesis that besides the relative polarity features [same] and [reverse], there is a feature [objection] that singles out MN declaratives among responding assertions, this is taken to be the edge feature that drives unambiguous MN markers into the CP space.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio