Abstract
Lexical pragmatics studies the processes by which word meanings are pragmatically modulated in context, resulting in communicated concepts that are different from the concepts encoded by the words used. Common examples are the verb “drink” being used to express a narrower meaning, such as “drink large quantities of alcohol”, or “raw” being used loosely, for example to communicate of a steak that it is undercooked. This chapter presents recent work in lexical pragmatics from the point of view of a contextualist approach to utterance interpretation, and discusses some of the current issues being debated. First, it defends the use of truth-value judgments to support the idea of lexical modulation, against arguments from semantic minimalism. Then it considers the nature of the input to modulation – encoded word meanings – focussing on the question of whether a word meaning is a concept (something that can be a constituent of thought) or something nonconceptual such as a concept schema or ‘grab bag’ of information that can be used to construct concepts. Finally, it briefly compares the nature of the output – the so-called ‘ad hoc’, communicated concepts.
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Notes
- 1.
(1a) will be recognizable as a Travis case (Travis 1997); the other examples are similar to those used by Carston (2002), Recanati (2004), Wilson and Carston (2007). I follow the standard practice of using small caps to indicate concepts and stars to indicate concepts that are different from the encoded concepts (i.e. ‘ad hoc concepts’), e.g. red* in the discussion of (1a).
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
This particular example would not be seen by many contextualists as a case of enrichment, because the apparent mandatoriness of supplying some completion could be seen as an indication that it is saturation, with “ready” encoding a hidden indexical (Recanati 2004 discusses this ‘Optionality Criterion’ for enrichment versus hidden indexicals).
- 5.
Noveck and colleagues presented adult subjects with sentences such as “Some of the turtles are in the boxes”, which is standardly thought to communicate that some but not all of the turtles are in the boxes. In a scenario where all the turtles present were in the boxes, responses were almost equally split between ‘true’ and ‘false’ (Noveck 2004: 308).
- 6.
I use the notation bowl* to indicate that this is not a lexicalized concept encoded by the word “bowl”: I assume that most English speakers are likely to have several different concepts that they would express using this word: bowling a cricket ball, a ten-pin bowling ball, etc., so would use the relevant one to complete the explicature of “Flintoff is ready”.
- 7.
Though indexicalists would dispute the judgments in certain cases: for example, most would not think that metaphorical interpretations contribute to explicature.
- 8.
They acknowledge that there are questions about how and whether a logical-encyclopaedic distinction should be drawn (see Carston 2002: 322). Fodor (e.g. 1998) rejects meaning postulates in light of Quinean objections to an analytic-synthetic distinction: on this view, none of the associated information would be content-constitutive; instead, it would all have ‘encyclopaedic’ status. However, the idea that some of the associated information at least has a more central status, capturing some core properties of the lexical meaning, will be useful here in order to present the account of modulation.
- 9.
See the problems posed by Frege cases, involving concepts that are distinct but co-referring, and Twin cases where identical concepts have different referents (Peacocke 1992).
- 10.
Other accounts that similarly treat encoded word meanings as underspecified and have also made proposals about the organization of information accessed through word meanings, and how it is used to construct communicated concepts, are Bibok (2014), Bosch (2009) and Vicente & Martinez-Manrique (2010).
- 11.
While the name ‘ad hoc concept’ does suggest that the entity so-called is novel, this is misleading: what Carston (e.g. 2002: chapter 5) and Sperber & Wilson (e.g. 1998), at least, mean by ‘ad hoc concept’ is simply a non-lexicalized concept, and they assume that we have a much larger stock of stable concepts than just the lexicalized ones.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to Ilse Depraetere and Raf Salkie for their organization of the seminar series from which this book grew, and to them and the other participants, particularly Emma Borg, for discussion. I’m also grateful to Katia Urquiza for many conversations about word meaning, and to an anonymous referee for helpful suggestions.
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Hall, A. (2017). Lexical Pragmatics, Explicature and Ad Hoc Concepts. In: Depraetere, I., Salkie, R. (eds) Semantics and Pragmatics: Drawing a Line. Logic, Argumentation & Reasoning, vol 11. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32247-6_6
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