DEPARTMENT OF SPEECH, HEARING & PHONETIC SCIENCES UCL Division of Psychology & Language Sciences |
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RECENT EVENT: INTERNATIONAL
WORKSHOP ON WORD
MEANING, CONCEPTS AND COMMUNICATION – Cumberland Lodge (UK) 16-18
September
2005
Welcome to the
Lexical Pragmatics' Website
Department of
Phonetics and Linguistics, UCL
When I sleep on 'an empty
stomach', is my stomach truly empty?
Is a man with one hair 'bald'? How
about a man with a few hairs? Is he still bald?
My dentist said the injection
would be 'painless' but I did feel some pain. Was my dentist lying?
This is the
virtual
home of the research project 'a
Unified Theory of Lexical Pragmatics' funded by the Arts and
Humanities Research Board (AHRB) - Grant Number AR16356. The project
has now been running for two years and has three methodological
strands: theoretical investigation, experimental work and corpus
analysis.
Lexical Pragmatics is a rapidly developing branch of linguistics which
investigates the processes by which linguistically-specified
('literal') word meanings are modified in use. Our OBJECTIVES include:
a) to develop a
unified, cognitively plausible account of
lexical-pragmatic processes and compare it with some alternative
accounts.
b) to consider how far lexical-pragmatic processes are governed by
general pragmatic principles which apply at both word and
sentence level.
c) to consider the implications of our account for the traditional
notion of literal meaning.
d) to investigate whether creative, occassion-specific uses (often
found in literary works) involve the same processes as more
conventional uses.
Bibliography
(with
downloadable papers)
Members
of the project
The investigators, Deirdre Wilson and
Robyn Carston collaborate
on all topics. The postdoctoral research
assistant Tim Wharton
works with them on both tehoretical and
pragmatical aspects of the project. The research assistants, Patricia
Kolaiti and Rosa E.
Vega Moreno, work mainly on carrying out the corpus
work and on the maintenance of this website.