Some Gricean/RT relevant passages from
LINGUIST List: Vol-13-1732. Jun 19 2002. ISSN 1068-4875.
Subject: 13.1732, Review: Pragmatics/Semantics: Németh & Bibok (2001)
Home Page: http://linguistlist.org/
E. Nemeth & K. Bibok (2001)
"Pragmatics & the flexibility of word meaning."
Elsevier. ISBN 0-08-043971-3, xii + 329 pp.
Current Research in the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface:
Volume 8. (Reviewed by L DeWaard Dykstra, Iowa Univ.)
"The current book is a collection of 11 papers focused on the confluence of
pragmatics and semantics."
"Although the authors use a variety of methodological approaches and
languages in the development of their arguments certain theories appear
consistently throughout their discussions:
[such as] relevance theory".
0. E Nemeth/K Bibok,
Towards the new linguistic discipline of lexical pragmatics.
1. R. Blutner/T Solstad,
2 case studies in lexical pragmatics
"3 case studies show that situated meaning is a combination of lexical
meanings and conversational implicature: an investigation into negative
strengthening in context using the English adjective 'happy,' and a
discussion of the spatial adjectives 'long,' 'wide,' 'deep' and 'thick.'"
2. I Boguslavsky,
On the scales & implicatures of 'even'.
"Boguslavsky is concerned with the treatment of 'even' in regard to
traditional understandings of the scales and implicatures associated with
it. ... His proposal is of a double scalarity which would account for
sentences of the type 'not x and not even y but z' is based on scales of
expectedness, where sentences of the diminuendo type (going from least to
most expected) and of the crescendo type (going from most to least
expected)."
3. S. Cote,
The flexibility of inference in triggers for inferable entities: evidence
for an interpretability constraint.
4. T. Fretheim,
In defense of monosemy.
"While not disputing the existence of lexical polysemy, Fretheim argues
that what often appears to be polysemy is in fact a modification of
the meaning of a word due to pragmatic factors. Citing Sperber and
Wilson's relevance theory (1985, 1986), Fretheim contends that
linguistic encoding can be either conceptual or procedural. He focuses
on the latter.
"Linguistic items that encode a procedure
do not contribute to the proposition expressed
by an utterance; rather, by guiding the addressee's
inferential phase of comprehension they place constraints
on the thought processes by which implicatures
and ground-floor and higher-level explicatures are derived"
(p. 80).
He states that procedural information is conveyed lexically, via intonation
and syntactically. The subsequent parts of the paper consist of case
studies in which he demonstrates the modification of
meaning of the English expressions 'at least,' 'after all,' [...] as they
are affected by varying intonation and syntactic patterns."
5. A. Kertesz,
Pragmatics & the flexibility of theoretical terms in linguistics: 2 case
studies
6. J. Pelvyvas,
The development of the grounding predication: epistemic modals & cognitive
predicates.
"Pelyvas [gives] image schemas of the modal auxiliaries 'should,' 'ought,'
taking into account deontic v. epistemic meaning and narrow v. wide scope."
7. G. Petho,
What is polysemy? a survey of current research & results
"Petho highlights a few key figures in the development of certain theories,
namely Deane (1987, 1988), Geeraerts (1993), Nunberg (1978), Bierwisch
(1983a), Kilgarriff (1992) and Pusejovsky (1995)."
8. T. Prcic,
Interpreting morphologically complex lexemes -- revisited
"He examines the role of pragmatics, specifically the issues of inferables,
the transparency/opacity line, explicit v. implicit meaning, and pragmatic
specialization."
9. R. Rozina,
Cultural constraints on meaning extension: derivational relations between
actions & happenings
10. I. Vasko,
The communicative function of the adverbial markers "later on, some time"
11. K. Bibok & E Nemeth,
How the lexicon & context interact in the meaning construction of utterances
"The authors argue that meaning can only be inferred by "assuming an
intensive interaction between the lexicon and the context" (p. 317). The
construction of meaning is made possible due to the cognitive principle of
relevance."
==
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