Lexical pragmatics, ad hoc concepts and metaphor: A Relevance Theory perspective

Abstract

Ostensive communication, the paradigm case of which is verbal communication, is the domain of a dedicated cognitive system, according to Relevance Theory (RT). This ‘pragmatics ’ module is responsible for inferring the content or meaning that the communicator intends by his/her ostensive stimulus. An important sub-process within the system is the adjustment or modulation of lexically-encoded meaning, which makes it possible for speakers to communicate a vastly greater range of concepts than those that are stably encoded in their linguistic system. This includes the meaning communicated by at least some cases of metaphorically-used language. Taking a broadly Fodorian view that lexical concepts are atomic (unstructured), this paper looks at some issues raised by the idea that addressees infer ad hoc concepts as part of the on-line comprehension process. As a cognitive-scientific theory, RT is open to evidence from a range of sources, including native speaker-hearer intuitions, recorded instances of linguistic communication (corpus data) from both communicatively typical and atypical populations, results from relevant psychological and psycholinguistic experiments, and findings in cognitive neuroscience on brain activation during both utterance production and comprehension. At the end of the paper, some tentative suggestions are made of questions arising from work in theoretical lexical pragmatics which might be amenable to investigation at the neuropragmatic level 1 *.

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