Lexical pragmatics

Abstract

Lexical Pragmatics is a research field that tries to give a systematic and explanatory account of pragmatic phenomena that are connected with the semantic underspecification of lexical items. Cases in point are the pragmatics of adjectives, systematic polysemy, the distribution of lexical and productive causatives, blocking phenomena, the interpretation of compounds, and many phenomena presently discussed within the framework of Cognitive Semantics. The approach combines a constrained-based semantics with a general mechanism of conversational implicature. The basic pragmatic mechanism rests on conditions of updating the common ground and allows to give a precise explication of notions as generalized conversational implicature and pragmatic anomaly. The fruitfulness of the basic account is established by its application to a variety of recalcitrant phenomena among which its precise treatment of Atlas & Levinson's Q- and I-principles and the formalization of the balance between informativeness and efficiency in natural language processing (Horn's division of pragmatic labour) deserve particular mention. The basic mechanism is subsequently extended by an abductive reasoning system which is guided by subjective probability. The extended mechanism turned out to be capable of giving a principled account of lexical blocking, the pragmatics of adjectives, and systematic polysemy.

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