Pragmatics and the Lexicon

This contribution investigates the interactions between the (mental) lexicon and pragmatics. It aims to give an overview about pragmatic phenomena that are connected with the semantic underspecification of lexical items. Cases in point are the pragmatics of adjectives, effects of negative strengthening, 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. After emphasizing some important consequences of the traditional view of lexical semantics—the contrastive analysis of lexemes within the Katz-Fodor tradition of semantics—several phenomena are collected that seem to conflict with its theoretical settings. These phenomena are taken as arguments in favor of a particular account of the division of labor between lexical semantics and pragmatics. This account combines the idea of (radical) semantic underspecification in the lexicon with a theory of pragmatic strengthening, based on conversational implicatures. The basic pragmatic mechanism can be expressed within the framework of (bidirectional) optimality theory for interpretation. It is argued that this approach may provide a principled account of several of the lexical-pragmatic phenomena that are currently discussed.

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