Semantische Form und pragmatische Anreicherung: Situationsausdrücke in der Äußerungsinterpretation

This paper is concerned with meaning variations taking place in the interpretation of utterances. In particular, it examines the phenomena of conceptual differentiation and conceptual shifting performed on expressions of situations. My point of departure is that the linguistic form drastically underdetermines the propositional content which is explicitly expressed by an utterance. Consequently, I suppose a general framework which makes a distinction between two basic phases within the process of understanding. In the first phase of interpretation, which is part of the autonomous grammatical system, the context-independent and, hence, merely formal meaning of the utterance is calculated by means of semantic composition. In the second phase its contextually specified meaning is derived by pragmatic inferences integrating the abstract meaning base with accessible elements of conceptual knowledge. In concretizing this picture, I offer a multi-level model in which the propositional content, starting from the level of semantic form, has to be elaborated step by step in a sequence of conceptual structures. In view of the fact that most verbs are open to a multitude of primary meaning variants, the paper argues for a minimalistic approach to their lexical-semantic form which allows for conceptual differentiation by fixing the parameters involved. Essentially, the strategy of radical underspecification is also applied to the problem of deviating interpretations which can be observed, for instance, in adverbial modification. My basic assumption is that in the course of compositional derivation further parameters are introduced by obligatory insertion of certain general schemata. If required, these parameters are available to a fixation by means of which a suitable conceptual shifting of the respective expression is realized.