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Published in Noel Burton-Roberts (ed.) 2007. Pragmatics. Palgrave, London: 230-259
Deirdre Wilson and Robyn Carston
Abstract:
According to recent work in the new field of lexical pragmatics, the meanings of words are frequently pragmatically adjusted and fine-tuned in context, so that their contribution to the proposition expressed is different from their lexically encoded sense. Well-known examples include lexical narrowing (e.g. ‘drink’ used to mean alcoholic drink), approximation (or loosening) (e.g. ‘flat’ used to mean relatively flat) and metaphorical extension (e.g. ‘bulldozer’ used to mean forceful person). These three phenomena are often studied in isolation from each other and given quite distinct kinds of explanation. In this chapter, we will propose a more unified account. We will try to show that narrowing, loosening and metaphorical extension are simply different outcomes of a single interpretive process which creates an ad hoc concept, or occasion-specific sense, based on interaction among encoded concepts, contextual information and pragmatic expectations or principles. We will outline an inferential account of the lexical adjustment process using the framework of relevance theory, and compare it with some alternative accounts.
1. Introduction
The relatively new field of lexical pragmatics explores the application of the semantics-pragmatics distinction at the level of individual words or phrases rather than whole sentences. The advantages of distinguishing semantic and pragmatic aspects of word meaning have long been recognised in pragmatically-oriented approaches to the philosophy of language, and were the starting point for Grice’s William James Lectures (Grice 1967/89: 3-21). However, the development of a separate field of lexical pragmatics was accelerated in the 1990s by a series of publications by linguists, psychologists and philosophers proposing more or less substantial departures from Grice’s account.[1]
The approaches discussed in this chapter share the view that lexical interpretation typically involves the construction of an ad hoc concept or occasion-specific sense, based on interaction among encoded concepts, contextual information and pragmatic expectations or principles. Use of the term ‘ad hoc concept’ in this connection is often traced to the psychologist Lawrence Barsalou (1987, 1993), whose work on categorisation showed that prototypical narrowing (i.e. the interpretation of a general term as picking out a subset of prototypical or stereotypical category members) was much more flexible and context-dependent than was standardly assumed. In later work (e.g. by the psycholinguist Sam Glucksberg and his colleagues, and by pragmatists working within the relevance-theoretic framework), it was suggested that the outcome of the ad hoc concept construction process could be either a narrowing or a broadening of the linguistically-specified meaning: that is, the communicated concept may be either more specific or more general than the encoded concept. This opens up the possibility of a unified account on which lexical narrowing and broadening (or a combination of the two) are the outcomes of a single interpretive process which fine-tunes the interpretation of almost every word. We will follow the standard practice of representing ad hoc concepts as starred concepts (e.g. happy*, shark*, break*).
The most radical versions of this unified approach argue not only that narrowing and broadening involve the same interpretive mechanisms and may combine in the interpretation of a single word, but that there is a continuum of cases of broadening, ranging from strictly literal use through approximation and other forms of loosening to ‘figurative’ cases such as hyperbole and metaphor, with no clear cut-off points between them. Such fully unified accounts reject the traditional distinction between literal and figurative meaning and claim that approximation, hyperbole and metaphor are not distinct natural kinds, requiring different interpretive mechanisms, but involve exactly the same interpretive processes as are used for ordinary, literal utterances. This is a substantial departure from the standard Gricean account.[2]
Whether or not they aim to provide a unified account of the full range of cases, most current approaches to lexical pragmatics also share the view that narrowing and/or broadening contribute to the truth-conditional content of utterances (what is asserted or explicated) as well as to what is implicated. That is, the ad hoc concepts created by the pragmatic interpretation of individual words and phrases are seen as constituents of the proposition the speaker is taken to have expressed, rather than merely contributing to implicatures, as in the standard Gricean account. Following Recanati (1993), we will call such approaches truth-conditional pragmatic approaches.[3], [4]
Although there is a growing consensus that lexical interpretation involves the construction of ad hoc concepts which contribute to the truth-conditional content of utterances, there is much less agreement on the nature of the interpretive mechanisms involved.[5] In this chapter, we will propose a radical version of the unified truth-conditional pragmatic account, using the framework of relevance theory, and compare it with some alternative accounts. The focus will be not so much on justifying the relevance-theoretic approach as compared to alternative pragmatic approaches, but on raising a more general question about the nature of the cognitive processes involved. We will argue (in line with Sperber & Wilson, forthcoming; Wilson & Carston, 2006) that lexical narrowing and broadening are genuinely inferential processes, and that an inferential account of lexical pragmatics is preferable to non-inferential accounts.
The chapter is organised as follows. Section 2 introduces and illustrates the basic data that a theory of lexical pragmatics should explain. Section 3 argues that the data call for a radical version of the unified truth-conditional pragmatic account, and that ad hoc concept construction is the unitary process required. In that section, we contrast fully inferential with partly inferential and purely associative accounts of the cognitive mechanisms involved in lexical interpretation, and in section 4, we propose an inferential account of lexical narrowing and broadening using the framework of relevance theory. Section 5 raises some further issues and considers some possible objections to a unified inferential approach.
2. Varieties of lexical adjustment
The aim of this section is to illustrate the processes of lexical narrowing and lexical broadening, using a variety of examples which suggest that there is a continuum of cases between literal use, approximation, metaphor and hyperbole, with no clear divisions between them. We will try to show that narrowing and broadening are flexible, highly context-dependent processes which cannot be adequately handled in terms of code-like rules, and end by introducing a further range of data that a unified account of lexical pragmatics might help to explain.
Lexical narrowing involves the use of a word to convey a more specific sense than the encoded one, with a more restricted denotation (picking out a subset of the items that fall under the encoded concept). Narrowing may take place to different degrees, and in different directions. Some illustrations are given in (1):
1a. I’m not drinking tonight.
1b. Buying a house is easy if you’ve got money.
1c. Churchill was a man.
In various different circumstances, the speaker of (1a) might be understood as conveying that she will not drink any liquid at all, that she will not drink any alcohol (or any of a certain type of alcohol, e.g. spirits), or that she will not drink significant amounts of alcohol. Each successive interpretation is narrower than the previous one, with a more restricted denotation.[6] (1b) suggests a pragmatic motive for narrowing. On a literal interpretation, the speaker would be understood as making the blatantly false claim that buying a house is easy for someone with any money at all; the effect of narrowing is to yield a more plausible, informative or relevant interpretation on which the speaker is understood as claiming that buying a house is easy for someone with a suitable amount of money. (1c) shows that narrowing may take place not only to different degrees but also in different directions: in different situations of utterance, the speaker might be understood as conveying that Churchill was a typical man or that Churchill was an ideal man (where the notion of what constitutes a typical man or an ideal man, like the notion of what constitutes a significant amount of alcohol in (1a) or an appropriate amount of money in (1b), is itself heavily context dependent) (cf. Barsalou 1987, 1993). An adequate pragmatic account of narrowing should shed some light on what triggers the narrowing process, what direction it takes, and when it stops.
One way of bringing out the flexibility and context dependence of narrowing is to consider the variety of interpretations that the same word would receive in different linguistic contexts. Standard examples discussed in the philosophical literature include the verbs ‘open’, ‘cut’ and ‘leave’, as illustrated in (2):
2a. cut the lawn/someone’s hair/a cake/one’s finger/a pack of cards/ …
2b. open curtains/one’s mouth/a book/a bottle/a road/the mountain/ …
2c. leave the house/home/food on a plate/one’s spouse/a note/ …
There is no standard or stereotypical method for cutting, opening or leaving tout court, but there are standard methods for cutting hair, cutting a lawn, opening curtains, and so on, each of which involves a narrowing of the more general concepts cut, open and leave (Searle 1980). A similar point is made in an experimental study of adjectives by the psychologist Gregory Murphy (1997). Taking as an example the adjective ‘fresh’, and using a variety of experimental techniques, he showed that it has innumerable slightly different interpretations across contexts. One method was to ask participants to provide antonyms for its occurrence in different adjective-noun combinations. Some of the most frequent responses are listed in (3) (Murphy 1997: 237-39):
3. fresh antonyms
shirt dirty
vegetables rotten
fish frozen
sheets recently slept in
water dirty/salt
bread stale
air polluted
outlook tired
assistant experienced
idea old
This clearly illustrates the point that what is arguably a single lexical item, encoding a general concept fresh, gets specified/narrowed/fine-tuned in slightly different ways in different linguistic contexts, and supports the more general claim that discourse context and pragmatic expectations strongly influence the direction in which narrowing takes place.[7]
Lexical broadening involves the use of a word to convey a more general sense than the encoded one, with a consequent expansion of the linguistically-specified denotation. As noted above, radical versions of the unified approach to lexical pragmatics such as the one proposed in relevance theory treat approximation, hyperbole and metaphor as subvarieties of broadening which differ mainly in the degree to which the linguistically-specified denotation is expanded. Approximation is the case where a word with a relatively strict sense is marginally extended to include a penumbra of items (what Lasersohn (1999) calls a ‘pragmatic halo’) that strictly speaking fall outside its linguistically-specified denotation. Some illustrations are given in (4):
4a. That bottle is empty.
4b. This policy will bankrupt the farmers.
4c. The garden is south-facing.
In (4a), the word ‘empty’, which has a relatively strict sense, might be intended and understood as an approximation, so that the speaker would be interpreted as claiming that the bottle in question is empty*: that is, close enough to being empty for the differences to be inconsequential for the purpose at hand (for instance, collecting bottles for recycling). In (4b), the word ‘bankrupt’ may be intended and understood either literally (bankrupt) or as an approximation (bankrupt*), in which case the speaker would be interpreted as claiming that the policy will bring the farmers close enough to bankruptcy for the differences to be inconsequential. Similarly, in (4c), the term ‘south-facing’ may be used literally (to mean that the garden faces due south), or as an approximation (south-facing*), meaning that the garden faces in a generally southerly direction.
On more radical versions of the unified approach, hyperbole is seen as involving a further degree of broadening, and hence a greater departure from the encoded meaning. For instance, a parent might say (4a) hyperbolically while pointing to a three-quarters-empty bottle, intending to convey that a teenager has drunk too much. Similarly, an opposition member might use (4b) to indicate hyperbolically that as a result of the government’s policy, the farmers will be substantially poorer than might have been expected or desired; and a new house owner might say (4c) hyperbolically of a house described in the estate agent’s brochure as facing east-south-east, intending to implicate that she has made the right choice. The fact that in each of these examples (‘empty’, ‘bankrupt’, ‘south-facing’) there seems to be a gradient or continuum of cases between literal use, approximation and hyperbole makes it worth looking for a unified account in which the same interpretive mechanisms apply throughout.
Within the fully unified account we are proposing, metaphor is seen as a still more radical variety of broadening than hyperbole, involving a greater departure from the encoded meaning. Consider (5a)-(5c):
5a. Sally is a chameleon.
5b. John’s critics are sharpening their claws.
5c. The agenda isn’t written in stone.
The encoded meaning of the word ‘chameleon’ is (let’s say) the concept chameleon, which denotes animals of a certain kind. In appropriate circumstances, however, (5a) might be metaphorically used to convey that Sally, who is not literally a chameleon, has a capacity to change her appearance to fit in with her surroundings, remaining unnoticed by her enemies and escaping attack (etc.). On the type of approach we envisage, this metaphorical use would be seen as involving an expansion from the category chameleon to the category chameleon*, which includes both actual chameleons and people who share with chameleons the encyclopaedic property of having the capacity to change their appearance in order to blend in with their surroundings (etc.). Similarly, in (5b) the category of events that literally involve sharpening of claws may be extended to include other events which have the encyclopaedic property of being preparations for attack, and in (5c) the category written in stone is broadened to include other items that are difficult to alter. These are relatively conventional metaphors, which are interpreted along fairly well-established lines (costing relatively little processing effort and yielding relatively limited and predictable effects). Novel metaphors allow more latitude in interpretation, and may call for a greater effort of memory or imagination, yielding richer rewards (see e.g. Pilkington 2000, Sperber and Wilson forthcoming).
Examples (4a)-(4c) above were designed to show that there is no clear dividing line between approximation and hyperbole. The examples in (6) below provide evidence of a gradient or continuum of cases between literal use, approximation, hyperbole and metaphor:
6a. That film made me sick.
6b. The water is boiling.
6c. That book puts me to sleep.
In (6a), for instance, the speaker may be understood as conveying that she actually vomited (a literal interpretation), that she came close enough to vomiting for the differences not to matter (an approximate interpretation), that the film made her physically queasy (a hyperbolic interpretation), or that the film induced some mental discomfort (etc.) (a metaphorical interpretation). Similar points apply to (6b) and (6c). In section 4, we will suggest how such cases might be handled on a unified inferential account.
A further variety of broadening, which we will call category extension, is typified by the use of salient brand names (‘Hoover’, ‘Xerox’, ‘Sellotape’) to denote a broader category (vacuum cleaners, photocopiers, sticky tape) including items from less salient brands. Personal names (‘Chomsky’, ‘Shakespeare’) and common nouns both lend themselves to category extension (cf. Glucksberg 2001: 38-52). Some more creative uses are illustrated in (7a)-(7d):
7a. Iraq is this generation’s Vietnam.
7b. I don’t believe it – they’ve appointed another Chomsky.
7c. Handguns are the new flick-knives.
7d. Ironing is the new yoga.
In (7a), ‘Vietnam’ may be understood as conveying an ad hoc concept vietnam*, which represents the category of disastrous military interventions. In (7b), ‘Chomsky’ might be understood as conveying an ad hoc concept chomsky*, which represents a broader category of forceful exponents of a particular approach to linguistics. In (7c), flick-knives* might represent the broader category of teenage weapons of choice, and in (7d) – a typical piece of lifestyle writer’s discourse – yoga* might be seen as representing the category of fashionable pastimes for relieving stress. These cases of category extension are not analysable as approximations. The claim in (7a) is not that Iraq is a borderline case, close enough to being Vietnam for it to be acceptable to call it ‘Vietnam’, but merely that it belongs to a broader category of which Vietnam is a salient member; and so on for the other examples. What approximation and category extension have in common is that they are both analysable as outcomes of a single pragmatic process of lexical adjustment which results in an ad hoc category whose denotation is broader than that of the lexically encoded concept.
Neologisms and word coinages provide further data for a theory of lexical pragmatics and shed some light on the nature of the mental mechanisms involved. Experiments by Clark & Clark (1979) and Clark & Gerrig (1983) show that newly-coined verbs derived from nouns, as in (8a)-(8b), and the recruitment of proper names into compound verbs or adjectives, as in (8c)-(8d), are no harder to understand than regular uses:[8]
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