Lexical Pragmatics

The notion of schema has been given a major role by Recanati within his conception of primary pragmatic processes, conceived as a type of associative process. I intend to show that Recanati’s considerations on schemata may challenge the relevance theorist’s argument against associative explanations in pragmatics, and support an argument in favor of associative (versus inferential) explanations. More generally, associative relations can be shown to be schematic, that is, they have enough structure to license inferential effects without any appeal to genuine inferential processes. Associative processes are thus able to explain a number of pragmatic and linguistic phenomena which have instead been thought to require specialized inferential processes.

This paper argues that the borrowed words in modern Indian languages serve to express an informal attitude (or usage label in terms of Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary) towards the hearer or the situation. The paper instantiates this by drawing examples from Marathi, Hindi, Telugu, Malayalam etc, the way English borrowed words function in these languages. It is also argued that English words have not always replaced the original or that motivation of borrowing is not merely absence of equivalent in the recipient languages. The native/original vocabulary now functions to reflect different attitudes like formal, journalistic, literary, humorous, erudite, legal etc.

The paper argues that the generation of the speakers which agrees upon such usage labels has developed a new network of usage labels that was absent for the previous generations. So, few years back it might have been prestigious to use English words to show erudition, literacy and education, however now English words stand for informal, associating, communicative attitude and quite ironic (for a speaker of previous generation) the native vocabulary now means formal, dissociating, snobbish, lacking communicative competence and therefore at times humorous. This change evinces a changed esthetic or change in usage labels of the words.

Chuku na sitiari hubeba maana mfichamo na maana wazi. Ili kubainisha maana hizi, lazima tamathali hizi za semi ziwekwe kwenye muktadha wa matumizi na kuwekwa kwenye mizani ya michakato ya Kipragmatiki Leksika. Tamthilia zilizotumika katika uchanganuzi huu zimetoa miktadha ambayo imetusaidia kufafanua kuwa tamathali hizo mara nyingi huwasilisha ukweli wa hali inayoelezwa na mtunzi. Tumeonyesha kuwa ukweli huu hutegemea habari tangulizi za msomaji, hali halisi katika tamthilia hizo na ujuzi wa msomaji kuhusu mfumo wa lugha iliyotumika. Utafiti huu umechunguza michakato mbali mbali ambayo tamathali hizi za semi hupitia katika ubongo wa msikilizaji hadi aupate ujumbe aliodhamiria msemaji kuuwasilisha.

The category of insults comprises disparaging qualifying terms, derogatory epithets, racial/ethnic slurs and participle-like expletives. All of them channel speakers' (negative) psychological states, so they are considered expressives. Despite the enormous interest that they have aroused, research has not duly addressed whether all types of insults communicate in the same manner, partake of the same nature and make a similar contribution to communication. This paper ventures some answers from a relevance-theoretic perspective. Relying on the showing-saying continuum and on the conceptual-procedural distinction, it argues that some insults merely show speaker meaning, others encode some conceptual load enabling them to communicate by saying and others communicate by an admixture of both. It also contends that some insults encode conceptual content and processing instructions, but others encode instructions alone. Their output, however, is complex, as it may trigger lexical-pragmatic processes adjusting the encoded conceptual load or psychological-state representations.

This paper investigates a subtype of systematic polysemy which in English (and several other languages) appears to rest on the distinction between count and mass uses of nouns (e.g., shoot a rabbit/eat rabbit/wear rabbit). Computational semantic approaches have traditionally analysed such sense alternations as being generated by an inventory of specialised lexical inference rules. The paper puts the central arguments for such a rule-based analysis under scrutiny, and presents evidence that the linguistic component provided by count-mass syntax leaves a more underspecified semantic output than is usually acknowledged by rule-based theories. The paper develops and argues for the positive view that count-mass polysemy is better given a lexical pragmatic analysis, which provides a more flexible and unified account. Treating count-mass syntax as a procedural constraint on NP referents, it is argued that a single, relevance-guided lexical pragmatic mechanism can cover the same ground as lexical rules, as well as those cases in which rule-based accounts need to appeal to pragmatics.

La pragmática léxica es un campo de investigación relativamente nuevo y de interés creciente que trata de dar cuenta de los procesos pragmáticos que tienen relación con la noespecificidad semántica de ítems léxicos. Los últimos desarrollos de la Teoría de la Relevancia (R. CARSTON 2002; D. SPERBER & D. WILSON 2000; D. WILSON & D. SPERBER 2002a,b; D. WILSON, EN PRENSA) han contribuido enormemente al desarrollo del campo y sus propuestas han suscitado gran interés, especialmente por lo que respecta a los procesos lexico-pragmáticos que inciden en la comunicación explícita. Así pues, para la Teoría de la Relevancia, la distinción entre semántica y pragmática puede también darse a nivel léxico. El objetivo de este trabajo es dar cuenta de los procesos de naturaleza pragmática que inciden en la negociación de significado léxico. Desde el análisis del discurso y la pragmática social, la comunicación es un proceso de negociación donde las contribuciones se ajustan a las necesidades y a las...

From the perspective of pragmatic looseness and pragmatic enrichment, the types of adjectivisation of noun and its formation motivation are analyzed. Furthermore, a reasonable explanation of such linguistic phenomenon is provided and its enlightenment to the field of applied linguistics is discussed.

In relevance-theoretic pragmatics, lexical adjustment, or ad hoc-concept construction, is considered a case of free pragmatic enrichment. It is hence included within the group of non-linguistically mandated processes that are automatically carried out during comprehension. Its output is an inferentially-specified representation of the conceptual content encoded, or activated, by open-class words like nouns, adjectives, verbs or adverbs. Ad hoc-concept construction is a necessary step to obtain a fully propositional, truth-evaluable form that captures in a more precise manner the portion of meaning that the speaker communicates explicitly. However, this paper argues that this lexical pragmatic process needs not always be described as completely exempt from linguistic mandate: it may sometimes be enacted and steered by a series of linguistic elements. These fall within two categories: (i) the evaluative morphemes that some lexical items may receive in some languages, and (ii) lexical and phrasal items adjacent to content words. These elements would finetune the representations arising from content words in terms of more specific, context-dependent features or shades. Additionally, they could include in such representations information about the speaker’s attitude towards, or stance about, what the speakers refer to. Therefore, that information needs not always be derived as implicatures.

Lexical Pragmatics is a research field that tries to give a systematic and explanatory account of a number of pragmatic phenomena that are connected with the semantic underspecification of lexical items. The approach combines a constraint-based semantics with a Gricean mechanism of pragmatics. The basic pragmatic mechanism rests on conditions of updating the common ground and allows to give a precise explication of notions as (generalized) conversational implicatures and pragmatic anomaly. The ...

Communication is traditionally defined as the transfer of information from a sender to a receiver by means of a (linguistic) code. This classical definition belongs to what Sperber & Wilson (1986) call the code model. Specifically, this model presupposes that the hearer’s retrieval of a codified meaning ‘packed up’ in a linguistic string is such that the speaker and the hearer will share exactly the same thought once the process of decoding is completed. The aim of pragmatics since the 1960s is to show that at the discourse level—and recently at the lexical level—there is no one-to-one mapping between linguistic meaning and utterance meaning. In other words, there is a gap between semantically-underspecified meaning and speaker meaning that can only be bridged by pragmatic inference. Consider:

La pragmática léxica es un campo de investigación relativamente nuevo y de interés creciente que trata de dar cuenta de los procesos pragmáticos que tienen relación con la noespecificidad semántica de ítems léxicos. Los últimos desarrollos de la Teoría de la Relevancia (R. D. WILSON, EN PRENSA) han contribuido enormemente al desarrollo del campo y sus propuestas han suscitado gran interés, especialmente por lo que respecta a los procesos lexico-pragmáticos que inciden en la comunicación explícita. Así pues, para la Teoría de la Relevancia, la distinción entre semántica y pragmática puede también darse a nivel léxico.

In spontaneous speech, occurrences of the same word form vary phonetically. Words that do not receive sentence accent tend to be less clearly articulated and shorter in duration in comparison to prominent words. If such an unaccented word is isolated from continuous speech, it may not even be identi®able by listeners, but as part of the speech stream, it is usually easily identi®ed and helps the listener to perceive and organize the spoken message as a whole. Thus, the variability of unaccented words is not random but must follow certain patterns determined by context. In this study, we take a closer look at the Finnish unaccented word-like construction niinku in spontaneous conversational speech samples collected from one female Finnish speaker. We provide an analysis of the phonetic variability of the niinku structure found in the data, including such properties as segmental duration, segmental make-up, and phonetic quality. We then show what kind of properties are common to all occurrences of this unaccented construction and discuss the conditions that probably govern its acoustic-phonetic quality.