Description

Seminar on Language and Communication

Institute for Logic, Cognition, Language and Information (ILCLI)

UPV-EHU

Multiple Word Meanings, Pragmatics and the Lexicon

Robyn Carston (Linguistics, University College London)

It's a virtual truism that (substantive) words can be, and often are, used to communicate different senses (concepts) on different occasions of use, and that we, therefore, need to make a distinction between a word's standing meaning and its occasion-specific senses. According to some recent views, a word's meaning is ‘semantically underspecified': it does not specify a concept/sense which can contribute directly to truth conditions, but is either too rich or too meagre and has to be transformed in some way before it can express a specific semantic content. Focussing on the phenomenon of polysemy, I discuss the underspecification options on offer and find problems with all of them.

I propose a different sort of account, one which requires making a distinction between the kind of lexicon that features in a narrow construal of language (I-language, as in the generative grammar tradition) and the lexicon of the broader public language system, a repository of communicative devices, which are both inputs to and outputs of the inferential pragmatic system.

Venue: Carlos Santamaria Zentroa, Room A 2.

(Attendance is free, but it should be notified in advance to zvonko.diaz@ehu.eus)