Abstract
Both in linguistics and in psycholinguistics there is some debate about how rich or thin lexico-semantic representations are. Traditionally, in formal semantics but also in philosophy of language as well as in cognitive pragmatics, lexical meanings have been thought to be simple stable denotations or functions. In this paper, we present and discuss a number of interpretational phenomena of which the analysis proposed in the literature makes crucial use of rich meanings. The phenomena in question are cases where the assignment of truth-conditional contents to utterances seems to follow rules that do not operate on simple stable denotations or any other kind of ‘thin’ meanings but where composition takes rich structured representations as input. We also discuss problems for such accounts, which are mostly based on the inability of extant rich meanings accounts to explain many other interpretational phenomena, and we discuss the solutions that have been proposed to solve them. Furthermore, we address the discussion whether the informationally rich meanings are part of semantics, and more specifically part of the lexicon, or whether this information should be ascribed to more general world knowledge.
Highlights
Both in linguistics and in psycholinguistics there is some debate about how rich or thin lexico-semantic representations are
The main goal of this paper was to show that there are many phenomena that pertain to the construction of truth-conditional compounds that follow characteristic patterns, and whose explanation requires appealing to knowledge structures organized in specific ways
We have shown that several extant accounts that invoke rich lexical meanings to explain such phenomena face problems related to inflexibility and lack of predictive power
Summary
Both in linguistics and in psycholinguistics there is some debate about how rich or thin lexico-semantic representations are. Pragmaticians of a cognitive persuasion, such as Relevance theorists (Sperber & Wilson 1995, Carston 2002) or Recanati (2004, 2010), have taken issue with just one tenet of traditional semantics, namely, whether the output of semantic composition, understood in the way formal semantics understands it, yields truth-evaluable units On their view, semantics underdetermines truth conditions (Carston 2002). The meaning of break, according to this view, can be captured in the schema: [CAUSE [BECOME [BROKEN]]] Such a schematic meaning suffices to account for the argument structure of break, as well as for its behaviour in alternations. According to Travis ‘[w]hat words mean plays a role in fixing when they would be true; but not an exhaustive one’ (Travis 1996: 451) It is far from clear what the constraints that these authors identify with word meanings can consist in. As far as we can see, the arguments for favoring one view or another are not decisive at this stage in the debate, we think that there is reason to doubt a certain ‘thin’ construal of lexical meanings
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