Abstract
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. EARLY ACCESS
Highlights
A central insight of lexical pragmatics is that word meanings undergo pragmatic modulation in the course of utterance interpretation
Lexical semantic accounts have influentially argued that systematic polysemy is generated by an inventory of specialised lexical inference rules, in this way avoiding a listing of predictable senses in the mental lexicon (Asher 2011, Asher & Lascarides 2003, Copestake & Briscoe 1992, 1995, Gillon 1992, 1999, Kilgarriff 1995, Kilgarriff & Gazdar 1995, Leech 1981, Ostler & Atkins 1992, Pustejovsky 1991, 1995)
I hope to have shown so far that none of the standard arguments given for a rulebased account of count-mass polysemy provides decisive grounds for claiming the existence of lexical rules, and that each of them can be countered by a plausible pragmatic explanation
Summary
A central insight of lexical pragmatics is that word meanings undergo pragmatic modulation in the course of utterance interpretation. Within many lexical semantic frameworks, the rules are taken to come with specific interpretive predictions based on lexically stored information, so that for instance, a mass use of an animal term would have a meat sense as default, a count use of a liquid term would have a conventional serving sense as default, and so on (e.g., Asher 2011, Asher & Lascarides 2003, Copestake & Briscoe 1992, 1995, Gillon 1992, 1999, Kilgarriff 1995, Kilgarriff & Gazdar 1995, Ostler & Atkins 1992, Pustejovsky 1991, 1995) Advocates of this sort of approach often claim that lexical rules are required to account for the availability of ‘default’ senses in uninformative contexts, and to explain the productivity and morpho-syntactic consequences of systematic polysemy and the parallel that might be drawn with morphological processes.
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