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1、Relevance and lexical pragmatics* DEIRDRE WILSON Abstract The goal of lexical pragmatics is to explain how linguistically specified (literal) word meanings are modified in use. While lexical-pragmatic processes such as narrowing, broadening and metaphorical extension are generally studied in isolati
2、on from each other, relevance theorists (Carston 2002, Wilson Ducrot 1972, 1984; Searle 1979; Lakoff Sperber Cruse 1986; Hobbs Lakoff 1987; Lahav 1989; Sweetser 1990; Horn 1992, 2000; Aitchison 1994; Bach 1994, 2001; Gibbs 1994; Copestake Franks 1995; Recanati 1995, 2004; Rips 1995; Bertuccelli Papi
3、 1997; Carston 1997, 1999, 2002; Blutner 1998, 2002; Lascarides Lasersohn 1999; Fauconnier Wilson Merlini Barbaresi 2003. 344 Deirdre Wilson defend the alternative view that they are outcomes of a single pragmatic process which fine-tunes the interpretation of virtually every word.2 I will adopt a s
4、imple model of linguistic semantics that treats words as encoding mentally-represented concepts, elements of a conceptual representation system or language of thought, which constitute their linguistic meanings and determine what might be called their linguistically-specified denotations.3 The goal
5、of lexical semantics is to investigate the relations between words and the concepts they encode, and the goal of lexical pragmatics is to account for the fact that the concept communicated by use of a word often differs from the concept encoded. Narrowing is the case where a word is used to convey a
6、 more specific sense than the encoded one, resulting in a restriction of the linguistically-specified denotation. Approximation and metaphorical transfer may be seen as varieties of broadening, where a word is used to convey a more general sense, with consequent widening of the linguistically-specif
7、ied denotation. The effect of narrowing is to highlight a proper subpart of the linguistically- specified denotation. Here are some illustrations: (1) All doctors drink. (2) a. As I worked in the garden, a bird perched on my spade. b. Birds wheeled above the waves. c. A bird, high in the sky, invisi
8、ble, sang its pure song. d. At Christmas, the bird was delicious. (3) Mary is a working mother. (4) I have a temperature. In (1), drink might convey not the encoded sense drink liquid but, more specifically, drink alcohol, or drink significant amounts of alcohol. In (2a-d), each use of bird would hi
9、ghlight a different subset of birds. As noted by Lakoff (1987: 80-82), (3) would generally indicate not just that Mary satisfies the definition female parent who works, but that she is a stereotypical working mother, bringing up young children while working for money outside the home; and (4) would
10、normally convey not the truism that the speaker has some temperature or other but that her temperature is high enough to be worth remarking on. 2 For elaboration of this view, see e.g. Carston 1997, 2002 chap. 5; Sperber Wilson Sperber 1996 chap 6; Carston 2002 chap 5; Wilson compare the interpretat
11、ions of flat in (8a-e): (8) a. This ironing board is flat. b. My garden is flat. c. My neighbourhood is flat. d. My country is flat. e. The Earth is flat. A second variety of broadening, which I will call category extension, is typified by the use of salient brand names (Hoover, Kleenex) to denote a
12、 broader category (vacuum cleaner, disposable tissue) including items from less salient brands. Personal names (Chomsky, Einstein) and common nouns both lend themselves to category extension (cf. Glucksberg 2001: 38-52). Some more creative uses are illustrated in (9-12): (9) Federer is the new Sampr
13、as. (10) Brown is the new black. (11) Mint is the new basil. (12) Is oak the new pine? In (9), Sampras evokes the category of gifted tennis players of a certain type. In (10) a typical piece of fashion writers discourse black evokes the category of staple colours in a fashion wardrobe; echoes are fo
14、und in cookery and interior design writing, as in (11) (herb of the moment) and (12) (trendy furniture wood). These examples of category extension are not analysable as approximations. The claim in (10) is not that Federer is a borderline case, close enough to being Sampras for it to be acceptable t
15、o call him Sampras, but merely that he belongs to a broader category of which Sampras is a salient member; and so on for the other examples. 346 Deirdre Wilson Metaphor and hyperbole may be thought of as more radical varieties of category extension.4 For example, (13) would be an approximation if us
16、ed to indicate that the water was close enough to boiling to be described as boiling, and a hyperbole if used to indicate that the water was merely hotter than expected, or uncomfortably hot: (13) The water is boiling. The metaphors in (14-16) are analysable on similar lines, as radical extensions o
17、f the linguistically-specified denotation: (14) Mary is a rose, a lily, a daisy, a violet; a jewel, a diamond, a ruby, a pearl. (15) That book puts me to sleep. (16) The leaves danced in the breeze. Thus, violet in (14) might be seen as representing the category of delicate, unflamboyant, easily ove
18、rlooked things, of which violets are a salient subcategory, and so on for other examples. 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 Wilson Carston 1997, 1999, 2000; Sp
19、erber Glucksberg 2001; Wilson Hopper Bertuccelli Papi 2000. 6 Appeals to polysemy are probably justified in many cases. However, since each encoded sense of a polysemous word may undergo further pragmatic processing, polysemy does not eliminate the need for lexical pragmatics. 7 See e.g. Horn 1984,
20、1992, 2000; Levinson 2000; Blutner 1998, 2002. For discussion, see Lakoff 1987. 8 See e.g. Lewis 1979; Lasersohn 1999. For discussion, see Gross 2001. 9 See e.g. Grice 1975, Levinson 1983. 348 Deirdre Wilson Amplify the informational content of the speakers utterance, by finding the most specific in
21、terpretation, up to what you judge to be the speakers m-intended point . (ibid: 114). The I-heuristic might be seen as dealing with stereotypical narrowings such as (3) above, and the I-Principle as dealing with less stereotypical cases such as (4). However, this approach leaves many aspects of the
22、narrowing process unexplained. In the first place, there may be several possible degrees or directions of narrowing, as in (1) (where drink may be narrowed to drink alcohol or drink a lot of alcohol) and (2) (where bird is narrowed in different ways in different contexts). Levinson (ibid: 118) notes
23、 (and experimental evidence confirms, cf. Barsalou 1987) that even stereotypical narrowing is context dependent. For example, Englishman in (20) would evoke different stereotypes in a discussion of cooking, cricket, sailing, seduction, etc: (20) John is an Englishman. In the second place, stereotypi
24、cal narrowing also competes with other varieties of narrowing.10 In (21), man might be narrowed to an idealised rather than a stereotypical interpretation, indicating that Churchill is a man worthy of the name rather than a typical man: (21) Churchill was a man. According to the I-Principle, the hea
25、rer of (1-4) and (20-21) should choose the appropriate degree and direction of narrowing using his judgement about the speakers m-intended point (i.e. the speakers meaning) a judgement which is therefore presupposed rather than explained by this account. Levinson acknowledges the context dependence
26、of I-implicatures, but maintains (ibid: 118) that at a sufficient level of abstraction they are default inferences (generalised implicatures) which hold as preferred interpretations across contexts, and indeed across languages. However, as illustrated in (5-19) above, broadening appears to be just a
27、s strong a tendency as narrowing at the lexical level, and it is not clear why narrowing rather than broadening should be seen as the default. Nor is it clear how an approach based on the I-principle could generalise to approximations or metaphors (which Levinson appears to treat as blatant violatio
28、ns of a maxim of truthfulness in the regular Gricean way). It is therefore worth looking for an alternative, more explanatory account. 10 For an interesting survey of many varieties of narrowing, see Lakoff 1987. Relevance and lexical pragmatics 349 Lewis (1983: 244-45) treats approximation as a typ
29、e of pragmatic vagueness governed by contextually-determined standards of precision: When is a sentence true enough? this itself is a vague matter. More important ., it is something that depends on context. What is true enough on one occasion is not true enough on another. The standards of precision
30、 in force are different from one conversation to another, and may change in the course of a single conversation. Austins France is hexagonal is a good example of a sentence that is true enough for many contexts but not true enough for many others. To shed any light on how approximations are understo
31、od, this approach would have to be supplemented by some account of how the appropriate standard of precision is formulated, and how it may change in the course of a conversation. Consider (22): (22) The lecture will start at 5.00 and end at 6.00. As noted in Wilson category extension, metaphor and h
32、yperbole are not. Lewis himself proposes separate analyses of approximation and figurative utterances (which he treats as encoding figurative meanings in the traditional semantic way; cf. Lewis 1983: 1983; Wilson but it is doubtful that such a cut-off point exists. Thus, (13) above has a gradient of
33、 interpretations with clear approximations at one end, clear hyperboles at the other and a range of borderline cases in between; (7) above, which I have treated as an approximation, could equally well be classified as a 350 Deirdre Wilson hyperbole; and examples such as (9-12) above, which I have tr
34、eated as cases of category extension, are sometimes classified as metaphors (Glucksberg 2001: v, 47). The lack of a clear cut-off point between approximation, category extension, hyperbole and metaphor also raises problems for Grices analysis of figurative utterances. On Grices approach, (13-14) abo
35、ve would be analysed as blatant violations of the maxim of truthfulness (Do not say what you believe to be false), implicating (23-24), respectively: (23) This water is very hot. (24) Mary resembles a rose in some respects. As noted by Wilson Glucksberg 2001). In interpreting (15) above (an example
36、due to Dan Sperber), for instance, it may never even occur to the hearer to wonder whether the book literally put the speaker to sleep. All this suggests that it is worth trying to develop a more general account of lexical-pragmatic processes, which acknowledges their flexibility, creativity and con
37、text dependence, and treats them as applying spontaneously, automatically and unconsciously during on-line comprehension to fine-tune the interpretation of virtually every word. In the next section, I will outline an account which brings together ideas from experimental studies of categorisation and
38、 metaphor,11 on the 11 See e.g. Barsalou 1987; Gibbs 1994; Glucksberg et al. 1997; Glucksberg 2001. Relevance and lexical pragmatics 351 one hand, and from relevance theory and other recent work in pragmatics,12 on the other. Experimental studies of categorisation by Barsalou (e.g. 1987, 1992) suppo
39、rt the view that lexical narrowing cannot simply be analysed as default inference to a ready-made stereotype or prototype. In the first place, typicality judgements about existing categories (e.g. BIRD, ANIMAL) are quite variable across individuals, contexts and times, and the appeal to ready-made s
40、tereotypes or prototypes does not explain this variability. In the second place, people can readily provide typicality rankings for made-up categories that they could not have encountered before (e.g. THINGS THAT CAN FALL ON YOUR HEAD), or predict the typicality rankings for familiar categories from
41、 the point of view of real or imagined individuals for whom they would be most unlikely to have ready-made prototypes stored. Barsalou sees these facts as best explained by assuming that the content of a category on a particular occasion is not determined by accessing a ready-made stereotype or prot
42、otype, but is constructed on-line in an ad hoc, context-specific way, from a reservoir of encyclopaedic information which varies in accessibility from individual to individual and situation to situation, with different subsets being chosen on each occasion. This idea clearly has implications for lex
43、ical narrowing. However, apart from noting that the choice of a particular subset of encyclopaedic assumptions is affected by discourse context, the accessibility of information in memory and considerations of relevance, he does not provide a concrete pragmatic hypothesis about how the narrowing pro
44、cess might go. As noted above, experimental studies of metaphor by Gibbs (1994) and Glucksberg (2001) confirm the inadequacy of models of comprehension based on the standard Gricean approach by showing that a literal interpretation does not always have to be considered and rejected before moving to
45、a metaphorical interpretation. Glucksberg proposes that metaphor should instead be analysed as a variety of category extension. On this approach (tacitly adopted in section 1 above), just as Hoover may be used to represent the broader category of vacuum cleaners of which it is a salient member, so S
46、ampras may be used to denote a broader category of gifted tennis players of which he is a salient member, and violet may be used to denote a broader category of delicate, unflamboyant, easily-overlooked things, of which it is a salient member. Glucksberg (2001: 46) comments: Good metaphors . are act
47、s of classification that attribute . an interrelated set of properties to their topics. It follows that metaphoric 12 See e.g. Recanati 1995, 2004; Carston 1997, 2002; Sperber Rubio Fernandez 2001; Vega Moreno 2001, 2003, 2004; Wilson Sperber 1989, 1997, 2000a; Wilson 1990- 2003, 1995; Carston 1997,
48、 1999, 2002; Sperber Papafragou 2000; Wilson He 2003. In earlier versions of the theory, implicatures based on loose and metaphorical uses of concepts were not seen as affecting explicatures via backwards inference during the mutual adjustment of explicit content, context and cognitive effects (for
49、discussion of these notions, see section 3 below). In later versions, with the introduction of the mutual adjustment process (e.g. Sperber Wilson Carston 2002; Wilson at which point, he stops. This mutual adjustment of explicit content, contextual assumptions and cognitive effects constrained by expectations of relevance is the central feature of relevance-theoretic pragmatics.16 16 Mutual adjustment is seen as taking place in parallel rather than in sequence. The hearer does not first identify the proposition expressed, t