Lexical Pragmatic Adjustment and the Nature of Ad hoc Concepts

Abstract

The questions in the domain of relevance-theoretic lexical pragmatics that strike me as most interesting and most in need of some long hard thought concern the nature of ad hoc concepts. (Carston, 2010: 248-249) AbstractAccording to truth-conditional pragmatics, a word may contribute an ad hoc concept to the proposition expressed, that is, something that differs from the concept the word encodes (the lexicalized concept). In relevance-theoretic lexical pragmatics, ad hoc concepts are treated like a species of concepts proper. Concepts as well as ad hoc concepts are taken to be atomic. Lexical pragmatic adjustment is conceived as the formation of an ad hoc concept that is narrower or broader in extension (or both) than the lexicalized concept involved. We argue that difference in extension should not be taken as the crucial feature of lexical pragmatics, since ad hoc concepts can have the same extension as the lexicalized concept. In contrast, we propose a positive view of ad hoc concepts as clusters of information poised to be used in inference. (Surprisingly, ad hoc concepts turn out not to be concepts at all.) The cluster account drops the assumption that ad hoc concepts are atomic and can therefore provide a satisfactory explanation of lexical pragmatic adjustment.2 Keywords ad hoc concept, concept, lexical pragmatic adjustment, truth-conditional pragmatics, relevance theory, proposition expressed Truth-Conditional Pragmatics and Ad hoc ConceptsGrice proposed that the pragmatic implicatures of an utterance are inferred from the proposition it literally expresses by drawing on pragmatic maxims. For him, the proposition expressed ("what is said", in Grice's terminology) by an utterance is determined by the linguistic meaning of the words uttered, the assignment of referents to context-dependent expressions such as pronouns and the resolution of ambiguities. (See Grice, 1975: 44). More recently several authors have argued that pragmatics does not only start when the proposition expressed is determined. Some aspects of the proposition expressed seem to be inferred on the basis of pragmatic principles.1 A criterion that has been important in the debate is the effect of embedding under logical operations such as negation. (See Carston, 2002: 193). Consider an example given by Carston (2002: 193):(1) A: Have you showered? B:No, I haven't. I showered yesterday and one should not shower too often.The negation in B's reply operates on the proposition that the speaker has showered on the day of utterance. Otherwise we could not see how B's reason (in his second sentence) bears on the truth of his utterance of "No, I haven't." Now it is has been controversial whether pragmatics enters 1 Wilson and Sperber, 1981, provides one of the earliest versions of this view. For overviews see Carston, 2002: 19-32; Recanati, 2004: 25f. 3 the picture in such cases through deriving the value of a hidden variable that is linguistically provided, or by "free" (i.e. purely pragmatic) enrichment. But it is accepted by both sides that th...

What words mean and express: semantics and pragmatics of kind terms and verbs

“…In fact, the differences between the 'angel' and the 'rabbit' case are so substantial that no theory should treat them as the same phenomenon. Besides the data about cross-reference, here are some other relevant differences between senses of regular polysemes and ad hoc concepts: (i) the different senses of a polyseme prime each other, while it is doubtful that the use of 'flat' in 'the sea is flat' primes FLAT*, with FLAT* being the concept expressed by 'flat' in 'the Tour de France third stage is flat'; (ii) there seems to be an essential difference between truly ad hoc concepts and senses of a polyseme: the typical ad hoc concepts (ANGEL*, FLAT*) are somewhat vaporous, hard to define or pin down or open-ended (Allott & Textor, 2012), while senses have clear references; (iii) polysemy resolution is usually presented as a process of selection, while ad hoc concept formation prima facie implies constructing one meaning on the fly: contextual information is relevant in both cases, but it seems that in different ways, because in one case contextual information is relevant in order to pick out an already existing sense, while in the other it is relevant in order to construct a meaning; (iv) finally, and above all: the systematicity of regular polysemy requires a specific explanation. Now, note that, although the account is not bound to hold that there is no difference between the two cases, it is difficult to produce an explanation of the difference between 6 The adoption of a thin meaning semantics in Relevance Theory has some implications with respect to ad hoc concepts: according to "standard" Relevance Theory words encode atomic concepts, which give access to encyclopedic entries.…”

“…That is, we do not need a thin semantic representation to tell us how far we can depart from the alleged lexical meaning. In these cases, i.e., cases of ad hoc concepts probably have a different texture -they are more vaporous and/or open-ended, and it is not easy to specify what categories they pick out (see Allott and Textor, 2012) -. They are not lexicalized, but it seems that, in general, they cannot be captured by linguistic means, while there is apparently no problem in characterizing linguistically a Barsalou-ad hoc category.…”

The lexical pragmatics of count-mass polysemy

“…Each position is associated with its own set of advantages and shortcomings (see Laurence & Margolis 1999 for a review, and Margolis & Laurence 2015 for recent perspectives). While I adopt the relevance-theoretic (Fodorian) position here, according to which there is a simple mapping between words and (atomic) mental concepts, this is not crucial to the overall argument presented in the paper (for relevance-theoretic accounts discussing whether pragmatically derived (ad hoc) concepts are plausibly atomic or decompositional, see Allott & Textor (2012) and Hall (2017). There is also an on-going debate within Relevance Theory regarding the nature of word meaning: one proposal is that substantive words (nouns, verbs, adjectives) do not encode full-fledged concepts but more schematic representations (Carston 2012(Carston , 2013.…”

Ciclo de vida de un concepto en el marco de la cognición ad hoc

“…Así, y aunque no existe una visión unitaria de lo que un concepto ad hoc es, la mayoría de los autores que emplean esta noción sostienen que los conceptos ad hoc son representaciones construidas pragmáticamente en función del contexto, en tareas de categorización, inferencia, comprensión, etc., y susceptibles de identificarse con entidades psicológicas presentes en la memoria de trabajo del sujeto (Barsalou 1987;Carston 2002;Allott y Textor 2012). Frente a esto, mi tesis es que los conceptos ad hoc -conceptos instanciados-son el resultado de procesos psicológicos que ocurren al vuelo en cada ocasión.…”