Lexical Pragmatics - Journal of Semantics

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128 Lexical Pragmatics(9) The Radical Underspecification View(a) Every lexical unit determines an underspecified representation (i.e. arepresentation that may contain, for example, place holders andrestrictions for individual and relational concepts).(b) The combinatorial system of language determines how lexical unitsare combined into larger units (phrases, sentences).(c) There is a system of type and sortal restrictions which determineswhether structures of a certain degree of (under)specification arewell formed.(d) There is a mechanism of contextual enrichment (pragmaticstrengthening based on contextual and encyclopedic knowledge).This inferential mechanism is controlled by cost factors and doesn'tneed triggering by type or sort violations.The mechanism of contextual enrichment carries the main burden inexplaining restrictions on interpretation. Because of its inferential character,this mechanism is structured non-compositionally. Inferential processingmust be controlled by cost factors. Such cost factors may reflect nonrepresentationalmeans as salience and relevance.* As we shall see in section 4,the idea of (radical) underspecification and contextual enrichment nicelyfits in the picture of mono tonic processing (Alshawi & Crouch 1992; vanDeemter & Peters 1996). Moreover, it is this feature of processing whichcrucially is involved in explaining pragmatic anomaly.3 LEXICAL PRAGMATICS AND THE THEORY OFCONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATUREBased on the material presented in the last section, the task of this section ismainly to evolve and propose a set of guidelines for realizing LexicalPragmatics as a proper theoretic settings. As we shall see, these guidelinesaim at a straightforward formulation of the notion of conversationalimplicature as a necessary prerequisite to develop Lexical Pragmatics.Before we are ready to speculate on what a proper treatment ofconversational implicatures might be, let me first make some remarksconcerning present accounts of conversational implicatures.For Griceans, conversational implicatures are those non-truth-functionalaspects of utterance interpretation which are conveyed by virtue of theassumption that the speaker and the hearer are obeying the cooperativeprinciple of conversation, and, more specifically, various conversational maxims:maxims of quantity, quality, relation, and manner.While the notion of conversational implicature doesn't seem hard toDownloaded from http://jos.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on September 12, 2014
Reinhard Blutner 129grasp intuitively, it has proven difficult to define precisely. The generalityof the cooperative principle and the conversational maxims makes itdifficult to specify just which maxims are involved in particular implicatures.Essential concepts mentioned in the maxims are left undefined(what is relevance, adequate evidence, etc.). However, before we can start to'flesh out' something like the maxims, Grice's view of implicature raiseseven more basic questions. Are there just the maxims Grice mentioned, ormight others be needed (as he suggested himself)? Or could the number ofmaxims be reduced? Sperber & Wilson (1986) are an extreme case insuggesting one only, the maxim of relevance. And what is the rationalebehind the cooperative principle and the maxims? Are they norms whichspeakers and hearers must know in order to communicate adequately (asGrice and most followers suggest)? Or are they generalizations about certainforms of inferential behavior which speakers and hearers need no more toknow to communicate than they need to know the principles of digestionto digest (Sperber & Wilson's position, a position which is also adopted inthe present account).An important step in reducing and explicating the Gricean frameworkhas been made by Atlas & Levinson (1981) and Horn (1984). TakingQuantity as a starting point they distinguish between two principles, theQ-principle and the I-principle (termed R-principle by Horn 1984).* Simplebut informal formulations of these principles are as follows:(10) Q-principle: Say as much as you can (given I) (Horn 1984: 13).Make your contribution as. informative (strong) aspossible (Matsumoto 1995: 23).Do not provide a statement that is informationallyweaker than your knowledge of the world allows,unless providing a stronger statement would contravenethe I-principle (Levinson 1987: 401).I-principle: Say no more than you must (given Q) (Horn 1984: 13).Say as little as necessary, i.e. produce the minimallinguistic information sufficient to achieve your communicationalends (bearing the Q-principle in mind)(Levinson 1987: 402)Read as much into an utterance as is consistent withwhat you know about the world. (Levinson 1983: 146-7)Obviously, the Q-principle corresponds to the first part of Grice's quantitymaxim (make your contributions as informative as required), while it can beargued that the countervailing I-principle collects the second part of thequantity maxim (do not make your contribution more informative than isrequired), the maxim of relation and possibly all the manner maxims. AsDownloaded from http://jos.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on September 12, 2014
Page 7 and 8: Reinhard Blutner 121(c) a fast book
Page 9: Reinhard Blutner 123not necessarily
Page 12: 126 Lexical Pragmaticsmeaning that
Page 18 and 19: 132 Lexical Pragmaticspr(m|sem(a))
Page 20 and 21: 134 Lexical Pragmaticsthe propositi
Page 22 and 23: 136 Lexical Pragmaticsprocesses and
Page 24 and 25: 138 Lexical Pragmaticsand a! that a
Page 26 and 27: 140 Lexical PragmaticsI have tried
Page 28 and 29: 142 Lexical Pragmaticsagainst the c
Page 30 and 31: 144 Lexical Pragmatics4.1 Cost-base
Page 32 and 33: 146 Lexical PragmaticsSince we have
Page 34 and 35: 148 Lexical Pragmaticsproposition B
Page 36 and 37: 150 Lexical Pragmatics(3$) (a) The
Page 38 and 39: 152 Lexical PragmaticsThis utteranc
Page 40 and 41: 154 Lexical Pragmatics(45) (a) 3e[S
Page 42 and 43: 156 Lexical Pragmaticson the way ho
Page 44 and 45: 158 Lexical PragmaticsNOTES1 I have
Page 46 and 47: i6o Lexical PragmaticsREFERENCESAls
Page 48: 162 Lexical PragmaticsPustejovsky,

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