Lexical Pragmatics - Journal of Semantics

Reinhard Blutner 139implausible to assume that I have only one book or one finger. Only in theformer case can the more precise genitive form (/ slept on my book; I slept inmy car) block the corresponding interpretation. In treating the examples onthe right-hand side, we have to take into account also those interpretationswhere more than one book or one finger is involved; in this case there is noalternative expression that may block the ego-centred interpretations andthey may be selected by means of the I-principle.Summarizing, the present account of conversational implicature triesto give a real unification of the two competing 'forces' expressed by theQ-principle and the I-principle, respectively. This approach contrasts withmost recent theoretical accounts (e.g. Hirschberg 1991; Matsumoto 1995)that have focused on single classes of conversational implicatures only. Incontrast, the present account tries to address the integration of differentkinds of conversational implicatures.The main problems addressed in this paper are problems of LexicalPragmatics. Before I come to a detailed treatment of some typical examples,I want to discuss four theses that are designed to characterize LexicalPragmatics from a methodological point of view.3.2 Four theses of Lexical PragmaticsLexical Pragmatics is a research field that tries to give a systematic andexplanatory account of pragmatic phenomena that are intimately connectedwith the semantic underspecification of lexical items. The approachcombines a compositional semantics with a general mechanism of conversationalimplicature. Starting off from a underspecified semanticrepresentation, a mechanism of information enrichment (abduction) isinvoked to yield the appropriate specification with regard to thecommon ground.In section 2 the range of Lexical Pragmatics has been characterized byseveral examples, and some general, typical problems have been discussed.The present subsection tries to sharpen the rather impressionistic picturethat has evolved and attempts to illuminate it from a methodologicalperspective.Downloaded from http://jos.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on September 12, 2014Thesis i: Lexical Pragmatics is non-compositionalIn section 2 I argued against the principle of pragmatic compositionality. Thisprinciple says that it is possible to decompose the lexical items of ancompound expression into conceptual components which combinedtogether determine the conceptual interpretation of the whole expression.