Lexical Pragmatics - Journal of Semantics

152 Lexical PragmaticsThis utterance does not have the highly marked status of (37a). The presentaccount explains this by making the plausible assumption that the tyres ofbicycles are one of the most salient parts of bicycles. Consequently, in thiscase the pumped up tyres- interpretation comes out as a cost minimal one, andit doesn't suffer from sort conflict.Needless to say, the present considerations regarding the amounts of theparameters have to be supported by careful empirical studies. However, as afirst step considerations of this kind may be valuable. They may demonstrateat least which kinds of influence are conceivable, and this again maybe tested empirically.4.3 Abduction and systematic polysemyIn this section I will demonstrate how the ideas put forward in section 4.1may provide a mechanism for generating the range of the conceptuallysalient senses of institute-type words—a mechanism that solves the restrictionproblem of polysemy. Adopting the radical underspecification view(section 2.2), I will show how the extended mechanism of conversationalimplicature is capable of giving a principled account.The general idea that leads us to underspecified representations in thecase of institute-type words is as follows. Suppose there are certain entitieswhich can be understood as conceptual frames or schemata and can beclassified according to the variety of institute-types (government, school,parliament, etc.). Suppose further that these entities can be consideredunder different perspectives. These perspectives are assumed to provide moreconcrete realizations of the rather abstract concept of a certain institute-typee, perhaps realized as building, process, or institution property. However,the particular perspective adopted and, consequently, the concreterealization of the intended institute-type remains semantically open.In a first approximation, the semantic representation of institute-typenominals may look like (41a, b).Downloaded from http://jos.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on September 12, 2014(41) (a) Ax 3e[SCHOOL(e) A REALIZE(e, x)](b) Ax 3e[GOVERNMENT(e) A REALIZE(e, x)]Note that the specification of x as building, process, or institution properhas not been specified in the lexicon. That means that the variety ofdifferent interpretations has not been treated by stipulating semanticambiguities. Note furthermore that the different restrictions on interpretativevariants, for example for school and government, are no longer treatedsemantically. As a consequence, the restriction problem of polysemy has tobe analysed pragmatically.