Lexical Pragmatics - Journal of Semantics

158 Lexical PragmaticsNOTES1 I have to thank an anonymous referee ofthe JS for this example.2 An anonymous referee notes that forhim beef sounds equally good as cow in(7). Consequently, the relevant differencein acceptability between (6b)and (7) is in cow (which sounds fine)more than in beef. This fact is sufficientto illustrate the phenomenon of deblocking,which is the relevant one in thepresent context3 These problems concern (i) the restrictivenessof the coercion mechanism, (ii)the apparent inflation of shiftingoperations, (iii) the stipulation of anadditional checking mechanism thatdiminishes the use of monotonicprocessing, and (iv) problems with theanalysis of co-predication in case oflogical polysemy. For details and furthercriticism, see Copestake & Briscoe('99S)> Fodor & Lapore (to appear),and Blutner (to appear).4 In general, cost factors relate to the(estimated) cost of accessing the differentinterpretations. In section 4.1 anexplicit account is provided whichbrings our system as close as possibleto a Bayesian network and takes costsas negative logarithms of certain conditionalprobabilities.5 Sperber & Wilson's (1986) extremeposition of reducing the maxims tojust one—the maxim of relevant—isn'trelevant in the present context. Asargued by Levinson (1989), Sperber &Wilson try the 'impossibility of reducingcountervailing principles to onemega-principle'. They concentrate onthe phenomena of classic particularizedRelevance implicatures illustrated byGrice, and they fail to account for thewhole range of generalized conversationalimplicatures—the implicaturesthat are most important for lexicalpragmatics.6 See, for example, Bierwisch (1983) andJackendofT (1983) for similar distinctions.The important point of this distinctioncorrelates with Grice's proposalin his William James Lectures to make adistinction within the 'total signification'of a linguistic utterance betweenwhat a communicator has said (in acertain favoured, and maybe to somedegree artificial, sense of said), and whata communicator has meant beyond it(what she has implicated, indicated,suggested).7 Mental model and conceptual representationare more psychologically colouredterms; information state is the favouredterm used in formal semantics.8 See, for example, McEliece (1977).9 In section 4 a more refined cost-functionis developed which sometimes allows theselection of state descriptions that are notminimal surprising. However, these statedescriptions can be characterized as the'better interpretations' because they aremore unifying and, in some sense, morerelevant than less surprising ones. Thisformulation brings us closer to the ideaof Atlas & Levinson (1981) where theI-principle is intended as inference to'the best interpretation' (with 'bestinterpretation' informally understoodas interpretation which prefers coreferentialreadings of entities, making useof stereotypical relations betweenreferents or events. However, it shouldbe added that the way in which Atlas &Levinson (1981) try to formalize theirPrinciple of Informativeness seemsrather misleading.10 Here K is the epistemic operator indexedto H and S, respectively. The epistemiclogic I assume is Hintikka's (1962). Asdiscussed by Zeevat (1997), this conditionon common grounds is only a necessaryone. Developing a more refined definitionof common ground, Zeevat formulatesalso an update operation for commongrounds. His conception, however,Downloaded from http://jos.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on September 12, 2014