Abstract
Lexical innovations (e.g., zero-derivations coined on the fly by a speaker) seem to bear semantic content. Yet, such expressions cannot bear semantic content as a function of the conventions of meaning in force in the language, since they are not part of its lexicon. This is in tension with the commonplace view that the semantic content of lexical expressions is constituted by linguistic conventions. The conventionalist has two immediate ways out of the tension. The first is to preserve the conventionalist assumption and deny that lexical innovations bear semantic content. The second is to dynamize the conventionalist assumption, that is, argue that presentations of unattested expressions trigger an augmentation of the standing semantic resources of the language and instantiate content as a result of this underlying update. Building on a comparison with the production of novel onomatopoeic words, iconic pseudowords and pro-speech gestures, the paper argues that the issue is best addressed by suspending the conventionalist assumption, and describes the metasemantic implications of the claim.
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Notes
I am not aware of previous uses of this verbification, and apologies if anyone else should be credited for the invention. That said, I can reasonably predict that most readers will be encountering the word for the first time. Also, notational caveat: from now on, I will use expressions of form wordCL to notate vocabulary items and their grammatical class, and expressions of form “word”S to notate lexical occurrences or presentations of words within sentences. Accordingly, I will use ShaqN and shaqV to refer to the proper name ‘Shaq’ and the verb ‘shaq’, respectively, and “shaq”(1) to refer to the unfamiliar presentation featuring in (1). This toy notation is not completely unambiguous, but will do the job for the purposes of this paper.
In machine learning (esp. computer vision), “zero-shot learning” refers to the processes by which a machine learns to recognize objects in an image without any labeled training data to help in the classification. Approximating a bit, “zero-shot learning” deals thus with the problem of building machines capable of emulating human-level abilities in the classification of objects belonging to a class they have never encountered before (Xian et al. 2018). Since the interpretation of “shaq”(1) can be characterized as a “zero-shot” task in this sense, I will borrow the label as a quick reminder to the fact that in cases such as (1) listeners are faced with the task of interpreting the inaugural presentation of a word which is not part of the lexicon of the language.
In what follows, I will sometimes omit this qualification for concision’s sake.
The exact scope of the set of supplementary factors that intervene in the determination of semantic content will, of course, vary depending on the theory of meaning one is assuming. A minimalist à la Borg (2004), a contextualist à la Recanati (2010), and a relativist à la MacFarlane (2014), are likely to endorse substantially different accounts of what formal processes and what resources, besides the conventions of the language, endow sentences and expressions with content. However, the matter is orthogonal to the specific claims made by L-Conventionalism and Semanticity, versions of which I take to be widely shared among parties to the debate on the nature of meaning. I’m making this explicit to stress that the two principles, and the tension between them we will consider in a moment, are not the outcome of partisan metasemantic premises, and should make sense across the spectrum of theories of meaning available on the philosophical market.
See, e.g., Gasparri and Murez (2019). Back to this in due course.
Throughout the paper, I will use labels such as “lexical innovations”, “novel expressions”, and “unattested words” almost interchangeably, but always to designate presentations of expressions which are not part of the lexicon of the language. Labels like “lexical innovation” are ambiguous between at least two readings: one referring to the use of brand new expressions (like “shaq”(1)), and one referring to semantically unfamiliar or deviant uses of attested expressions. These are distinct objects of analysis, and this paper is about the former.
Among the examples he considers: “Bea managed to houdini her way out of her cell”; “A local resident expressed concern that incoming developers were going to east village her neighborhood in Brooklyn”; “The delivery boy managed to porch the newspaper at every house on the block”; “Pat made sure to whisky the punch before the teachers arrived”. In what follows, I will keep relying on (1) as my central case study, but the rest of the argument would apply equally well to any of these other examples.
A reviewer points out that another solution would be to assume that “shaq”(1) is a code for a definite description built with attested lexical material, something like “John tried to do the kind of thing Shaq usually does”, and that “shaq”(1) inherits its content from definite description it replaces. This is certainly a possibility, but the move raises some questions. What non-ad hoc motivations do we have to believe that “shaq”(1) is a proxy for a definite description? What would be the exact format of the description involved, and how would it fit into the original structure of (1) (“John was fifteen feet from the basket and tried to do the kind of thing Shaq usually does [
his way] [?? to the rim]”)? Furthermore, while the move is available for (1), it does not appear to be an open option for some of the instances of lexical innovation we will consider below. I therefore will not consider this possibility further.It might be worth recalling that for Davidson malapropisms and cases of accidental mispronunciations were as challenging for a conventionalist theory of meaning as cases like (1). Yet, the generalization is debatable. For example, Predelli (2010) and Lepore and Stone (2017) argue that malapropisms (e.g., “The police apprehended two auspicious individuals”) can be reconciled with assumptions in the same ballpark as L-Conventionalism by hypothesizing that the sentence actually presented in such cases is the one featuring the word the speaker attempted to articulate (i.e., “The police apprehended two suspicious individuals”), and that the utterance inherits the conventional semantic features of the sentence it was intended to externalize. Cf. Armstrong (2016: fn. 17).
For example, Armstrong’s (2016) argument that a dynamic approach can preserve a role for linguistic conventions in accounting for the semantic properties of lexical innovations, seems to be an argument in favor of what I have called “weak Dynamic L-Conventionalism”. Proof that weak Dynamic L-Conventionalism is viable would be of consequence, and Armstrong does a remarkable job of showing the interest and the explanatory virtues of the view. However, if I am correct, the less ambitious reading of Dynamic L-Conventionalism would not settle the specific tension between Semanticity and L-Conventionalism we are considering.
Which many fear is inevitably going to suffer from major drawbacks: among others, it will flirt with a controversial form of Humpty Dumptyism, and will have a hard time making sense of how speakers may be ignorant or confused about the semantic properties of the expressions of their language (e.g., Barber 2001).
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pressing me on this.
Thanks to two anonymous reviewers for inviting me to clarify this.
As a matter of fact, cooperative lexical innovation tends to rely on an implicit theory of the informational resources required to interpret the unattested word, and on an assumption that such resources are available to the listener. For example, the production of (1) is likely to occur modulo a tacit belief that the addressee is familiar with Shaquille O’Neal and associates him to the properties that are relevant to the interpretation of “shaq”(1) (being physically imposing and bumping defenders under the rim) in an almost stereotypical fashion.
Note on the terminology: pro-speech gestures are gestures that replace entire words. They are distinguished from co-speech gestures, which are produced simultaneously with the spoken words they modify, and from post-speech gestures, which follow the expressions they modify.
Since I am putting weight on the parallels between lexical innovations and novel iconic presentations, note that I am not assuming, or trying to convince the reader, that the interpretation of iconic presentations has no place for conventions. First of all, some iconic presentations are completely conventionalized and require the knowledge of an explicit signaling convention to be successfully interpreted (another basketball analogy: think of the gesture used by NBA officials to signal a travel violation). Other iconic presentations rely on implicit or natural representational conventions which subjects can identify and parse even with no explicit learning, but remain “conventions” in the full sense of the term: think of Greenberg (2013) on the conventions of linear projection in pictures, and Cumming et al. (2017) on the conventions of viewpoint coherence in film. However, as we have repeatedly made clear, the issue at stake here is the relationship between semantic content and specialized conventions of semantic character, rather than the relationship between semantic content and “general” conventions of meaning (e.g., the kind of non-linguistic conventions explored by recent work on pictorial representation). The issue whether or not the semantic content of presentations of unattested words is constituted by an underlying augmentation of the body of specialized conventions holding in the language, is independent on whether their content is also (partly) dependent on non-specialized conventions of meaning (e.g., in (12), a conventional mapping from decreases in pitch to decreases in tone or affect). Willingness to grant the latter claim would not settle the former. Thanks to two anonymous reviewers for helpful discussion on these points.
One might object that this conclusion is a figment of the limited battery of tests we have considered, or that a more careful heuristics might do the job of disentangling the innovation of (1) from the non-linguistic constituents featuring in (12) and (13). However, there is growing independent consensus that iconic constituents like [u]-sound descending in pitch(12) and hand with palm up + arm descending diagonally(13) do trigger sophisticated semantic and compositional effects, and that they do so even on first exposure. Besides entailments, they seem to trigger scalar implicatures, presuppositions and associated phenomena (e.g., anti-presuppositions), homogeneity inferences characteristic of definite plurals, as well as some expressive inferences normally found in pejorative terms. See, a.o., Abusch (2012), Ebert and Ebert (2014), and Schlenker (2019).
For the record, I am considering the possibility simply to illustrate the neutrality of Productive Periphery, not to imply that we should go for intention-insensitivity. On intentions and conventions, see, e.g., Schiffer (2017).
Though it might be worth mentioning that linguistic theory has been steadily shifting away from the consensus that while iconicity can be found in spoken languages, phenomena such as onomatopoeia and sound symbolism are “asterisks to the far more important principle of the arbitrary sign” (Pinker 1999: 2). A flurry of findings suggests that iconic form-to-meaning mappings are much more pervasive (in signed and spoken lexicons alike) than the dogma of arbitrariness suggests, and that elements of iconicity tend to be present, in various degrees and at various levels (phonemic, prosodic, morphological), even in the linguistic forms we have learned to characterize as “arbitrary”. See, e.g., Hinton et al. (2006); Perniss et al. (2010).
Besides, recall that the properties of the shape [∫wum] are insufficient to fix any univocal meaning and that, much like in (1), reasoning about context has to pull its weight. If the inaugural presentation of “schwoom”, instead of occurring in (11), occurred in the sentence “The stocks were going up yesterday but today they’ll most certainly schwoom”, the verb would be readily understood to denote something very different from the event pictured by “schwoom”(11) (presumably, a fall instead of a swift horizontal movement). So (1) and (11) are not as distant as the difference in iconic character might seem to suggest.
Another way to put the point: proof that L-Conventionalism is universally false does not make it generically false. If I am correct, universal interpretations of L-Conventionalism are refuted by the negative instances provided by cases of lexical innovation. Nonetheless, L-Conventionalism might remain sound as a generic claim, that is, as a claim about the factors that endow presentations of lexical expressions with semantic content in “typical” cases, and modulo the premise that utterances of sentences built exclusively with familiar lexical material are the statistic norm. Compare with Armstrong (2015) on “moderate explanatory conventionalism”.
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Acknowledgements
I am indebted to Amir Anvari, Josh Armstrong, and Philippe Schlenker for discussion on an ancestor of this paper, and to two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on the submitted manuscript. The usual disclaimer applies. Financial support from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation is gratefully acknowledged.
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Gasparri, L. Lexical innovation and the periphery of language. Linguist and Philos 45, 39–63 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-020-09319-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10988-020-09319-2