Semantic polysemy and psycholinguistics

Mind and Language 36 (1):134-157 (2021)
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Abstract

The paper urges that polysemous phenomena are typically semantic not pragmatic. The part of a message sent by a polysemous expression is typically one of its meanings encoded in the speaker's language and not the result of pragmatic modification. The hearer receives that part of the message by a process of disambiguation, by detecting which item in the lexicon the speaker has selected. This is the best explanation of observed regularities. The paper argues that the experimental evidence from psycholinguistics, particularly that produced in discussions of “underspecification” and “overspecification,” does not undermine this view nor support the pragmatic alternative.

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Citations of this work

Polysemy: Pragmatics and sense conventions.Robyn Carston - 2021 - Mind and Language 36 (1):108-133.
Poetry and the Possibility of Paraphrase.Gregory Currie & Jacopo Frascaroli - 2021 - The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 79 (4):428-439.
Is 'Cause' Ambiguous?Phil Corkum - 2022 - Philosophical Studies 179:2945-71.
Explaining systematic polysemy: kinds and individuation.Katherine Ritchie & Sandeep Prasada - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.

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References found in this work

Rules and representations.Noam Chomsky (ed.) - 1980 - New York: Columbia University Press.
Rules and representations.Noam A. Chomsky - 1980 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3 (1):1-15.
Convention: A Philosophical Study.David Lewis - 1969 - Synthese 26 (1):153-157.
Relevance.D. Sperber & Deirdre Wilson - 1986 - Communication and Cognition: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly Journal 2.
Studies in the Way of Words.Paul Grice - 1989 - Philosophy 65 (251):111-113.

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