Abstract
The notions of saturation and free pragmatic enrichment (otherwise known as completion and expansion) have played a central but controversial role in recent work on the philosophy of language. We try to get a better insight into these concepts by linking them with the lexical semantic distinction between ambiguity and underspecification. We argue that the crucial problems in both domains cluster around the distinction between linguistic meaning and meaning in context. We argue that the notion meaning in context is semantic, as opposed to what we call ‘what is communicated’, which involves semantic and pragmatic information. We then propose that saturation and lexical ambiguity are alike in that they both involve the semantic relation between linguistic meaning and meaning in context, whereas free pragmatic enrichment and the resolution of lexical underspecification have to do with the pragmatic relation between meaning in context and what is communicated. We show that this proposal sheds new light on two long-standing empirical problems in linguistics: English modals, and the present perfect tense.
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Notes
- 1.
It is worth pointing out that, notwithstanding his use of the word process in the passage cited, Bach does not consider completion and expansion to be inferential processes, but prefers to think of them as types of information added to the linguistic meaning. Carston and Recanati, on the other hand, use the verbs to saturate, to modulate and to (pragmatically) enrich to refer to inferential processes as part of utterance interpretation.
- 2.
- 3.
Alternatively, one might want to argue that the ‘geometrical’ (accurate) reading is derived from the everyday ‘loose’ use.
- 4.
We will argue that ‘loose talk’ instantiates ‘what is communicated’. (See Sect. 2.6)
- 5.
- 6.
We are aware that our discussion does not do justice to the rich literature in lexical semantic theory. The discussion of lexical meaning ideally requires the choice of a specific theory of semantic representation, with a constrained metalanguage to discuss meaning in. All we are trying to do here is show that linking the field of lexical semantics with the concepts of saturation and free pragmatic enrichment is mutually beneficial.
- 7.
This informal use of aunt seems to be dying out in the UK. When the second-named author was a student, a helpful organisation called ‘University Aunts’ offered advice and support. It was run by a group of benevolent older women, as the name was intended to suggest. Now this is ancient history, and all that remains near his Alma Mater is ‘Auntie’s Tea Shop’, with the name presumably still intended to suggest old-fashioned female benevolence. In other parts of the world the use survives: in the outstanding 2013 Indian film The Lunchbox, the older female friend who lives upstairs from the central female character is always addressed as ‘Auntie’. Other polysemes of aunt, appalling but happily obsolete, include ‘prostitute’ and ‘gossip’ – see OED senses (2) and (3).
- 8.
Our choice of the basic meaning (the kinship sense) is based on a metalinguistic intuition rather than extensive corpus research.
- 9.
The fact that literal and metaphorical interpretations are antagonistic is a reason to link metaphors with ambiguity and saturation. This is controversial: previous work has tended to treat metaphors and FPE as similar because the literal reading of, for example, My boss is a weasel is complete, and truth-evaluable as false (cf. You won’t die). Recanati treats metaphor interpretation as a free pragmatic process (2010: 4 and passim), and Carston includes metaphor as a variety of modulation (2010: 219). On the other hand, Wilson & Carston note similarities between metaphor and polysemy (2006: 429), albeit in a discussion which tries to assimilate polysemy to modulation, rather than the other way round. We cannot resolve this issue here, but we remain convinced that any account of metaphor has to take account of the antagonism between the literal and metaphorical interpretations of weasel.
- 10.
Space prevents us from incorporating notions here from recent work in ‘lexical pragmatics’. See the papers by Hall and Lemmens in this volume for discussion.
- 11.
Depraetere (2014) uses the term ‘lexically-regulated saturation’. We use restricted (vs. unrestricted, cf. note 13) to highlight the contrast with other types of saturation. Her discussion is focussed on modal verbs that either express possibility or necessity and does not address will and shall. (cf. Van der Auwera and Plungian 1998)
- 12.
We will not go into the detail of the defining features, as it is the basic principle that is important in the context of this article. See Depraetere (2014) for the full analysis.
- 13.
Depraetere (2014) uses ‘saturation with open-ended valuation’ for what we here call ‘lexically unrestricted saturation’.
- 14.
Alternatively, the past tense can be analysed as not having a Reference Time at all, as in Salkie (2010). For our purposes, all that matters is that the Present Perfect is analysed as (E-R, S).
- 15.
The finite present perfect is admittedly not a lexical marker; it is a grammatical form composed of a finite form of auxiliary have and a past participle. However, the finite present perfect also illustrates saturation that is lexically regulated in the sense that the form comes with an inherent range of meanings, one of which is instantiated in the context.
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Acknowledgement
We are grateful to David Hornsby, Naoaki Wada, Kent Bach and the reviewers for their very useful comments on a draft of this paper. We are responsible for any remaining errors.
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Depraetere, I., Salkie, R. (2017). Free Pragmatic Enrichment, Expansion, Saturation, Completion: A View from Linguistics. In: Depraetere, I., Salkie, R. (eds) Semantics and Pragmatics: Drawing a Line. Logic, Argumentation & Reasoning, vol 11. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32247-6_2
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