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13 - Noun-Noun Compounds from the Perspective of Relevance Theory

from Part II - Pragmatics and Linguistic Issues

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 July 2019

Kate Scott
Affiliation:
Kingston University, London
Billy Clark
Affiliation:
Northumbria University, Newcastle
Robyn Carston
Affiliation:
University College London
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Summary

Anne Bezuidenhout shows how the meaning of noun-noun compounds cannot be predicted by linguistic rules but must allow for a component of context-specific relevance-based inference. She reviews several approaches which attempt to provide semantic and/or statistical (bigram frequency-based) accounts of the meaning of compounds but finds none of these fully adequate.She concludes that such accounts inevitably have to be supplemented by local pragmatic processes of concept narrowing and broadening (ad hoc concept construction) such as those developed within the relevance-theoretic framework.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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