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Pragmatics and word meaning

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 1998

ALEX LASCARIDES  and
ANN COPESTAKE
ALEX LASCARIDES
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
ANN COPESTAKE
Affiliation:
Stanford University
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Abstract

In this paper, we explore the interaction between lexical semantics and pragmatics. We argue that linguistic processing is informationally encapsulated and utilizes relatively simple ‘taxonomic’ lexical semantic knowledge. On this basis, defeasible lexical generalisations deliver defeasible parts of logical form. In contrast, pragmatic inference is open-ended and involves arbitrary real-world knowledge. Two axioms specify when pragmatic defaults override lexical ones. We demonstrate that modelling this interaction allows us to achieve a more refined interpretation of words in a discourse context than either the lexicon or pragmatics could do on their own.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Linguistics , Volume 34 , Issue 2 , September 1998 , pp. 387 - 414
Copyright
1998 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

An earlier version of this paper appeared in the Proceedings of SALT V. We are grateful to Ted Briscoe, Nicholas Asher, Dan Flickinger, Danièle Godard, Ivan Sag and to participants at SALT and the 1995 AAAI Spring Symposium on Representation and Acquisition of Lexical Knowledge for their helpful comments on material presented here. We have also benefited from anonymous JL comments. This work was partially supported by the ESPRIT Acquilex-II, project BR-7315, grant to Cambridge University, and by the ESRC grant, project number R000236052, to The University of Edinburgh.