Pragmatics and Word Meaning

Alex Lascarides
University of Edinburgh

A lexicon must encode generalisations about word meaning. I will argue that some of these conventional generalisations must be represented as default, so that pragmatic information can override them. Intuitively, this captures the ways in which a sufficiently rich discourse context can determine novel meanings to words.

I will present a formalism where these ideas can be captured: the lexical generalisations will be encoded in a default inheritance system which marks defaults about word meaning as such in logical form; the pragmatic framework will utilise more powerful default reasoning mechanisms over arbitrary background knowledge. I will attempt to show that this interaction between the lexicon and pragmatics 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.