Somehow this announcement ended up in my spam tray, when it clearly is not junk at all.
bq.. *Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences*
Colloquium Series
Dr. Larry Horn
of Yale University
“Pragmatics and the Lexicon”
Monday, May 3rd, 2004 at 4:15 p.m.
METCALF RESEARCH BUILDING, ROOM 129
The silver anniversary of Jim McCawleys classic paper Conversational Implicature and the Lexicon provides a natural springboard for an exploration of the state of the art in lexical pragmatics. A century before McCawleys investigation of how Gricean inference informs our understanding of the structure and use of lexical items, Hermann Paul (1880) had surveyed a range of constructions whose form and distribution reflect the interplay of two functional principles governing conversation, the tendency to reduce expression (later formulated by G. K. Zipf as the linguistic correlate of a more general Principle of Least Effort) and the contextually determined communicative requirements on sufficiency of information. The descendants of this functional dialectic include the speaker’s vs. hearer’s economies of Zipf and Martinet and the opposed halves of Grice’s Maxim of Quantity (“Make your contribution {as informative as is required/no more informative than is required} for the current purpose of the exchange”), grounded within a general theory of rationality and co-operation. From these Gricean submaxims, in turn, derive the Q and R Principles of Horn 1984 (essentially = Say enough/ Dont say too much) and the interplay of effort and effect within Relevance Theory (Sperber & Wilson 1986). While the interaction of the Paul/Grice principles pervades the entire linguistic systemas emerges notably in the minimax between articulatory “laziness” vs. perceptual distinctness in functional phonetics and the corresponding violable constraints in Optimality Theoryit is the consequences of this interaction for the lexicon that provide the focus for this presentation.
Since McCawley’s seminal paper, it has become gradually evident that choices among lexical alternatives is guided to a large extent by pragmatic principles; work by Elizabeth Traugott and others has examined the role of these principles in semantic change. After comparing pragmatic and semantic approaches to asymmetries in lexicalization and the inference from most to not all, I will survey the role of speaker- and hearer-based economy principles in motivating syntagmatic reduction, euphemism and negative strengthening, lexical clones (_No, I wanted a SALAD salad_) and the productive formation of “un-nouns” (from the _un-cola_ to the _un-politician_). Finally, drawing on the complementary tendencies of Avoid Synonymy and Avoid Homonymy, I will argue that synchronic, diachronic, and developmental aspects of lexical pragmatics provide support for a neo-Gricean view of the division of labor in natural language meaning.
p. I’ll be getting off a red-eye flight, going to teach a class on G{o”}del, then going to this talk. I might not ask the most enlightened question I suspect.