Polysemy and the Semantic-pragmatic interface : The Case of Up in a Context-based Model
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| Year of publication | 2016 |
| Type | Popularization text |
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| Description | The present study adopts a context-based approach to the meaning pattern of up. My analysis draws on the notion of ‘context’ defined as a composite of surrounding linguistic cues, world knowledge and physical environment of the utterance, and on a parsimonious criterion of sense establishment. I demonstrate that the proposed model is capable of distinguishing context-sensitive implicatures and senses, with only two separate senses listed for up, viz. ‘vertically higher’ and ‘completion’. The developmental hierarchy in the meaning networks in addition refines Hampe’s (2005) challenge to the axiological parameter (Krzeszowski 1997) by unhooking ‘completion’ from ‘good’. The proposed model finally addresses cases of seeming oxymora to explicate the context-sensitivity of interpretations. The paper concludes with a two-fold implication: the parsimonious context-oriented methodology first and foremost distinguishes between context-induced implicatures and context-insensitive senses, and it furthermore captures the details of meaning as contextualization patterns by explicating how the prototypical sense of a preposition, undergoing the fine-tuning of linguistic, epistemic and physical context, is capable of deriving diverse contextual implicatures in real language use. |