Mira Ariel
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- January 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780198709848
- eISBN:
- 9780191780158
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198709848.003.0020
- Subject:
- Linguistics, Semantics and Pragmatics, Psycholinguistics / Neurolinguistics / Cognitive Linguistics
Codes and inferences compete in language, and the competition manifests itself at the level of the language system and in real‐time interactions. Grammars sometimes offer a monosemous code for some ...
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Codes and inferences compete in language, and the competition manifests itself at the level of the language system and in real‐time interactions. Grammars sometimes offer a monosemous code for some messages, but sometimes a form not coded for the intended message can (or must) be mobilized to serve the speaker's message. This is polysemy, where the speaker relies on a rich context which helps the addressee derive the interpretation via inference. This chapter examines various disjunctive interpretations and finds a number of competitions for expressing them. First, the disjunctive idea may be expressed by a dedicated construction, e.g. [X or Y], but it may be left to inference, when derived on a series of questions, for example. Second, specialized disjunctive interpretations may be conveyed by the general, polysemous construction, with the help of context‐driven inferences, or by dedicated, monosemous sub‐constructions, which encode the specialized meaning (e.g. [X or something]).Less
Codes and inferences compete in language, and the competition manifests itself at the level of the language system and in real‐time interactions. Grammars sometimes offer a monosemous code for some messages, but sometimes a form not coded for the intended message can (or must) be mobilized to serve the speaker's message. This is polysemy, where the speaker relies on a rich context which helps the addressee derive the interpretation via inference. This chapter examines various disjunctive interpretations and finds a number of competitions for expressing them. First, the disjunctive idea may be expressed by a dedicated construction, e.g. [X or Y], but it may be left to inference, when derived on a series of questions, for example. Second, specialized disjunctive interpretations may be conveyed by the general, polysemous construction, with the help of context‐driven inferences, or by dedicated, monosemous sub‐constructions, which encode the specialized meaning (e.g. [X or something]).
