The lexical pragmatics of count-mass polysemy

Systematic polysemy and the count-mass distinction*

This paper investigates the type of systematic sense alternation that rests on the count-mass distinction in English. Computational semantic approaches often suggest treating such sense alterations as being generated on the basis of a set of lexical inference rules, yielding, for instance, for an animal-denoting term, a meat sense ( ̳We‘re having rabbit for dinner‘), a fur sense ( ̳Annie is weari...

Lexical Pragmatics

Lexical Pragmatics is a research field that tries to give a systematic and explanatory account of pragmatic phenomena that are connected with the semantic underspecification of lexical items. Cases in point are the pragmatics of adjectives, systematic polysemy, the distribution of lexical and productive causatives, blocking phenomena, the interpretation of compounds, and many phenomena presentl...

Representing Lexical Polysemy

This paper gives an overview of work on a computational approach to representing lexically governed polysemy. The framework is illustrated with an account of the interpretation of compound nouns and with some examples of extended usages of words. I discuss how generative devices can be controlled to avoid an explosion in interpretations a din the number

The Semantics and Pragmatics of Polysemy: A Relevance-Theoretic Account

The Lexical Semantics Of English Count And Mass Nouns

The systematic connection between English mass and count nouns has long been known. Those working within lexical semantics have frequently cited such systematic connections as instances which are susceptible of treatment by so-called lexical rules (Leech 1981), lexical inference rules (Ostler and Atkins 1991), or subtype coercion (Pustejovsky 1995). This paper has three aims: to present the pri...