The Co-operative Lexicon

It is widely accepted that semantic theories should, as far as possible, be compositional. The claim that a theory is compositional, however, lacks bite if lexical and pre-lexical items are allowed to mean diierent things in diierent contexts. The aim of the current paper is to show how two speciic phenomena can be dealt with by relying on combinatorial eeects to infer diierent consequences from the same items in diierent contexts without altering the contributions that these items make individually. Consider the following sentences: (1) Henrietta was crossing the road. (2) Harry was hiccupping. In (1) it seems as though the present participle marker is being used to indicate that some event with a well-deened end point was in progress at some time in the past, and that it is reasonable to suppose that this end point was eventually reached | Henrietta did cross the road. Cases like (1) are generally taken to be prototypical: the present participle marker indicates the progressive aspect, which says that some extended event with a recognisable end point is in progress and will probably reach its conclusion. Asherr1992] considers the circumstances under which (1) will lead you to conclude that Henrietta did indeed reach the far side of the road, arguing that this conclusion can only be reached by using a default inference rule which would be cancelled in cases like: (3) Henrietta was crossing the road, when she was hit by a bus. I have no argument with his analysis of (1) and (3). What concerns me here is the apparent change in the contribution of the present participle marker in (2). In (2) we have a (conceptually) instantaneous event, namely a hiccup. Since hiccups are generally thought of as taking no time, it is not possible to be in the middle of a single hiccup and hence we are somehow driven to conclude that Harry was in the middle of a series of hiccups. A similar problem arises with: (4) Allan is living in Enniskerry. Here we have a homogeneous state which is not thought of as having a well-deened conclusion. As such the present participle cannot be taken as an indication that the culmination of my living in Enniskerry has not been reached, since there is no such thing. In this case the present participle somehow transforms itself to an indicator of temporariness, so that you can get exchanges like the …