The Pragmatic Construction of Word Meaning in Utterances

It is undeniable that words have “meanings” that go above and beyond the scope of linguistic research. This article proposes that the meanings of words a speaker intends in an utterance be pragmatically enriched by relevance-driven inferential mechanisms, which take what is linguistically encoded as a guide in inferring speaker’s meaning. In order to regulate the occurrence and the interpretation of the pragmatic meaning of words in utterances, based on Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory, we hypothesize that both the idea that our minds are flexible enough to construct far many more concepts than our languages can linguistically encode and the idea that the relevance-driven inferential mechanisms are powerful enough to construct the concept intended on the basis of the encoded concept and the context in which it is processed; we can often communicate this concept by modifying a certain word for which we have a stable conceptual representation in memory. The depth, to which the encoded concepts are processed, in arriving at the pragmatic meaning the speaker intends as a component of the explicature of her utterance, and the effort invested are constrained at every stage by the search for an optimally relevant interpretation of utterance in communication.