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Part of
Implicitness: From lexis to discourse
Edited by Piotr Cap and Marta Dynel
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 276] 2017
► pp. 67–94

Chapter 4
Implicitness in the lexis

Lexical narrowing and neo-Gricean pragmatics

| University of Auckland

In this chapter, I present a neo-Gricean pragmatic analysis of lexical narrowing. By lexical narrowing is meant the phenomenon of implicitness whereby the use of a lexical item conveys a meaning that is more specific than the lexical expression’s lexically encoded meaning. Lexical narrowing can be grouped into two types: (i) Q-based and (ii) R/I-based. In the first type, the use of a semantically weaker lexical item in a set of contrastive semantic alternates Q-implicates the negation of the meaning associated with that of the semantically stronger lexical item in the same set. In the second, the use of a semantically general lexical expression I-implicates a semantically more specific sense. Finally, I argue that the pragmatic enrichment involving lexical narrowing is nothing but a neo-Gricean, ‘pre-semantic’ conversational implicature.

Keywords: lexical narrowing, lexical/semantic underspecification, pragmatic enrichment, neo-Gricean lexical pragmatics, pre-semantic conversational
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Semantic underspecification
    • 2.1Linguistic underdeterminacy thesis
    • 2.2Semantic or lexical underspecification
  • 3.Classical and neo-Gricean pragmatics
    • 3.1Classical Gricean pragmatics
    • 3.2Horn’s bipartite neo-Gricean model
    • 3.3Levinson’s trinitarian neo-Gricean pragmatic model
  • 4.Two types of lexical narrowing
    • 4.1.Q-based lexical narrowing
    • 4.2.R/I-based lexical narrowing
  • 5.Pragmatic enrichment involving lexical narrowing: Explicature, the pragmatically enriched said, conversational impliciture or conversational implicature?
  • Author Query
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 30 June 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.276.04hua
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