Encyclopedic information and pragmatic interpretation

Abstract

AbstractConsidering the interaction between grammar and pragmatics, the present paper aims to thoroughly investigate the role played by encyclopedic information in the lexicon and in pragmatic construction of utterance meaning. With the help of a series of subtle analyses of Hungarian and Russian data, several types of encyclopedic information are identified both in encoded lexical-semantic representations of word senses and inferential mechanisms of utterance interpretation. It is demonstrated that representations and mechanisms are mutually connected to each other. More precisely, on the one hand, requirements on representations are raised by a considerable number of possible utterance meanings, and, on the other, special mechanisms are needed to construct them from lexical-semantic representations. It is the attempt to account for such mutual connections that forms a novel and promising conception of lexical pragmatics.