Wilson and Sperber--Relevance Theory(28)

Relevance Theory 267

In the second place, lexical narrowing is a much more flexible and context-dependent process than appeals to generalised implicature or default interpretations suggest. Barsalou (1987, 1992) surveys a wide range of experimental evidence which shows that even apparently stereotypical narrowings of terms such as bird, animal, furniture, food, etc. vary considerably across situations, individuals and times, and are strongly affected by discourse context and considerations of relevance. In Barsalou’s view, his results are best explained by the assumption that lexical items give access not to ready-made prototypes (assignable by default rules) but to a vast array of encyclopaedic information which varies in accessibility from occasion to occasion, with different subsets being selected ad hoc to determine the occasion-specific interpretation of a word. On this approach, bank in (11b) might be understood as conveying not the encoded concept BANK1 but the related concept BANK*, with a more restricted encyclopedic entry and a narrower denotation, constructed ad hoc for this particular occasion.

In Barsalou’s view, the construction of ad hoc concepts is affected by a variety of factors, including context, the accessibility of encyclopedic assumptions and considerations of relevance. However, he makes no concrete proposal about how these concepts might be derived, and in particular about how the construction process is triggered and when it stops. The relevance-theoretic comprehension procedure may be seen as a concrete hypothesis about how such a flexible, relevance-governed lexical interpretation process might go. The hearer treats the linguistically encoded word meaning (e.g. BANK1 in (11b)) as no more than a clue to the speaker’s meaning. Guided by his expectations of relevance, and using contextual assumptions made accessible by the encyclopedic entry of the linguistically encoded concept (e.g. that forgetting to go to the bank where one keeps one’s money may make one unable to repay money one owes), he starts deriving cognitive effects. When he has enough effects to satisfy his expectations of relevance, he stops. The results would be as in

(12) above, except that the contextual assumption in (d), the explicature in (e) and the implicatures in (f) and (g) would contain not the encoded concept BANK1 but the ad hoc concept BANK*, with a narrower denotation, which would warrant the derivation of the cognitive effects required to satisfy the hearer’s expectations of relevance.

The effect of such a flexible interpretation process may be a loosening rather than a narrowing of the encoded meaning (resulting in a broader rather than a narrower denotation). This is another way in which lexical pragmatic processes differ from default, or stereotypical, narrowing. Clear cases of loosening include the use of a prominent brand name (e.g. Hoover, Xerox, Kleenex) to denote a category which also contains items from less prominent brands; other good examples are approximations based on well-defined terms such as square, painless or silent, but the phenomenon is

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