Linguistic Knowledge and Language Use

One of the key challenges in linguistics is to account for the link between
linguistic knowledge and our use of language in a way that is both descriptively
accurate and cognitively plausible. This pioneering book addresses these chal-
lenges by combining insights from Construction Grammar and Relevance
Theory, two influential approaches which until now have been considered incom-
patible. After a clear and detailed presentation of both theories, the author
demonstrates that their integration is possible, and explains why this integration
is necessary in order to understand exactly how meaning comes about. A new
theoretical model is offered that provides groundbreaking insights into the
semantics–pragmatics interface and addresses a variety of topics, including the
nature of lexical and grammatical concepts, procedural meaning, coercion and
idiom processing. This title is part of the Flip It Open Programme and may also be
available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

benoı̂t leclercq is an Associate Professor in English Linguistics at the

University of Paris 8. His research focuses on the semantics–pragmatics interface,
with a particular interest in the domain of modality. Recent publications include
Models of Modals (co-authored, De Gruyter, 2023).
Linguistic Knowledge
and Language Use
Bridging Construction Grammar and Relevance
Theory

Benoît Leclercq
Université Paris 8
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DOI: 10.1017/9781009273213
© Benoît Leclercq 2024
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Title: Linguistic knowledge and language use : bridging construction grammar and
relevance theory / Benoît Leclercq.
Description: Cambridge, United Kingdom : Cambridge University Press, 2024. |
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 Contents

List of Figures page vi

Acknowledgments vii

1 Introduction 1
2 Understanding Construction Grammar and Relevance Theory 5
2.1 Construction Grammar 5
2.2 Relevance Theory 34
2.3 Conclusion 64

3 Redefining Lexical Semantics and Pragmatics 66

3.1 On the Nature of Concepts and Ad Hoc Concepts in RT 67
3.2 Lexical Semantics: A Structured Body of Encyclopedic Knowledge 92
3.3 Concepts and Literalness: Issues of Representation or Computation? 97
3.4 Lexical Pragmatics: Lexically Regulated Saturation 106
3.5 Lexical Semantics and Pragmatics: Setting the Story Straight 112
3.6 Conclusion 115

4 Understanding Lexemes: The Role of the Linguistic Co-Text 117

4.1 Coercion 118
4.2 Procedural Meaning and Lexical Pragmatics 141
4.3 Lexemes and Idioms 169
4.4 Conclusion 178

5 Conclusion 181

Bibliography 187
Index 215

v
 Figures

2.1 Lexicon–syntax continuum in CxG page 9

2.2 Fixity and complexity of constructions 15
2.3 Radial network of play 22
2.4 Schematic network of run (from Langacker, 1991b: 267) 23
2.5 Constructing an utterance (adapted from Goldberg, 2003: 221) 29
3.1 Concepts (adapted from Sperber and Wilson, 1995: 92) 67
3.2 Concept cat 68
3.3 Concepts as atoms 69
3.4 Logical entry as conceptual content 82
3.5 Logical and encyclopedic entries as conceptual content 88
3.6 Logical and encyclopedic entries as conceptual content (2) 89
3.7 Conceptual content? 90
3.8 Concepts and encyclopedic content 91
4.1 Lexicon–syntax continuum in CxG (2) 139
4.2 Procedural meaning: constraints on interpretation (adapted from
Wilson and Sperber, 1993: 3) 144
4.3 Constructions: correlation between formal and semantic
gradients 149
4.4 ‘Lexically regulated saturation’ and utterance
comprehension (1) 153
4.5 ‘Lexically regulated saturation’ and utterance
comprehension (2) 177
5.1 ‘Lexically regulated saturation’ and utterance
comprehension (2) 183

vi
 Acknowledgments

This book contains the theoretical apparatus that I developed for my

Ph.D. thesis, which I completed in 2019 at the University of Lille. I was and
remain extremely grateful to my supervisor, Ilse Depraetere, to whom I am
forever indebted. Thank you for your patient guidance and continuous support.
In various ways, I have learned extensively from you. Challenging at times,
your keenness and attention to detail and precision were truly stimulating. Your
immense knowledge was a considerable source of inspiration. And your
contagious joy and enthusiasm for research provided much-needed motivation
during the tough times of the research process. Thank you for being a shining
example of scientific rigor, open-mindedness and humility. You have made me
a better linguist and a better person.
I also owe a great intellectual debt to Martin Hilpert and Billy Clark, who
respectively introduced me to Construction Grammar and Relevance Theory
during my MA studies in Lille. I thank them both for formative discussions and
for instilling in me the passion that led to the work presented in this book. I am
most grateful to Billy Clark for the countless discussions (on my research,
Relevance Theory, and linguistics more generally) and for providing such
a safe space for doubt and questioning.
I have learned a lot from my interactions with linguists from Lille, Paris and
from around the world. It will be difficult to do justice to them all, but I need to
mention Dany Amiot, Bert Cappelle, Agnès Celle, Guillaume Desagulier, Rita
Finkbeiner, Dylan Glynn, Gunther Kaltenböck, Maarten Lemmens, Mégane
Lesuisse, Cameron Morin, Cédric Patin, Christopher Piñón, Laurence Romain
and Jasper Vangaever. They have been teachers, colleagues, co-authors,
friends, and they have added considerably to my intellectual growth and my
experience in academia. Special thanks go to Bert Cappelle, who has always
been eager to share thoughts and whose feedback has greatly contributed to
keeping a sharp critical mind.
Thanks are also extended to Helen Barton and Isabel Collins, from
Cambridge University Press, for an enjoyable editorial process.
Last but not least, thank you, coffee. It is not just the taste of it, even though
I have learned to appreciate a good double espresso. I generally think that

vii
viii Acknowledgments

people vastly underestimate the power of coffee. In particular, I have always

been a fervent advocate of coffee breaks. Not that they make for good excuses,
or anything. Coffee breaks directly contribute to the research process. Those
shared with colleagues, after a seminar. Those at conferences, discussing each
other’s presentations. Those that are much needed before submitting an article.
And most importantly, those with your family and friends, when you remember
that their love is what matters most. For all of that, thank you, coffee.
1 Introduction

The aim of this book is to reassess the semantics–pragmatics interface by

combining insights from Construction Grammar (Goldberg, 1995, 2006;
Hoffmann and Trousdale, 2013a; Hilpert, 2019; Hoffmann, 2022) and
Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1995; Wilson and Sperber, 2012;
Clark, 2013a).
The past seventy years have witnessed increasing attempts at describing
linguistic knowledge and language use, from which various approaches grad-
ually emerged. This growing interest can be traced back to Chomsky’s (1965:
59) observation that appropriate descriptions of language use also necessarily
require a good understanding of the underlying mechanisms, i.e. the cognitive
abilities, that make communication possible. The extent to which performance
and competence actually differ has caused a great deal of debate in the litera-
ture. Nevertheless, it is primarily this distinction that triggered a “cognitive
turn in linguistics” (Schmid, 2012: 380). Of course, with this new approach to
language came a host of new research questions, the different answers to which
resulted in the emergence of various frameworks. Construction Grammar and
Relevance Theory developed out of this quest to provide cognitively plausible
accounts of language use and, in their respective domains of application, gained
enough importance to become respected landmarks in the linguistic scene.
These two theories are the starting point of this book.
In spite of their common interest in cognition, the two frameworks generally
focus on different aspects of language use. In Construction Grammar, the main
goal is to provide an accurate description of what constitutes linguistic know-
ledge and to explain how this knowledge is actually exploited in practice. In
contrast, Relevance Theory grew out of a general concern to understand the
cognitive underpinnings that enable us to make sense of our world and in
particular, when applied to linguistic communication, to how they contribute to
understanding the speaker’s communicative and informative intentions.
Although these two frameworks provide equally insightful understandings of
verbal communication, there have been very few attempts to combine their
perspectives. This is most probably due to the often-held assumption that
grammar and pragmatics belong to different realms of cognition and deserve

1
2 1 Introduction

separate attention since knowledge about one can hardly provide a better
understanding of the other. The aim of the book is precisely to show, however,
that this combination is not only useful, but is indeed necessary in order to
provide a richer description of the underlying mechanisms of both grammar
and pragmatics and of their respective contributions to the interpretation of an
utterance.
Because they were developed independently on the basis of different under-
lying assumptions with an eye to answering different research questions, the
two frameworks sometimes provide opposite analyses of the same phenomena.
For instance, consider the discussion between Bilbo and Gandalf:
(1) “Good morning!” said Bilbo, and he meant it. The sun was shining, and the
grass was very green. But Gandalf looked at him from under long brushy
eyebrows that stuck out further than the brim of his shady hat.
“What do you mean?” he said. “Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that
it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good this
morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?”
“All of them at once,” said Bilbo. (from Tolkien, 1937)

Putting aside Gandalf’s wit for a moment, one might wonder why he needs to
ask Bilbo what exactly he intends to communicate when using the phrase good
morning. As a linguist, the answer to this question will vary depending on the
theoretical background in which it is couched. Exaggerating somewhat,
a constructionist might answer that Gandalf’s answer is indeed a bit odd
given that good morning is a conventional construction of English which is
a formula commonly used as a greeting when you meet a person for the first
time early in the day. Given this convention, Gandalf should have known that
Bilbo only meant to say hello and therefore answered good morning in return.
In opposition, a relevance theorist might argue that Gandalf’s answer is quite
appropriate since, in spite of the linguistic conventions, the meaning of a lexical
item remains usually underspecific and needs to be systematically enriched in
context via pragmatic inferential processes. As a result, if the intended inter-
pretation was not clear, then Gandalf is indeed entitled to ask what it was that
Bilbo actually meant. This of course is a very simplistic demonstration, and
theorists in the different frameworks probably have more moderate views than
the ones they are associated with here. Nevertheless, this example is meant to
capture a general observation that will become clear throughout the following
chapters, namely that Construction Grammar and Relevance Theory respect-
ively tend to over-emphasize the role played by linguistic conventions and
pragmatic inferencing, and typically so at the cost of the other. It could of
course be argued that this tendency is an inevitable side effect of the respective
aims of the two theories. Unfortunately, this therefore means that for a broad
range of linguistic phenomena, it is unclear which of the two frameworks
 1 Introduction 3

actually achieves descriptive accuracy (a goal they both set out to achieve)
since their respective predictions sometimes come into conflict. For the sake of
cognitive accuracy, it is therefore necessary to compare the two frameworks in
a systematic manner so as to pin down more specifically the respective contri-
butions of grammar and pragmatics during the interpretation of an utterance. It
is my aim to do so.
In order to appreciate the respective contributions of Construction Grammar
and Relevance Theory to the understanding of verbal communication, it is
essential to provide detailed overviews of the two frameworks first. In
Chapter 2, each theory will be introduced in turn. Their strengths will be
highlighted and the weaker points needing particular attention (especially
those that concern the semantics–pragmatics interface) will be identified. On
the basis of this review, focus on the main points of contention will lead me to
articulate the discussion around two facets of lexical semantics–pragmatics. In
Chapter 3, the aim will be to define exactly how the notions of semantics and
pragmatics apply to a lexical item. It will be shown that although the two
frameworks describe the meaning of a lexeme in conceptual terms, their
opposite views on the nature of concepts affects the way these concepts are
argued to contribute to the understanding of the lexemes with which they are
associated. I will assess the exact nature of conceptual content and the way this
content is exploited in context on the basis of various arguments. I will
generally argue that understanding a lexeme depends on rich semantic know-
ledge together with strong pragmatic principles, and the notion of lexically
regulated saturation will be used to capture the interpretation process of
a lexical item. In the following chapter, Chapter 4, the aim is to discuss the
ways in which the direct linguistic environment of a lexeme contributes to this
particular interpretation process. First, I will critically assess the nature of
a mechanism known as coercion and argue that, although clearly semantically
constrained, coercion is itself also essentially pragmatic. I will then show that
the pragmatic roots of coercion are linked to the procedural nature of the
semantic content encoded by the grammatical constructions in which lexemes
occur. In doing so, both the formal nature of these constructions and the notion
of procedural encoding will be (re)defined. It will be shown that constructions
that have a coercive force are necessarily (semi-)schematic constructions and
that procedural meaning might best be described in meta-conceptual terms.
Second, it will be shown that the interpretation of a lexeme is also largely
determined by more lexically fixed (i.e. idiomatic) sequences. Upon recogni-
tion of these patterns, the process of lexically regulated saturation may thus be
suspended. I will argue that interpreting these larger patterns is a context-
sensitive process and that the principle of relevance introduced in Relevance
Theory can explain the underlying mechanism.
4 1 Introduction

The concluding section of this book will show that integrating the perspec-
tives of Construction Grammar and Relevance Theory proves to be particularly
beneficial in the search for descriptive accuracy. In addition to increasing the
respective explanatory power of the two frameworks, conjoining these two
approaches provides additional insights into the underlying cognitive mechan-
isms which make verbal communication successful.
2 Understanding Construction Grammar
and Relevance Theory

Construction Grammar and Relevance Theory will now be presented in turn. In

the case of Construction Grammar, it will be shown that its main strength
resides in its capacity to provide a thorough understanding of linguistic know-
ledge. Its usage-based take on language provides profound insights into the
forms and functions of the linguistic units that individuals can use. At the same
time, the discussion will show that its focus on conventions makes for only
a partial understanding of linguistic communication. Concerning Relevance
Theory, the opposite observation will be made. I will show that while it
provides a very elaborate analysis of the pragmatic processes that make verbal
communication successful, the argumentation is sometimes weakened by
theory-internal assumptions about linguistic knowledge.

2.1 Construction Grammar

Construction Grammar is a cognitively oriented theory of language whose
central aim is to account for the entirety of linguistic knowledge. The term
construction grammar was first used by Charles Fillmore and Paul Kay
(Fillmore, 1985a, 1988, 1989; Fillmore, Kay and O’Connor, 1988; Fillmore
and Kay, 1995), who were concerned about the lack of attention given in
derivational generative grammars to allegedly more peripheral linguistic
phenomena (e.g. idiomatic expressions, ‘irregular’ clausal structures). From a
constructionist perspective, these phenomena are considered as much a part of
an individual’s linguistic knowledge as any general grammatical rules, and not
merely by-products of some combinatorial or transformational operations
(Hoffmann and Trousdale, 2013b: 3). That is, instead of a core–periphery
view, constructionists adopt a more holistic approach to language. In this
approach, knowing a language only (or mostly) consists in knowing construc-
tions, hence the name of the theory. Like the Saussurean sign (de Saussure,
1916), constructions are defined as arbitrary form–function mappings
(Goldberg, 1995: 4). However, whereas the Saussurean sign only applies to
lexemes (and morphemes), the notion of construction extends to all aspects
of grammar, including idioms as well as abstract phrasal patterns. To use

5
6 2 Construction Grammar and Relevance Theory

Goldberg’s (2003: 223, 2006: 18) much-cited phrase, it is “constructions all the
way down.”
Adopting such a symbolic view of language is of course not distinctive of
Construction Grammar. This idea is largely shared by functional/cognitive
linguists (e.g. Lakoff, 1987; Langacker, 1987, 1991a, 2008; Talmy, 1988,
2000a, 2000b; Wierzbicka, 1988; Halliday, 1994; Givón, 1995, inter alia).
Yet Construction Grammar stands out from other functional/cognitive-oriented
frameworks in terms of how these symbols (i.e. constructions) are said to be
acquired and mentally represented, as well as how they interact with one
another. There are (naturally) different points of contention between construc-
tionists themselves as well. The term ‘Construction Grammar’ in fact covers
a range of different constructionist approaches (cf. Croft and Cruse, 2004:
257–290; Goldberg, 2006: 213–214, 2013; Hoffmann, 2022: 256–271;
Ungerer and Hartmann, 2023). In this book, I will mostly work with the ideas
developed within (Goldbergian) Cognitive Construction Grammar (Goldberg,
2006: 213; Boas, 2013: 233). The absence of formalism in this approach
seems particularly well suited for its integration with Relevance Theory.
Nevertheless, since I will not de facto ignore other constructionist approaches,1
I will continue to use the umbrella term Construction Grammar and its conven-
tional acronym CxG to refer to the theory.

2.1.1 Fundamental Principles

The use of the term construction in CxG can sometimes be unsettling when
you are not familiar with the theory, for it does not only refer to complex
combinations or grammatical structures such as is usually the case elsewhere
in linguistics. Rather, all objects of linguistic knowledge are argued to be
constructions: morphemes, lexemes, idioms as well as larger phrasal patterns
(Goldberg, 2003: 219). In CxG, what defines a construction is not its internal
complexity but its symbolic nature: constructions are conventional pairings of a
specific form and a particular semantic or pragmatic function (Goldberg, 1995:
4, 2006: 5; Langacker, 2008: 5). In order to be conventional, i.e. in order to be
part of the speaker’s knowledge and obtain construction status, these pairings
should exhibit at least one of two properties: (i) non-predictability, and/or
(ii) sufficient frequency of occurrence. Goldberg (2006) puts it as follows:
Any linguistic pattern is recognized as a construction as long as some aspect of its form
or function is not strictly predictable from its component parts or from other construc-
tions recognized to exist. In addition, patterns are stored as constructions even if they are
fully predictable as long as they occur with sufficient frequency. (Goldberg, 2006: 5)

1
I also largely embrace Langacker’s approach, Cognitive Grammar, which comes very close to
Goldberg’s Cognitive Construction Grammar (see Langacker, 2009).
 2.1 Construction Grammar 7

Originally, Goldberg (1995: 4) defined non-predictability as the only

defining criterion for construction status. From this perspective, construc-
tions were all assumed to be either semantically or formally non-
predictable, the paradigm case of which are idioms. The semantics of
piece of cake and kick the bucket, for instance, are non-predictable because
they are non-compositional, i.e. they cannot be understood solely on the
basis of the individual lexemes that compose them. In the sentence in (2),
the form of the construction many a day is non-predictable, given that many
usually selects for a plural noun.
(2) I have waited many a day for this to happen. (Hilpert, 2019: 10)
Linguistic expressions that show non-predictability are naturally good can-
didates for construction status, for they require language users to store them
independently of the canonical patterns from which they cannot be derived
(Hilpert, 2019: 12). This explains why morphemes and words are construc-
tions, since their forms and functions are non-predictable and language users
have to learn them individually (Goldberg, 2002a: 1). However, not all linguis-
tic patterns are non-predictable. The phrases Make a wish and I miss you, for
instance, are neither semantically nor formally deviant. The same is true of the
multi-word patterns legal action and in exchange as well as the inflected
forms smaller and students. What gives these patterns construction status is
not non-predictability but frequency of occurrence. That is, these patterns are
used frequently enough to be stored by the speaker as distinct constructions
(cf. Langacker, 1988; Stemberger and MacWhinney, 1988; Arnon and Snider,
2010; Hanna and Pulvermüller, 2014, inter alia).2
In other words, in CxG, knowing a language consists in knowing patterns
that combine a form and a meaning either non-predictively or that occur with
sufficient frequency. According to this definition, all of the patterns in (3) to (9)
are constructions.3
(3) ADJ-ish

a. Part of it is yellowish. (COCA, spoken)

b. But, generally, I think of myself as a youngish person in an oldish
body. (NOW)
(4) Roof
a. The roof is leaking in a lot of places. (COCA, spoken)
b. Smoke rises through a hole in the roof. (COCA, spoken)

2
See Ungerer and Hartmann (2023) for a recent discussion on the definition of constructions.
3
Most of the examples used in this book were extracted from corpora available on Mark Davies’
interface (english-corpora.org): BNC (British National Corpus), COCA (Corpus of Contemporary
American English) and NOW (News on the Web) corpora (Davies, 2004, 2008-, 2016-).
8 2 Construction Grammar and Relevance Theory

(5) Private property

a. For example, there’s no private property in the Soviet Union. (COCA,
spoken)
b. Trespassing upon private property is unlawful in all States. (COCA,
written)
(6) Break the ice
a. What can I say to break the ice with a guy? (COCA, written)
b. Did you try to do anything to break the ice with them? (COCA, spoken)
(7) X is the new Y construction
a. So that’s why I say, you know, land is the new gold. (COCA, spoken)
b. Strong is the new skinny according to the New York Post. (COCA, spoken)
(8) WAY construction (form: [SUBJ V one’s way OBL])
a. Mickey Mouse tootled his way across the screen. (NOW)
b. You can’t buy your way into someone’s heart and mind. (NOW)
(9) CAUSED-MOTION construction (form: [SUBJ V OBJ OBL])
a. Henry’s friend moved the bookcases in Mr Emerson’s study. (COCA,
spoken)
b. My constituents will vote me out of office. (COCA, spoken)
In the sentences in (3), the morphological schema ADJ-ish is used to indicate
approximation or vagueness: vaguely yellow in (3a), and relatively young/old
in (3b). The noun roof in (4) refers to the cover of a building. Regardless of their
frequency of occurrence, these two constructions are neither semantically nor
syntactically predictable from their component parts. This is not the case of
the multi-lexeme construction private property in (5). This construction, used
to indicate an individual’s land or building, can be predicted both syntactically
(as a particular instance of the [Adj N] pattern) and semantically (i.e. it is
semantically transparent). Still, it certainly has construction status for most
(native) English speakers due to its high frequency of occurrence. In (6), the
idiomatic expression break the ice is syntactically predictable. It can be seen
as an instantiation of the more general [V NP] and [Det N] constructions.
However, it is not semantically predictable. Nothing in the individual meanings
of break, the and ice can predict the interpretation of the idiom in terms of a
particular social behavior between individuals who are meeting for the first
time. In (7), the X is the new Y construction is neither entirely syntactically nor
semantically predictable. This pattern is not syntactically predictable since Y
can be realized by an adjective, as in (7b), although the string the new would
normally select a nominal head (to instantiate the more regular [Det Adj N]
pattern). Neither is it semantically predictable, because none of the elements
that occur in this construction suggest that the X and Y items should be
interpreted not literally but in a metonymic relationship to a bigger category
 2.1 Construction Grammar 9

break the ice

private property
CAUSED-MOTION
roof -ish X is the new Y WAY construction construction

Fixedness Openness

Figure 2.1 Lexicon–syntax continuum in CxG

that hearers need to infer in context, e.g. in (7b) strong and skinny have to be
understood in relation to the category of what body type currently seems to be
more attractive (cf. Dancygier and Sweetser, 2014: 154). The WAY construc-
tion in (8), used to convey manner (or means) of motion, is arguably syntac-
tically predictable. It is not, however, semantically predictable. The meanings
of the different items in (8b), for instance, and in particular that of the verb
buy, do not themselves convey (metaphorical) manner of motion interpret-
ations (cf. Jackendoff, 1990: 218; Israel, 1996: 218). Finally, a similar
analysis can be given to the CAUSED-MOTION construction identified in (9).
While the form of the construction can be derived from more canonical
patterns, examples like (9b) show that the caused-motion meaning with
which it is associated is not always predictable from its component parts
(cf. Goldberg, 1995: 152–179).
CxG therefore establishes no principled distinction between elements of
the lexicon and larger phrasal (or ‘syntactic’) patterns. Instead of a dichotomy
between the two, it is assumed that there is a continuum of constructions from
more lexical to more syntactic. This continuum is often referred to as the
lexicon–syntax continuum (Langacker, 2005: 102; Croft and Cruse, 2004:
255; Goldberg, 2006: 220). One way of representing this continuum is to locate
constructions on a gradient of lexical fixedness, i.e. from lexically fixed to
lexically open (or schematic) constructions, as in Figure 2.1 (inspired by Kay
and Michaelis, 2012: 4; Michaelis, 2017, 2019).
There are different reasons why no strict distinction is made between
lexicon and syntax in CxG, all of which are closely related. The main
reason has to do with the general aim of the theory. Although CxG
directly takes its name from arguing that all levels of linguistic knowledge
can be described in terms of constructions, it is primarily concerned with how
linguistic knowledge relates to cognition in order to provide a “psychologic-
ally plausible account of language” (Boas, 2013: 233). A central assumption
within CxG is that language does not require a specific cognitive mechanism
but is the product of general cognitive abilities (Lakoff, 1987: 58, 1991: 62;
Langacker, 1991b: 1; Tomasello, 2003: 3; Goldberg, 2006: 12, 2019: 52;
10 2 Construction Grammar and Relevance Theory

Bybee, 2010: 6–8, 2013: 49).4 Like other models in functional/cognitive

linguistics, CxG therefore rejects a modular view of language and in particu-
lar the autonomy of syntax (Croft and Cruse, 2004: 1; Fried and Östman,
2004: 24). That is, grammatical constructions are not separated from the rest
of our linguistic knowledge and abilities. In addition, constructionists
consider that the “primary function of language is to convey information”
(Goldberg, 2013: 2).5 From this perspective, all components of language are
considered to be meaningful. Hence, like lexical items, grammatical con-
structions are assumed to have a specific meaning that contributes to the
understanding of the sentences in which they occur. This is the case for the
WAY construction and the CAUSED-MOTION construction in (8) and (9) dis-
cussed above. It is also true of the DITRANSITIVE construction, different
instantiations of which are found in (10).
(10) a. The United Nations was giving them food. (COCA, spoken)
b. Heloise passed me the wooden bowl. (COCA, written)
c. He told his wife the same thing. (NOW)

Although the interpretations of these sentences differ, they are composed of

similar constructions, one of which is called the DITRANSITIVE construction
(Goldberg, 1995: 141–151). In terms of semantics, it is this construction that
conveys the notion of transfer, or more specifically X CAUSES Y TO RECEIVE Z
(Goldberg, 1995: 141). And this meaning is said to be associated with the
abstract phrasal form [SUBJ V OBJ1 OBJ2], which all sentences in (10) instanti-
ate. Specifically, all the slots of this pattern are associated with a specific
function:
(11) DITRANSITIVE: Syn: SUBJ V OBJ1 OBJ2
( ) ( ) ( ) ( )
Sem: Agent CAUSE-RECEIVE Recipient Theme
As the representation in (11) indicates, each of the open slots of the construc-
tion is associated with a particular function which, in context, is inherited by the

4
The psychological and neurological reality of this assumption is supported by empirical and
experimental evidence (cf., for instance, overviews by Bates and Goodman, 1997, 1999;
Tomasello and Slobin, 2005; Behrens, 2009, and references cited therein). See Cappelle (to
appear) for a critical discussion, though.
5
This quote is interesting as it could suggest that Construction Grammar falls prey to the
“descriptive fallacy” (Austin, 1962: 3), namely the assumption that words and utterances are
only used to convey (truth-evaluable) propositions while language is also used to perform a
number of other functions (i.e. speech acts). Yet this is clearly not the view adopted in CxG. Not
only does it reject truth-conditionality, but it also acknowledges the other types of (pragmatic)
functions that language is used to perform (see next section). Nevertheless, as will be shown in
Section 2.1.2.3, this quote is a good example of the symptomatic vagueness with which issues
that relate to the semantics–pragmatics interface are treated.
 2.1 Construction Grammar 11

lexical items that occur in that slot.6 In (10a), for instance, them and food are
respectively interpreted as ‘recipient’ and ‘theme’ because of their occurrence
in the OBJ1 and OBJ2 slots of the DITRANSITIVE construction. Of course, it could
also be argued that these interpretations of the lexemes are not due to their
being used in a distinct DITRANSITIVE construction but to the subcategorization
frame (i.e. valence)7 of the main verb give of which they are the arguments.
Although this might sometimes be the case, the perspective developed in CxG
nonetheless seems to provide better insights into an individual’s linguistic
knowledge and about their use of the language. First of all, experimental data
reveal that these constructions are psychologically real and that language users
do store grammatical patterns in association with a specific function independ-
ently of the lexical items that occur inside them (cf. Hare and Goldberg, 1999;
Bencini and Goldberg, 2000; Kaschak and Glenberg, 2000; Chang, Bock and
Goldberg, 2003; Goldberg and Bencini, 2005; Ye, Zhan and Zhou, 2007;
Bencini and Valian, 2008; Boyd, Gottschalk and Goldberg, 2009; Johnson
and Goldberg, 2013; Shin and Kim, 2021; Li et al. 2022, inter alia).
More importantly for us, the observation that grammatical constructions,
like lexical items, are meaningful necessarily shifts the semanticist’s focus of
attention. In (12), for instance, kick is interpreted in terms of transfer and the
expressions Bob and the football respectively receive the roles of ‘recipient’
and ‘theme’ not because of the subcategorization frame of the verb kick, which
usually only selects one object (e.g. Pat kicked the ball), but because of their
occurrence in the DITRANSITIVE construction.
(12) Pat kicked Bob the football. (Goldberg, 1995: 11)
(13) Lyn crutched Tom her apple. (Kaschak and Glenberg, 2000: 512)
Similarly, the DITRANSITIVE construction is responsible for the transfer inter-
pretation in (13) of the denominal verb crutch, whereby Lyn (SUBJ/agent) is
understood to have used a crutch in order for Tom (OBJ1/recipient) to receive
her apple (OBJ2/theme). In this case, not only are the respective roles of Tom
and her apple inherited from the DITRANSITIVE construction, but also the CAUSE-
RECEIVE interpretation of crutch. The particular interaction between a lexeme

6
The representation in (11) is adapted from Goldberg (1995: 50, 2006: 138). Please note that
although specific thematic roles and (Jackendovian) primitives (CAUSE and RECEIVE) have been
used to describe the construction’s semantics, they have no “theoretical significance” here
(Goldberg, 1995: 49). That is, these labels are only used because they facilitate the semantic
description of the argument-structure construction. However, the actual semantics of the
DITRANSITIVE construction are more complex and require more than a list of rudimentary
components (see Section 2.1.2.2).
7
Subcategorization frames have been “an essential part of linguistic theorizing since Chomsky
(1965)” (Goldberg, 2006: 65).
12 2 Construction Grammar and Relevance Theory

and a construction such as in (13) is often referred to as coercion and will be

addressed more fully in Section 2.1.3.
Finally, CxG assumes no a priori distinction between the lexicon and syntax
because of its usage-based approach to language. That is, no syntactic struc-
tures or linguistic items of any sort are considered to be innate. Rather, a central
tenet within CxG consists in viewing all aspects of linguistic knowledge as
resulting from language use (Langacker, 1991b: 264; Croft, 2001: 59;
Goldberg, 2006: 44; Diessel, 2013: 347). From this perspective, one’s linguistic
knowledge consists in “the cognitive organization of one’s experience with
language” (Bybee, 2006: 711). In particular, regardless of their internal com-
plexity, it appears that linguistic patterns emerge from a process of categoriza-
tion (and generalization) over exemplars, i.e. concrete realizations (Kemmer
and Barlow, 2000; Tomasello, 2003, 2006; Bybee, 2010). In CxG, these
concrete realizations – which are found in utterances – are called constructs,
while the generalizations that emerge from them are what form constructions
(Fried, 2015: 980). Consider the sentences in (14) to (16).
(14) a. It’s about a cat who stole a dog’s bed. (NOW)
b. Why don’t you have a cat? (COCA, spoken)
c. The cat wanted a little air time. (COCA, spoken)
(15) a. She was as calm as a pond on a windless day. (COCA, written)
b. I felt as proud as a president. (COCA, written)
c. Clare acted as serious as a nun. (COCA, written)
(16) a. It was you who begged for those loans in the past. (NOW)
b. In some cases, it is their wives who are the chief wage earners. (COCA,
written)
c. It is my son who made it. (COCA, written)

Constructionists believe that just like the form and meaning of the lexeme
cat are acquired by generalizing over different usage events such as in (14), the
as ADJ as a N construction is itself acquired by generalizing over examples
like those in (15), and the It-CLEFT construction by generalizing over examples
such as in (16). That is, all aspects of linguistic knowledge are acquired by a
gradual process of categorization and generalization across usage events, and
no grammatical pattern is therefore considered innate. As a result, linguistic
knowledge is “viewed as emergent and constantly changing” (Bybee, 2013:
49). Indeed, new constructs have a systematic impact on the representation of a
construction. The lexicon–syntax continuum represented in Figure 2.1 can
therefore be seen as a consequence of this usage-based acquisition process,
with different constructions being more or less abstract depending on the
degree of generalization made possible by the input received by an individual.
It also follows from this perspective that all constructions (lexical to grammat-
ical) are not stored separately but are located in the same repository of linguistic
 2.1 Construction Grammar 13

knowledge. This repository is referred to in CxG as the construct-i-con

(Jurafsky, 1992: 28; Goldberg, 2003: 219).
It is important to note that the construct-i-con does not contain only con-
structions, i.e. generalizations (cf. Section 2.1.2.2, footnote 14,), but these are
stored alongside the individual constructs from which they emerge (Abbot-
Smith and Tomasello, 2006; Bybee, 2010, 2013; Goldberg, 2006). According
to Langacker (1987), arguing that linguistic knowledge is either composed of
broad generalizations or specific instantiations amounts to committing to what
he calls the “rule/list fallacy” (Langacker, 1987: 29), i.e. an either/or idealiza-
tion that may not correspond to a speaker’s cognitive reality. This assumption is
in particular supported by the observation that frequency plays a major role in
the mental representation of constructions (cf. Ellis, 2002; Diessel, 2007). The
effects of frequency are often discussed in terms of a construction’s degree
of entrenchment (Langacker, 1987: 59, 2008: 16; Schmid, 2020: 205ff.). The
more frequently a linguistic expression is used, the more cognitively
entrenched it is. Among other characteristics, a high degree of entrenchment
correlates with higher cognitive salience (i.e. accessibility) and faster process-
ing (Harris, 1998; Schmid, 2007, 2017; Blumenthal-Dramé, 2012). How this
particular view has an impact on the representation of meaning, which is the
focus of this book, will be fully discussed in Section 2.1.2.2.

2.1.2 Constructions: What They Are

Constructions are considered the basic building blocks on the basis of which
complex structures and sentences can be constructed. Given that construc-
tions combine a form with a meaning, the interpretation of an utterance
therefore depends on which constructions are being used in a given context
and how they are being assembled. In order to understand the individual
contribution of these constructions to the interpretation process, it is neces-
sary to look more closely at how CxG defines the notions of form and
especially that of meaning.

2.1.2.1 The Forms of Constructions The previous section already referred

to the possible forms that constructions can have. It remains to be established
exactly what constitutes the form of a construction. CxG considers that the
formal pole of a construction includes phonological and morphosyntactic
properties (cf. Boas, 2013: 234). To give one example, knowing the construc-
tion admire consists in knowing that it is pronounced /ədˈmaɪər/ for instance,8

8
I say ‘for instance’ since it follows logically from CxG’s usage-based approach that not all
English speakers have the pronunciation shown here (e.g. /ədˈmaɪr/ with a rhotic American
accent).
14 2 Construction Grammar and Relevance Theory

and that it shares the morphosyntactic properties of verbs (e.g. subject–verb

agreement, tense inflection, etc.). Not all constructions are phonologically
specific, however. Because they are gradually acquired in context, it was
shown earlier that constructions may be more or less schematic depending on
the degree of abstraction involved (cf. the lexicon–syntax continuum, Figure
2.1). Like the verb admire, the lexeme audience and the idiom by and large, for
instance, are lexically (and phonologically) fixed constructions. On the other
hand, constructions like the as ADJ as a N construction identified in (15) are
only partially specific. Some parts of this construction, the as and as a elements,
are lexically (and phonologically) fixed. The two open slots ADJ and N,
however, only specify the morphosyntactic properties that the (phonologically
specific) items that fill them should have. Other constructions, such as the
DITRANSITIVE construction, are, however, entirely schematic and only specify
for morphosyntactic properties. As described in (11), for instance, the
DITRANSITIVE construction takes the schematic form [SUBJ V OBJ1 OBJ2].
Only the items that fill the different slots of this construction are phonologically
specific, e.g. me, ball, threw, the and Jake in (17).
(17) Jake threw me the ball. (COCA, written)
The forms of constructions can therefore vary from fully lexically (and
phonologically) specific to more schematic. This is not, however, the only
way in which constructions have been approached and described in CxG.
Constructions are also often discussed in terms of another continuum from
atomic to complex constructions (see Croft and Cruse, 2004: 255; Langacker,
2005: 108). That is, as illustrated in Figure 2.2, in addition to being lexically
specific or schematic, constructions can also vary in size. From this perspec-
tive, increased complexity does not correlate with increased schematicity.
Rather, lexically specific constructions can also be very complex. In
Figure 2.2, the idiom break the ice and the phrase as soon as possible are
good examples of lexically specific and complex constructions. Partially spe-
cific constructions can also be relatively simple (e.g. the How ADJ! construc-
tion, as in How adorable! or How confusing!) as well as more complex (e.g. the
X is the new Y construction, as in (7)). Finally, fully schematic constructions
need not always be complex, such as the DITRANSITIVE construction, but can
also be simpler (e.g. the AUX V construction as in have slept or should write).
Representations such as that in Figure 2.2 perfectly illustrate the position
adopted in CxG that linguistic knowledge is not strictly divided between words
on the one hand and syntactic rules on the other, but that it is composed of a
network of more or less complex and schematic constructions. As such, it also
nicely captures the perspective adopted in CxG that all of these forms gradually
emerge from language use.
 2.1 Construction Grammar 15

DITRANSITIVE
Complex as soon as possible X is the new Y
construction

break the ice What a(n) N! DET ADJ N

private property How ADJ! AUX V

Atomic roof V-ment ADJ

Fixedness Openness

Figure 2.2 Fixity and complexity of constructions (adapted from Leclercq,

2023: 67)

There is, however, a central implication of the usage-based approach

adopted in CxG that I have not yet discussed, and which directly concerns
the form of constructions and in particular that of argument structure construc-
tions (e.g. the DITRANSITIVE and CAUSED-MOTION constructions). The different
surface forms in (18) to (19) illustrate what is commonly referred to as the
“dative alternation” (cf. Pinker, 1989: 82; Rappaport Hovav and Levin, 2008:
129; Perek, 2015: 154).
(18) [SUBJ V OBJ1 OBJ2]
a. We’ll give them a voucher. (COCA, spoken)
b. They’ll send you the tune beforehand. (COCA, spoken)
(19) [SUBJ V OBJ2 to OBJ1]
a. She gave the money to the suspect. (COCA, spoken)
b. You can send a postcard to us. (COCA, spoken)
In a Chomskyan transformational account of grammar, it has been argued
that these different surface forms are derived from a single (deep) underlying
syntactic structure (cf. Akmajian and Heny, 1975: 185). In CxG, however, these
forms are not treated as variants of the same structure but as two distinct
constructions (cf. Perek, 2015: 148, and references cited therein). The pattern
in (18), as mentioned before, is referred to as the DITRANSITIVE construc-
tion, and the pattern in (19) is referred to as the To-DATIVE construction.
This distinction is argued to follow logically from the usage-based nature
of linguistic knowledge, with generalizations emerging from surface struc-
tures (Goldberg, 2002b: 329).9 In CxG, what is true for the dative

9
Perek (2015: 149) argues that a speaker’s knowledge most probably also includes knowledge of
the commonalities between the two constructions, which he discusses, following Cappelle
(2006), in terms of an allostruction. See Perek (2015: 151–166) for more details.
16 2 Construction Grammar and Relevance Theory

alternation is (of course) also true for other alternations, such as the
causative alternation (cf. Romain, 2017, 2022) and the locative alternation
(cf. Perek, 2015: 158). Here, each pattern in the alternation is considered a
construction in its own right since each can be identified with its own set
of idiosyncratic properties.
Note that the focus on form here is relevant to the semantics–pragmatics
interface for a simple reason. Constructions are defined as form–meaning
pairings. The DITRANSITIVE and the To-DATIVE constructions identified in
(18) and (19) should therefore each be associated with a specific meaning.
The main question has to do with what meaning is expressed exactly. The
DITRANSITIVE construction was described in (11) in terms of a notion of
transfer, whereby X CAUSES Y TO RECEIVE Z. At first sight, the To-DATIVE
construction in (19) seems to convey a similar meaning. It is assumed in
CxG, however, that differences in form should systematically correspond to
differences in meaning. This has been discussed in terms of the principle of
no synonymy (Goldberg, 1995: 67), recently reframed as the principle of no
equivalence (Leclercq and Morin, 2023). According to this principle, the
To-DATIVE construction should therefore serve a different function from
the DITRANSITIVE construction. Thompson and Koide (1987: 400) argue that
the iconic distance between the SUBJ and OBJ1 positions in fact reflects a
conceptual distance, whereby the To-DATIVE construction conveys greater
physical distance between the referents of SUBJ and OBJ1 than the
DITRANSITIVE construction. Similarly, Goldberg (1995: 90) argues that the
sentences in (18) are better interpreted as conveying X CAUSES Y TO MOVE TO
Z.10 That is, both analyses consider the To-DATIVE construction to convey
greater motion than the DITRANSITIVE construction. As Diessel (2015)
points out:
This explains why the verbs bring and take are particularly frequent in the to-dative
construction, whereas verbs such as give and tell are proportionally more frequent in the
ditransitive (cf. Gries and Stefanowitsch, 2004). (p. 313)
This observation is meant to show that even seemingly similar patterns can
convey slightly different meanings.11 Therefore, it is important for the seman-
ticist, and in particular the pragmaticist, to pay careful attention to the forms of
the constructions that speakers use, as they provide rich clues as to the intended
interpretation. (In the next sections, it will be shown that this is not systematic-
ally the case in Relevance Theory.) It will have become clear that, like in the

10
Note that Goldberg (1995: 89–97) considers the To-DATIVE alternative to be a metaphorical
extension of the CAUSED-MOTION construction (SUBJ V OBJ OBL), which she calls the TRANSFER-
CAUSED-MOTION construction and which explains her semantic description.
11
That there is a semantic difference between the two constructions has received support from
experiments in neuroscience (cf. Allen et al., 2012).
 2.1 Construction Grammar 17

Chomskyan tradition, CxG also tries to account for the generativity of lan-
guage, i.e. the ability to produce novel sentences (Fried and Östman, 2004: 24).
Unlike in the Chomskyan tradition, however, this generativity is not attributed
to transformational syntactic rules. Rather, generativity originates from the
possibility for meaningful constructions to combine with (and be embedded
in) other meaningful constructions. Therefore, as mentioned before, complex
sentences are not only syntactically complex but also semantically complex,
given that both their form and meaning have to combine. Some of the results
behind this combination process will be discussed in Section 2.1.3.

2.1.2.2 Semantics in Construction Grammar The previous section illus-

trates the challenge that describing the form of a construction in isolation
from its meaning can represent. The next step therefore naturally consists
in spelling out more explicitly how meaning is defined in CxG. The
reader will already have noticed that in spite of this section’s title, I
have just used the term meaning (twice) instead of the term semantics.
This might appear as a confusing terminological laissez-faire to those
working on the semantics–pragmatics interface. However, this is a delib-
erate choice that, as will become clear in this section and the next,
actually reflects much of the CxG viewpoint with regard to the functional
pole of constructions. For this reason, I will continue using the term
meaning here and gradually elucidate the reasons why it is preferred –
together with the term function – to the notion of semantics.
The perspective on meaning adopted in CxG can be attributed in particular to
Charles Fillmore (1975, 1976, 1982, 1985b), George Lakoff (1987, 1988,
1989) and Ronald Langacker (1987, 1991a, 1991b), whose work has largely
contributed to the development of CxG. It is important to understand, however,
that CxG also generally embraces most of the ideas on meaning developed in
the wider context of cognitive linguistics (see Geeraerts and Cuyckens (2007:
25–418), Geeraerts (2010: 182–272, 2017, 2021) and Lemmens (2016) for
detailed overviews). To put it simply, the meaning of a construction is often
discussed in terms of a concept, a conceptual structure or a conceptualization
(cf. Langacker, 2008: 46). This view is prima facie similar to the one adopted in
Relevance Theory, which, as we will see, also discusses meaning in terms of
concepts (cf. Section 2.2.3.1). However, the two frameworks have a radically
different understanding of the nature of concepts. In CxG, as in cognitive
linguistics more generally, concepts are understood not in terms of atomic
primitives but as more or less complex units of our conceptual system that
are internally structured (cf. Lakoff, 1987). This approach was developed in
direct opposition to atomic accounts of conceptual content such as the one
developed by Jerry Fodor (cf. Fodor, Fodor and Garrett, 1975; Fodor et al.,
1980; Fodor, 1998: 40–87, inter alia). That is, concepts are considered to be
18 2 Construction Grammar and Relevance Theory

complex structures. The aim of this section therefore is to understand what

type of information concepts make accessible and how this information is
organized.
In order to discuss the nature of these conceptual structures, different
theoretical constructs have been developed, such as frames (Fillmore,
1985b), idealized cognitive models (Lakoff, 1987) and domains
(Langacker, 1987). Although these terms reflect slightly different stand-
points, they “are often interchangeable” (Langacker, 2008: 46). For this
reason, I will not delve into the particularities of each proposal but will
discuss more generally the core assumptions that they all share.12 A
central assumption is that concepts are cognitive objects: “meanings are
in our head” (Gärdenfors, 1999: 21). Meaning is therefore not understood
in CxG as a bearer of truth-conditions in relation to the external (or some
possible) world. Rather, meaning is understood in terms of the way
speakers themselves construe and conceptualize the world and particular
situations. This has been discussed in cognitive linguistics in terms of the
notion of construal (Langacker, 1991b: 61, 2019). Consider the sentences
in (20) to (21).
(20) a. The rock is in front of the tree. (Langacker, 2008: 76)
b. The tree is behind the rock. (Langacker, 2008: 76)
(21) a. [This type of bird] spends its life on the ground. (Fillmore, 1982: 121)
b. [This type of bird] spends its life on land. (Fillmore, 1982: 121)
In the sentences in (20), the same situation is being depicted (i.e. both
sentences would have the same truth-conditions). They differ, however, in
terms of their vantage point (cf. Langacker, 2008: 73), i.e. the perspective
adopted by the speaker to describe the situation. Similarly, in the sentences in
(21), the nouns ground and land can be used to refer to the same “dry surface of
the earth” (Fillmore, 1982: 121). Choosing one or the other, however, depends
on whether you construe this surface in relation to the air (22a), or in relation to
the sea (22b).13 That is, it is argued that their meanings consists of these
particular construals, in which some content is understood in relation to a
particular background.

12
Note that there is a tendency among construction grammarians to discuss meaning in terms of
frames (see Goldberg, 1995: 25; Boas, 2021). This is particularly true when describing the
semantics of verbs and argument-structure constructions, for which frames offer a relatively
more adapted perspective. As Goldberg (1995: 7) herself points out, however, all three
approaches have been crucial to the development of CxG.
13
Specific terminology has been used to describe the particular construal depicted here: figure and
ground (Langacker, 2008: 58) or profile and base (p. 66). From this perspective, the nouns
ground and land are used to denote a similar figure/profile but in relation to a different ground/
base.
 2.1 Construction Grammar 19

(22) a. GROUND b. LAND

Air

Sea

You will notice the particular schematic imagery that underlies the two
representations in (22). This captures another central assumption in cognitive
linguistics with respect to what meanings are actually composed of. It is
assumed that much of a construction’s meaning is made of a number of pre-
conceptual image schemas (Johnson, 1987: xix; Langacker, 2008: 32; Hampe,
2005). Image schemas, as Evans and Green (2006: 184) point out, are not
exactly the type of symbolic mental images such as the ones depicted in (22).
Still, the notion of image schema is meant to capture the observation that much
of our conceptual system is shaped by our perceptual and physical experiences,
from which conceptual patterns can be abstracted. It was mentioned earlier that
a central tenet of CxG is to view language as drawing on general cognitive
mechanisms and emerging from language use. This does not only hold for
linguistic forms but is also true at the level of meaning. Meaning also gradually
emerges from renewed experiences and language use, and it is clear in cogni-
tive linguistics that this experience is not purely mentalistic or intellectual but
involves all of our perceptual and physical senses, as well as social and cultural
practices:
“Experience,” then, is to be understood in a very rich, broad sense as including basic
perceptual, motor-program, emotional, historical, social, and linguistic dimensions.
I am rejecting the classical empiricist notion of experience as reducible to passively
received sense impressions, which are combined to form atomic experiences. By
contrast, experience involves everything that makes us human – our bodily, social,
linguistic, and intellectual being combined in complex interactions that make up our
understanding of our world. (Johnson, 1987: xvi)

In other words, a central assumption within cognitive linguistics is that mean-

ing is not a purely linguistic notion (and therefore not autonomous) but is
encyclopedic in nature, i.e. concepts include knowledge about the world and
how we experience it (Croft and Cruse, 2004: 30; Geeraerts and Cuyckens,
2007: 5; Langacker, 2008: 39; Lemmens, 2016: 92; Diessel, 2019: 93;
Goldberg, 2019: 12). The meaning (i.e. semantics) of the noun strawberry,
for instance, includes a whole set of knowledge ranging from its particular
shape and color, that it is a (summer) fruit, as well as facts about how they grow
and how they are usually sold (i.e. in a punnet), etc. Similarly, as Lemmens
(2016: 92) points out, the meaning of the construction school night necessarily
20 2 Construction Grammar and Relevance Theory

includes cultural knowledge of how weeks are divided and organized as well as
social practices that are related to school nights with regard to the rest of this
cultural/social organization (e.g. weekends). This analysis also applies to more
phrasal patterns such as the DITRANSITIVE construction discussed earlier. Each
of the open slots of this construction, [SUBJ V OBJ1 OBJ2], was described via
conceptual primitives: Agent CAUSE-RECEIVE Recipient Theme. As mentioned in
footnote 6, however, the exact meaning of this construction is actually more
complex and cannot be reduced to these primitives (see Goldberg, 1995: 49).
The meaning of the DITRANSITIVE construction more largely includes know-
ledge of how humans engage in acts of transfer (Goldberg, 1995: 39), i.e.
knowledge of what a transfer actually involves, of the respective roles of
agents, recipients and themes and the relation between them, as well as who/
what can usually perform these roles (Goldberg, 1995: 142–151).
Already, it should be clear why the more general terms meaning and function
are therefore preferred to the term semantics. The perspective adopted here
indeed rejects the traditional division between purely linguistic content on the
one hand (usually referred to as semantics) and encyclopedic knowledge on the
other (usually attributed to pragmatics). That is, what is often attributed to
pragmatics – as is the case in Relevance Theory – is considered to directly
contribute to a construction’s semantics. There is therefore no strict division
between the two (as in (23)), but rather a gradation from semantics to pragmat-
ics (as in (24)), both adapted from Langacker (2008: 40, Fig. 2.4):

(23) Semantics Pragmatics Separate Components

(24) Gradation
Semantics Pragmatics

What the representation in (24) is meant to capture is that it is not necessarily

clear to what extent, during the interpretation of an utterance, some particular
piece of encyclopedic knowledge is already part of a given conceptual structure
or is pragmatically derived from the context. Rather, because of the constantly
changing nature of conceptual structures, some pieces of knowledge are
already well established in the speaker’s conceptual structure (i.e. semantic)
while others are only in the process of conventionalizing (i.e. partially seman-
tic), and yet others are wholly contextual (i.e. pragmatic). This is not the only
reason why the term semantics is not often used in cognitive frameworks. One
of the reasons comes from another central assumption that meanings are not
seen as (context-free) disposable packages that speakers and hearers simply
access when using a particular construction. Rather, it is assumed that using a
construction only provides a point of access to all of its associated knowledge,
 2.1 Construction Grammar 21

and that meaning is constructed in context (see Evans, Bergen and Zinken,
2007: 9; Radden et al., 2007: 1; Langacker, 2008: 41; Taylor, 2017: 261). That
is, the actual meaning of a construction largely depends, in context, on “which
portions of this encyclopedic knowledge are activated, and to what degree”
(Langacker, 2008: 42). Some parts of this knowledge are so central to the
understanding of a particular construction that they systematically get activated
across usages, but other (more ‘peripheral’) aspects of knowledge will only get
activated in some contexts and not others, i.e. will be more salient in some
contexts and not others. For this reason, Langacker (2008: 30) prefers to talk
about meaning in terms of conceptualizations rather than concepts, the former
term conveying greater dynamicity than the latter notion, which conveys more
stativity. It will become clear in the next chapter that some of these assumptions
are also central to Relevance Theory, which I will present in Section 2.2.3.1.
Adopting an encyclopedic view of meaning (or semantics) necessarily
requires some further explanation in terms of how this knowledge is organized
and represented in the speaker’s and hearer’s minds. It is generally understood
in cognitive linguistics that the conceptual structure associated with a particular
construction does not simply represent an unstructured “grab bag” of encyclo-
pedic knowledge (Lemmens, 2017: 107). Rather, this knowledge is well struc-
tured and organized. Conceptual structures are usually described in terms of
categories. There are, however, various ways in which these categories can be
described. In CxG, as in cognitive linguistics more generally, categories are
often discussed in terms of either a radial network (Lakoff, 1987) or a sche-
matic network (Langacker, 1987) of encyclopedic knowledge. In either case, it
is assumed that our knowledge is organized in a number of interconnected
bundles (or clusters) of knowledge, one of which is more central to a given
category than others. This more central cluster of knowledge is usually referred
to as the prototype (Rosch, 1975, 1978, 1983; Rosch and Mervis, 1975; Taylor,
1995).14 Via an analogical process, the encyclopedic information associated
with a given exemplar (i.e. construct) is located within the category in relation
to the prototype, either as a more or less specific instance of that prototype or as
an extension depending on its resemblance to previously encountered

14
Note that two perspectives have developed concerning these networks: a prototype model and an
exemplar-based model (see Bybee, 2006, 2010, 2013). The difference is whether the individual
clusters are made up of all the individual traces (and uses) of encyclopedic knowledge (exemplar-
based), or whether there is some form of abstraction involved (prototype). These two approaches are
often seen as being in opposition. Like Barsalou (1990) and Hampton (2016), however, I think these
are not necessarily opposite analyses but simply two sides of the same coin: while individuals do
categorize on the basis of the individual usage events (i.e. exemplars), there is also most probably
some abstraction of the knowledge involved (prototype). The possibility for abstractions to be
derived does not preclude the possibility for individual exemplars to be stored, and vice versa. In this
book, I will continue using the term prototype, but without the theoretical assumption that this
necessarily precludes the storage by individuals of particular exemplars.
22 2 Construction Grammar and Relevance Theory

Perform Practice a
music sport

Do enjoyable Compete
activities against

Take part
in a game

Figure 2.3 Radial network of play

exemplars. For instance, the verb play gives access to the radial category
represented in Figure 2.3.15
This network represents the category of encyclopedic knowledge that the
verb play gives access to, and which is organized in different clusters of various
resemblance. These different dots (or clusters) constitute the different senses of
the verb (which can then be understood as different but related concepts). In
this network, one of the different clusters of encyclopedic knowledge (i.e.
senses) – shown here in the bold circle – is more central than others and all
other senses develop as extensions from this central sense. This representation
captures the conventional polysemy of the verb play, each of the different
clusters representing one of the senses of the verb.
Radial networks such as in Figure 2.3 nicely enable the identification and
understanding of the various senses of a given construction by identifying the
relation between the different clusters of encyclopedic information that a
construction is associated with. Now, independently of whether any kind of
abstraction or generalization occurs within the clusters themselves (see foot-
note 14), Langacker (1991b: 266) suggests that there is schematization (i.e.
abstraction) across clusters, and that some of these senses may be more
schematic than others, but also that there may be a “superschema” (1991b:
267) that accounts for all of the senses that compose the conceptual network.
He calls such a network a schematic network. He discusses, for instance, the
schematic network of the verb run, as shown in Figure 2.4.
Like in the radial network, this network is composed of different clusters or
senses, one of which is more central than the others (box in bold). Other senses
are seen as semantic extensions from this more central sense (broken arrows).
In addition to the radial network, however, some senses are seen as schematic
15
Note that this figure is a relatively simple representation of the radial category that is associated
with the verb play, which in reality is probably more complex. This figure was drawn on the
basis of the definitions provided by the online Cambridge Dictionary, available at: http://dicti
onary.cambridge.org/fr/dictionnaire/anglais/play (last accessed: May 31, 2023).
 2.1 Construction Grammar 23

RAPID
MOTION

RAPID RAPID RAPID

n-LEGGED MECHANICAL FLUID
LOCOMOTION MOTION MOTION
(engine) (water)

RAPID RAPID
2-LEGGED 4-LEGGED
LOCOMOTION LOCOMOTION
(person) (animal)
COMPETITIVE
POLITICAL
ACTIVITY
(candidate)
COMPETITIVE RAPID RAPID
2-LEGGED 4-LEGGED 4-LEGGED
LOCOMOTION LOCOMOTION LOCOMOTION
(race) (dog) (horse)

Figure 2.4 Schematic network of run (from Langacker, 1991b: 267)

relative to other senses (plain arrows), and one of them is schematic to all these
senses (broken box). In the next chapter, I will try to show how this perspective
can help to shed some light on different issues that concern the semantics–
pragmatics interface, and in particular in relation to the ideas developed in
Relevance Theory (see Section 3.4). For now, in order to avoid possible
misunderstandings, a few points concerning these representations are worth
mentioning. It is true that the different clusters identified correspond to differ-
ent senses of the construction to which the network is associated, e.g. the verb
run in Figure 2.4. In CxG, conventional polysemy (a network of interrelated
senses) is the norm rather than the exception (Goldberg, 1995: 31, 2019: 20).
However, it is necessary to understand, as mentioned before, that this polysemy
is neither predetermined nor fixed, and that these senses are not context-free
packages. First, these conceptual networks are gradually acquired via exposure
to actual exemplars and emerge from this experience. As a consequence, within
and across languages, not every individual will share exactly the same concep-
tual structure (although speakers of the same speech community most certainly
have very similar ones). As Langacker (1991b: 267) himself points out, English
speakers may not all have within their conceptual structure of run clusters
of knowledge as specific as some that can be found in Figure 2.4 (e.g. the
“bottom” dog and horse type of running senses). Similarly, not everyone will
necessarily abstract the (same) superschema, in this case rapid motion. In other
words, the categories that individuals possess are relatively flexible, and
24 2 Construction Grammar and Relevance Theory

constantly change depending on their experience. Second, and directly related

to this last observation, it is interesting to note that this usage-based approach
easily explains language change and grammaticalization (Bybee, 2010;
Traugott and Trousdale, 2013), since it is usage that determines the shape of
these categories and how they gradually develop.

2.1.2.3 The Pragmatics of Constructions It will now have become clear that
meaning in CxG is to be understood in terms of rich conceptual structures that
emerge via our experience of the world and which are constantly evolving and
changing. In the next section, I will discuss the interaction between different
constructions and, therefore, between different conceptual structures. Before
doing so, I will address one last point, which can also explain why the terms
meaning and function are preferred to the term semantics in CxG.16 In this
section, I will briefly look at how the notion of pragmatics has been discussed
in relation to constructions in CxG. It is essential to understand that construc-
tionists, although primarily focusing on what constitutes our linguistic know-
ledge, do not ignore the role of pragmatics. Ideally, CxG tries to account for
all of “the rich semantic, pragmatic, and complex formal constraints” that
somehow regulate the use of individual constructions (Goldberg, 2003: 220).
However, there has so far been little attention paid to pragmatics in CxG (cf.
Cappelle, 2017; Finkbeiner, 2019a; Leclercq, 2020). Furthermore, pragmatics
in this framework is understood and approached in a way that differs from how
it is generally discussed in the literature on the semantics–pragmatics interface.
This is a potential source of confusion.
This particular approach is best illustrated in Goldberg (2004), who distin-
guishes between non-conventional pragmatics and conventional pragmatics
(Goldberg, 2004: 428). The former kind of pragmatics has to do with online
computations of contextual effects such as are usually discussed in (post-/neo-)
Gricean pragmatics. The latter, conventional type of pragmatics is concerned
with “the conventional association of certain formal properties of language
with certain constraints on pragmatic contexts” (p. 428). It is this latter type of
pragmatics that constructionists are mostly interested in (cf. Kay, 2004;
Nikiforidou, 2009; Lee-Goldman, 2011; Cappelle, 2017; Kuzai, 2020). Yet,
by virtue of being conventional, one may wonder to what extent this type of
‘pragmatics’ really is ‘pragmatics’ rather than semantics, and what exactly the
term is meant to capture. This question is the focus of this section.
It is generally considered in CxG that “some constructions have pragmatic
content built into them” (Cappelle, 2017: 116). Some of this pragmatic content
follows from the usage-based nature of meaning representation. As Bybee

16
See Leclercq (2020) for a critical discussion of the use of the terms ‘semantics’ and ‘pragmatics’
in CxG.
 2.1 Construction Grammar 25

(2010) points out, because semantic structures are gradually acquired via
repetition, “frequently made inferences from the context can become part of
the meaning of an expression or construction” (Bybee, 2010: 52). An often-
discussed example in CxG is the What’s X doing X? (or WXDY) construction,
illustrated in (25).
(25) a. What’s it doing in the box? (COCA, written)
b. What’s THAT book doing in the library? (NOW)
c. And what’s he doing in my kitchen? (COCA, written)

All of the sentences in (25) express a notion of incongruity (or disapproval)

regarding a specific situation (Kay and Fillmore, 1999: 4). In (25b), for instance,
the speaker seems to disapprove of a given book being available in a specific
library. Although Kay and Fillmore recognize that this meaning most probably
originated as a conversational implicature, “the semantics of incongruity is now
CONVENTIONALLY associated with the special morphosyntax of WXDY
constructs” (p. 5, original emphasis). That is, this part of the communicated
meaning is not (re)calculated each time the hearer comes across the WXDY
construction but is accessed as part of their knowledge of the construction. In this
case, a previously pragmatic aspect has become conventional and is now part of
the meaning of the construction itself. It is for this reason that Kay and Fillmore
refer to it in terms of semantics rather than in terms of pragmatics.
Cappelle (2017: 118) points out, however – and this seems to have been the
underlying reason for Goldberg to discuss the notion of conventional pragmat-
ics – that it is not necessarily clear to what extent a conventionalized pragmatic
aspect necessarily becomes a semantic aspect of a construction. The functional
pole of a construction, it is argued, may actually be composed of both semantic
and conventional pragmatic aspects of meaning (and hence the preference for
using the words meaning/function). I will discuss the case of the let alone
construction to explain this view. In their oft-cited paper, Fillmore, Kay and
O’Connor (1988: 514) discuss the use of let alone and its communicative
function in sentences such as in (26) to (28) (original emphasis).
(26) I don’t even want to read an article ABOUT, let alone a book written BY, that
swine.
(27) Max won’t eat SHRIMP, let alone SQUID.
(28) He wouldn’t give A NICKEL to his MOTHER, let alone TEN DOLLARS to a COMPLETE
STRANGER.

In these sentences, the let alone construction (or rather, the X let alone Y
construction) is argued to introduce each of the two conjoined elements in
terms of “contrasted points on an implicational scale” (Cappelle, Dugas and
Tobin, 2015: 72). In the sentence in (27), for instance, Max’s eating squid is
26 2 Construction Grammar and Relevance Theory

understood as being less probable than his eating shrimp (which is itself already
very unlikely). This aspect is argued to be the semantic contribution of the
construction. In addition, it is argued that the construction is also used to indicate
to the hearer that the second conjunct (e.g. that there is no chance that Max is
going to eat squid) provides the most relevant – in the Gricean sense – piece of
information to the context at hand (Cappelle, Dugas and Tobin, 2015: 72). In this
case, the construction therefore conventionally provides the hearer with the tools
that they would otherwise have had to work out in context. Yet according to
Fillmore, Kay and O’Connor (1988: 532), in spite of being conventionally
associated with the let alone construction, this later contribution is argued not
to be purely semantic but is instead pragmatic (see also Cappelle, Dugas and
Tobin, 2015: 73).
Note that in addition to the ‘pragmatics’ of examples such as the WXDY
construction and the X let alone Y construction, a number of other pragmatic
functions associated with particular constructions have been identified, such as
in (29) to (30).
(29) Can you pass the salt? (Stefanowitsch, 2003: 108)
(30) It’s not pretty, it’s gorgeous. (Kay and Michaelis, 2012: 2286)
The construct in (29), for instance, is argued to instantiate the Can you X?
construction, which is conventionally associated with a request indirect
speech act (Stefanowitsch, 2003: 109). That is, this indirect speech act is
not calculated online, but is accessed by the hearer as part of their knowledge
of the construction. From the perspective of CxG, this part of the function of
the construction is not purely semantic (since it is non-propositional) but is
instead a pragmatic convention. Similarly, in the construct in (30), it is argued
that the adverb not is used here not to negate the proposition itself but as a
metalinguistic device to cancel a specific quantity implicature (cf. Kay and
Michaelis (2012: 17), and references cited therein). That is, in constructional
terms, this function is not semantic but pragmatic.
The previous paragraphs show that there is no clear agreement as to what
counts as purely ‘semantic’ or ‘pragmatic’. As discussed in Leclercq (2020),
though CxG initially considers the semantics–pragmatics distinction “more or
less obsolete” (auf der Straße, 2017: 61), two opposite views can be distin-
guished: one that considers that semantics is the domain of conventional
meaning while pragmatics pertains to contextual inference (e.g. Kay and
Fillmore’s 1999 analysis of the WXDY construction), and one that views
semantics as contributing to propositional (i.e. truth-conditional) content
and pragmatics to non-truth-conditional content (e.g. Fillmore, Kay and
O’Connor’s 1988 analysis of the X let alone Y construction). It has to be
understood that as much as CxG does not define meanings in terms of truth-
 2.1 Construction Grammar 27

conditions, and sees meaning as a very dynamic object (see previous section),
constructionists still primarily seem to think of the notion of semantics as being
propositional in nature (although it is not clear exactly what their position on
the matter really is, e.g. Kay and Michaelis, 2012: 2277). This assumption is in
particular defended by Cappelle (2017: 122), who argues that it is “useful to
make a distinction between lexical or propositional semantics . . . and prag-
matic information.” From this perspective, the information provided for
example by the let alone construction about the second conjunct in terms of
its particular relevance to a given discourse is indeed not semantic since it is
non-propositional. This assumption is also central to Goldberg’s (2004) dis-
tinction between conventional and non-conventional pragmatics, both of which
concern non-truth-conditional aspects of meaning. As mentioned in Leclercq
(2020), one might argue that this view comes into direct contradiction with the
approach presented in Section 2.1.2.2, in which it was argued that truth-
conditions do not define the meaning of a construction. As I see it, there is no
necessary contradiction, however: “[o]ne can maintain the view that meaning is
not restricted to truth conditions and at the same time argue that there is a level
at which some aspects of meaning (more than others) will eventually contribute
to establishing the truth value of the proposition expressed” (Leclercq, 2020:
232). Indeed, as Gärdenfors (1999) puts it, “the truth of expressions is con-
sidered to be secondary, since truth concerns the relation between the mental
structure and the world. [. . .] Meaning comes before truth” (p. 21). So it is
possible for CxG to preserve a clear semantic/pragmatic distinction and to treat
as purely semantic those (conventional) aspects of meaning that are eligible
to contextual truth values and as pragmatic those that are not. We will see in
Chapter 4 how this question relates to the conceptual/procedural distinction
established in Relevance Theory.
Now, regardless of how semantics and pragmatics are understood in CxG, it
is relatively explicit that non-conventional pragmatics (Goldberg, 2004: 428),
i.e. conversational pragmatics as discussed in the (post-/neo-)Gricean tradition,
is not the focus of interest in CxG. Rather, the interest remains to a large extent
centered on knowledge itself. Nevertheless, because of CxG’s usage-based
approach to language, as mentioned before, it does recognize the role of
pragmatics during verbal communication. Unfortunately, constructionists
sometimes leave some room for ambiguity concerning their exact stance on
the question. For instance, the title What’s pragmatics doing outside construc-
tions? in Cappelle (2017) is a bit surprising. It might seem as though the author
is rejecting the possibility for pragmatics to exist outside of constructions. The
What’s X doing Y? construction used here, which Cappelle himself discusses,
indeed introduces a notion of incongruity and disapproval for the relation
between X and Y. Does this mean that Cappelle (and constructionists more
generally) rejects the role of conversational, non-conventional pragmatics?
28 2 Construction Grammar and Relevance Theory

No. Although this is what his title could suggest, this is not the position of CxG.
Cappelle himself acknowledges the major role of (non-conventional) pragmat-
ics during the interpretation of an utterance (Cappelle, 2017: 117). The aim of
Cappelle (2017) is only to show that pragmatics can also be part of construc-
tions, and that it does not only take place outside of constructions.17 Of course,
the aim of CxG is only to describe an individual’s linguistic knowledge, and
therefore it could be argued that it does not need to explain the ins and outs of
conversational pragmatics. In this case, however, CxG on its own is not enough
to fully explain how linguistic communication works and succeeds. In order to
do so, one needs an account of how non-conventional pragmatics operates.
Goldberg (2006) argues that
[a] focus on form to the neglect of function is like investigating a human organ such as
the liver, without attending to what the liver does: while this is not impossible, it is
certain to fail to be explanatory. (p. 168)
Similarly, one might argue that focusing on semantics without looking at
pragmatics, although not impossible, has little explanatory power. As
Gonzálvez-García (2020: 112) puts it, “the treatment of semantic and/or prag-
matic facts in [Cognitive Construction Grammar] is at best somewhat incon-
sistent with the theoretical premises invoked.” This is why an approach along
the lines of Relevance Theory is necessary.

2.1.3 Constructions in Interaction: Coercion

There is one more aspect of the theory that I will now discuss and which will
prove particularly relevant when comparing CxG with Relevance Theory. This
has to do with the interaction between various constructions that are used in an
utterance. As mentioned before, utterances result from the complex combin-
ation of a number of different constructions, all of which contribute to this
utterance in terms of both form and meaning. Goldberg (2003: 221) nicely
captures this complexity in Figure 2.5, for instance.
Figure 2.5 illustrates the constructionist view according to which one utter-
ance (in (a), What did Liza buy the child?) results from the combination of
various constructions, identified in (b). Interestingly, Figure 2.5 is but one
illustration of the generativity of language which can be explained by the
infinite combinatorial possibilities that constructions offer (Goldberg, 1995:
7; Fried and Östman, 2004: 14). The aim of this section is to understand more
specifically the scope of these possibilities and the ways in which

17
A similar observation can be made about Bergs and Diewald’s (2009) Contexts and
Constructions volume. Although some chapters do address non-conventional pragmatics,
most are concerned with how pragmatics can be part of constructions.
 2.1 Construction Grammar 29

(a) [ What did Liza buy the child? ]

(b) 1. Liza, buy, the, child, what, did constructions (i.e. words)
2. DITRANSITIVE construction:
3. Question construction: [ ]
4. Subject-auxiliary inversion construction:
5. VP construction:
6. NP construction:

Figure 2.5 Constructing an utterance (adapted from Goldberg, 2003: 221)

constructions, and in particular lexemes, may (or may not) interact with other
constructions. Consider for instance the use of fly in the following examples.
(31) The pilot announced that geese were flying in the sky. (COCA, written)
(32) Our son was just three months old when we first flew him across the Atlantic.
(COCA, written)
(33) It was a breathtaking experience to fly over the beautiful valley of Palampur.
Why walk, when you can fly your way down! (NOW)

Example (31) contains a rather prototypical use of the verb, in both form and
meaning. The uses of fly in (32) and (33), however, are comparatively more
unusual. In (32), fly is interpreted in terms of a caused motion, whereby the
parents have taken their son on a flight across the Atlantic at three months of
age. In (33), there is a particular focus placed on the specific manner of
motion which is encoded by the verb fly. In CxG, it is considered that these
interpretations actually result from their being used inside another construc-
tion, the CAUSED-MOTION construction and the WAY construction respectively.
We can see indeed that these sentences differ from (31) not only in meaning
but also in form. In (32), the form [SUBJ V OBJ OBL] can be easily identified.
As mentioned in Section 2.1.1, this form is associated with the meaning X
causes Y to go Z to form the CAUSED-MOTION construction. It is understood in
CxG that the interpretation of fly in (32) follows from its being used in that
construction. Similarly in (33), the form [SUBJ V one’s way OBL] is argued to
be associated with a particular manner of motion interpretation to form the
WAY construction, and it is the use of fly in this construction that provides its
particular interpretation in (33). So the interpretation of the verb fly here
depends as much on the semantics of the constructions in which it is used as
on its own lexical meaning.
30 2 Construction Grammar and Relevance Theory

In the example just discussed, it could be argued that the verb fly readily
combines with the semantics of the two constructions in which it occurs.18 This
naturally follows because there is semantic coherence and semantic corres-
pondence (cf. Goldberg, 1995: 50) between the lexical item and the two
constructions, i.e. the semantic features of the lexical item that is used closely
correspond to those of the constructions in which it occurs and therefore can
combine (or fuse) with each of them. The verb fly indeed refers to a specific
motion event which is a central aspect of both the CAUSED-MOTION and the WAY
constructions. Sometimes, however, a lexeme and the construction in which it
occurs are not semantically (and morphosyntactically) coherent and compat-
ible. Consider the sentences in (34) to (36).
(34) He drank three beers hoping that would help. It did not. (COCA, written)
(35) I just Google Mapped my way to an exam because I didn’t know where
Engineering South was. #senioryear (Twitter, @Brittany_N_Lee, 21 apr.
2016)
(36) The doc (. . .) had happied himself to death on his own laudanum two months
before. (COCA, written)
In (34), the noun beer is a mass noun that should not be specified for number,
i.e. it should neither be inflected with the plural -s suffix nor with the number
three, and which is prima facie incompatible with the morphosyntactic context
in which it occurs.19 Nevertheless, instead of the mass reading (i.e. the liquid),
beer is here interpreted in accordance with its morphosyntactic context in terms
of a countable portion of beer (given our world knowledge of how beer is
usually served, most probably three bottles or pints). That is, its interpretation is
somehow inherited from the semantics of the construction in which (and with
which) it occurs. Similarly in (35), the noun Google Maps, which usually refers
to a GPS application, is here used as a denominal verb to refer to a particular
means of motion. That is, the speaker communicates that they used Google
Maps in order to arrive at the location of their exam. CxG has a specific
explanation for the origin of this interpretation. This interpretation is argued
to be inherited from the WAY construction (SUBJ V one’s way OBL) in which it
occurs. The lexeme Google Maps is originally neither a verb nor does it encode
means of motion (which is expected in that position of the WAY construction).
At first sight, there is a semantic (and morphosyntactic) mismatch between the
noun and the WAY construction. Nevertheless, it is interpreted as a means of
motion verb in accordance with the position it occupies in that construction.
Finally, in (36), the adjective happy is also used creatively as a de-adjectival

18
This will be discussed more fully in Chapter 4.
19
Hilpert (2019: 17) discusses a similar example.
 2.1 Construction Grammar 31

verb. In this case, it is not used to refer to the doc’s mental state, but to the
(metaphorical) act of leading himself to his own death by using drugs. This can
once again be explained in terms of the larger construction in which it occurs: in
this case the CAUSED-MOTION construction (SUBJ V OBJ OBL). Although happy
is neither a verb nor encodes caused-motion (as required by the CAUSED-
MOTION construction), it is so interpreted in accordance with the larger con-
struction in which it occurs.
The examples just discussed show that sometimes a lexeme can be used in
a construction with which it is seemingly incompatible, i.e. there can be a
mismatch between the semantic and morphosyntactic properties of the lexeme
and those of the construction in which it occurs. In these cases, the lexeme is
systematically reinterpreted in accordance with the semantics of that construc-
tion. This resolution process has been discussed in CxG in terms of coercion
(Goldberg, 1995: 159; Michaelis, 2003a, 2003b, 2004; Lauwers and Willems,
2011; Hilpert, 2019: 17; Leclercq, 2019). The term coercion was first used
outside the framework of Construction Grammar. The terms ‘coerce’ and
‘coercion’ were initially used in programming languages (Aït-Kaci, 1984)
and artificial intelligence (Hobbs, Walker and Amsler, 1982; Hobbs and
Martin, 1987; Hobbs et al., 1993) and were soon adopted and developed by
formal semanticists interested in aspectual meaning (Moens and Steedman,
1988: 17; Pustejovsky, 1991: 425, 1995: 106, 2011: 1401; de Swart, 2000: 7,
2011: 580). It is from this work on aspect that Construction Grammar has
borrowed the term coercion. In particular, Michaelis (2004) took up the notion
and adapted it to the needs of the theory. The term has been used to describe a
variety of phenomena in the different frameworks just mentioned.
Nevertheless, they all share the view that coercion is concerned with the
resolution of an incompatibility between a selector (e.g. argument structure
construction) and a selected (e.g. lexeme) whereby the latter adapts to the
former. This has been referred to by Michaelis (2004) as the “override
principle”:
The override principle. If a lexical item is semantically incompatible with its morpho-
syntactic context, the meaning of the lexical item conforms to the meaning of the
structure in which it is embedded. (p. 25)
The interpretations of the lexemes beer, Google Maps and happy as they are
used in (34) to (36) precisely follow from such coercion effects: they are
interpreted in accordance with the semantics of the different constructions in
which they occur. As mentioned before, the same coercion effect is involved in
example (13), repeated here:
(37) Lyn crutched Tom her apple. (Kaschak and Glenberg, 2000: 512)
32 2 Construction Grammar and Relevance Theory

The interpretation of the denominal verb crutch in terms of transfer

(whereby Lyn used the crutch to give Tom her apple) is inherited from the
DITRANSITIVE construction in which it occurs (SUBJ V OBJ1 OBJ2). Although
there is originally a semantic (and morphosyntactic) mismatch between the
noun crutch and the verb position it occupies in the DITRANSITIVE construc-
tion, the noun is reinterpreted in accordance with the semantics of the
construction.
There are three further points concerning coercion that I wish to address.
First, it has to be understood that the notion of coercion has been widely
discussed in a number of different frameworks and that it is perceived and
described in slightly different ways in each of them (see Audring and Booij
(2016) for an interesting discussion). For instance, in the tradition of formal
semantics (cf. Pustejovsky, 1991, 1995, 2011; de Swart, 2000, 2011;
Jackendoff, 1997), on the basis of which Michaelis has elaborated her own
account, coercion seems to be understood as an autonomous linguistic process
whereby language itself coerces (or shifts) the meaning of a particular lexeme.
Lauwers and Willems (2011: 1224) point out that these approaches have indeed
given very little attention to the role of language users and context during
the interpretation process. Such a position somehow seems to resonate in
Michaelis’ own work in any case, and in particular in the way the override
principle has been stated. Because of CxG’s usage-based approach to language,
however, I believe that most construction grammarians view coercion as
involving a process whereby the language users themselves have to solve the
mismatch between the lexeme and the morphosyntactic context in which they
occur. Such a perspective has been nicely captured by Langacker (1987):
Putting together novel expressions is something that speakers do, not grammars. It is a
problem-solving activity that demands a constructive effort and occurs when linguistic
convention is put to use in specific circumstances. (p. 65)
This particular point of view will be addressed more fully in Chapter 4 and I
will take into account other arguments when relating the notion of coercion to
some of the work developed in Relevance Theory, for, as we will see, this
notion raises a lot of questions. In particular, and this is my second point, one of
these questions has to do with how the “problem-solving activity,” i.e. the
mismatch resolution, is actually accounted for. After all, as Yoon (2012) points
out, although coercion in CxG is seen as a process carried out by language
users, “the psychological process toward the resolution [is] not dealt with”
(Yoon, 2012: 7). This question will also be addressed in Chapter 4.
Finally, it is also worth mentioning that there is a limit to coercion. Coercion
is possible because of the productivity of the constructions that speakers use
(Lauwers and Willems, 2011: 1224), i.e. the possibility for a construction to
produce novel forms and combine with new lexemes. However, this
 2.1 Construction Grammar 33

productivity is constrained (cf. Cappelle, 2014), that is, it is not possible for any
construction to combine with any new lexeme and for coercion (i.e. mismatch
resolution) to take place. This restriction is often discussed in terms of partial
productivity, coverage, competition and statistical preemption (Goldberg,
1995: 120, 2019; Boyd and Goldberg, 2011; Goldberg, 2011; Suttle and
Goldberg, 2011). That is, as productive as constructions may be, there are
systematic constraints that limit the range of possible coinages. Given the focus
of this book on lexical meaning, however, I will not delve into the specific
constraints on constructional productivity but only focus on those cases where
novel forms (such as in (34) to (37)) are possible and give rise to coercion
effects (see also Bergs, 2018; Hoffmann, 2018; and references cited therein).

2.1.4 Construction Grammar: Summing Up

Construction Grammar is a cognitively grounded theory of language that
mostly focuses on knowledge. As a functionalist approach, it assumes that all
forms that a language is composed of are essentially meaningful. From this
perspective, meaning should be at the very heart of linguistic analysis. In
particular, construction grammarians often discuss the semantics (or rather
function) that is associated with any given construction. Due to its particular
appeal to usage, we have seen that CxG has a particular understanding of the
notion of semantics. As mentioned in Section 2.1.2.2, meaning is discussed in
terms of encyclopedic knowledge. It therefore rejects the traditional division
between semantics (as purely linguistic knowledge) and pragmatics (in terms
of encyclopedic knowledge), but rather believes in a more gradual distinction
from more to less conventional aspects of encyclopedic knowledge. As a result,
it is assumed that the functional pole of constructions is rather rich and that
polysemy is almost systematic. In the next chapter, this view will be compared
to the relevance-theoretic approach, and I will discuss whether or not the two
are compatible. What is particularly interesting in CxG is that it considers all
different forms of a given language to be systematically associated with
different functions. As discussed in the case of the dative alternation, even
small differences in form are related to differences in function. This therefore
provides the analyst – whether it be a semanticist or a pragmaticist – with a
relatively clear agenda. Constructions indeed provide a solid source of infor-
mation in order to identify the speaker’s intended interpretation. Hence, trying
to identify a speaker’s meaning should always involve looking carefully at the
particular form of an utterance, from which a number of specific functions can
be recovered and to which pragmatic principles can apply. As we will see in
Chapter 3, however, this multifaceted strategy is not always adopted in
Relevance Theory.
34 2 Construction Grammar and Relevance Theory

The difficulty with Construction Grammar is to pin down exactly its view
on pragmatics. On the one hand, it has been shown that much pragmatic content
is considered to be part of a construction’s function. This was referred to
as conventional pragmatics. On the other hand, it is less clear how non-
conventional (i.e. conversational) pragmatics generally fits in with the general
enterprise of CxG, which gives rather little space to these facets of ‘meaning’.
Of course, constructionists may argue that CxG aims only at providing a
framework for linguistic knowledge and that (non-conventional) pragmatics
falls outside its scope. However, it is not clear why this should necessarily be
the case. CxG assumes that linguistic knowledge results from one’s experience
with language. From this perspective, the experience itself – which involves
non-conventional pragmatics – should be as much an aim of study as the
resulting knowledge. It has been shown, however, that construction grammar-
ians tend to focus on the result itself (i.e. on knowledge) more than they do on
the experience. This is the reason why, for instance, speakers are sometimes
credited with too much knowledge (e.g. Sandra and Rice (1995) on preposi-
tions, see also Sandra (1998: 368)) that instead should probably be attributed to
pragmatics. In order to arrive at a cognitively more accurate description of
linguistic knowledge and language more generally (which was earlier stated
as being one of CxG’s main goals, CxG may therefore have to integrate
principles of pragmatics more explicitly in its framework.

2.2 Relevance Theory

Relevance Theory is a theory of cognition and cognitive processes which has
mostly been applied to verbal communication. In this framework, much focus is
placed on the semantics–pragmatics interface and the processes involved during
the interpretation of an utterance. It was originally developed by Dan Sperber and
Deirdre Wilson and was first fully spelled out in their seminal book Relevance
([1986] 1995). Relevance Theory grew out of Sperber and Wilson’s desire to make
sense of our capacity to understand the world, and in particular our capacity to
communicate effectively. As such, it had a direct impact on the field of pragmatics.
Indeed, Paul Grice – whose work provided a major incentive for the development
of pragmatics – had already addressed some of the most central issues discussed in
Relevance Theory (Grice, 1989). Yet, although sharing a number of Gricean
assumptions, Sperber and Wilson developed Relevance Theory as an alternative
account to that of Grice (and other post- and neo-Gricean theories) and thus
challenged traditional perspectives on pragmatics. In Relevance Theory, the
success of verbal communication is not attributed to a number of maxims, or
rules, that interlocutors follow, but to a single cognitive mechanism referred to as
the principle of relevance (see Section 2.2.1).
 2.2 Relevance Theory 35

Since the publication of Relevance in 1986, the theory has been extensively
revised and extended to address many of the issues discussed in the pragmatics
literature (cf. Carston, 2002a; Wilson and Sperber, 2012; Clark, 2013a; Wilson,
2017; Allott, 2020). The length of Francisco Yus’ up-to-date online bibliog-
raphy (http://personal.ua.es/francisco.yus/rt.html), which gathers almost all of
the research embedded in a relevance-theoretic perspective, bears witness to
this. The variety of contributors to the development of the theory has naturally
led to diverging points of view within the framework itself. Nevertheless,
relevance theorists have remained relatively united and, for that reason, I will
continue using the general term Relevance Theory (and its acronym RT) in
spite of individual differences across some of its advocates.

2.2.1 Principle(s) of Relevance

The reason Relevance Theory has remained a stable framework for so many
years is most probably the fact that in spite of internal differences among
relevance theorists, the underlying assumption responsible for the development
of the theory has never changed and still inspires many researchers. This
assumption I referred to earlier as the principle of relevance. This principle
was first introduced in Relevance (Sperber and Wilson, [1986] 1995) and
remains today the most central element of the theory around which other
ideas have been developed. It is already worth noting that although a number
of relevance-theoretic notions will be challenged in this book, the principle of
relevance will not be one of them. This principle offers key answers to some of
the questions that Construction Grammar fails to address, and this is why it
deserves a section of its own.

2.2.1.1 Defining Relevance Understanding the term principle of relevance

in RT can be a challenge for at least two reasons. First, part of the difficulty lies
in the ambiguity of the term used, for there are actually not one but two
principles of relevance: the first (or cognitive) principle of relevance and the
second (or communicative) principle of relevance (Sperber and Wilson, 1995:
261). In the literature, however, it is common to refer to the second principle as
the principle of relevance (see Section 2.2.1.2).20 Second, another difficulty
concerns the meaning of the term relevance itself. This notion is used in RT in a
very technical sense, which differs both from the everyday perception of
‘relevance’ and from Grice’s understanding of the notion. Yet, in order to
understand the two principles of relevance (i.e. how and to what phenomena

20
This is most probably because the second/communicative principle of relevance was originally
the only one discussed in the 1986 edition of Relevance. Claims about cognition were only
turned into a principle in the second edition of the book in 1995.
36 2 Construction Grammar and Relevance Theory

the notion of relevance applies), it is essential to define exactly what is meant

by relevance in the first place.
As mentioned before, RT is first and foremost a theory about cognition. In
particular, it aims at explaining, in cognitively realistic terms, information
processing, and notably how inferential processes are constrained (Wilson and
Sperber, 1991: 586; Sinclair and Winckler, 1991: 13; Sperber and Wilson, 1995:
32, 66; Clark, 2013a: xv). The notion of relevance therefore does not apply only
to language but to all possible types of cognitive stimuli: visual, auditory,
kinesthetic, etc. The perspective developed in RT was originally based on Jerry
Fodor’s language of thought and modularity of mind hypotheses (Fodor, 1975,
1983).21 The term cognition is understood in RT as having “to do with ‘think-
ing’” (Clark, 2013a: 91). Like Fodor, RT assumes that thoughts are language-like
mental (or conceptual) representations and that thinking (i.e. cognition) is the
computation of these mental representations (Sperber and Wilson, 1995: 71).
External stimuli are taken as input by specialized modules (or input systems)
which transform the type of information they receive (visual, linguistic, etc.) into
mental representations of the same format: logical forms (p. 72). These
mental representations are then used as input information by central cognitive
systems which perform computations over them. The information provided
by the various input systems is integrated with information stored in memory
and various inferential tasks are then performed (p. 71). These inferential
tasks form the basis of comprehension processes and belief fixation. It is such
processes, for instance, that enrich the often-incomplete logical forms into
full-fledged assumptions (i.e. fully propositional conceptual structures). As we
will see in the next section, most linguistic logical forms provided by a given
utterance need to be enriched. More generally, the inferential tasks performed
by the central cognitive systems enable an individual to keep their represen-
tation of the world, their belief system, as accurate as possible by comparing
the newly formed assumptions with those already stored in memory (Clark,
2013a: 96).
According to Fodor, the computations that take place within the central
systems are primarily inferential and require different types of pragmatic
abilities (Fodor, 1983: 110). He argues, however, that it is not possible to
describe exactly how these inferential tasks are carried out and how all of the
information that comes into somebody’s central systems is actually processed
in order to keep their belief system up to date (p. 112). Sperber and Wilson
disagree with Fodor, however, and they introduced the notion of relevance as
an attempt to provide such an explanation (Sperber and Wilson, 1995: 66).
21
Note that RT has since moved away from Fodor’s (1983) original ideas and now adopts a
slightly different view of the modularity of the mind (see, for instance, Sperber, 1994, 2001,
2005; Carston, 1997a, 2006; Wilson and Sperber, 2004; Wilson, 2005). Issues related to this
debate will not be addressed in this book.
 2.2 Relevance Theory 37

According to Sperber and Wilson, not all information is equally worth process-
ing. Information worth processing is relevant information. First introduced as a
lawlike generalization, the notion of relevance has laid the foundations of RT.
Relevance is not an either/or property of a given input but, rather, is a matter
of degree (Sperber, 2005: 63). The relevance of an input is defined in terms of a
balance between cognitive effects and processing effort (Wilson and Sperber,
2004: 609):
(38) Relevance of an input to an individual
a. Other things being equal, the greater the positive cognitive effects
achieved by processing an input, the greater the relevance of the input to
the individual at that time.
b. Other things being equal, the greater the processing effort expended, the
lower the relevance of the input to the individual at that time.
The first part of this definition makes it clear that the more positive cognitive
effects a stimulus provides to an individual in a particular context, the more
relevant it is. A stimulus has cognitive effects whenever, once integrated with
information already stored in memory, it causes a change in an individual’s
set of assumptions (their cognitive environment, Sperber and Wilson, 1995:
38). According to Sperber and Wilson (1995: 109), there are in particular
three ways in which a given stimulus can have such cognitive effects. First, a
new stimulus achieves cognitive effects if it strengthens an already existing
assumption. This happens, for instance, if you suspect two of your friends
might be dating, yet do not have much proof. Then one day, you see them
walking in the street holding hands. This new information achieves cognitive
effects by strengthening your assumption that they are dating. Second, a new
stimulus also achieves cognitive effects if it contradicts an already existing
assumption. For instance, you might think that your husband is out working in
the garden, but then you suddenly see him in front of the computer checking
his email. This new information achieves cognitive effects by contradicting a
previously held assumption. Finally, a new stimulus also has cognitive effects
if, when integrated with older assumptions, it leads to the derivation of a new
assumption (called a contextual implication, Sperber and Wilson, 1995: 107).
For instance, you have been informed that the concert will be canceled if it
rains. A few hours before the event, as you walk back home, a storm hits
town. This new information achieves cognitive effects since you derive the
contextual implication that the concert will be canceled (and therefore you
can stay at home, etc.). According to Wilson and Sperber (2004: 608), the
derivation of contextual implications provides the most important type of
cognitive effects.
The relevance of a given input is not a specific quantitative notion that can be
easily measured but is, rather, comparative (Sperber and Wilson, 1987: 742,
38 2 Construction Grammar and Relevance Theory

1995: 132). The relevance of an input indeed varies depending on the number
of cognitive effects it provides in a specific context. The same input may be
more or less relevant depending on the context or the strength22 of the
assumptions that are manifest to an individual at a given time. More import-
antly, as the definition in (38b) clearly indicates, the relevance of an input is
also a function of the mental effort spent on processing it (Sperber and
Wilson, 1995: 124). The amount of effort required depends on a number of
different factors such as “recency of use, frequency of use, perceptual
salience, ease of retrieval from memory, linguistic or logical complexity
and size of the context” (Clark, 2013a: 104; see also Allott (2013: 66) and
references cited therein). The more processing effort is needed by a given
stimulus, the less relevant it is.

2.2.1.2 Principles of Relevance It will have become clear from the preced-
ing section that various sources of information can be more or less relevant
depending on the mental processing effort they require as well as the number of
cognitive effects they achieve. A central claim within RT is that we do not pay
equal attention to these different inputs. Rather, it is claimed that we tend to
allocate cognitive resources only to those inputs that are maximally relevant.
This is referred to as the first (or cognitive) principle of relevance (Wilson and
Sperber, 2004: 610):
(39) Cognitive Principle of Relevance
Human cognition tends to be geared to the maximization of relevance.
This means that both our specialized input systems (which compute external
stimuli) and the central systems (which compute internal stimuli) tend to
devote cognitive resources to inputs that provide as many cognitive effects
as possible for as little processing effort as possible (Sperber and Wilson,
1995: 261). This tendency, it is argued, results from a biological evolution
caused by the systematic pressure towards relevance (Sperber, 1996: 114,
2005: 67; Sperber and Wilson, 2002: 13; Wilson and Sperber, 2004: 110). Of
course, it is important to understand that, in and of themselves, most natural
stimuli do not provide any indication of their potential relevance. As a
consequence, the selection of maximally relevant information is said to
follow from a specific heuristic that involves “local arbitrations, aimed at
incremental gains, between simultaneously available inputs competing for
immediately available resources” (Sperber and Wilson, 1995: 261; cf. also
Sperber, 2005: 63). How exactly such heuristics apply to language will be

22
The strength of an assumption refers to the extent to which an assumption is accepted as true by
an individual (Sperber and Wilson, 1995: 75; see also Wilson, 2022 on the strength of
communicated propositions).
 2.2 Relevance Theory 39

discussed in the next section. According to Sperber and Wilson (1995: 156),
however, some stimuli do provide an indication of their own potential
relevance to an individual: ostensive stimuli. This hypothesis forms the
basis of the second (or communicative) principle of relevance (Wilson and
Sperber, 2004: 612):
(40) Communicative Principle of Relevance
Every ostensive stimulus conveys a presumption of its own optimal relevance.
A stimulus is ostensive whenever it indicates an individual’s intention to
communicate and to be informative (Sperber and Wilson, 1995: 54–64).
Utterances are probably the paradigm case of ostensive stimuli (hence the
focus on language in RT), but other types of stimuli can also be ostensive
(e.g. gesture). In RT, it is argued that ostensive stimuli – such as a speaker’s
utterance – systematically communicate a presumption of their own optimal
relevance, as described in (41) (from Wilson and Sperber, 2004: 612).
(41) Presumption of optimal relevance
a. The ostensive stimulus is relevant enough to be worth the audience’s
processing effort.
b. It is the most relevant one compatible with the communicator’s abilities
and preferences.

From this perspective, ostensive stimuli are systematically expected to provide

an individual with enough cognitive effects to justify the amount of effort
required to process them. The consequences of this presumption are twofold.
First, because of this expectation, an individual systematically processes osten-
sive stimuli in such a way as to optimize their relevance. In addition, it also
follows from this presumption that individuals who intend to communicate a
given assumption need to make sure the ostensive stimulus they use can be
optimally processed by the addressee (Sperber and Wilson, 1995: 157).23 Both
these corollaries have been tested and have received support from experimental
evidence (cf. Sperber, Cara and Girotto, 1995; Girotto et al., 2001; van der Henst,
Carles and Sperber, 2002; van der Henst, Sperber and Politzer, 2002; van der
Henst and Sperber, 2004; van der Henst, 2006; Gibbs and Bryant, 2008). More
generally, it has to be understood that the communicative principle of relevance is
not meant as a specific rule that individuals need to follow (and could therefore
violate) but is introduced in RT as a lawlike generalization about what the human
mind does whenever it is faced with ostensive stimuli (Sperber and Wilson,
1995: 162). In the next section, we will see how this principle applies to linguistic
stimuli and in particular how it is relevant to the field of lexical pragmatics. Note

23
This second consequence has in fact recently led Park and Clark (2022) to aptly argue that there
is a relevance-focused production heuristics.
40 2 Construction Grammar and Relevance Theory

that in order to facilitate the discussion, I will generally refer to the second
(communicative) principle of relevance as the principle of relevance. Given the
focus on language and lexical pragmatics, this is the most relevant of the two
principles for our discussion.

2.2.2 Meaning, the Underdeterminacy Thesis and Comprehension

Heuristics
The notion of relevance has been primarily applied to linguistic communica-
tion. As mentioned above, the use of language is indeed a paradigm case of an
ostensive stimulus (see discussion in Assimakopoulos, 2022) and therefore
raises expectations of optimal relevance. Speakers are thus expected to make
their contribution worth the hearer’s processing effort and, concurrently,
hearers tend to look for an interpretation that provides enough cognitive
effects to justify the amount of effort invested in the process. This observation
has been used in RT in particular to explain the pragmatics of linguistic
communication.24 In RT, the term ostensive-inferential communication is in
fact generally preferred to the term linguistic communication (Sperber and
Wilson, 1995: 50). It is a central assumption in RT that linguistic communi-
cation does not only consist in the ostensive use of linguistic conventions.
Rather, in order for linguistic communication to be effective, and for the
speaker’s meaning to be fully recovered, much inferencing also needs to take
place. Inference is needed, for instance, for the derivation of implicatures, this
latter term having been introduced by Paul Grice (1989: 24). Consider the
following dialogue:
(42) LAURA: Would you like some more chicken?
PETER: I’m full, thanks.

Here, in order to understand Peter’s answer and act in accordance with the
information it conveys, Laura needs to derive the implicature that Peter does
not want any more chicken. Implicatures are textbook examples of what an
individual needs to infer and what requires good pragmatic competence
(Zufferey, Moeschler and Reboul, 2019). It is clear for relevance theorists,
however, that much more than just implicatures actually need to be inferred in
order for communication to be successful. It was noted earlier that linguistic
logical forms often need to be enriched into full-fledged (i.e. fully propos-
itional) assumptions. It is indeed argued in RT that a linguistic input often fails
to provide all of the information that is being explicitly communicated by an

24
In RT, the term pragmatics refers to inferential processes and inferred meanings and the term
semantics usually refers to the encoded meaning of an expression (Wilson, 2011: 9).
 2.2 Relevance Theory 41

individual. This is usually discussed in terms of the underdeterminacy thesis

(Carston, 2002a: 19):
(43) The underdeterminacy thesis
Linguistic meaning underdetermines what is said.
That is, it is assumed in RT that there is a gap between the meaning of the words
that we use (i.e. linguistic meaning) and the content of the proposition that is
explicitly expressed (i.e. what is said in Gricean terms (Grice, 1989: 25)). The
communicated propositions are systematically richer than the meaning of the
linguistic conventions used to convey those propositions. According to this
view, much inferencing is therefore also needed at the explicit level of com-
munication in order to derive a speaker’s intended interpretation. There are
various sources of linguistic underdeterminacy. Carston (2002a: 28) identifies
six such sources. The examples given in (44) to (49), and in particular the
italicized items, illustrate each of these sources.
(44) Multiple encodings (i.e. ambiguities)
a. Give me my bow. (COCA, written)
b. Both of them really get to every ball. (COCA, spoken)
(45) Indexical references
a. She pointed out some consequences of not wearing the correct shoe. (NOW)
b. Some of the wealthiest people in the world live there. (NOW)
(46) Missing constituents
a. I was just wondering if you were good enough. [for what?] (BNC, written)
b. Chelsea are a better bet for trophies. [than whom?] (BNC, written)
(47) Unspecified scope of elements
a. Everyone isn’t perfect. (COCA, written)
b. We need 103 Canberrans to bake a cake. (NOW)
(48) Underspecificity or weakness of encoded conceptual content
a. What it comes down to is trying to give children a better Christmas. (BNC,
spoken)
b. Let’s be more efficient and make the tax payers’ money be used wisely.
(BNC, spoken)
(49) Overspecificity or narrowness of encoded conceptual content
a. It’s so empty I can hear the tick of a wristwatch from three rows away. (NOW)
b. That’s exactly what it was. I feel that I loved a – a teddy bear for 15 years,
and suddenly I’ve met this young man who – who has everything I wanted
my son to have. (COCA, spoken)
Prior to Carston, Grice had already acknowledged the types of underdeter-
minacy identified in (44) and (45), for which disambiguation and reference
assignment are required (Grice, 1989: 25). He does not explain, however, how
42 2 Construction Grammar and Relevance Theory

these processes are carried out (Carston, 2002a: 21). Utterances such as in (46)
are said to be missing a constituent (and therefore underdetermine what is said)
since no truth value can be attributed to them without this constituent.25 In
(46a), for instance, one needs to know exactly what quality or skill is being
referred to in order to be able to evaluate whether ‘you’ is good enough. The
sentences in (47) are typical examples of scopal ambiguities, whereby the
scope of a given linguistic item needs to be contextually worked out in order
to understand the speaker’s intended interpretation. In (47a), for instance, it is
not clear whether the speaker is communicating that not everyone is perfect or
that no one is perfect. In (48) and (49), the different examples used more
directly fall within the field of lexical pragmatics, the focus of this book. In
(48a), the encoded content of the noun children underspecifies what is actually
being communicated since not just any children are being referred to but only
children in need. In (49a), the encoded content of the adjective empty over-
specifies what is explicitly expressed given that the room was not literally
empty, but only sufficiently so that the speaker could hear the ticking of
someone else’s watch. In both cases the content of the word used is either too
specific or not specific enough (with regard to the speaker’s intended interpret-
ation) and needs to be pragmatically adjusted. More examples will be discussed
in the next section.
It is argued in RT that the interpretation of the utterances in (44) to (49)
involves a single inferential process. As mentioned before, the aim of RT is to
explain how this inferential process is constrained on the basis of the principle
of relevance. This approach will be introduced in the rest of this section. First,
however, it is important to note that it is clear from the relevance-theoretic
perspective that inferential processes are not only required for the derivation
of implicatures and implicated content. Rather, pragmatic inference is also
involved at the explicit level of communication, whereby the conceptual
material provided by the linguistic logical form of an utterance also needs to
be pragmatically enriched into a fully propositional assumption (Sperber and
Wilson, 1995: 181; Carston, 1988: 41, 2002a: 107, 2016a: 614). For this reason,
Sperber and Wilson (1995) coined the term explicature (by analogy with the
term implicature) to refer to the pragmatically enriched explicit content of an
utterance (Sperber and Wilson, 1995: 182; see also Carston, 1999, 2004, 2009,
2010).26 It follows from this perspective that RT draws the line between
semantics and pragmatics somewhere at the explicit level of communication
(cf. Carston and Hall, 2012). While an implicature is purely the product of

25
Perry (1993: 206) uses the term unarticulated constituents (see also Bach, 1994a: 269).
26
Similar terms have been used elsewhere in the pragmatics literature (see, for instance,
Recanati’s (1989: 297–302) use of the phrase what is said and Bach’s (1994b: 125) notion of
impliciture).
 2.2 Relevance Theory 43

pragmatic inference, an explicature is a “semantic-pragmatic hybrid” (Carston,

2004: 819) since it is a pragmatic development of a linguistic logical form.
One of the goals of RT is to explain exactly how the inferential derivation
of explicit and implicit content is constrained. It will have become clear
from the previous sections that in RT the principle of relevance is considered
as being the main driving force behind interpretation processes. Ostensive
stimuli come with a presumption of their own optimal relevance. As a
consequence, speakers need to optimize the relevance of their utterances,
and hearers, whether for the recovery of explicatures or implicatures, need
to look for an interpretation that provides them with enough cognitive
effects to justify the amount of effort they put into the interpretation process.
In this sense, inferential processes are constrained by the search for rele-
vance, which is systematically expected given the ostensive nature of utter-
ances. Still, it remains to be spelled out exactly how hearers actually proceed
to recover the speaker’s intended interpretation. The principle of relevance
specifically indicates that the more cognitive effort, the less relevance. As a
result, hearers do not consider all possible interpretations and then choose
the most relevant one. This would require too much processing effort and
therefore be self-defeating (see Sperber, 2005: 64). Rather, it is argued in RT
that the principle of relevance naturally lays the foundations for the follow-
ing comprehension procedure (Sperber and Wilson, 2002: 18; Wilson and
Sperber, 2004: 613):
(50) Relevance-theoretic comprehension procedure
a. Follow a path of least effort in computing cognitive effects. In particular,
test interpretive hypotheses (disambiguations, reference resolutions,
implicatures, etc.) in order of accessibility.
b. Stop when your expectations of relevance are satisfied.
That is, for a given utterance, hearers do not process all possible interpretations
but only focus on those that are most salient and which they test (for optimal
relevance) in order of accessibility. Once an interpretation provides them with
enough cognitive effects to justify the amount of processing effort involved, they
stop searching and consider this interpretation to be the one intended by the
speaker.27 From a relevance-theoretic perspective, this comprehension proced-
ure does not involve complex conscious computations. Rather, it is understood as
an unconscious and intuitive process that involves “fast and frugal heuristics”
(Wilson and Sperber, 2004: 624; see also Gigerenzer et al., 1999). In other

27
As Wilson and Sperber (2004) point out, this naturally requires that “a speaker who wants her
utterance to be as easy as possible to understand should formulate it (within the limits of her
abilities and preferences) so that the first interpretation to satisfy the hearer’s expectation of
relevance is the one she intended to convey” (Wilson and Sperber, 2004: 614).
44 2 Construction Grammar and Relevance Theory

words, it is computationally the simplest procedure possible (cf. Allott, 2002:

80). Consider the following exchange:
(51) PETER: I just thought we could put the sofa in Tom’s car.
RICHARD: It’s too big!

In order to understand Richard’s answer, Peter first needs to recognize the

ostensive nature of Richard’s behavior. The recognition of Richard’s ostensive
behavior creates an expectation of optimal relevance, whereby Peter is to
allocate cognitive resources in such a way as to optimize the relevance of the
logical form provided by Richard’s utterance. Peter therefore derives the
explicature by assigning a referent to the pronoun it (i.e. the sofa) as well as
enriching the adjectival phrase too big (i.e. too big to fit in Tom’s car). This
is the most relevant explicature that Peter can derive, and he stops at this
interpretation, since it enables him to infer the implicatures that they cannot
put the sofa in Tom’s car and that they need to find another solution. These
implicatures are directly relevant to Peter since they contradict (at least) one of
his assumptions and thus modify his cognitive environment. As such, this
interpretation provides Peter with enough cognitive effects to justify the effort
invested in processing Richard’s utterance, and therefore he stops looking for
other interpretations. Note that, from the relevance-theoretic approach, the
derivation of explicatures and implicatures is not treated as sequential. In the
example just discussed, for instance, Peter does not first derive the explicature
The sofa is too big to fit in Tom’s car and then the implicature We cannot put the
sofa in Tom’s car. Rather, the derivation of explicatures and implicatures is
coordinated and both are gradually derived on the basis of contextual assump-
tions in order to optimize relevance. This is referred to by Wilson and Sperber
(2004: 617) as a process of mutual parallel adjustment.
In the next section, I will focus particularly on how this comprehension
heuristics has been applied to lexical meaning and will therefore mostly discuss
the derivation of explicatures. It is first important to understand why exactly this
comprehension procedure is possible in the first place. Following Grice (1989:
213–223), it is argued in RT that inferential communication is primarily possible
because of our ability to attribute particular mental states (such as beliefs, desires
and intentions) to our interlocutors and vice versa (Sperber and Wilson, 1995:
24, 2002: 3; Carston, 1999: 103). This mind-reading ability is usually discussed
in terms of the theory of mind hypothesis (see Carruthers and Smith, 1996;
Goldman, 2012). According to Sperber and Wilson (1995), ostensive-inferential
communication is possible notably because of our capacity to recognize some-
one’s communicative and informative intentions (Sperber and Wilson, 1995:
50–64). From this recognition follows a presumption of relevance that system-
atically constrains the inferential processes that are required to derive a speaker’s
communicated content and to build mental representations about an individual’s
 2.2 Relevance Theory 45

thoughts and desires as well as specific attitudes.28 The relationship between

mind-reading abilities on the one hand (and in particular intention recognition)
and pragmatic abilities on the other has been widely discussed in the pragmatics
literature (cf. Haugh, 2008; Haugh and Jaszczolt, 2012). Unlike other pragmatic
theories, however, RT has more systematically integrated theory of mind into its
framework, which naturally leads to the development of new ideas within the
theory. One such development concerns the type of information that hearers
actually recover when interpreting a given utterance. On the basis of their mind-
reading abilities, it is argued in RT that hearers do not only recover a speaker’s
communicated assumptions (be they explicatures or implicatures), but also
recover a speaker’s commitment and attitude towards those. That is, hearers
also recover speakers’ meta-representations of their communicated assumptions
(Wilson, 2000). One particular kind of meta-representation that hearers are said
to recover is called a higher-level explicature (Wilson and Sperber, 1993: 4;
Sperber, 2000b: 6; Ifantidou, 2001: 80; Carston, 2004: 825). Consider the
following example (from Wilson and Sperber, 1993: 4):
(52) a. PETER: Can you help?
MARY (SADLY): I can’t.
b. Mary says she can’t help Peter to find a job.
c. Mary believes she can’t help Peter to find a job.
d. Mary regrets that she can’t help Peter to find a job.
In order to understand Mary’s answer in (52a), Peter will derive the explicature
Mary cannot help me to find a job on the basis of his expectation of optimal
relevance. In addition, it is argued in RT that Peter will also embed this
explicature within a higher-level representation (i.e. a meta-representation)
such as in (52b) to (52d). This higher-level explicature includes either the
representation of a particular speech act (as in (52b)) or the representation of
a propositional attitude (as in (52c) and (52d)) (cf. Carston, 2004: 825). Exactly
which of these higher-level explicatures are derived by Peter naturally depends
on the context and therefore on which assumptions are manifest to him when
interpreting Mary’s utterance. Note that from the relevance-theoretic stand-
point, however, “hearers always infer at least one higher level of embedding for

28
In cognitive psychology, it is argued that our mind is equipped with a specific “theory-of-mind
module” that enables mind-reading inferential processes (see Leslie, 1992, 1994; Baron-Cohen,
1994, 1995; Scholl and Leslie, 1999, inter alia). Within RT, Sperber and Wilson argue that
pragmatics (and in particular the search for optimally relevant interpretations) is a specific type
of mind-reading ability and even suggest that it constitutes a specialized submodule: the
comprehension (or Relevance) module (Sperber, 2000a: 129; Wilson, 2000: 42; Sperber and
Wilson, 2002: 5). Whether or not this is actually the case will not be discussed here. However, it
is worth noting that according to Zufferey (2010), the relevance-theoretic approach “seems to
offer the best model to account for the role of theory of mind in verbal communication”
(Zufferey, 2010: 25; see also Zufferey, 2015: 91).
46 2 Construction Grammar and Relevance Theory

any proposition we express” (Clark, 2013a: 209). The systematic derivation of

higher-level explicatures therefore makes them an integral part of the interpret-
ation of an utterance. Carston (2004: 825) in fact argues that sometimes the
relevance of an utterance is to be found precisely in higher-level explicatures.29
Note that the notion of higher-level explicatures is directly relevant to our
discussion because of the particular way in which they can be derived. In the
example in (52) above, their derivation seems to be entirely pragmatic. Yet it
has been suggested in RT that, in precisely the same way as some words
provide rich clues about the speaker’s intended interpretations, there must be
linguistic items whose sole function is to help the hearer recover higher-level
explicatures (cf. Wilson and Sperber, 2012: 166). This will be discussed more
fully in Section 2.2.3.2. For now, it is worth noting from the relevance-theoretic
perspective that questions of semantics and pragmatics pervade linguistic
communication. For this reason, RT prefers to talk about ostensive-inferential
communication.
In this section, the focus was placed on the pragmatics of linguistic
communication. Any good theory of pragmatics, however, necessarily
rests upon a particular theory of semantics, and vice versa. Exactly what
approach to semantics is adopted in RT will be addressed in the next
section. This will enable us to identify explicitly the similarities and
differences between RT and CxG and how compatible they are in terms
of theoretical description. Before doing so, I wish to make a small obser-
vation. It was shown previously that CxG mostly focuses on the semantic
(i.e. conventional) side of linguistic communication without much consid-
eration for (non-conventional) pragmatics. As we have seen in this section,
however, much of what is actually communicated by an individual is
inferred in context and not provided by the linguistic items that they use.
From this perspective, CxG alone can therefore not explain exactly how
linguistic communication succeeds. This is the reason why CxG needs to
be combined with a theory of pragmatics such as RT to be fully explana-
tory. At the same time, integrating RT and CxG can prove to be a real
challenge for the following reason: the relevance-theoretic approach to
pragmatics is actually based on a view of semantics that radically differs
from that adopted in CxG.

29
As Reboul (2001) rightly points out, this notion “also enables [relevance theorists] to propose a
solution to Moore’s paradox” (Reboul, 2001: 46; emphasis mine), which has to do with the
absurd nature of sentences like “I called you and I don’t believe I did.” In RT, when a speaker
asserts a proposition P, her interlocutor usually derives the higher-level implicature that she
believes P to be true.
 2.2 Relevance Theory 47

2.2.3 Semantics in Relevance Theory

RT is particularly well known as a theory of pragmatics that tackles issues
related to non-conventional aspects of linguistic communication. Yet RT also
offers a specific understanding of the nature of linguistically encoded content,
i.e. of semantics.
As mentioned in Section 2.1.2.2, in a purely terminological sense, Relevance
Theory and Construction Grammar share a similar view since both frameworks
discuss the notion of semantics in terms of concepts. It is argued in RT that the
(optimally relevant) assumption communicated by a speaker forms “a struc-
tured set of concepts” (Sperber and Wilson, 1995: 85). From a theoretical
standpoint, however, the perspectives developed in RT and CxG are fundamen-
tally different since they are based on two opposite understandings of the nature
of concepts. Indeed, relevance theorists follow Jerry Fodor’s hypothesis (Fodor
et al., 1980; Fodor, 1998), which postulates that concepts are atomic (Sperber
and Wilson, 1995: 91, 1998: 187; Carston, 2002a: 321). This specific approach
is categorically rejected in the constructionist approach. In addition, concepts
in RT are only discussed in relation to lexical items: “the ‘meaning’ of a word is
provided by the associated concept” (Sperber and Wilson, 1995: 90). Unlike in
CxG, however, comparatively little attention is paid to the semantics of larger
linguistic patterns (see below).
The RT-specific approach to ‘concepts’ is explained in the next section. In
particular, I will try to show how RT’s commitment to atomism has heavily
influenced its analysis of lexical pragmatics, which results in theoretical
(in)compatibility with CxG. However, it is worth first mentioning that RT
discusses the notion of semantics not only in terms of concepts but also in
terms of procedures. On the basis of the work of Blakemore (1987, 2002), more
recent developments of RT consist in arguing that the encoded content of some
linguistic expressions might best be described in terms of procedural meaning.
What the term procedural meaning exactly captures (and why it is relevant to
our discussion) will be explained in Section 2.2.3.2.

2.2.3.1 Concepts and Ad Hoc Concepts In their seminal book Relevance,

Sperber and Wilson (1995) discuss the encoded content of linguistic items
in terms of their associated concepts (Sperber and Wilson, 1995: 90). In
particular, following Fodor, Sperber and Wilson adopt an atomic, non-
decompositional approach: “the meaning of a word such as ‘yellow’, ‘giraffe’
or ‘salt’ is an irreducible concept” (p. 91; emphasis mine). RT’s commitment to
conceptual atomism becomes explicitly clear in Carston (2002a):
I follow Jerry Fodor in assuming that concepts encoded by (monomorphemic) lexical
items are atomic and so not decompositional; they don’t have definitions (sets of
necessary and sufficient component features) and they are not structured around
48 2 Construction Grammar and Relevance Theory

prototypes or bundles of stereotypical features (for the arguments, see Fodor et al., 1980;
Fodor, 1998; Laurence and Margolis, 1999). (p. 321)
It will have become clear that this approach to concepts is in direct opposition
to that adopted in CxG, in which concepts are precisely understood in terms of
encyclopedic knowledge organized in a network of related bundles around a
prototype (see Section 2.1.2.2). The aim of this section is to spell out explicitly
what the atomic account adopted in RT consists of. In addition, I will introduce
the relevance-theoretic approach to lexical pragmatics and show how this
perspective is directly influenced by the atomic approach to lexical semantics
(and as a result cannot be easily integrated into a framework such as CxG). It is
important to note here that the notion of concept represents a real issue in RT
and that, within the theory itself, there are at least “three different possible
views of what constitutes the content of concepts” (Groefsema, 2007: 139). In
this section, I will introduce what I consider to be the more traditional approach
to concepts in RT, as well as some of the issues that it raises for the semantics–
pragmatics interface. A more comprehensive analysis of the relevance-
theoretic perspective on concepts is given in the next chapter.
From a Fodorian point of view, the information provided by an atomic
concept does not consist of a set of specific features, and even less so of a
particular definition. Rather, conceptual information is said to consist of a
nomological mind–world relation, i.e. a lawlike mind–world dependency
(Fodor, 1998: 12).30 The information provided by the concept CAT, for instance,
consists of a necessary relationship between that concept and a specific instan-
tiation of a cat in the real world. From this perspective, the argument goes, it is
impossible to define what the word cat actually means: cat simply means CAT
(p. 67). This lays the foundations for Fodor’s (1998: 55) disquotational lexicon
hypothesis, which RT largely adopts. In order to discuss a given lexical
concept, relevance theorists disquote the word and put it in capitals: love
means LOVE, happy means HAPPY, etc. This formalization serves to highlight
the hypothesis that words and concepts belong to two different types of lexicon
(see Sperber and Wilson, 1998). When the linguistic item directly contributes
to a particular sentence (public lexicon), the conceptual counterpart systemat-
ically feeds the language of thought (mental lexicon). This is one of the two
functions of lexical concepts: they directly appear in the linguistic logical forms
that form the basis of the thoughts that we communicate (Sperber and Wilson,
1995: 86).
In addition, atomic concepts also perform another function which appears to
be essential within RT. In addition to contributing to the language of thought,
atomic concepts also serve as an address (i.e. a point of access) to a variety of
30
More simply, Carston (2010) says that the content of an atomic concept consists in “its
denotation – what it refers to in the world” (Carston, 2010: 265).
 2.2 Relevance Theory 49

information stored in memory. Specifically, there are three types of information

that a concept gives access to: lexical, logical and encyclopedic (Sperber and
Wilson, 1995: 86). The lexical entry of a given concept provides details about
the linguistic item used to express that concept. This ranges from the phono-
logical and morphosyntactic properties as well as co-occurrence possibilities.
The logical entry of a concept provides information about the logical implica-
tions of that concept and consists of “a set of deductive rules which apply to
logical forms of which that concept is a constituent” (Sperber and Wilson,
1995: 86). That is, for instance, the logical entry of the concept CAT includes
inference rules such as {CAT → ANIMAL} and {CAT → MAMMAL} which enable an
individual to compute the logical form in which the concept occurs and to
derive new assumptions. From this perspective, the logical entry does not
provide representational information about the concept but only computational
information about how to use that concept (p. 89). In opposition, the encyclo-
pedic entry precisely consists of representational information. The encyclope-
dic entry includes all of the real-world knowledge and assumptions that an
individual stores in association with a specific concept and which provides a
rich contextual background for the derivation of new assumptions. In the case
of the concept CAT, this includes assumptions such as:
General knowledge about the appearance and behaviour of cats, including, perhaps,
visual images of cats, and, for some people, scientific knowledge about cats, such as
their anatomy, their genetic make-up, or their relation to other feline species, etc., and,
for most people, personal experiences of, and attitudes towards, particular cats.
(Carston, 2002a: 321)
Sperber and Wilson (1995: 88) observe that “such notions as schema, frame,
prototype or script” are often used to discuss encyclopedic knowledge and in
particular how the encyclopedic entry is internally structured and organized.
Sperber and Wilson commit to none of those views, however (Sperber and
Wilson, 1995: 88). In fact, unlike the different theoretical models that introduce
these notions, RT is generally not inclined to explain how encyclopedic infor-
mation is structured. To be precise, the encyclopedic entry is actually viewed as
a “‘grab bag’ of encyclopaedic information” (Hall, 2017: 94). The only type of
structure which is discussed is “in terms of the degree of accessibility of the
items of information it contains, which implies that the internal structure of this
entry is in constant flux” (Wałaszewska, 2011: 316; see also Carston, 2002a:
321). In comparison to the different networks discussed in Section 2.1.2.2, RT’s
notion of encyclopedic knowledge is therefore relatively structureless. This can
be easily explained due to the status attributed to encyclopedic information
in RT.
From the relevance-theoretic standpoint, the types of information stored in
the logical and encyclopedic entries of a given concept only serve to compute
50 2 Construction Grammar and Relevance Theory

the logical form in which that concept occurs. It is often argued, however, that
they do not directly contribute to the semantics of the lexical item that is
associated with that concept. Here, RT and CxG therefore provide opposite
analyses. While in CxG encyclopedic knowledge is considered a central
element of conceptual content, and is particularly structured, in RT it is only
perceived as “contextual information” (Ribeiro, 2013: 104; see also Sperber
and Wilson, 1995: 89; Carston, 1997b: 119). Note that it is not always clear,
though, what the status of logical and encyclopedic information actually is in
RT. Groefsema (2007: 139) convincingly shows how the relevance-theoretic
perspective on concepts developed in Sperber and Wilson (1995) leaves room
for various interpretations, some of which would actually consist in viewing
encyclopedic and/or logical information as being content-constitutive. This
will be discussed at length in the next chapter. Nevertheless, there is a general
tendency to consider that the logical and encyclopedic information that a
concept gives access to does not constitute its content:
Neither the encyclopaedic nor the logical information associated with a concept can be
thought of as constitutive of the concept or as being its content. (Reboul, 2008:
522–523)
[Logical and encyclopaedic] properties are clearly not internal components of the
lexical concepts themselves. (Carston, 2010: 249)
None of the information – logical or encyclopaedic – is constitutive of the concept.
(Hall, 2011: 4)
The fact that the logical and encyclopedic entries are not content-constitutive
is often supported, in addition to Fodor’s own arguments (see Fodor et al., 1980;
Fodor, 1998), by a number of observations within RT. First of all, some concepts
may not have both of these entries. Sperber and Wilson (1995: 92) argue, for
instance, that the concept to which the lexical item and is associated “may lack an
encyclopaedic entry,” i.e. it is not itself associated with real-world knowledge.
Similarly, it is argued that concepts associated with proper names may not trigger
inferential rules and therefore lack a logical entry (p. 92). In addition, relevance
theorists appear to share the assumption that only a limited set of inferential rules
can occur in the logical entry of a concept. (They never discuss more than one or
two inference rules for each concept they look at.) Why this should be the case is
not necessarily clear, but this motivates relevance theorists to assume that the
logical entry “generally [falls] short of anything definitional” (Carston, 2002a:
321). This is further supported by the observation that different concepts may share
similar inferential rules, which therefore cannot be used to distinguish between
them. The concepts CAT and DOG, for instance, both contain the inferential rule
{ANIMAL OF A CERTAIN KIND} (p. 322). Ultimately, it is argued that – unlike logical
information – encyclopedic knowledge varies a lot across individuals and time
 2.2 Relevance Theory 51

(Sperber and Wilson, 1995: 88) and is therefore too unstable to possibly be
content-constitutive.
In spite of not being content-constitutive, the information stored in the
logical and encyclopedic entries is argued to play a significant role during the
interpretation process of an utterance. As will become clear in the rest of this
section, they are key elements in the relevance-theoretic account of lexical
pragmatics.
A central assumption in RT is that the words we use underdetermine the
actual content of the thoughts that we communicate. In Section 2.2.2, this was
referred to as the underdeterminacy thesis. In the sentence in (48a), repeated
here in (53), the word children, for instance is used to express not the concept
CHILDREN with which it is originally associated but the unlexicalized (atomic)
concept CHILDREN-IN-NEED.
(53) What it comes down to is trying to give children a better Christmas.

It is argued in RT that, as the example in (53) illustrates, most of the concepts

that we actually communicate are not lexicalized, i.e. they lack a lexical entry
(Sperber and Wilson, 1998: 189). In order to convey these concepts, speakers
therefore use the lexical entry of the most resembling concept, on the basis
of which hearers recover the communicated concept in accordance with their
expectations of relevance and following the comprehension procedure
discussed in Section 2.2.2. Consider the sentences in (54) and (55). These
examples nicely show that, in different contexts, the same lexical item (here
man) may be used to express a variety of different concepts and not necessarily
the one to which it is originally associated.
(54) A: I need a man to love me. (COCA, spoken)
B: Your dad loves you.
A: Dad, come on, you know what I mean.
(55) A: I need a man to love me. (COCA, spoken)
B: Tom loves you.
A: I said a man.

In neither of the examples does the speaker use the lexical item man to
refer to the atomic concept MAN, say ‘a male human being’. In (54),
assuming that the speaker is a heterosexual woman, she probably means
to communicate a concept such as ‘heterosexual bachelor ready to commit
to a long-lasting relationship’. In (55), she could intend the concept ‘het-
erosexual bachelor with prototypically masculine features’. These two con-
cepts are not lexicalized in English. In order to communicate these
concepts, the speaker therefore uses the lexical entry of another, similar
(enough) concept on the basis of which the hearer should be able to infer
the intended ones in accordance with their expectations of relevance and,
52 2 Construction Grammar and Relevance Theory

therefore, by following the relevance comprehension procedure. How

exactly the intended concepts are recovered by the hearer is a major
concern to relevance theorists. Naturally, as will have become clear, it is
argued in RT that the recovery of these unlexicalized concepts is largely
constrained by the search for optimal relevance which is triggered by the
ostensive nature of the speaker’s utterance. Precisely how the content of
these concepts is actually established still calls for specification, however.
Relevance theorists propose a specific account to explain the underlying
mechanisms of lexical pragmatics, i.e. the meaning-construction process of
lexical items.
The relevance-theoretic account of lexical pragmatics is generally based
on the work of Lawrence Barsalou and his notion of ad hoc categories
(Barsalou, 1983, 1987, 1993). According to Barsalou, conceptual categories
(i.e. concepts) are never just retrieved from memory. Rather, we systematically
construct ad hoc categories, i.e. occasion-specific categorizations (or conceptu-
alizations), that are tailored to the specifics of each situation in which they
occur.31 (See references cited in footnote 31 for empirical and experimental
evidence.) Following Barsalou, RT argues that utterance comprehension system-
atically requires the creation of ad hoc concepts. From this perspective, in spite
of their being associated with a specific atomic concept, it is argued in RT that
“all words behave as if they encoded pro-concepts: that is . . . the concept it is
used to convey in a given utterance has to be contextually worked out” (Sperber
and Wilson, 1998: 185). The interpretation of the sentences in (53) to (55), for
instance, does not consist first in testing (for relevance) the concepts CHILDREN
and MAN associated with the lexical items children and man and then in deriving
the intended concept. Rather, their interpretation directly requires the contextual
construction of the ad hoc concepts CHILDREN* in (53), MAN* in (54) and MAN**

31
Already, it is important to note that this theoretical choice is unfortunate since it is inconsistent
with the atomic approach to concepts adopted in RT. Barsalou et al. (1993: 57) note that:
[Barsalou] has been fairly schizophrenic in his definition of concept. Barsalou (1987, 1989,
1993) argues that concepts are temporary representations in working memory; Barsalou (1992a)
and this chapter argue that concepts are bodies of knowledge in long-term memory; Barsalou
(1992b) argues that concepts determine categorization. From this paper on, the following
terminology will be followed: Concepts are the underlying knowledge in long-term memory
from which temporary conceptualizations in working memory are constructed.
This quote shows that it is quite a challenge to pin down exactly what Barsalou considers to be a
concept. I will come back to his view in the next chapter. For now, suffice it to say that his view
of concepts is indisputably not atomic and neither is his view of ad hoc categorization (cf.
Barsalou, 2000: 247, 2012: 239, 2016: 11; Yeh and Barsalou, 2006: 352; inter alia). Therefore,
although relevance theorists generally discuss lexical semantics (i.e. concepts) in atomic terms,
their approach to lexical pragmatics is based on a non-atomic approach. As I will try to show in
the rest of this section and in particular in the next chapter, this naturally leaves a number of
questions unanswered and results in many inconsistencies within RT.
 2.2 Relevance Theory 53

in (55).32 As I will show in the next chapter, this view naturally raises a number
of fundamental questions. For instance, it is no longer clear what the role of the
lexically encoded concept actually is. As Recanati (2004: 97) points out, lexical
concepts therefore seem to be “communicationally irrelevant.” This is rather
inconsistent with the general claim that human cognition is geared towards
relevance. In addition, the challenge is to know exactly what the nature of
these ad hoc concepts is and how they are derived. These questions are at the
origin of much debate within RT (see Chapter 3). Concerning the nature of ad
hoc concepts, the traditional approach in RT considers that, like lexical concepts,
they are atomic (e.g. Carston, 2010: 250). As for the way they are derived, the
rest of this section will describe the underlying assumption developed in RT.
In RT, the derivation of ad hoc concepts is argued to result from a single
inferential process often called ‘free’ pragmatic enrichment (Carston, 2004:
830, 2010: 218). This pragmatic process is free in the sense that it is not directly
required by the linguistic item which is used to express that concept.
Nevertheless, it will have become clear that “free” pragmatic enrichment
remains constrained (or guided) by the search for optimal relevance in order
to develop the logical form into a full-fledged explicature. In RT, this process of
pragmatic enrichment is said to result in three possible outcomes: a narrower
concept, a broader concept, or both a narrower and broader concept (Carston,
1997b: 121, 2002a: 334; Wilson and Carston, 2006: 409, 2007: 231; Sperber
and Wilson, 2008: 92).
There is conceptual narrowing whenever the sense (or denotation) of the ad
hoc concept is more specific than that of the lexical concept from which it is
derived (Wilson and Carston, 2007: 232). The interpretations of children and
man above involve such conceptual narrowing. Consider also the following
examples:
(56) a. I have a temperature. (Sperber and Wilson, 2008: 91)
b. Either you become a human being or you leave the group. (Wilson and
Carston, 2007: 240)
c. I’m not drinking tonight. (Wilson and Carston, 2007: 232)
In (56a), the noun temperature is not used to communicate the context-free
concept TEMPERATURE (i.e. ‘some degree of heat’) which it originally encodes.
That someone has a particular temperature is a simple truism that achieves no
relevance to an individual since it provides them with no cognitive effects.
Rather, what is communicated in (56a) is the more specific, narrower ad hoc
concept TEMPERATURE*, ‘abnormally high temperature’, which is argued to be

32
It is conventional in the relevance-theoretic literature to use the * symbol to differentiate ad hoc
concepts (e.g. CHILDREN*) from context-independent lexical concepts (e.g. CHILDREN). When
different (but related) ad hoc concepts are being referred to, such as in (54) and (55), a number of
stars may be added to distinguish between them (e.g. MAN*, MAN**, MAN***, etc.).
54 2 Construction Grammar and Relevance Theory

inferentially derived following the comprehension procedure. A similar truism

can be found in (56b). It can but only be mutually manifest to the interlocutors
that the hearer (already) is a human being, and the latter must therefore infer a
more specific ad hoc concept HUMAN-BEING*, e.g. a ‘well-mannered person’. A
similar narrowing process is also said to occur when interpreting (56c).
Depending on the context, the speaker can be taken to communicate either
that they will not be drinking any alcoholic drinks at all (DRINK*), or that they
will not drink themself drunk (DRINK**). Both these interpretations are more
specific than the encoded concept DRINK (i.e. ‘absorption of liquids’) and have
to be inferentially derived by the hearer.
The derivation of ad hoc concepts, as mentioned above, may also provide an
interpretation which is broader than that of the lexical concept from which it is
derived. In this case, it is argued that the sense (or denotation) of the ad hoc
concept is more general than that of the lexical concept (Wilson and Carston,
2007: 234). Consider the following sentences:
(57) a. Holland is flat. (Sperber and Wilson, 2008: 91)
b. This policy will bankrupt the farmers. (Wilson and Carston, 2007: 234)
c. This steak is raw. (Carston, 2002a: 328)
In (57a), the adjective flat is not used to convey the concept FLAT, i.e. that
Holland is literally even. Rather, the word is loosely used to communicate the
broader ad hoc concept FLAT* whereby Holland is simply understood as not
being mountainous. In (57b), the verb bankrupt can be understood literally. But
there might also be some contexts in which it is loosely used to communicate
that farmers will in fact lose a great amount of money (but yet not go bankrupt).
This interpretation therefore requires the derivation of the broader ad hoc
concept BANKRUPT*. Finally, the sentence in (57c) may be used literally to
communicate that the steak is not cooked at all. It can also be used more
loosely, however. For instance, you might use (57c) when you are not pleased
with the cooking of your steak in a restaurant, in which case interpreting raw
requires the derivation of the less specific ad hoc concept RAW*, i.e. not cooked
enough.
Finally, ad hoc concepts can also be both narrower and broader than the
encoded lexical concept from which they are derived. In this case, the sense of
the ad hoc concept merely overlaps with that of the lexical concept (Carston,
1997b: 114).
(58) a. Robert is a computer. (Wilson, 2009: 44)
b. Caroline is a princess. (Wilson and Carston, 2006: 406)
c. Sally is an angel. (Wilson, 2009: 44)
In (58a), computer is used to communicate the ad hoc concept COMPUTER*. This
concept is narrower in the sense that it only refers to the quality of fast
 2.2 Relevance Theory 55

computation, and broader in that the category is extended to include individuals

other than physical objects. Interpreting (58b) requires the derivation of the ad
hoc concept PRINCESS* which is also both narrower and broader than the lexical
concept PRINCESS. It is broader since it is extended to non-royal individuals and
narrower since it only selects (for instance) the particularly good physical
properties often attributed to princesses. Similarly, the interpretation of angel
in (58c) is argued to be both narrower and broader than the lexical concept
ANGEL. It is narrower since it only includes good angels, and broader given that
it extends beyond celestial creatures.33
It will have become clear that all of these cases of conceptual narrowing and/
or broadening are said to be derived following the relevance comprehension
procedure discussed in Section 2.2.2. The challenge here is to understand
exactly what constitutes the content of ad hoc concepts. It was mentioned
earlier that, like lexical concepts, ad hoc concepts are also considered to be
atomic. If such is the case, it is very unclear in what way ad hoc concepts can be
narrower/broader than lexical concepts. The notions of narrowing and broad-
ening necessarily require some internal structure that can be exploited in
different ways (cf. Assimakopoulos (2012: 23), and references cited therein).
By virtue of being atomic, however, concepts in RT do not provide such
structure. The reason why the terms narrower and broader are used follows
from the way the content of these concepts is said to be determined. Ad hoc
concepts are derived not solely on the basis of the atomic (lexical) concept
itself, but primarily on the basis of the information stored in the logical and
encyclopedic entries that the concept gives access to. Carston (1997b) expli-
citly says that, in order to derive ad hoc concepts
the hearer decodes the lexically encoded concept, thereby gaining access to certain
logical and encyclopedic properties; he treats the utterance as a rough guide to what the
speaker intends to communicate, and, in effect, sorts through the available properties,
rejecting those that are not relevant in the particular context and accepting those that are,
as reflections of the speaker’s view. (p. 107)

33
As the sentences in (58) illustrate, ad hoc concepts that are both narrower and broader than the
lexical concepts often include examples of metaphorical use. Within RT, the interpretation of
(lexical) metaphors is argued to follow from exactly the same process of conceptual develop-
ment as cases of loose and hyperbolic use. The only difference concerns the extent to which the
denotation of the ad hoc concept actually overlaps with that of the lexical concept from which it
originates. For this reason, the notion of a “literal–loose–metaphorical continuum” has been
introduced within RT (Sperber and Wilson, 2008: 93, see also Wilson and Carston, 2007). In
comparison, cognitive linguists (and, therefore, construction grammarians) usually give a
different treatment to metaphors (cf. Grady (2007) for a detailed overview). I will not address
this issue here. For some work on the compatibility between the relevance-theoretic approach to
metaphors and that elaborated in cognitive linguistics, see Tendahl and Gibbs (2008), Tendahl
(2009), Wilson (2009, 2022), Stöver (2010) and Gibbs and Tendahl (2011).
56 2 Construction Grammar and Relevance Theory

That is, the content of ad hoc concepts is argued to be determined on the basis of
the information stored in the encyclopedic and/or logical entries of the context-
free lexical concept (Carston, 2002a: 347). From this perspective, it is easier to
understand how ad hoc concepts can be narrower/broader than the lexical con-
cepts from which they are inferentially derived. It is the set of information stored
in the logical and encyclopedic entries that is narrower/broader (p. 347). As will
become clear in the next chapter, this approach to the construction of (lexical)
meaning provides a solid basis for the understanding of lexical semantics and
pragmatics that I will explore in more detail and put in relation to the (not so
different) constructionist perspective. Nevertheless, as far as meaning is con-
cerned, there still seems to be a contradiction within RT (cf. Mioduszewska,
2015). On the one hand, it is argued that both lexical and ad hoc concepts are
atomic and that it is this atom that constitutes the content of the lexical item used.
At the same time, the difference between lexical concepts and ad hoc concepts is
located at the level of the logical/encyclopedic entries, in particular in terms of
how the information stored in those entries actually overlaps. In a sense, this
suggests that the information stored in the logical/encyclopedic entries is there-
fore content-constitutive, unlike what is often argued in RT. Given this dichot-
omy, there can be only one of two outcomes. One possibility is to keep arguing
that the content of lexical items (i.e. lexical semantics) must be the atomic concept
itself. In this case, the challenge is to know exactly what the nature of ad hoc
concepts actually is. This is explicitly what Carston (2010) points out:
The questions in the domain of relevance-theoretic lexical pragmatics that strike me as
most interesting and most in need of some long hard thought concern the nature of ad
hoc concepts. Are ad hoc concepts the same kind of entity as lexical concepts (apart
from not being lexicalised)? Are they atomic or decompositional (perhaps even defin-
itional)? . . . This is a research programme with most of the work yet to be done and I do
not have much to offer here but a few hunches, hopes, and intuitions. (p. 249)
Although Carston (2010: 250) argues that these questions still “remain to be
answered,” however, she considers that there is no reason to think that ad hoc
concepts are not atomic. Alternatively, it has been suggested that ad hoc
concepts, unlike lexical concepts, are not atomic but decompositional/
definitional (e.g. Vicente and Martínez Manrique, 2010; Allott and Textor,
2012). The other possibility consists in abandoning the general atomic com-
mitment to concepts and in considering that both lexical and ad hoc concepts
are decompositional/definitional (e.g. Assimakopoulos, 2012). As might have
become clear from the previous discussion, I will suggest an analysis along
these lines in the next chapter.34 Please note, of course, that the two possibilities

34
It is important to note that the focus of this book is on linguistic meaning and not conceptual
format. I will therefore not argue in favor of or against conceptual atomism. This debate requires
more space than is possible here and has already resulted in a considerable body of research.
 2.2 Relevance Theory 57

just discussed both rest on the initial assumption that lexical items must encode
concepts. In the next chapter, I will show that more recent developments of RT
also consider an alternative possibility whereby (context-free) lexical meaning
might not be conceptual at all (see Section 3.3.2).
It is crucial to understand that this discussion of the nature of lexical
semantics is indispensable. The perspective on concepts adopted in RT has
serious theoretical consequences. I will discuss two of them here.
One of the consequences of the relevance-theoretic approach to concepts/
lexical semantics concerns its understanding of the notions of monosemy and
encoded polysemy. There is a general tendency in RT to assume that lexical
items are monosemous, i.e. that they only encode one concept. The different
analyses of the sentences in (56) to (58) have already pointed in that direction.
It is argued that the interpretation of the items temperature in (56a), drink in
(56c) and angel in (58c), for instance, are all pragmatically inferred from
context following the relevance-theoretic comprehension procedure. From a
constructionist perspective, however, these senses are already encoded by the
lexical items which are used to communicate them.35 Of course, it can be
argued that the analyses of the sentences in (56) to (58) are purely rhetorical and
are only meant to explain the relevance-theoretic approach to lexical pragmat-
ics, and that relevance theorists are well aware that these particular senses
might already be part of the speaker’s knowledge. In fact, relevance theorists
readily recognize that some of the senses they discuss in inferential terms might
be stored by speakers of English (e.g. Wilson, 2003: 277; Wilson and Carston,
2007: 238, Carston, 2016a: 618, 2019: 152, 2021: 122). Strictly speaking,
encoded polysemy is therefore not rejected in RT. Yet, monosemy is still
preferred to polysemy. As I have shown in Leclercq (2023), for instance, the
various relevance-theoretic accounts of modal meaning in English all adopt
(and strongly argue for) a monosemous account (cf. Walton, 1988; Haegeman,
1989; Groefsema, 1992, 1995; Klinge, 1993; Berbeira Gardón, 1996, 1998,
2006; Nicolle, 1996, 1997a, 1998a; Papafragou, 2000; Kisielewska-Krysiuk,
2008). More generally, Carston (2002a) says:
I am uneasy with the assumption that a monosemous analysis is always to be preferred to
a polysemous one, though the “if at all possible, go pragmatic” strategy that it entails is
one that I generally follow myself, as it makes for much more elegant analyses and
because, for the time being, we lack any other strong guiding principle. (p. 219)

Rather, my aim is to argue that, regardless of whether concepts are atomic or not, the encoded
meaning (i.e. semantics) of lexemes must contain the encyclopedic information that a concept
gives access to.
35
It is worth noting that the senses discussed earlier for the item temperature, drink and angel
actually all have an entry in different dictionaries (e.g. Cambridge Dictionary, last accessed
November 29, 2017, https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/temperature).
58 2 Construction Grammar and Relevance Theory

It is not clear why the notion of elegance is used as a (defining) criterion when
conducting a scientific investigation, especially if one is to be descriptively
accurate. (That is, one should be careful not to aim for elegance at any cost.)
Beyond concerns of elegance, the relevance-theoretic appeal to monosemy is
primarily grounded in a number of assumptions on which the theory was
developed.
First, encoded polysemy might be dispreferred simply because it does not fit
well with Fodor’s atomic view of conceptual content and in particular with the
disquotational lexicon hypothesis (cf. Fodor and Lepore, 2002: 116–117; see
also Carston, 2010: 276). Fodor (1998: 53) explicitly argues that “there is no
such thing as polysemy.” Of course, not all relevance theorists share Fodor’s
view. Falkum (2011), for instance, very explicitly argues that “contrary to
Fodor, I believe that there is such a thing as polysemy” (p. 61). Yet the kind
of polysemy that Falkum has in mind is not encoded polysemy but some sort of
pragmatic polysemy: words can be used to communicate different concepts in
different contexts, the actual content of which has to be systematically inferred
(p. 61). In other words, there is still no room given to encoded polysemy.
I believe this is largely due to another theoretical commitment within RT.
Encoded polysemy might be eschewed by relevance theorists simply
because it is at odds, in spite of what could be argued, with the relevance-
theoretic approach to ad hoc concepts. (This will be discussed at more length in
the next chapter.) Even though relevance theorists claim that they are not
particularly interested in encoded polysemy, they do argue that their pragmatic
approach to lexical meaning can explain its origin (see Falkum, 2011: 147,
2015: 96; Carston, 2013: 187, 2016a: 619, 2019: 152, 2021: 123, inter alia).
The repeated derivation of an ad hoc concept will lead to its conventionaliza-
tion alongside the original lexical concept. This is a point of view I share. As
Assimakopoulos (2012: 19) points out, however, the notion of ad hoc concepts
was originally developed within RT as a rejection of the “encoded first”
hypothesis.36 It is argued in RT that the lexically encoded concept is not simply
retrieved from memory and tested first for optimal relevance but that an ad hoc
concept is systematically constructed following the relevance-theoretic com-
prehension procedure. In this case, as mentioned before, the question is to know
what the role of the encoded concept actually is. Intuitively, it seems more
relevant (since relatively effortless) to test this concept first for optimal rele-
vance and then to try and derive an ad hoc concept. In the next chapter, I will
discuss some of the issues that this approach raises and some of the solutions
that have been suggested. The point to be made here is that monosemy might be
36
Assimakopoulos (2012: 19) actually refers to the ‘literal first’ hypothesis, in keeping with the
relevance theoretic tradition. However, this hypothesis does not relate to literal versus non-
literal (e.g. metaphorical) types of meaning but to encoded versus inferred types of meaning.
This is why I prefer to use the term encoded here.
 2.2 Relevance Theory 59

generally preferred within RT because it is hard to see how relevance theorists

could explain the relevance (in the technical sense) of having several encoded
senses when they cannot explain the relevance of having even just one. That is,
in a sense, since the encoded senses are argued not to be tested first, then why
bother storing them in the first place? This kind of thinking seems to be
underlying the latest development in Wilson (2011, 2016) and Carston (2013,
2016b), which I will discuss at length in the next chapter.
This perspective comes in direct opposition to the view adopted in CxG,
according to which polysemy is the norm and monosemy the exception. I tend
to sympathize with the constructionist approach, especially since I doubt that
the ‘if at all possible, go pragmatic’ strategy can achieve descriptive accuracy.
In the next chapter, one of my aims will be to show that there is no necessary
incompatibility between arguing both for polysemy as well as against the
“encoded first” hypothesis. One only needs, as Carston herself points out,
specific guiding principles. I will attempt to provide such principles.
There is another, less direct, consequence of the relevance-theoretic
approach to concepts that also needs mentioning. The main aim of relevance
theorists is not so much to describe linguistic competence as it is to explain the
pragmatics of linguistic communication. Yet in order to provide an accurate
account of linguistic pragmatics, it is essential to know exactly what constitutes
an individual’s linguistic knowledge and how this knowledge actually contrib-
utes to different communicative acts. In RT, considerable attention is given to
lexical concepts, their nature and how they are used in context. Unlike in CxG,
however, comparatively little attention is given to other (larger) elements of the
language. Only a few relevance-theoretic studies mention the possibility for
larger (non-lexical) patterns to be meaningful and to contribute to the under-
standing of an utterance. This includes, for instance, work on sentence types
(e.g. Clark, 1991), prosody (cf. Scott, 2017, 2021, and references cited therein
for a detailed overview) and clefts (e.g. Jucker, 1997). More generally, how-
ever, most of the work conducted from a relevance-theoretic standpoint focuses
strictly on aspects of lexical semantics/pragmatics.37 As a result, it is argued,
for instance, that interpreting the creative use of flick-knife and wrist in (59) and
(60) consists of a purely pragmatic process, whereby the ad hoc concepts FLICK-
KNIFE* and WRIST* are derived in accordance with the principle of relevance.

(59) Handguns are the new flick-knives. (Wilson and Carston, 2007: 236)
(60) She wristed the ball over the net. (Wilson and Carston, 2007: 237)
The interpretation of flick-knives as metonymically referring to a bigger cat-
egory (e.g. favorite weapon of choice) is said to result from “a single pragmatic
37
This is clear from the topics addressed in references in Francisco Yus’ detailed online bibliog-
raphy (http://personal.ua.es/francisco.yus/rt.html).
60 2 Construction Grammar and Relevance Theory

process of lexical adjustment” (Wilson and Carston, 2007: 236). Similarly,

interpreting wristed as a particular caused-motion verb solely depends on one’s
background knowledge “about the various arm movements of competent tennis
players” (p. 237). That is, in order to explain the interpretation of these
lexemes, no linguistic elements other than the lexemes themselves are dis-
cussed. As a consequence, relevance theorists once more have to turn to
pragmatics to explain their interpretation. From the constructionist perspective,
however, this strategy can sometimes be avoided. It is clear in CxG that it is not
only lexemes that are meaningful but also larger (syntactic) units of the
language. The interpretation of the sentences in (59) and (60), for instance,
does not depend only on the lexemes that are used but also on the meaning of
the larger constructions in which they occur: in (59) the X is the new Y
construction and in (60) the CAUSED-MOTION construction. In (59), the meto-
nymic interpretation of flick-knives is required by the slot it occupies in the X is
the new Y construction. Similarly, in (60), the caused-motion interpretation of
wristed is already part of the CAUSED-MOTION construction in which it occurs.
Exactly how the lexeme inherits its meaning from the construction will be
discussed in greater detail in Chapter 4.
Naturally, it must be understood that relevance theorists do not necessarily
reject constructionist ideas. Yet there remains a general tendency not to view
larger patterns of language as meaningful units. (After all, RT generally adopts
a Chomskyan formal approach to language, against which CxG was precisely
developed. See Carston, 2000: 87; Clark, 2013a: 346.) Because of the relative
absence of such insights into linguistic structures, however, relevance theorists
once more have to play the “all pragmatics” strategy, an option which –
although (arguably) theoretically appealing – may not always be descriptively
accurate. For this reason, I believe instead that RT can benefit from the
constructionist insights.
Exactly how the various lexemes inherit their meanings from the construc-
tion in which they occur will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 4, where I
will show that combining insights from RT and CxG is necessary because
neither account on its own can explain the interpretations of (59) and (60).

2.2.3.2 Procedural Meaning It is a central assumption in RT that commu-

nication depends on inference more than it does on language. From this
perspective, language is only “subservient to the inferential process” and in
particular to relevance (Sperber and Wilson, 1995: 176). Language indeed
provides the most cost-efficient way to achieve optimal relevance. In the
previous section, we saw that lexical concepts for instance provide rich clues
for the recovery of the intended interpretation which is inferentially con-
structed. That is, lexical concepts provide a solid basis for where relevance is
to be sought and found. Given this particular approach to linguistic
 2.2 Relevance Theory 61

communication, referred to in RT as ostensive-inferential communication, the

challenge is to know exactly how language contributes to the comprehension
process. It is argued in RT that in addition to specific mental representations (i.e.
concepts), language might also be used to provide information about how to
compute these mental representations and directly constrain the inferential
process involved during the search for optimal relevance. This type of informa-
tion is often referred to as procedural, and was first introduced in RT in the work
of Diane Blakemore (1987, 1990, 2002). As a result, it is argued that lexical
items may have either conceptual or procedural semantics, each contributing
differently to the interpretation of the utterance in which they are used.
What exactly constitutes the nature of procedural expressions is not clear (cf.
Groefsema, 1992; Bezuidenhout, 2004; Curcó, 2011; Wilson, 2011, 2012, inter
alia). This issue will be taken up in Chapter 4. It is generally argued, however,
that unlike lexical concepts, procedural expressions do not map onto mental
representations but are instead used to convey specific instructions for the
processing of conceptual elements. Blakemore (1992: 151) explicitly describes
procedural expressions as items that “encode instructions for processing propos-
itional representations.” The aim of these procedures is to guide the hearer
towards optimal relevance by constraining the inferential process and by limiting
the range of possible inferences. That is, they act as semantic constraints on
inferential processes. In order to illustrate this observation, Blakemore originally
discussed the use of discourse connectives in English in such procedural terms:
(61) Tom can open Ben’s safe. So he knows the combination. (Blakemore,
2002: 79)
(62) Tom can open Ben’s safe. After all, he knows the combination. (Blakemore,
2002: 79)
According to Blakemore, the use of so and after all in (61) and (62), respect-
ively, is only meant to provide the hearer with an instruction about how to
connect the two propositions and guide the hearer towards optimal relevance.
The markers do not contribute to these propositions but only to their computa-
tion: their use directs the hearer towards the particular consequential/causal
relationship intended by the speaker and which they have to infer. Without
these markers, hearers may either fail to recover the speaker’s intended inter-
pretation or simply spend too much effort deriving it (hence making it less
relevant). Hence, procedural expressions are primarily used to facilitate the
optimization of relevance.
Since the work of Blakemore, the conceptual/procedural distinction has been
extended and applied to various expressions within RT (cf. Escandell-Vidal,
Leonetti and Ahern (2011) for a detailed overview). Although this has raised a
62 2 Construction Grammar and Relevance Theory

number of issues within RT (see Carston, 2016b), there are two observations
that need to be mentioned with respect to procedural meaning.
The first observation is that, given that inference occurs both at the explicit
and implicit level of communication in RT (see Section 2.2.2), procedural
meaning can be used to constrain the derivation of both implicatures and
explicatures. In the case of discourse markers, it is often argued that they put
a constraint on the derivation of implicatures. In Grice’s (1989: 25) famous
example He is an Englishman; he is, therefore, brave, the discourse marker
therefore is used to constrain the derivation of the implicated premise
Englishmen are brave. Expressions with procedural meaning can also constrain
the derivation of explicatures and higher-level explicatures, however. At the
level of explicatures, it is argued, for instance, that pronouns and demonstra-
tives provide semantic constraints for the recovery of a specific referent and
therefore have procedural semantics (Wilson and Sperber, 1993; Scott, 2011,
2013, 2016). Procedural meaning can also constrain the derivation of higher-
level explicatures. Clark (1991) argues, for instance, that sentence types (i.e.
imperatives, exclamatives and interrogatives) provide the hearer with an
instruction for how to reconstruct the speaker’s attitude towards the communi-
cated proposition, i.e. to reconstruct how the proposition is mentally repre-
sented by the speaker.
The second observation concerns the actual nature of procedural meaning.
Although it is not necessarily clear what constitutes the semantics of procedural
expressions, a number of criteria are often used to distinguish concepts from
procedures. Carston (2016b: 160–161) lists five properties that define
procedural encoding: (i) introspective inaccessibility, (ii) non-composi-
tionality, (iii) rigidity, (iv) not susceptible to nonliteral use, and (v) not
polysemous. These properties will be discussed in Chapter 4. As we will
see, they may not be completely unerring. However, it is worth mention-
ing that rigidity is often perceived as being the best defining feature of
procedural expressions (cf. Escandell-Vidal and Leonetti, 2011). The
rigidity of procedural meaning has to be understood in comparison with
the relative flexibility of conceptual meaning. Whenever there is an
incompatibility between a lexical concept and a procedural expression,
the semantics of the procedural expression always wins out over the
lexical concepts, which has to be adjusted to fit with the procedural
semantics. Consider the following example:
(63) John is being silly. (Escandell-Vidal and Leonetti, 2011: 93)

The authors argue that, although the stative feature inherent to the concept SILLY
is incompatible with the dynamic nature of progressive aspect in English, it is the
procedural nature of progressive marking (i.e. “procedural information about
how to construct the internal representation of the state of affairs,” p. 92) that
 2.2 Relevance Theory 63

forces a dynamic representation of the situation. This type of description,

whereby the meaning of an expression adjusts to that of another linguistic
item, is described in Construction Grammar in terms of coercion. Interestingly,
it is exactly in those terms that Escandell-Vidal and Leonetti describe the
difference between conceptual and procedural meaning.38 They argue that lex-
ical concepts are coercible but procedural expressions are not: they only have a
coercive force (2011: 86). This observation will prove very useful in Chapter 4
when discussing the notion of coercion. I will show that the notion of coercion as
discussed in CxG might help shed new light on the actual nature of procedural
encoding.

2.2.4 Relevance Theory: Summing Up

Relevance Theory is a cognitive theory of communication. It is based on the
assumption that our mind is equipped with the capacity to treat only those
pieces of information that provide us with enough cognitive effects to justify
the amount of effort involved to process them, i.e. relevant information. This
‘principle of relevance’ in particular makes it possible to explain exactly how
linguistic communication can succeed in spite of the fact that most of the words
we use often fail to determine exactly the thoughts we intend to communicate.
Ostensive acts of communication raise a specific expectation of relevance. As a
result, understanding an utterance simply consists in optimizing the relevance
of its interpretation. This involves a particular comprehension procedure which
leads to the derivation of both explicatures (enriched explicit content) and
implicatures (inferred implicit content). In particular, we have seen that RT
puts forward a specific account of how conceptual content is adjusted in context
and how ad hoc concepts – context-specific concepts – are derived in order to
meet this expectation. This approach to lexical pragmatics will prove particu-
larly useful in the next chapter, for, as mentioned previously, CxG lacks a
detailed account of pragmatics and RT provides one of the most developed
accounts of pragmatics in the literature.
The challenge with Relevance Theory is not to understand how pragmatics
works but to pin down the extent to which it is actually involved in linguistic
communication. Relevance theorists largely adopt a broad Fodorian perspec-
tive on semantics according to which lexical concepts are atomic. Yet this
perspective is not completely compatible with how they account for the deriv-
ation of ad hoc concepts. As a result, the question is left open as to what actually
constitutes the content of both lexical concepts and ad hoc concepts. This

38
In order to explain example (63), Escandell-Vidal and Leonetti (2011) explicitly refer to the
literature on aspectual coercion. It is worth noting that they are, to my knowledge, the only ones
in RT to use the term coercion.
64 2 Construction Grammar and Relevance Theory

ambiguity about the nature of concepts, however, has led relevance theorists to
play the “all pragmatics” strategy. As a result, words are almost systematically
considered to be semantically monosemous, and ad hoc concepts systematic-
ally have to be inferred. But also, the meanings that words are used to convey
are often analyzed independently of the particular constructions in which they
occur. Yet, from the perspective of CxG, a number of aspects that are con-
sidered to belong to pragmatics in RT are often viewed as semantic properties.
In the next chapter, the aim will be to try and combine these two approaches to
conceptual content and show that a combination of them might be more
psychologically real as well as more descriptively accurate.

2.3 Conclusion
Construction Grammar and Relevance Theory are currently two of the most
discussed frameworks in their respective domains. Construction Grammar has
put forward a specific account of linguistic knowledge, and Relevance Theory
presents a detailed perspective on communication more generally. It will have
become clear, however, that the strength of one of these two frameworks often
corresponds to the weakness of the other. Where CxG provides a detailed
account of linguistic forms and semantics, Relevance Theory still seems to
be looking for specific guidelines on what constitutes the content of linguistic
expressions. At the same time, where Relevance Theory proposes a very
thorough understanding of pragmatic inference, Construction Grammar fails
to integrate such principles into its framework. The aim of this book thus
consists in drawing a theoretical bridge between these two frameworks and to
show that the two frameworks nicely complement each other. Integrating the
two frameworks is more easily said than done, however, as they are based on
radically opposite ways of understanding what constitutes not only meaning
but even language more generally. Clark (2013a) explicitly says that Relevance
Theory “is based on a broadly Chomskyan approach to language and on
Fodorian assumptions about modularity” (Clark, 2013a: 95). Construction
Grammar, however, is one of the early functional approaches to grammar that
was developed in opposition to these two traditions. Nevertheless, the aim of
the next chapters is to show that in spite of these differences, Construction
Grammar and Relevance Theory are not de facto incompatible.
Most recently, the need for CxG and RT to interact and be integrated has
become more and more apparent. As mentioned in footnote 33, some recent
work in the field of lexical metaphors aims to combine the two approaches. In a
recent (concluding) chapter, Billy Clark (2017) points out that:
One example which has often occurred to me and which has not been much considered,
if at all, is the possibility of adopting ideas about the pragmatic principles which
 2.3 Conclusion 65

constrain interpretation from one approach and connecting them with ideas about the
nature of semantics and pragmatics from other approaches. . . . It might be possible, for
example, for construction grammarians to adopt only the central relevance-theoretic
principles and consider how they might constrain interpretations within a construction
grammar approach. Once again, it seems that there are significant benefits from bringing
together researchers from different backgrounds. (p. 352)
More recently, Finkbeiner (2019b) edited a special issue that precisely
focused on how ideas from Construction Grammar can be combined with
perspectives from post-/neo-Gricean approaches to pragmatics. So it generally
appears that there is a desire to bring together these two frameworks (see also
Xue and Lin, 2022). The aim of this book, which builds on ideas developed in
previous research (cf. Leclercq, 2019, 2020, 2022, 2023), is precisely to spell
out some of the directions in which this integration can be operated.
3 Redefining Lexical Semantics and Pragmatics

The aim of this chapter is to arrive at a better understanding of lexical semantics

and pragmatics. The main challenge addressed in this book is that of pinning
down exactly what constitutes the content of lexical items and how this content
is exploited in context. While the notion of concept is often used, its complex
nature is at the origin of debate across and within different theoretical frame-
works. Construction Grammar and Relevance Theory, for instance, have been
developed on the basis of opposite understandings of what concepts are and
how they contribute to the interpretation of an utterance. Yet more recent
developments in RT lead me to believe that the two approaches might not be
incompatible. In fact, I intend to show that combining insights from the two
frameworks provides an interesting view of the semantics and pragmatics of
lexical elements.
The perspectives on semantics adopted in CxG and RT have long been
diametrically opposed (e.g. Fodor, 1998; Levine and Bickhard, 1999). On the
one hand, RT rests on the Fodorian assumption that concepts are necessarily
atomic, whereas in CxG it is argued that concepts are encyclopedic in nature.
When combining the two theories, this divergence need not (arguably) be
a challenge, however. One could simply decide to focus on those distinctive
aspects of each theory for which the other crucially lacks an explanation (for
instance, lexical pragmatics in CxG, and constructional semantics in RT). Yet
I am strongly convinced it could be a mistake to do so. Indeed, the more you
look into each of the two frameworks, the more you realize that internal
developments have been greatly influenced by their respective approaches to
semantics, especially in RT. It is therefore essential to address this question of
lexical semantics so as to pave the way for a genuine integration of RT
and CxG.
The notion of concepts adopted in CxG has been relatively unchallenged
within the theory itself, and remains rather stable (see Section 2.1.2.2). In
comparison, the status of concepts in RT is more controversial. As pointed
out, the picture painted in the previous chapter is a simplified version of a much
more complex situation. There is a real debate in the relevance-theoretic
literature as to what exactly constitutes the nature and content of concepts
and, as a natural consequence, that of ad hoc concepts. I will introduce this

66
 3.1 Concepts and Ad Hoc Concepts in RT 67

debate in the first sections of this chapter. Eventually, I will argue that the
perspective on conceptual content adopted in CxG might provide an interesting
alternative to most of the approaches developed within RT. At the same time, it
will be shown that the relevance-theoretic approach to lexical pragmatics can
also shed new light on the actual function of conceptual content, i.e. on the
actual function of lexical semantics, and how this content is exploited in
context.
In this book, the terms (lexical) semantics and pragmatics will be used very
regularly. Although these terms are described in different ways in RT and CxG,
there is a general agreement that semantics has to do with conventional aspects
of meaning whereas pragmatics refers to inferred meanings and inferential
processes. This is how I will use these terms in the rest of this book (see
Leclercq (2020) for an alternative view, however).39

3.1 On the Nature of Concepts and Ad Hoc Concepts in RT

The difficulty in understanding exactly what constitutes conceptual content in
RT dates back (at least) to Sperber and Wilson’s ([1986] 1995) use of the term.
In Relevance, Sperber and Wilson originally treat “concepts as triples of
entries . . . spelling out its logical, lexical and encyclopaedic content”
(Sperber and Wilson, 1995: 92; emphasis mine). From this perspective,
a concept consists of the combination of those three entries, as shown in
Figure 3.1.40
In order to understand the implications of such a view of concepts, I will
apply this model to the concept cat, a representation of which is given in
Figure 3.2. In accordance with the basic approach outlined in Sperber and
Wilson ([1986] 1995), this concept consists of three entries. The lexical entry is
composed of the word that is used to express the concept (cat), its phonological

CONCEPT
Lexical Entry

Logical Entry

Encyclopedic Entry

Figure 3.1 Concepts (adapted from Sperber and Wilson, 1995: 92)

39
Please note that this chapter focuses only on conceptual meaning. The type of meaning which in
RT is identified as procedural (see Section 2.2.3.2) will be discussed in the next chapter.
40
See Section 2.2.3.1 for a detailed description of each entry.
68 3 Redefining Lexical Semantics and Pragmatics

CONCEPT CAT
Lexical Entry
cat /’kæt/ noun ...

Logical Entry
[animal] [mammal] [...]
Encyclopedic Entry
have whiskers / meow /...

Figure 3.2 Concept cat

properties and its morphosyntactic features. In the logical entry a number of

inferential rules are stored that enable the use of that concept (e.g. that cats are
animals, that cats are mammals, etc.). And finally, the encyclopedic entry stores
all of the encyclopedic information (or world knowledge) that directly concerns
cats, along with the information that individuals have gradually acquired.
With such a description, the difficulty remains to identify exactly what
constitutes the semantics of the lexical item that is used to express the concept.
Indeed, Sperber and Wilson argue that “the ‘meaning’ of a word is provided by
the associated concept (or, in the case of an ambiguous word, concepts)”
(Sperber and Wilson, 1995: 90). Yet, in Figure 3.2, it is clear that what
constitutes the concept cat is the sum of the information found in the lexical,
logical and encyclopedic entries. This therefore suggests that the meaning of
the lexical item cat partly consists of the lexical entry itself. It is unlikely that
Sperber and Wilson endorse this view, however. Groefsema (2007: 138) also
argues that this is “an undesirable conclusion.”
Given this scenario, either the notion of concept or of meaning has to be
redefined. According to Groefsema, there are three possible views that emerge
from this observation:
1. The logical and encyclopaedic entries of a concept constitute the content of the
concept.
2. Conceptual addresses are simple, unanalysable concepts whose entries do not
constitute their content.
3. The logical entry of a concept constitutes the content of that concept, while infor-
mation in the encyclopaedic entry does not contribute to the content of the concept.
The role of the encyclopaedic entry is to contribute to the context in which an
utterance encoding the concept is interpreted. (Groefsema, 2007: 139)

In the next sections, I will introduce each of these alternatives, taking into
account their respective advantages and limits. In particular, the aim is to
identify how much each of these views can account for the notions of mono-
semy and polysemy, as well as provide a sound basis for the derivation of ad
 3.1 Concepts and Ad Hoc Concepts in RT 69

hoc concepts. It is important to note that these views do not receive equal
attention in RT. Concerning the first view, for instance, only Groefsema
explicitly argues in favor of it (or, at least, a version of it; see Section 3.1.3).
For that reason, I will introduce the first view only after I have presented View 2
and View 3. Both these views indeed receive support from a number of
relevance theorists. The aim is to try and identify which of these views is
most compatible with the perspective adopted in CxG.

3.1.1 Concepts as Atoms

The first solution to the issue identified above is to consider that concepts
are not, in fact, triples of entries but rather, as represented in Figure 3.3,
consist of a different object (in bold) which itself gives access to the
different entries (View 2). This is the perspective that was presented in the
previous chapter.
According to this view, the meaning of a lexical entry consists of the atomic
concept with which it is associated. The logical and encyclopedic information
that a concept also gives access to only serves during the inferential phase of
comprehension, and is used to derive ad hoc concepts, explicatures and implica-
tures (see Section 2.2.3.1). This broadly Fodorian approach to concepts41 helps to
compensate for the difficulty identified above. In this case, the lexical entry is no
longer a constitutive element of the concept, and the meaning of the lexical entry
can be identified explicitly: it is the atomic concept itself. As mentioned in the
previous chapter, this is the view most largely adopted within RT.
Although this view solves the ambiguity inherent in the description given in
the previous section, it also raises a number of issues itself, a couple of which
were briefly discussed in the previous chapter and will be taken up here. One of

lexical semantics
CONCEPT
atomic

Lexical Entry Logical Entry Encyclopedic Entry

Figure 3.3 Concepts as atoms

41
Fodor argues that concepts are atomic, but does not give any particular status to logical and
encyclopedic information, at least originally (see, for instance, Fodor, 1998). Later he adopted
a similar perspective by explicitly placing encyclopedic knowledge within “mental files”
(Fodor, 2008: 94).
70 3 Redefining Lexical Semantics and Pragmatics

the very first difficulties with this view is to understand exactly what is
considered to constitute the content of an atomic concept. Fodor (1998: 12)
argues that the content of concepts consists of their “causal-cum-nomological”
relations with the world (i.e. a lawlike causal dependency between the concept
and a specific referent in the real world). In Carston’s (2010) words, as
mentioned before,
the content or semantics of this entity is its denotation, what it refers to in the world, and
the lexical form that encodes it, in effect, inherits its denotational semantics. (Carston,
2010: 245)
From this perspective, the content of a concept is not some internal representa-
tion but consists only of the relationship between the concept and the object or
property that it refers to in the mind-external world. A number of objections
have been raised against this type of referential semantics, in particular by
philosophers (e.g. Wittgenstein, 1958; Quine, 1960; Davidson, 1967, 1984;
Chomsky, 2000, 2003; Brandom, 2000; Ludlow, 2003; Sztencel, 2012a, 2012b,
2018, inter alia). The aim of this section is not to look individually at each of
these objections, especially since they have often been presented on the basis of
various theoretical commitments to meaning, truth and reference. Rather, the
aim is to show that such a view of referential semantics does not align with the
more general picture of lexical pragmatics developed in RT (as opposed to what
might be expected to be the case) and as a result challenges the relevance-
theoretic commitment to conceptual atomism.

3.1.1.1 Relevance Theory and Referential Semantics: Compatible? The

content of an atomic concept, according to Fodor, consists in the necessary
(causal-cum-nomological) relationship that the concept has with a particular
object in the mind-external world. One of the questions addressed by Sztencel
(2012a) concerns the origins of this necessity, and in particular why it is that
concepts refer to the things they do. Specifically, she nicely shows that Fodor’s
definition of conceptual content is relatively circular and therefore fails to be
fully explanatory (Sztencel, 2012a). Given the relevance-theoretic commit-
ment to Fodor’s approach, this also becomes an issue for RT. Sztencel’s
(2012a) argument runs as follows: if concepts necessarily have to refer to (or
lock onto, to use Fodor’s terminology) a specific referent in the external world,
then there must be something internal to concepts (and prior to reference) that
forces us to select this specific referent:
The question is: what is it about any particular concept in and of itself that makes it lock
onto the things it does lock onto and not other things? The problem is that if primitive
concepts are to be in a non-arbitrary relation to what they “lock to” then they must have
logically prior internal content independent of, but determinative of, the “locking”
relation just like complex concepts. (Sztencel, 2012a: 491)
 3.1 Concepts and Ad Hoc Concepts in RT 71

For instance, what is it about the concept cat that necessarily makes it refer to
cats? According to Fodor, however, the only element that composes the content
of the concept cat is the referential relation itself. This is why Sztencel argues
that there is circularity in Fodor’s view of conceptual meaning: in this account,
what can explain reference to cats is the referential relation itself.
The reason this question is directly relevant to RT comes from the
particular way in which Fodor tried to handle the issue (although he most
probably did not consider it to be an issue). One of the ways in which
Fodor could have simply objected to the circularity just mentioned is by
arguing that, after all, he considers atomic concepts to be innate (Fodor,
1998: 124). In this case, although the circularity identified above remains, it
cannot be used as an argument against Fodor any more. Concepts refer to
the things they do in virtue of what they are programmed to refer to.
Assuming Fodor is right, “since normal adults command a vocabulary of
at least 60,000 words, it would seem that, at a bare minimum, they possess
60,000 innate concepts” (Laurence and Margolis, 2002: 28; emphasis
mine). It is doubtful that we have (as many as) 60,000 innate concepts
and I agree with Churchland (1986: 389) that it is “difficult to take such an
idea seriously.” Many arguments have been presented in the literature on
concepts against the innateness hypothesis (see, among many others, Locke
[1690] 1975; Berkeley, 1709; Hume, [1739] 1978; Wittgenstein, 1958;
Johnson, 1987; Lakoff, 1988; Putnam, 1988; Elman et al., 1996; Cowie,
1998, 1999; Barsalou, 1999; Levine and Bickhard, 1999; Prinz, 2002;
Tomasello, 2003; Sampson, 2005, and the references cited in
Section 2.1). There is convincing evidence in the above papers, and
I agree with what their authors write. For reasons of space, however,
I will not elaborate on those arguments.
The questionable plausibility of the innateness argument is not the main
issue here. More generally, to view concepts as innate has a direct conse-
quence for the relevance-theoretic perspective on lexical pragmatics. It is
strongly argued in RT that the concepts that are expressed in utterances are
not lexically encoded but need to be pragmatically inferred by the hearer in
order to derive the intended interpretation (see Section 2.2.3.1). If one
considers concepts to be innate, however, it becomes doubtful whether any
(ad hoc) atomic concepts have to be inferred and that such inferential mech-
anisms as described in RT are ever useful. Speakers simply have a number of
concepts at their disposal.
Naturally, it could be argued that many of those innate concepts are non-
lexicalized and still need to be contextually derived (or selected) in accordance
with the principle of relevance. After all, it is often argued in RT that many
(supposedly) ad hoc concepts are not purely the product of pragmatics, in the
72 3 Redefining Lexical Semantics and Pragmatics

sense that they are not entirely new but consist of stored concepts that are
simply not lexicalized:42
The pragmatic process of inferring ad hoc concepts in utterance interpretation . . . may
result in a tokening of one of these stable, albeit non-lexicalised, concepts, already
established in the hearer’s conceptual system. (Carston, 2010: 251)
Neither Fodor nor relevance theorists have adopted exactly this view, how-
ever. On this issue, RT radically departs from Fodor’s account. On the one
hand, Fodor somehow argues against the possibility that there might be unlex-
icalized atomic concepts. According to him, there is a strict one-to-one map-
ping between lexical words and atomic concepts (Fodor, 1998: 55). Discussing
different uses of the verb keep (NP kept the money, NP kept the crowd happy,
etc.), he argues that the differences in meaning come from the verb’s arguments
but not from the verb itself: in all instances, keep expresses the single atomic
concept keep (p. 52). As a result, as mentioned in Section 2.2.3.1, Fodor also
considers that “there is no such thing as polysemy” (1998: 53). In this case,
a theory of ad hoc concepts (and more generally of inference) is not required.
On the other hand, RT takes a much more nuanced approach. First of all, it has
long been argued within RT that there is not a one-to-one mapping between the
public and the mental lexicon (i.e. between words and concepts), but that there
is a one-to-many mapping (Sperber and Wilson, 1998). That is, individuals also
store and use concepts that are not lexicalized. In fact, on the basis of the work
of Barsalou, Sperber and Wilson explicitly argue that “the idea that there is an
exhaustive, one-to-one mapping between concepts and words is quite implaus-
ible” (1998: 185). I also share this view. As a result, even if concepts were
innate, a theory of concept inference/selection such as developed in RT is
required. This is all the more true since relevance theorists seem to assume
that concepts are not innate but are instead acquired or learned. This position is
more or less explicit in the work of Carston (2002a) and Wilson and Sperber
(2012) and becomes very explicit in the work of Wharton (2004, 2014), who
specifically discusses the acquisition of lexical meaning, i.e. conceptual
content.43 It therefore also follows that many of the concepts that are commu-
nicated are considered to “be quite new” (Carston, 2010: 251) and need to be
inferred pragmatically. That is, unlike what is suggested by Fodor, speakers are
not innately equipped with a finite set of concepts, but there is an infinite
number of concepts that they can use and gradually acquire (hence the need
for the comprehension procedure developed in RT).

42
In this case, however, it is no longer clear in what sense these concepts are ad hoc (cf.
Mioduszewska, 2015: 87).
43
To my knowledge, only Carston assumes that “we are born with at least some innate concepts”
(2010: 250). It is unclear whether she still holds this view, however (see Section 3.3.2).
 3.1 Concepts and Ad Hoc Concepts in RT 73

It will start to become clear why the referential approach to conceptual

content proposed by Fodor does not fit well with RT, unlike what relevance
theorists believe. By rejecting the innateness hypothesis, RT inevitably also has
to abandon the referential approach to meaning put forward by Fodor (which
they do not). Indeed, without the innateness hypothesis, there is no explanation
given for the necessary relationship between a concept and its referent.
Naturally, the critics will argue that scientific theorizing often consists in
working with hypotheses for which we may as yet lack an explanation, and
RT, therefore, does not have to abandon referentialism. Nevertheless, there are
(at least) two more reasons why RT might prefer to move away from
referentialism.
The first reason follows from the observation that referentialism is incon-
sistent with one of the most central claims put forward within RT. The notion of
explicatures was developed within RT to account for the observation that the
logical form of an utterance never fully determines the speaker’s intended
interpretation, which has to be pragmatically derived (see Section 2.2.2).
This is referred to as the underdeterminacy thesis. And from this perspective,
logical forms cannot be defined in terms of truth-conditions:
Various terms for this are used in the literature; the linguistic expression employed is
described as providing an incomplete logical form, a ‘semantic’ skeleton, ‘semantic’
scaffolding, a ‘semantic’ template, a proposition/assumption schema (see, for instance,
Sperber and Wilson, 1986/95; Recanati, 1993; Bach, 1994b; Taylor, 2001). What all of
these different locutions entail is that the linguistic contribution is not propositional, it is
not a complete semantic entity, not truth evaluable. (Carston, 2002b: 134)
In RT, it is generally assumed that only the enriched propositions that are
derived pragmatically, i.e. explicatures and implicatures, can be described in
such truth-conditional terms (Carston and Hall, 2012: 76; see also Moeschler,
2018). Yet, when considering that concepts have referential semantics (by
locking onto a specific entity or property in the mind-external world), then
they “must have truth-theoretic content” (Sztencel, 2011: 379). By extension,
the logical forms in which concepts occur should also be defined in terms of
these truth-conditions. Even if the concepts that occur in the logical forms do
not correspond exactly to what the speaker intends to communicate, they still
have truth-conditions.44 It is therefore inconsistent for RT to argue both that
concepts have referential content and that logical forms are not truth-evaluable.
For this reason, “it has become unclear in what form Relevance Theory still
holds the underdeterminacy thesis” (p. 376). As a result, either RT needs to

44
Note that, outside RT, a number of researchers have precisely provided descriptions along these
lines (e.g. Borg, 2004, 2016; Cappelen and Lepore, 2005, inter alia). According to them,
although sentences fail to provide the speaker’s intended meaning, the words that a speaker
uses do have truth-theoretic content.
74 3 Redefining Lexical Semantics and Pragmatics

change its view concerning the nature of conceptual content, or it needs to

revise (or abandon, even) the underdeterminacy thesis (cf. Burton-Roberts,
2005). Some might want to stick with the Fodorian assumption that concepts
are necessarily referential. In this case, the difficulty is to determine exactly in
what sense logical forms underdetermine the speakers’ intended interpretation.
It is most likely that relevance theorists will prefer to keep the underdetermi-
nacy thesis as it is currently formulated, and which provides a strong basis on
which the rest of the theory has been developed (see, in particular,
Section 2.2.2), and rather to reconsider the nature of lexical concepts. I also
believe this is the most preferable option. From this perspective, concepts do
not have truth-theoretic content, but truth values are only accessible once the
explicatures have been derived (and which relevance theorists call real (as
opposed to linguistic) semantics, cf. Clark, 2013a: 299).45 Naturally, this
requires the explicit spelling out of what constitutes the content of lexical
concepts. As we will see in the next sections, there have been a few suggestions
in RT.
There is a second important argument against a purely referential account of
conceptual content: Fodor himself seems to be aware of the difficulties that
such an account of meaning faces. Sztencel (2018) aptly captures the reason
why concepts must have some internal content:
If concepts do actually lock onto things in the world, we want to say that they do so non-
arbitrarily – in other words, that there is something about the concept itself (some
property of the concept, which I am calling its internal content) that determines that it
locks onto the things it does lock onto and not anything else. The question is then: should
we align ‘semantics’ with (internal) content or with (external) reference? Having so
distinguished between content and reference, it seems reasonable to say that content is
metaphysically prior to and a precondition for reference. Insofar as ‘semantics’ is
referential at all, such semanticity derives from, is parasitic on, internal conceptual
content. It is arguable, then, that it is internal content that is fundamentally ‘semantic’.
(Sztencel, 2018: 14)
It appears that Fodor is not a complete stranger to this line of argumentation.
After all, he once argued “(a) that the content of a linguistic expression should
be distinguished from such of its semantic properties as its truth conditions; and
(b) that content is – though truth conditions are not – a construct out of the
communicative intentions of speaker/hearers” (Fodor, 1982: 105–106; original

45
Although ‘meaning’ in CxG (as in cognitive linguistics more generally) is not defined in truth-
conditional terms, which is a perspective I largely endorse myself, this second view (i.e. an
approach in terms of ‘real’ semantics) is closer to the approach generally adopted in CxG.
Indeed, the way RT relocates truth-values at another, pragmatic, level does not radically differ
from the perspective (most probably) adopted in CxG (which, as mentioned earlier, cannot
entirely get away without truth-conditions), according to which truth-values are secondary to
meaning and are evaluated in context.
 3.1 Concepts and Ad Hoc Concepts in RT 75

emphasis). From this perspective, meaning is in the head and not purely
referential.46 As mentioned in the previous chapter, the idea that meaning is
in the head is a view that cognitive linguists in general and construction
grammarians in particular have largely adopted. In fact, Chomsky himself
also subscribes to this view. He explicitly argues that “the semantic properties
of words are used to think and talk about the world in terms of the perspectives
made available by the resources of the mind” (Chomsky, 2000: 16). Moreover,
Fodor also understands that reference alone (and, with it, truth-conditions)
cannot distinguish between the meaning of different lexical items, especially
those that are co-referential (e.g. Superman and Clark Kent; Fodor, 2008: 86).
He specifically argues that to distinguish between the two, one also has to
associate with the lexical items different modes of presentation (Fodor, 1998:
15).47
Unfortunately, in spite of these observations, Fodor still clings to the idea
that concepts must be atomic, referential items. According to him, as far as
conceptual content (i.e. meaning) is concerned, neither the mode of presenta-
tion nor the mental files (cf. footnote 41) that he introduces are actually
relevant: “all that matters is the extension” (Fodor, 2008: 87). Relevance
theorists do not have to comply with Fodor, however. It will not be the first
time that they part company from him (e.g. on how modular the mind is, on the
acquisition of concepts, on inference rules). RT could be stronger as a theory if
it were to change its view of conceptual content and adopt a non-referential
approach to lexical meaning. The challenge in this case, of course, is to identify
exactly what constitutes this content. Is it the inference rules located in the
logical entry? This is a possibility that some relevance theorists entertain and
which will be introduced in Section 3.1.2. Or is the content of a concept
determined by the information stored in the encyclopedic entry? In
Section 3.1.3, we will see that Groefsema (2007) favors this position. As
mentioned in the previous chapter, this is also a view that is strongly defended
in cognitive linguistics and, therefore, in CxG. In fact, it is also worth noting
that some philosophers have argued that the information stored within Fodor’s
mental files (which more or less correspond to RT’s encyclopedic knowledge)
should be considered to be the content of those concepts (e.g. Lee, 2017). In
Section 3.4, I will also argue in favor of such a perspective on conceptual
content.

3.1.1.2 Ad Hoc Concepts and Atomism: Problems It is important to under-

stand the immediate relevance of the previous section to the question addressed
46
Arguing against Hilary Putnam, Fodor (1982: 110) says that he finds “unattractive” a position
whereby “meaning is not in the head.”
47
Fodor’s modes of presentation closely resembles the notion of construal/vantage point put
forward (in different ways) in cognitive linguistics.
76 3 Redefining Lexical Semantics and Pragmatics

in this chapter. In the previous chapter, it was conceptual atomism, and not
referentialism, that was considered to be the main issue for RT. Conceptual
atomism does not (arguably) presuppose referentialism, or vice versa. It could
therefore be argued that, having rejected referentialism, one could still maintain
atomism. According to Fodor, however, referentialism and atomism are neces-
sarily related. (As we will see in this section, this is also the case for Carston.)
Fodor actually calls himself a “referential atomist” (Fodor, 2008: 99). It has
been shown in the previous section, however, that referentialism is generally
incompatible with the relevance-theoretic enterprise. One is therefore also
entitled to question the necessity (and, even, the possibility) for RT to argue
that concepts are atomic. The aim of this section is precisely to show that
atomism is also incompatible with the relevance-theoretic approach to lexical
pragmatics and that alternative perspectives have to be considered.48
Conceptual atomism and the relevance-theoretic approach to pragmatics are
incompatible for a number of reasons, all of which are closely related. One of
them, however, particularly stands out from the others and seems to be the most
problematic case for RT. This issue was briefly addressed in the previous
chapter and will be elaborated on here. The difficulty for RT is to explain, on
the basis of atomic concepts, how hearers manage to derive ad hoc concepts.49
Take the following examples:
(64) It’s clear that stress can contribute to chronic disease, but fixing stress is not as
simple as taking a deep breath or an occasional yoga class. (NOW)
(65) During the adoption process in 2015, Avinash told the court that he loves his Taya
and Tayi (uncle and aunt) who are now his parents and they too love him. (NOW)

48
As mentioned several times already, it is important to note that the focus of this book is
‘meaning’. Therefore, when arguing against atomism, I only mean to argue that conceptual
content (i.e. the meaning of lexical items) is not atomic. I make absolutely no claim regarding
the form that concepts take when occurring in thoughts, however. They may well be atomic (say,
a conceptual address, or Fodor’s ‘file name’), but I challenge the view that their content consists
of this atom.
49
The systematic derivation of ad hoc concepts in itself is not at issue here. Barsalou indeed
provides solid evidence that individuals systematically create ad hoc categories (cf. footnote 31
for references). This view is also very much in line with most approaches developed in cognitive
linguistics, such as Langacker’s notion of conceptualization which he uses to refer to the
dynamic nature of conceptual content:
Rather than being fixed, the values of linguistic elements are actively negotiated; and rather than
being static, the meanings of complex expressions emerge and develop in discourse. . . .
Meaning is not identified with concepts but with conceptualization, the term being chosen
precisely to highlight its dynamic nature. (Langacker, 2008: 30; original emphasis)
The only issue being tackled in this section is the apparent incompatibility between the
particular way ad hoc concepts are said to be derived and the atomic commitment to the nature
of concepts and ad hoc concepts.
 3.1 Concepts and Ad Hoc Concepts in RT 77

There are various ways in which the lexemes stress and parent can be under-
stood depending on how they are used by the speaker. It is theoretically possible
(in the required contexts, of course, not here) that their interpretation will lead
to the recovery of the encoded concepts stress and parent (whatever these
are). This scenario is relatively unproblematic, since in this case the intended
interpretation (and therefore the content of the communicated concept) equals
that of the lexical (encoded) concept. Difficulties emerge, however, if the
hearer has to infer an ad hoc concept. This is the case for the interpretation of
the sentences in (64) and (65). In the sentence in (64), the word stress can be
understood as communicating the more specific (i.e. narrower) concept
stress*: ‘high/undue levels of stress’. In the sentence in (65), hearers have
to infer the more general (i.e. broader) concept parent* in which the bio-
logical aspect of parenthood is dropped. From the relevance-theoretic stand-
point, these two examples illustrate cases of conceptual narrowing and
broadening, respectively (see Section 2.2.3.1).
As mentioned in the previous chapter, the difficulty here is to under-
stand how RT can argue in favor of both conceptual atomism and the
systematic narrowing and/or broadening of conceptual content.
Considering that lexical concepts and ad hoc concepts are atomic, it is
unclear in what sense exactly ad hoc concepts can be narrower/broader
than lexical concepts. Somehow, these notions necessarily require some
form of internal structure that our minds can exploit in different ways (in
accordance, of course, with the comprehension procedure). The notion of ad
hoc concepts is often introduced in the relevance-theoretic literature in
direct reference to the work of Barsalou on ‘ad hoc categories’. Yet, looking
carefully at what Barsalou himself argues, it is relatively clear that concepts
are not atomic, and that the process of conceptual adjustment is possible
only because concepts are considered to be “bodies of knowledge in long-
term memory” (Barsalou et al., 1993: 57). Interestingly, in some specific
accounts of RT, one could also be led to believe that a similar view is
adopted by relevance theorists themselves. After all, they often argue that
the derivation of ad hoc concepts crucially depends on the information
stored in the encyclopedic entry:
On this approach, bank . . . might be understood as conveying not the encoded concept
bank but the ad hoc concept bank*, with a more restricted encyclopedic entry and
a narrower denotation. (Wilson and Sperber, 2004: 618; emphasis mine)
In another utterance situation, different items of encyclopaedic information about
children might be more highly activated making most accessible such implications as
that Boris doesn’t earn his keep, expects others to look after him, is irresponsible, etc.,
resulting in a distinct ad hoc concept child** in the explicature. (Carston, 2012: 613;
emphasis mine)
78 3 Redefining Lexical Semantics and Pragmatics

In this case, the information stored in the encyclopedic entry provides the
structure on the basis of which ad hoc concepts can be derived. In other words,
the content of ad hoc concepts more or less resembles that of lexical concepts
depending on the degree of overlap between the information stored in their
respective encyclopedic entries. Naturally, this strongly suggests that encyclope-
dic information must be content-constitutive. Yet, this is incompatible with RT’s
commitment to atomism. This incompatibility has already been pointed out by
a number of relevance theorists, among whom is Anne Reboul:
Relevance Theory rests on a Fodorian account of concepts according to which concepts
are atomic, hence not definitions. Ad hoc concepts, however, are supposed to be formed
by modifying the definition of the original concept by deleting features or introducing
them in the definition. This directly contradicts a Fodorian view of concepts. (Reboul,
2014: 20)
In addition to Reboul (2014), this contradiction has also been discussed, among
others, by Vicente (2005: 190), Burton-Roberts (2007: 106), Groefsema (2007:
146), Vicente and Martínez-Manrique (2010: 49), Allott and Textor (2012:
198), Assimakopoulos (2012: 23), and Mioduszewska (2015: 83). As a result,
either RT has to change its approach to the formation and nature of ad hoc
concepts, or it needs to rethink exactly what it considers conceptual content to
consist of. From the perspective outlined above, the information stored in the
encyclopedic entry (and the logical entry) is a good candidate. In the rest of this
chapter, I will strongly argue in favor of this option. Before doing so, it is worth
investigating a bit further this incompatibility between atomism and the rele-
vance-theoretic notion of ad hoc concepts.
In spite of the demonstration just made, Carston maintains that she has been
“unable to find any arguments supporting the alleged incompatibility”
(Carston, 2010: 247) and argues that the underlying thinking that points
towards this incompatibility “is quite wide of the mark since the account of
ad hoc concept formation is not semantic and not internal to the linguistic
system” (p. 247). This last statement has long puzzled me for a number of
reasons. First of all, it is doubtful whether anyone (among relevance theorists or
not) has ever considered the process of conceptual adjustment to be a purely
semantic process. But more importantly, it is unclear why the fact that this is
indeed a pragmatic process can be used as an argument against the incompati-
bility discussed by many. If it were so obvious, then presumably the apparent
incompatibility would have been raised less often. Furthermore, regardless of
whether one considers conceptual adjustment to be a semantic or a pragmatic
process, the type of conceptual narrowing/broadening discussed in RT requires
some internal structure to be exploited which the atomic approach does not
offer. For this reason, although the incompatibility between the atomic view of
concepts and the relevance-theoretic approach to ad hoc concepts formation
 3.1 Concepts and Ad Hoc Concepts in RT 79

strikes many as blatant, it is important to take a closer look at the reasons why
Carston assumes that there is no such incompatibility.
In order to understand Carston’s comment, one needs to take into account all of
her theoretical commitments. Of all relevance theorists, Carston is probably the
most Fodorian in her approach to meaning. She is in particular very faithful to the
referential approach that he advocates. This is particularly clear from the way in
which she uses the term denotation (see, for instance, Carston, 1997b, 2002a,
2010, 2012). It is most probably this commitment to referential semantics that can
explain Carston’s surprise (and rightly so). It is clear to Carston that the informa-
tion stored in the encyclopedic entry is not content-constitutive but only provides
contextual information about concepts, i.e. about their denotation. Although this
stored encyclopedic knowledge is indeed exploited during the comprehension
phase to recover the intended concept, it does not eventually form the content of
this ad hoc concept either. The content of ad hoc concepts is determined, like
lexical concepts, solely by their denotation. The encyclopedic and logical infor-
mation that a lexical concept provides only serves in context to recover the
denotation of the communicated ad hoc concept. According to Carston, the level
at which conceptual narrowing/broadening matters is not the encyclopedic level
(which is not content-constitutive) but the level of the denotation itself. Ad hoc
concepts can be said to be narrower/broader than the lexical concepts from which
they are derived depending on the degree of overlap between the set of items that
fall within their denotation (Carston, 2002a: 353). This is why, according to
Carston, it is not incompatible to argue both that ad hoc concepts are atomic
(since they consist of a referential relation) and that they can be narrower/broader
than the lexical concept from which they are formed (depending on their denota-
tional overlap).50
Carston’s perspective seems internally coherent and therefore appears to
solve the incompatibility mentioned above. The question is whether this view is
theoretically and descriptively accurate, however. There are two crucial points
that need to be addressed here. First, Carston’s account is flawed since it
ignores a basic constraint imposed by referential atomism. According to Hall
(2011), the atomic account requires that neither the logical nor the encyclopedic
types of information made accessible by a concept be “constitutive or refer-
ence-determining” (Hall, 2011: 7). Yet, as was just explained, it is clear in
Carston’s account that the logical and encyclopedic entries directly contribute
to establishing reference. As a result, her view suggests (in spite of what she
argues) that these two types of information are content-constitutive (since
content determines reference).51 This is why her approach to concepts and ad
50
That is why Carston (2010: 247) argues that the derivation of ad hoc concepts takes place
outside the linguistic system.
51
That content determines reference seems to be implicitly assumed by those who discuss the
incompatibility identified above (see, for instance, Reboul, 2000: 60).
80 3 Redefining Lexical Semantics and Pragmatics

hoc concepts runs counter to the atomic view of conceptual content, which
compromises the coherence of her account. Second, Carston’s approach is all
the more problematic in that her defense of conceptual atomism rests primarily
on the assumption that concepts are referential. Besides the issue of determin-
ing how reference is established, it was shown in the previous section that
referential semantics is incompatible with some of the core notions developed
within RT (e.g. the one-to-many mapping between words and concepts, the
difference in truth-conditions between the logical form and explicatures, etc.).
So Carston advocates for a referential account, but there are a number of critical
questions that she fails to address (see Section 3.1.1.1), which further threatens
the coherence of the account sketched in the previous paragraph. It is therefore
highly questionable whether conceptual atomism can be maintained in RT.
Rather, it is preferable to drop conceptual atomism, together with referential-
ism. It was shown in the previous section that in order to be able to establish
reference, one must have some internal content (prior to reference) which itself
can be considered to constitute the content of that concept. Carston assumes
that the recovery of an ad hoc concept’s denotation is largely made possible by
the encyclopedic entry made accessible by the lexical concept with which it is
associated. From this perspective, the information stored in the encyclopedic
entry once more seems to be the best candidate for what constitutes conceptual
content. This view, which will be adopted later in this chapter, is further
supported by the observation that the account of ad hoc concepts presented in
RT was developed on the basis of Barsalou’s work on (ad hoc) categories
which, as mentioned above, he conceives of as bodies of information (and not
as atoms).
It is worth noting that Carston finds Fodor’s arguments for conceptual
atomism “unassailable” (Carston, 2010: 245) and argues that “the most com-
pelling of these, perhaps, is that no-one has been able, despite centuries of
trying, to give adequate definitions for any but a tiny group of words” (p. 245).
This viewpoint will be discussed in more detail in Section 3.5. Suffice it to say
that it remains dubious why Fodor’s arguments are unassailable, in particular
the one Carston mentions and which actually seem to be the most inconsequen-
tial argument Fodor puts forward.52 That no one has ever been able to provide
specific definitions for most of the words we use is not bulletproof evidence that
conceptual content is necessarily atomic. It might, however, tell us something
about how the mind works, as I will suggest in Section 3.5. But Fodor’s own
skepticism about definitions cannot be used as an argument for atomism.

52
As far as the content of concepts is concerned, there is quite a large amount of evidence (see
Section 2.1.2.2), starting from the work of Barsalou himself, that shows that conceptual content
consists of a structured network of information rather than an atom. Therefore, Fodor’s argu-
ments are, in fact, assailable.
 3.1 Concepts and Ad Hoc Concepts in RT 81

The difficulties that an atomic view of conceptual content involves go

beyond the challenge represented by the derivation of ad hoc concepts. One
further difficulty concerns how conceptual content can be argued to be
acquired. If, like Fodor, one assumes concepts to be innate and to be in a one-
to-one mapping with the lexicon, then there is no such issue. As mentioned in
the previous section, however, relevance theorists tend not to view concepts as
innate objects and consider that there are more concepts than just those that are
lexicalized. In this case, it is unclear exactly, given the variety of atomic
concepts that a lexeme could lock onto, which of those it should actually be
associated with.53
Directly related to this issue is the question of monosemy and polysemy.
If one considers concepts to be atomic, then it is also not straightforward
how polysemy can possibly be represented in one’s mind. As mentioned in
the previous chapter, indeed, Fodor himself assumes that there is no such
thing as polysemy since he considers there to be a one-to-one mapping
between words and concepts. Relevance theorists, however, do not adopt
such isomorphism. They admit that some words might be (conventionally)
polysemous. Yet, considering that concepts are atoms, only two outcomes
for the representation of meaning are possible, polysemy not being one of
them. In the first case, if one assumes that conventional polysemy exists
(although it is obvious to construction grammarians, it is much less so in
the pragmatics literature), then the identified meanings cannot be distin-
guished from cases of homonymy. Indeed, in this case it is opaque how
one mentally represents the assumed relationship between the different
atoms. It is doubtful, however, that the senses of the lexeme wood (e.g.
‘material’ and ‘geographical area’) are unrelated in the same way as the
senses of the lexeme bank are (e.g. ‘financial institution’ and ‘land along-
side a river’). Considering that conventional polysemy exists, it is prefer-
able to keep the notion distinct from cases of homonymy. Yet, viewing
concepts as atoms does not make this possible. The alternative option is to
consider that although lexemes can be used to convey different concepts in
different contexts, only one of those concepts is actually encoded by the
lexeme which is used to express them. This is what Carston (2013: 187)
calls pragmatic polysemy, which is a view also defended by Falkum
(2011, 2015). Here, although lexemes are considered to be pragmatically

53
Given the aim of this book, I will not go into the detail of this issue here. Nevertheless, it is worth
noting that this question has led to quite diverging opinions among the relevance theorists who
try to answer the question. On the one hand, for instance, Tim Wharton is “very much into
nativist accounts of concept acquisition, in the sense of Bloom 1996, Dehaene 1997 and
Margolis 1998” (Tim Wharton, p.c.). In comparison, Sandrine Zufferey argues that frequency
must have a key role in the acquisition of concepts (Zufferey, 2010: 146, 2015).
82 3 Redefining Lexical Semantics and Pragmatics

polysemous, they are assumed to be semantically monosemous. I have

expressed strong doubts about such a perspective in the previous chapter.
In Section 3.3, I will elaborate on these doubts.

3.1.1.3 Concepts and Atomism: Conclusions Conceptual atomism pro-

vides an interesting solution to the challenge identified above in terms
of what exactly constitutes the meaning of a lexical item. The meaning
comes from the referential relation made accessible by the atomic concept.
I have argued that this perspective – which is the most adopted in RT –
faces a number of problems. The first difficulty concerns the referential
nature of this concept. Referential semantics, beyond its own limits, is not
compatible with some of the most central tenets of RT. In addition, conceptual
atomism does not seem to be compatible with the account of ad hoc concept
formation largely discussed within RT. Instead, it has been suggested that an
account whereby concepts have internal content is better equipped to face the
different challenges that referential atomism faces. Before introducing such an
account, it is worth looking at the other accounts of conceptual meaning that
have been argued for in RT.

3.1.2 Conceptual Content and the Logical Entry

Another way of dealing with the issue identified at the beginning of this chapter
is to consider that the content of concepts, regardless of whether or not they are
atomic, (also) consists of the information stored in the logical entry that the
concept gives access to. This view is the third possibility discussed by
Groefsema (2007) and is illustrated in Figure 3.4.
This possibility can be more or less explicitly found in the work of
a number of relevance theorists. Sperber and Wilson (1987), for instance,
specifically argue that they “see [the semantic properties of a word] as
provided by the logical entry filed at the same address” (Sperber and
Wilson, 1987: 741). Later, Carston (2002a) adopts a similar view. She
argues that logical information is a defining property of concepts, i.e. it is

CONCEPT
atomic

Lexical Entry Logical Entry Encyclopedic Entry

lexical semantics

Figure 3.4 Logical entry as conceptual content

 3.1 Concepts and Ad Hoc Concepts in RT 83

content-constitutive, and that conceptual narrowing and broadening is

located at the level of the logical entry:
An ad hoc concept formed by strengthening a lexical concept seems to involve elevating
an encyclopaedic property of the latter to a logical (or content-constitutive) status . . . an
ad hoc concept formed by the loosening of a lexical concept seems to involve dropping
one or more of the logical or defining properties of the latter. (Carston, 2002a: 339,
emphasis mine)
This view quite explicitly suggests that the logical entry made accessible by
a concept provides the meaning of a lexical entry. Yet this comes in complete
opposition to (and again seems incompatible with, see Section 3.1.1.2) Carston’s
strong atomic commitment to conceptual content. More recently, she argues that:
A decompositional view might also seem to have been implied by my talk (Carston
2002a: 339) of the dropping of logical properties (in the case of loose uses) and the
promoting of encyclopaedic properties (in the case of narrowing), although this does not
strictly follow, since these properties are clearly not internal components of the lexical
concepts themselves and need not be taken that way for ad hoc concepts either. In fact, it
was my aim then, as now, to maintain a consistently atomic view of concepts if at all
possible. (Carston, 2010: 249)
The opposition between these two quotes quite clearly shows the tension that
can be found in Carston’s own work and more generally within RT. Carston is
aware of this tension and explicitly points out (in Carston, 2010) that she should
not be understood as arguing that the logical properties are content-constitutive.
Nevertheless, this post-hoc clarification may not be entirely convincing for it
generally seems that she is struggling to explain the different facets of her
approach. Indeed, a few pages before denying that this is the perspective she
adopts, Carston (2010) repeats that the inference rules found in the logical entry of
a concept “are, crucially, taken to be content constitutive” (Carston, 2010: 246).
Elsewhere in the relevance-theoretic literature, Falkum (2011) writes that
logical properties “are thought to be content-constitutive of a concept”
(Falkum, 2011: 118). This view is in particular strongly defended by Horsey
(2006).
This approach to conceptual content provides, like the first view discussed
previously, an interesting solution to the issue identified at the beginning of this
chapter when trying to pin down exactly what Sperber and Wilson consider to
be the content of a concept. In this case, the meaning of a lexical item consists
of the information stored in the logical entry.54 Like in the previous scenario,

54
After the first publication of Relevance, Macnamara (1987: 724) is probably the first to have
noticed the difficulty of identifying exactly what Sperber and Wilson consider the content of
a concept to consist of. It is interesting to note that it is when responding to Macnamara that
Sperber and Wilson (1987) argue that the information stored in the logical entry constitutes the
content of a concept.
84 3 Redefining Lexical Semantics and Pragmatics

the information stored in the encyclopedic entry only serves during the infer-
ential phase of comprehension to derive explicatures and implicatures.
However, although this perspective does not share the limits of the atomic
view, it also faces a number of issues.
Unlike the atomic account of conceptual content, this view can capture more
easily in what sense exactly conceptual narrowing and/or broadening is pos-
sible. As described by Carston above, it is the set of inference rules that one
stores in the logical entry that provides (together with encyclopedic informa-
tion) the necessary structure on the basis of which narrowing/broadening can
occur. Somehow, this view is also equipped to answer the challenge that refer-
entialism represents. In this case, one has internal content from which a specific
reference can be established. And yet, this view does not entirely solve the issue
of how to determine reference. First of all, the content of the logical entry of some
concepts is not sufficient to justify exactly why they refer to the entity/object they
do and not to another. Consider, for instance, the concepts rottweiler and
dobermann. In order to be able to establish reference, the internal content must
be sufficiently detailed to enable us to pick the right referent. When using the two
concepts rottweiler and dobermann, one refers to two distinct kinds of dogs
even though they (arguably) look quite similar. Yet it is not clear in RT whether
the logical entry associated with each of these two concepts provides enough (in
the sense of distinguishing) information to determine the right reference, i.e.
reference to rottweilers and to dobermanns respectively (and not the other way
round). As mentioned in the previous chapter, it is often argued in RT that the
information stored in the logical entry never fully defines a concept. Sperber and
Wilson (1995) argue that:
Our framework allows for empty logical entries, logical entries which amount to
a proper definition of the concept, and logical entries which fall anywhere between
these two extremes: that is, which provide some logical specification of the concept
without fully defining it. (p. 92)

Such a view is problematic if we assume that the information stored in the logical
entry is content-constitutive and should, therefore, be reference-determining. It is
unclear how one can accurately establish reference if the concepts one uses are not
fully defined (and sufficiently distinct from other concepts). As a result, either RT
needs to argue that the logical entry always fully defines a concept, or it needs to
consider that the content of a concept is not (only) determined by the information
stored in the logical entry, for otherwise reference cannot be established. The
latter option is preferable, and as we will see in the next section, the information
stored in the encyclopedic entry once again seems to be a good candidate.
Now, in spite of the latter observation, let’s assume for a moment that the
logical entry fully determines the content of a concept. In this case, the meaning
of a concept is clearly identifiable, it is prior to reference, enables conceptual
 3.1 Concepts and Ad Hoc Concepts in RT 85

narrowing/broadening, and makes reference assignment possible. There are

two reasons why this option still remains relatively problematic, however. The
first reason comes from the observation that this perspective faces exactly the
same limits as “classical” (Aristotelian) definitions in terms of necessary and
sufficient conditions.55 Indeed, if the logical entry of a concept fully defines
that concept, then it will inevitably consist of a set of necessary and sufficient
inferential rules which can be used to compute (Sperber and Wilson, 1995: 89)
the logical forms in which these concepts occur. Yet there are a number of
issues with this view. One of them follows from the observation that concepts
are not mentally represented in such rigid terms, but are more flexibly organ-
ized (around a prototype) and have fuzzy boundaries (see, for instance, Rosch
1975).56 This explains why, for instance, both eagles and ostriches can be
described as birds even though the feature ‘fly’ (which could be argued to be
central to the concept bird, i.e. common to all birds) applies to eagles but not to
ostriches. As a result, if one still wants to argue, on the one hand, that (like
eagles) ostriches are birds and, on the other, that concepts are defined in terms
of inferential rules, then the property {bird → fly} needs to be dropped from
the list. The difficulty for a theory of concepts is that this might result in
concepts that possess very few inferential rules and that, as a consequence,
fail to be fully defined since they are not sufficiently distinguishable from one
another. That is, whether we like it or not, the logical entry cannot fully define
a concept. In that case, this leads us back to the challenge identified above.
Directly related to this issue is the observation that for some concepts, in
particular abstract ones, it is quite hard to understand exactly what inferential
rules can possibly make up their logical entry. For instance, it is unclear what
rules are attached to the concept freedom, and in particular in what sense these
rules enable us to distinguish it from another abstract concept such as
liberty.57 Generally, then, inferential rules alone cannot possibly define the
content of concepts, which strongly suggests that other elements associated
with concepts (e.g. encyclopedic information) must constitute their content.
There is a second reason why it is problematic to view the logical entry of
a concept as being its content. If one is to define concepts in terms of inferential
rules, then one must at least have some idea of what these rules actually consist
of. Yet the relevance-theoretic perspective faces a number of limits which

55
As Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk (2007: 146) points out, issues with classical definitions have in
particular been addressed by Quine (1953, 1960), Wittgenstein (1958), and by Rosch (1973,
1975).
56
It is worth noting that Barsalou himself considers that concepts are not defined by strict common
features but are composed of a graded structure (Barsalou, 1985, 1987).
57
This observation receives support from experimental evidence. On the basis of property-
generation tasks, Wiemer-Hastings and Xu (2005) show that “abstract concepts tend to be
more schematic in nature, involving a larger proportion of unspecific features than concrete
concepts” (p. 733).
86 3 Redefining Lexical Semantics and Pragmatics

greatly weaken the role of the logical entry as a distinct entity. The approach
developed in RT will be discussed in the rest of this section.
When Sperber and Wilson (1995) establish the distinction between the
information stored in the logical and encyclopedic entries, they argue that the
main difference is one of mental representation:
The information in encyclopaedic entries is representational: it consists of a set of
assumptions which may undergo deductive rules. The information in logical entries,
by contrast, is computational: it consists of a set of deductive rules which apply to
assumptions in which the associated concept appears. (Sperber and Wilson, 1995: 89)
From this perspective, logical information consists of deductive rules of the
type {cat → mammal}. These rules help to compute (i.e. draw inferences
from) the logical forms in which a lexical concept occurs. This view is
problematic, however. First, when they distinguish between encyclopedic and
logical information, Sperber and Wilson explicitly argue that the distinction
between the two generally corresponds to the philosophical analytic–synthetic
dichotomy (Sperber and Wilson, 1995: 88). That is, by virtue of defining
a concept, the logical information must necessarily be true of that concept
(i.e. analytic), while the (non-defining) information stored in the encyclopedic
entry is only true in virtue of one’s experience in the world of that concept (i.e.
synthetic). Sperber and Wilson explicitly argue, however, that the analogy only
means to capture the observation that knowledge can be stored in different
ways (cf. quote above) but not that it necessarily entails different types of truth
(p. 88). This is convenient since the analytic/synthetic distinction is rather
controversial. Quine (1953, 1960) in particular believes that it is not possible
to distinguish between different types of truth and specifically argues against
analyticity (i.e. necessary truth). More recently in the relevance-theoretic
literature, a similar view is adopted by Horsey, who argues that the information
stored in the logical entry is not analytic in the traditional philosophical sense
(Horsey, 2006: 74). Rather, he argues that the truth of information is subjective
and may be different across individuals (p. 25), and that whether an individual
chooses to place a specific piece of information in the logical or encyclopedic
entry crucially depends on whether that person takes this piece of information
to be content-constitutive (p. 75). Sperber and Wilson adopt a similar perspec-
tive when they argue that the same piece of information can function “now as
part of the content of an assumption [i.e. logical entry], now as part of the
context in which it is processed [i.e. encyclopedic entry]” (Sperber and Wilson,
1995: 89). In this case, however, it means that the distinction between the
logical and the encyclopedic entry is only a “psychological distinction”
(Carston, 2010: 275), i.e. a perceptual difference that may not translate into
different cognitive processes. As a consequence, one could question the neces-
sity both to distinguish between the two entries and, in particular, to argue that
 3.1 Concepts and Ad Hoc Concepts in RT 87

only the information stored in the logical entry constitutes the content of
a concept. Carston (2002a) explicitly doubts that there is “really a clear
logical/encyclopaedic distinction” (Carston, 2002a: 322). The necessity to
distinguish between the two kinds of information seems to originate from
a particular intuition. As Horsey (2006) points out, for Quine the distinction
is meant to capture “intuitions of centrality” (Horsey, 2006: 13), i.e. intuitions
about which pieces of information are more central to a concept than others.
A similar intuition can be found in the work of Sperber and Wilson when
they say:
Intuitively, there are clear-enough differences between encyclopaedic and logical
entries. Encyclopaedic entries typically vary across speakers and times . . .. Logical
entries, by contrast, are small, finite and relatively constant across speakers and times.
(Sperber and Wilson, 1995: 88)

In other words, it is assumed that individuals classify as content-constitutive (i.e.

logical) those pieces of information that are more central (and therefore stable) to
a concept and as contextual (i.e. encyclopedic) those that are less central (and
therefore less stable). This perspective is highly problematic, however. From
a theoretical standpoint, apart from the philosopher’s intuition, there is nothing
that justifies the view according to which less stable, more peripheral aspects of
concepts do not directly contribute to their content too. From a more psycho-
logical viewpoint, it is unclear why individuals should so categorically treat less
central elements as necessarily not being content-constitutive, especially since it
is not clear in this case how individuals even manage to decide when a given
piece of information is central to a concept or not. Horsey (2006: 75) himself
admits this is a challenge. That is, the distinction is not straightforward. As
a consequence, there is no reason to distinguish between logical and encyclope-
dic information: there is simply conceptual knowledge. Of course, this does not
mean that individuals do not categorize this knowledge in different ways, with
some aspects of it being considered more central to a concept than others. The
different networks discussed in cognitive linguistics, for instance, introduce the
notion of a prototype precisely so as to account for this intuition (see also
Goldberg, 2019: 16). Yet the rest of the conceptual network in which
a prototype occurs is also considered to be content-constitutive.
This last observation provides a transition to the last issue concerning logical
information. If one considers that only the information stored in the logical
entry is content-constitutive, then it is once more unclear how exactly (conven-
tional, encoded) polysemy can be mentally represented, if it is at all possible. In
this case, the logical entry simply consists of a hodgepodge of inferential rules
that can be computed once a concept appears in the logical form of an utterance.
Yet, considering that polysemy is possible, then one would want to be able to
88 3 Redefining Lexical Semantics and Pragmatics

distinguish between different, organized sets of logical information that can be

exploited independently of one another. It is unclear how that is possible in RT.
In this section, I considered the possibility for conceptual content to be
composed of the information stored in the logical entry that a concept is argued
to give access to in RT. Although this view solves the ambiguity identified at the
beginning of the chapter, namely that of understanding exactly what constitutes
the meaning of a lexical item, it faces a number of issues itself. In particular, the
difficulty is to know whether this entry alone can ever fully define a concept.
This is notably supported by the observation that pinning down exactly what
constitutes the nature of this entry and in what sense it differs from the
information stored in the encyclopedic entry represents a real challenge. In
the following sections, I will argue that there is no need to distinguish between
two types of entries. Before doing so, I will introduce the last possibility
identified by Groefsema (2007: 139).

3.1.3 Conceptual Content, Logical and Encyclopedic Knowledge

The third possibility to deal with the ambiguity left by Sperber and Wilson is to
consider that the content of a concept is determined by the information stored in
both the logical and the encyclopedic entries (see Figure 3.5). This is the first
possibility that Groefsema (2007) mentions, but I have treated it as the last
possibility since there are only very few relevance theorists who adopt this
perspective. This is unfortunate, as will become clear, since it is the best solution
for RT (or at least, a version of it).
Like the first two options discussed in the previous sections, this view can
avoid a number of challenges. In this case, it is clear what the meaning of
a concept is: the combination of logical and encyclopedic information.
Furthermore, it is also clear how reference assignment can be established and
how ad hoc concepts can be derived.
This view, although not largely adopted within RT, may seem to follow from
a particular assumption in RT. Although the atomic account presented earlier is
strongly defended in RT, the concept that a lexical entry is associated with is often

CONCEPT
atomic

Lexical Entry Logical Entry Encyclopedic Entry

lexical semantics

Figure 3.5 Logical and encyclopedic entries as conceptual content

 3.1 Concepts and Ad Hoc Concepts in RT 89

CONCEPT

Lexical Entry Logical Entry Encyclopedic Entry

lexical semantics

Figure 3.6 Logical and encyclopedic entries as conceptual content (2)

described simply as an address in memory, or a point of access, that enables us to

retrieve the information stored in the different entries (represented in Figure 3.6).
[A concept] appears as an address in memory, a heading under which various types of
information can be stored and retrieved. (Sperber and Wilson, 1995: 86)
In RT, concepts are psychological objects and each consists of a label or address.
(Romero and Soria, 2010: 22)
The assumption is that a concept is a kind of ‘address’ in memory which provides access
to three kinds of ‘entry’. (Clark, 2013a: 244)
The conceptual address corresponds to the form that a concept takes in
thought, while the information provided by the different entries constitutes
the content of this very concept: “the distinction between address and entry is
a distinction between form and content” (Sperber and Wilson, 1995: 92). As
mentioned already, the lexical entry of a concept provides the linguistic coun-
terpart used to express the concept (i.e. a specific word/sign), while the logical
and encyclopedic entries can be understood here as specifying the actual
content of the concept, some aspects of it being more central and stable than
others.
Few relevance theorists adhere to this view, yet some have put forward very
similar hypotheses. Before looking at these proposals, it is worth briefly
discussing the limits of such an account of conceptual content. The main
limit of this view corresponds very closely to the limit identified for the
previous view with respect to the distinction between logical and encyclopedic
entries. It is unclear exactly in what sense it is necessary to distinguish between
logical and encyclopedic information, since this distinction may not actually
reflect a cognitive reality. I will not repeat the arguments here (see page 86), but
it is preferable simply to get rid of this distinction and to argue instead that there
is simply conceptual content. As a result, a conceptual address does not give
access to three but only to two types of entry: its linguistic form and its content.
Of course, the difficulty in this case is to determine the nature of this content
and whether it is more of the logical type or the encyclopedic type, as illustrated
in Figure 3.7.
90 3 Redefining Lexical Semantics and Pragmatics

CONCEPT

Lexical Entry ?

lexical semantics

Figure 3.7 Conceptual content?

The answer to this question has to be encyclopedic knowledge. In the

previous section, a number of arguments were presented against the use of
inference rules to explain the nature of conceptual content. Inferential rules are
hard to distinguish from other (non-deductive) inferential processes, they
cannot easily account for the flexible nature of conceptual structures and
therefore fail to fully define a concept. Encyclopedic knowledge does not
face the same limits. First, it is not inferential in nature and thus can be
distinguished from particular processes of inference involved during the com-
prehension phase. In addition, provided it has the right representational format
(e.g. prototype theory), it can also account for the flexible nature of concepts
and, therefore, fully define them (see Section 3.2). Furthermore, that concep-
tual content is encyclopedic in nature also seems to follow from its usage-based
origin. It is rather clear when one adopts a usage-based approach to language
and communication (which is the case in RT) that one primarily conceptualizes
the world through one’s experience with it, and in particular through the
repeated exposure to particular pieces of encyclopedic information which are
then organized in one’s mind. This is the reason why in CxG, as in cognitive
linguistics more generally, concepts are primarily described in encyclopedic
terms.
It is interesting to note that the perspective on concepts just described, solely
in encyclopedic terms, can sometimes be found in the relevance-theoretic
literature. Having carefully considered the different options she introduces,
Groefsema (2007) concludes that the only solution to the challenge she identi-
fies is to consider that it is the encyclopedic entry of a concept that makes up its
content (Groefsema, 2007: 155). This is also a view which can be found in the
work of Anne Reboul. She explicitly argues, for instance, that “the distinction
between word and concept is presumably nearer to that between lexical and
encyclopedic knowledge than any other distinction” (Reboul, 2000: 60).58 It
also seems to be the underlying assumptions of Wilson and Sperber (2004)
when they argue that “the encoded conceptual address is merely a point of
access to an ordered array of encyclopedic assumptions from which the hearer
is expected to select in constructing a satisfactory overall interpretation”
58
See also Assimakopoulos (2008).
 3.1 Concepts and Ad Hoc Concepts in RT 91

CONCEPT

Lexical Entry Encyclopedic Entry

lexical semantics

Figure 3.8 Concepts and encyclopedic content

(Wilson and Sperber, 2004: 619). This enables me to represent concepts as

shown in Figure 3.8.
Already, it is worth noting that this perspective is quite reminiscent of
the way in which CxG defines constructions: form–meaning pairings.
Beyond this resemblance, it is interesting to note that this view faces
none of the issues that the previous account does.59 In the next section,
I will try to show that this approach, which is very similar to that adopted
in CxG, provides the best alternative to define lexical semantics. Before
doing so, I would like to make a final observation concerning the nature of
this encyclopedic entry.
As mentioned several times already, RT provides a very convincing,
explicit and tangible explanation of how meaning is determined in context
and, concurrently, is able to explain the origin of polysemy. Unfortunately,
as pointed out by Lemmens (2017), given that the encyclopedic entry of
a concept is only considered to be a “grab bag” of knowledge, it is unclear
exactly how new interpretations can affect these conceptual structures in
the long term and, therefore, how polysemy is assumed to be represented
in one’s mind. Specifically, he convincingly argues that it is “unclear how
different modulations of one and the same lexical item will be

59
Note that, in this representation, the lexical entry is still considered not to be radically distinct
from the concept to which it is attached, but is also part of the knowledge that one has about
a concept. That is, here, lexical knowledge is conceptual knowledge. There is a debate whether
or not lexical knowledge and conceptual knowledge should be distinguished (e.g. Murphy
(2000), and references cited therein). This issue will not be addressed here. Nevertheless, it is
worth noting that the view represented in Figure 3.8 is not unfamiliar both in RT and in CxG.
Relevance Theory, in spite of its Chomskyan approach to language, assumes that concepts are
made up of three entries, one of which is the lexical entry. In CxG, as in cognitive linguistics
more generally, it also follows from the non-modular, usage-based approach to language that
lexical knowledge is necessarily part of one’s conceptual knowledge. Paradis (2003: 265) very
explicitly says that:
The conventionalized routines of linguistic expression may be referred to as the lexicon.
However, such a lexicon is not an encapsulated component. On the contrary, it is inseparable
from conceptual knowledge and cognitive abilities in general. Lexical items evoke and are
evoked by concepts, which involve all kinds of meaning specification that we use in various
usage-events. I see no reason for postulating a separate non-conceptual type of lexical
knowledge.
92 3 Redefining Lexical Semantics and Pragmatics

represented” (Lemmens, 2017: 104). Lemmens naturally recognizes that,

when the encyclopedic entry is viewed as being content-constitutive, then
the relevance-theoretic approach “is but one step away from being fully
compatible with a cognitive view” (2017: 102). Lemmens’ comment here
is particularly relevant since it shows that arguing that conceptual know-
ledge is encyclopedic in nature does not suffice; one also needs to specify
the particular way in which this information is structured. In the next
section, we will see that the perspective adopted in CxG provides such
a structure.

3.2 Lexical Semantics: A Structured Body of Encyclopedic

Knowledge
The previous section shows the problem involved in pinning down the content
of a concept (and, as a consequence, the meaning of lexical concepts) in RT.
Following Groefsema (2007), it was shown that there are at least three views
that emerge from the relevance-theoretic literature, one of which stands out
particularly with respect to the others (the atomic view). The strengths and
weaknesses of each of those views were presented in turn. Eventually, it was
suggested that the information stored in the encyclopedic entry is the best
candidate for what constitutes lexical ‘meaning’. At the theoretical level it is
the view that best fits the other underlying assumptions of the theory (namely,
how the underdeterminacy thesis, the notion of explicatures, and the derivation
of ad hoc concepts have been formulated). From a more descriptive level, and
as far as meaning is concerned, this perspective does not face many of the
challenges that the other views encounter. As mentioned several times already,
a relatively similar view is adopted in CxG which, given its usage-based
approach, also views meaning in terms of encyclopedic knowledge. In this
section, I will briefly point out some of the advantages of adopting such
a perspective generally, as well as discuss the ways in which the view adopted
by constructionists can provide further insights into the difficult question that
defining lexical semantics represents. It is on this basis that the notion of lexical
pragmatics will be discussed in Section 3.4.
In order to discuss the advantages of the CxG approach, I will look in turn at
all of the issues and difficulties that were identified in the previous section and
show that it can handle most of them. In particular, I will focus on the way that
encyclopedic knowledge is assumed to be structured in CxG and I will argue
that this approach provides the required, solid basis to explain polysemy (and
language change more generally).
It is traditional when discussing questions of lexical meaning, at least in
philosophy, also to address the question of reference. In Section 3.1.1.1, it was
shown that this question can sometimes represent a challenge depending on the
 3.2 Lexical Semantics 93

way one defines meaning. In order to be able to establish the right reference,
one necessarily needs to possess some internal conceptual content prior to
reference. The perspective adopted here, according to which lexical meaning is
to be defined in encyclopedic terms, precisely enables reference. This know-
ledge is internally stored in the minds of speakers and can be used to establish
reference to a specific item/person in context. This content does not constitute
the reference itself but forms the basis from which reference is possible. In this
case, for instance, the reason why the concept cat is used to refer to cats simply
follows from what we know about cats and which enables us to refer to cats in
the real world.
At the same time, unlike the different views presented earlier, this content is
not considered to constitute the necessary and sufficient conditions that
a concept gives access to and that are systematically used when establishing
reference. That is, unlike an atomic concept or inferential rules, encyclopedic
content is not taken to be necessarily and systematically true of that concept in
all contexts and, therefore, is not used only to refer to items that share exactly
the same properties (e.g. the concept bird, Section 3.1.2, can be used to refer
both to eagles and ostriches, although the property ‘fly’ applies only to eagles
and not to ostriches). This is due to the dynamic nature and graded structure of
encyclopedic knowledge which individuals gradually acquire from the differ-
ent contexts in which a concept occurs. As mentioned in Section 2.1.2.2, from
a usage-based approach such as CxG, the conceptual structures that one has in
mind emerge from one’s experience with these concepts in the world. This
experience involves a categorization process whereby new uses of a concept
systematically affect the mental representation of that concept and new infor-
mation is stored alongside old information. This process does not result in
a grab bag of information, but new information is systematically placed within
a conceptual network. This network is organized around a prototype, which
contains the most salient features of a concept, and forms different bundles of
knowledge (i.e. different senses) which are organized via analogy on the basis
of a judgment of similarity. (The main difference between the radial network
and the schematic network introduced in Section 2.1.2.2 mostly concerns the
extent to which individuals actually abstract away from their experience.)
A result of this process of categorization is that the different “features” that
a concept makes accessible need not be necessarily activated across contexts
but only get activated in the relevant contexts. That is, the conceptual network
is a relatively flexible mental object that speakers and hearers can exploit in
different ways. In this scenario, concepts do not make particular reference
necessary (contra Fodor), but a given reference (and with it its truth values)
is solely determined in a specific context by a particular speaker (and therefore
has to be retrieved by the hearer).
94 3 Redefining Lexical Semantics and Pragmatics

This last observation provides a nice transition to the next advantage of

holding an encyclopedic view of conceptual content. As mentioned above, if
one considers concepts to be atomic, to consist of inferential rules or simply to
be grab bags of knowledge, then it is unclear how different modulations can
affect the original concept from which they are derived (and therefore, it is
unclear how RT can possibly explain language change).60 Considering instead
that concepts are structured networks of acquired knowledge, this is no longer
an issue. The particular way in which (old and new) information is exploited
within a particular context directly impacts the conceptual network to which
those pieces of information relate (either by entrenching an already existing
bundle of knowledge, i.e. sense, or by creating a new one). And this perspec-
tive, together with strong pragmatic principles (such as those proposed in RT),
can explain how language change actually works. I will come back to lexical
pragmatics later.
In addition, and in direct relation to the previous point, this approach can also
make sense of the (much-discussed) process of ad hoc concept creation. First of
all, once we assume that individuals store conceptual networks, it then becomes
clear in what sense we manage to derive narrower and/or broader concepts in
different contexts. (Although, as we will see in Section 3.4, the terms narrow-
ing and broadening might be slightly inappropriate.) Indeed, the conceptual
network provides the necessary structure on the basis of which narrowing/
broadening can occur.61 There is conceptual narrowing when the information
conveyed by a particular concept is more specific than that originally provided
by the stored conceptual network; and there is conceptual broadening when the
information provided by a concept is less specific than the information found in
the original network. This is particularly interesting since, as mentioned above,
this process also directly leaves a trace in the conceptual network, and the
repeated derivation of a given ad hoc concept will lead to its entrenchment (and
conventionalization) in the conceptual network from which it is originally
derived. In Section 3.4, I will come back to the pragmatic process which is
involved in the derivation of ad hoc concepts and how it fits in with the picture
of lexical semantics presented here. As mentioned in the previous chapter, the
pragmatic principles involved during meaning adjustments are often omitted in
the cognitive linguistics literature, and it is not clear exactly what is meant by

60
Note that in RT, although it is assumed that assumptions may be strengthened or contradicted in
context (p. 37), the structure of encyclopedic knowledge is not addressed since they generally
assume that concepts are atomic and that the encyclopedic entry plays only a secondary role.
61
It is interesting to note, as mentioned several times already, that Barsalou himself (a standard
reference in RT) actually develops his notion of “ad hoc categories” on the assumption that they
are structured bodies of knowledge (and not atoms/inferential rules). So this perspective is also
consistent with the original view from which the notion of ad hoc concepts was introduced in
RT. (This is true to the extent that Barsalou only talks about narrowing processes. This will be
discussed in Section 3.4.)
 3.2 Lexical Semantics 95

the words context and pragmatics. Nonetheless, it is important to point out that,
regardless of how one defines pragmatics, it is largely accepted and argued
within cognitive frameworks such as CxG that meaning (and therefore the
conceptual networks that one stores) is not conceived of as fixed items that one
simply invokes each time a specific linguistic element is used. It is a central
assumption in cognitive linguistics that the meaning of a word is constantly
negotiated and it is argued, like in RT, to “emerge and develop in discourse”
(Langacker, 2008: 30). That is, as mentioned in Section 2.1.2.2, a crucial
commitment in cognitive frameworks is that understanding an utterance does
not simply consist in unpacking information but rather involves a systematic
process of meaning construction (see, for instance, Taylor, Cuyckens and
Dirven, 2003; Croft and Cruse, 2004; Evans, 2006, 2009; Evans and Green,
2006; Evans, Bergen and Zinken, 2007; Radden et al., 2007; Langacker, 2008;
Geeraerts, 2016; Taylor, 2017; Schmid, 2020, and references cited therein).
The next difficulty is of course to understand exactly how this meaning-
construction process is actually carried out, since cognitive linguists often
fail to make explicit the pragmatic principles involved (see Section 2.1.2.2).
We will see that RT provides very interesting insights into the matter.
Nevertheless, it is not because one argues that concepts are encyclopedic in
nature that one therefore abandons the idea that meaning is primarily context-
ually derived. Indeed, quite the opposite is true. As Lemmens (2017: 106)
points out, “no one will deny the importance of contextual modulation, but this
does not provide evidence that meaning should not, or cannot, be encyclopae-
dic.” Although this type of meaning is quite rich, it remains to be exploited and
negotiated by individuals in context. How exactly this is carried out will be
explained more fully later in this chapter, the aim of which is to show that
although neither of the two theories provides a full account of lexical seman-
tics–pragmatics, their integration precisely enables one to achieve greater
descriptive accuracy.
As a matter of fact, the richness of conceptual content constitutes the last
point that I want to address in this section. When one views concepts as being
primarily encyclopedic in nature given that they result from one’s experience,
then one faces the necessary conclusion that concepts must be internally quite
rich (cf. Lemmens, 2017: 106; Hogeweg and Vicente, 2020). That is, concepts
are not decontextualized, abstract objects but are filled with contextual infor-
mation. Two consequences directly follow from this observation. First of all,
this richness can explain why encoded polysemy is considered to be the norm in
frameworks such as CxG (and why it is possible in the first place). In this case,
one necessarily has to organize one’s knowledge, and the different nodes of the
mental network that one derives represent the different senses of the lexical
item associated with that concept. This view is naturally compatible with the
perspective adopted in RT. Carston (2016a), for instance, very explicitly argues
96 3 Redefining Lexical Semantics and Pragmatics

that “polysemy very often has its basis in pragmatics. . . . Lexical meaning
evolves and very often it is a (recurrent) pragmatic inference that lies at the root
of new meanings” (Carston, 2016a: 621). To the best of my knowledge, no (or
few) cognitive linguists would dispute Carston’s claim. However, unlike the
type of atomic semantics advocated by Carston, it is interesting to notice that
only an encyclopedic view of conceptual content enables us to capture exactly
how pragmatics can impact on the mental representation, as discussed above,
and in particular how one can mentally represent the link between different
modulations of the same concept and therefore make (semantic) polysemy
possible. Relevance theorists are fully aware of (semantic) polysemy. Carston
(2002a: 219), however, rightly suggests that postulating polysemy is not
enough; one must also explain how the meaning of polysemous items is
actually used and exploited in different contexts. This is an important question
which will be addressed in the next sections. Before doing so, I want to discuss
very briefly another consequence of assuming rich conceptual knowledge. The
account of ad hoc concepts discussed in RT primarily rests on the assumption
that the words we use largely fail to convey the speaker’s intended interpret-
ation (i.e. the underdeterminacy thesis). Assuming that concepts are essentially
encyclopedic and, therefore, are rich representations, one could dispute the
necessity to postulate the underdeterminacy thesis exactly as it is presented in
RT (and strongly defended by Robyn Carston). Indeed, do the words we use
always underdetermine what we want to communicate? Instead, it might also
be appropriate to view the systematic derivation of ad hoc concepts (i.e.
meaning construction) as resulting from some form of indeterminacy. Indeed,
the assumption that pragmatics functions exclusively to complete the meaning
of utterances that semantics fails to provide is not satisfactory. (Note that
relevance theorists have never suggested that this is the case; quite the contrary
since they argue for the systematic derivation of ad hoc concepts, see next
section.) Rather, given the picture presented above in terms of meaning con-
struction, semantics and pragmatics are inextricably intertwined. Yet the notion
of underdeterminacy fails to capture this aspect of utterance interpretation.
First, as mentioned before, it strongly suggests that pragmatics only serves to
compensate for defective semantics. Yet it does not. Furthermore, it also
suggests that the content provided by the words we use is quite poor. Again,
as mentioned above, it is not. Rather, pragmatics and semantics are simultan-
eously exploited in context to derive a relevant interpretation. And in that
sense, as far as polysemy is concerned, it seems preferable to argue that
semantics does not (necessarily) underdetermine what a speaker wants to
communicate but rather is indeterminate with respect to their intentions. This
move is, of course, not meant to diminish the role of pragmatics during the
process of utterance interpretation. It simply consists in giving back to
 3.3 Concepts and Literalness 97

semantics more room in a theory of comprehension than is often given in RT.

This will be discussed more fully in the next two sections.
The encyclopedic view of conceptual knowledge such as adopted in CxG
and defended here faces a major challenge: that of understanding exactly how
this content is exploited in context, i.e. understanding in what sense it can fit
with an account of lexical pragmatics and whether semantics and pragmatics
are necessarily to be distinguished. This issue will be addressed in the next two
sections. The conclusion to this section is that the encyclopedic view of
conceptual content nicely resolves a number of issues that the other perspec-
tives (discussed in the previous sections) fail to answer. These issues are
primarily theoretical in nature. Moreover, the encyclopedic view nicely ties
in with the accounts developed in RT and CxG. Beyond its theoretical
adequacy, the encyclopedic view of concept also provides a psychologically
sound assumption about concepts and is also consistent with most of the
experimental research carried out in cognitive science (see, for instance,
Barsalou, 2012, 2016, and references cited therein).

3.3 Concepts and Literalness: Issues of Representation

or Computation?
The aim of this chapter is to provide a better understanding of lexical semantics
and pragmatics. The first part of this chapter was primarily concerned with
questions relating to lexical semantics. It was eventually suggested that the
content of lexical items is best described in usage-based, encyclopedic terms.
This view seems to be not only descriptively accurate, but it is also compatible
with the views on meaning developed in both RT and CxG. The aim now is to
try and position this perspective on meaning in the larger context of utterance
comprehension and to understand more specifically how lexical pragmatics
operates. This might seem a relatively straightforward and easy task, especially
given the somewhat shared usage-based approach to ‘meaning construction’
adopted within both RT and CxG. However, as we will see below, this is not
straightforward.
Understanding the nature of concepts and describing the manner in which
they are used are, of course, two closely related issues. Precisely at the interface
between lexical semantics and pragmatics, however, comes another issue that
I have been careful not to mention in the first part of this chapter. It is only once
this question has been addressed that I will be able to detail exactly in what
sense lexical pragmatics is understood to operate.
As mentioned in the previous chapter, the account of ad hoc concepts
presented in RT was originally developed on the basis of two observations.
There is, of course, the underlying assumption captured by the underdetermi-
nacy thesis that the content of the words we use often fails to fully determine
98 3 Redefining Lexical Semantics and Pragmatics

what we are actually trying to communicate. But more importantly, as

Assimakopoulos (2012: 17) points out, the account of ad hoc concepts devel-
oped in RT primarily rests on the rejection of the “encoded first” hypothesis
(see Section 2.2.3.1). That is, in accordance with the work of Barsalou (and
psycholinguists more generally), relevance theorists assume that individ-
uals do not first test for relevance the encoded concept (or concepts) that
a lexical item gives access to and then modulate this concept in context if it
is not relevant enough; instead they systematically derive ad hoc concepts
(i.e. systematically reconstruct a context-specific concept) across contexts.
The same view is also largely adopted within CxG, in which the systematic
process of meaning construction is often discussed. Within RT, however, it
has recently been argued that this assumption somehow raises a dilemma
concerning the nature of concepts. As we will see in Section 3.4, this does
not have to be an issue, and it is not considered to be one in cognitive
linguistics. The aim of this section, however, is to try and understand
exactly what this issue consists of and how it has been dealt with
within RT.
The issue with the “non-encoded-first” hypothesis defended in RT has in
particular been discussed by Deirdre Wilson and Robyn Carston:
Why should a hearer using the relevance-theoretic comprehension heuristic not simply
test the encoded (‘literal’) meaning first? What could be easier than plugging the
encoded concept into the proposition expressed, and adjusting it only if the resulting
interpretation fails to satisfy expectations of relevance? In other words, what is there to
prevent the encoded concept being not only activated, but also deployed? (Wilson,
2011: 12)
However, the worry is that, given that the relevance-based comprehension heuristic
explicitly licenses hearers to follow a path of least effort in accessing and testing
interpretations for relevance, it seems natural to suppose that the encoded concept,
which is made instantly available by the word form, would be tried first and only
pragmatically adjusted if it didn’t meet the required standards of relevance. (Carston,
2013: 195)
In other words, it seems more relevant (in the technical sense) to test the
encoded concept for relevance before trying to derive an ad hoc concept. The
question here is to know whether arguing both for the relevance-guided
comprehension heuristics and against the “encoded-first” hypothesis does not
lead to a theoretical contradiction. This is particularly true when one adopts, as
I do in this book, a relatively rich type of lexical semantics. In Section 3.4, I will
argue that the answer to this question does not concern lexical semantics but
lexical pragmatics and that there is no necessary contradiction. Both Wilson
and Carston, however, have treated this problem assuming that it concerns
lexical semantics directly rather than lexical pragmatics, and that one therefore
 3.3 Concepts and Literalness 99

needs to deal with this contradiction. I will examine their views in the rest of
this section.62

3.3.1 Deirdre Wilson’s (2011, 2016) Procedural Account

Wilson (2011) is perhaps the first to have directly discussed the contradiction in
adopting the relevance heuristics (follow a path of least effort) and rejecting the
“encoded first” hypothesis. She puts forward the following solution. According
to her, the reason concepts are not directly accessed but ad hoc concepts are
systematically derived is to be found at the level of lexical semantics (i.e. the
level of the encoded meaning of a word). She argues that the systematicity
involved in the derivation of ad hoc concepts might reflect much more complex
semantics than previously assumed. Specifically, she argues that, in addition to
being associated with a particular concept, lexemes might automatically “trig-
ger a procedure for constructing an ad hoc concept on the basis of the encoded
[one]” (Wilson, 2011: 17). In order to explain the paradox, Wilson thus
suggests that lexical words are semantic hybrids that both activate a concept
and trigger a procedure to construct an ad hoc concept. (Procedures, as men-
tioned in the previous chapter, consist of specific instructions for the processing
of conceptual information which are meant to guide the hearer towards (opti-
mal) relevance.) In this case, it is clear how Wilson gets rid of the issue she
identifies in the first place. By virtue of encoding an instruction to construct an
ad hoc concept, lexemes can never simply give access to the encoded concept.
We observe the instruction and do so by following a path of least effort.
Paradox resolved.
According to Wilson (2011, 2016), an account in procedural terms provides
an elegant explanation both for the theoretical contradiction identified earlier in
this chapter and for the underpinnings of lexical pragmatics more generally. For
a number of reasons, however, I share Carston’s (2013) skepticism about this
proposal. First, an account in procedural terms makes the derivation of ad hoc
concepts not only systematic but also compulsory. Yet it is sometimes argued in
RT, as Carston (2013: 196) points out, that “the encoded concept can, on
occasion, be the concept communicated (Sperber and Wilson, 1998, 2008).”
If the derivation of an ad hoc concept is viewed as obligatory, however, it is
unclear whether or not it is ever possible to reconstruct the encoded concept
(i.e. whether the procedure enables the recovery of the encoded concept).
Assuming it is possible, then Wilson needs to account for the observation
that reconstructing the original concept (arguably) takes more effort than
simply testing it as it is, which makes the overall interpretation less relevant
than it could have been (since the more processing effort, the less relevance).

62
Sections 3.3.1 and 3.3.2 were published in Leclercq (2022).
100 3 Redefining Lexical Semantics and Pragmatics

Assuming it is not possible to reconstruct the original concept, the challenge is

to understand how that concept (and the associated procedure) was acquired in
the first place and what exactly the function of that concept is, as well as what is
the relevance of storing a concept that is never actually entertained and
communicated by individuals. Second, this view also suggests that words
that encode a concept therefore all encode exactly the same procedure, namely
that of constructing an ad hoc concept. Yet, as Carston (2013) points out, this
tremendously weakens the approach to procedural meaning developed in RT.
Just like no two words encode exactly the same concept, it is implicitly
assumed in RT that no two words encode exactly the same procedure. Yet
this assumption is seriously challenged here. (One may argue, however, that
this need not directly be an issue for Wilson.) In fact, third, Wilson’s proposal is
all the more surprising since it assumes that all words are thus (at least partly)
procedural. Yet, there is growing consensus that procedural encoding is
a property of grammatical units of the language and not of lexical items (see
Section 4.2.2). Finally, the challenge with Wilson’s proposal also comes from
the observation that the task she attributes to a particular procedure is in RT
originally supposed to be taken care of by the relevance-guided comprehension
heuristics (Carston, 2013: 196; Escandell-Vidal, 2017: 88). That is, individuals
are said to adjust concepts in RT because of their expectations of relevance.
Adding a specific procedure is quite unnecessary since it is redundant with
respect to one of the central claims of the theory. Carston (2013: 193) in fact
argues that this move “seems like overkill.” For all these reasons, a different
solution to the paradox might be preferable.63

3.3.2 Robyn Carston’s (2013) Underspecific Content

In spite of disagreeing with Wilson’s proposal, Carston shares the concern that
rejecting the “encoded first” hypothesis is inconsistent with arguing for the
relevance-guided comprehension heuristics. Therefore, she puts forward an
alternative solution. Carston (2013: 196) suggests that, maybe, the reason
encoded concepts are never tested first (and then adjusted only when they do
not meet one’s expectations of relevance) simply follows from the fact that
words never actually encode full concepts but only conceptual schemas or
templates (i.e. underspecific schematic meanings).64 In order to recover the
63
Of course, this does not mean that the interpretation of lexical items never involves procedures.
Meaning is largely compositional, and I will in fact argue in Chapter 4 that the derivation of ad
hoc concepts is directly guided by the procedural function of the grammatical constructions in
which lexemes occur, thus sometimes giving rise to coercion effects. However, I reject the idea
that all lexical items themselves encode the same procedure of having to create an ad hoc
concept.
64
This is a suggestion that, for other reasons, she already made in Carston (2002a: 360). Her
solution thus comes across as slightly less post hoc than Wilson’s.
 3.3 Concepts and Literalness 101

full-fledged concepts intended by the speaker, these conceptual schemas thus

have to be contextually enriched. As in Wilson’s proposal, this perspective
makes the construction of an ad hoc concept necessary and hence explains why,
while following a path of least effort, encoded concepts are not tested first
(since there is no concept to start with; see below). Unlike Wilson’s proposal,
however, it has the advantage of not putting any additional burden on the
lexicon. Nonetheless, Carston’s proposal also faces a number of crucial issues.
Carston argues that her account is as explanatory as Wilson’s without sharing
any of its limitations. She argues, for instance, that, unlike Wilson’s account,
hers “does not entail an obligatory process that is sometimes unnecessary (as
when the encoded concept is the concept communicated)” (Carston, 2013:
197). Two comments can be made about this observation. First, it is not clear
in what sense her account does not require an obligatory process of concept
construction. By virtue of being underspecific, concept schemas necessarily
have to be enriched in context in order to arrive at a specific interpretation (i.e.
to derive a specific proposition). This process is therefore precisely required by
the type of semantics that Carston argues for. Second, she suggests that the
reason why the construction of an ad hoc concept in this account is not
necessary follows from the observation that the communicated concept might
be the one which is encoded. It is difficult to reconcile what seem like two
opposite hypotheses. On the one hand, she argues that words do not encode
concepts but concept schemas, while on the other, she argues that the commu-
nicated concept might be the encoded one. Yet either words encode full
concepts or concept schemas, but the advantage of concept schemas cannot
possibly be that they provide a full concept. In spite of what she might argue,
Carston’s account thus suffers from limitations similar to Wilson’s.
The proposal that Carston develops here once more quite strikingly illus-
trates the tension that there is in her own work in terms of how to define
concepts. If one assumes that words encode concept schemas, and not full-
fledged concepts, one necessarily drops the idea according to which concepts
are referential, atomic objects (a position, as mentioned before, Carston has
quite staunchly defended until very recently). This is not the only issue with
Carston’s proposal, however. There is at least one other critical theoretical
implication that needs to be discussed. The relevance-theoretic approach to the
semantics–pragmatics interface was developed on the assumption, called the
underdeterminacy thesis (Carston, 2002a: 19), that words alone do not suffice
to recover the speaker’s intended meaning and that, besides implicatures, much
inferential work is also needed at the explicit level of communication. Sperber
and Wilson (1995: 182) coined the term explicature precisely to capture the
hybrid nature (semantic and pragmatic) of explicit propositions. As
I understand it, though, the standard argument within relevance theory has
always consisted in highlighting some form of pragmatic underdeterminacy.
102 3 Redefining Lexical Semantics and Pragmatics

That is, the sentences we use do carry a specific meaning (which occurs in the
logical form of an utterance), and this meaning only has to be pragmatically
enriched (e.g. disambiguation, reference assignment, conceptual adjustment)
in order to derive the explicature. If one now assumes that words merely
encode concept schemas, however, then one necessarily has to postulate some
form of semantic underdeterminacy whereby language does not simply fail to
provide the speaker’s intended interpretation but altogether fails to provide
any meaning at all. This seems to be Carston’s underlying assumption when
she says that “while sentences encode thought/proposition templates, words
encode concept templates; it’s linguistic underdeterminacy all the way down”
(Carston, 2002a: 360; emphasis mine). However, this perspective is hardly
plausible. For one, such a view generally seems to undermine the relevance-
theoretic approach to the semantics–pragmatics interface and in particular the
notion of explicatures. Indeed, from this perspective, explicatures are essen-
tially pragmatic in nature, which means that they can never truly be explicit
(cf. Sperber and Wilson, 1995: 182), which therefore adds confusion as to
their role and status in utterance comprehension (cf. discussion in Borg,
2016). As will become clear in Section 3.4, I contend that individuals do
have rather rich conceptual knowledge. Within relevance theory, Wilson
(2011) also questions the plausibility of such an underspecification account.
The idea that some words might not encode full-fledged concepts but simply
act as pointers for the recovery of conceptual content can be found in Sperber
and Wilson’s (1998) discussion of pro-concepts. This notion (which is more
of an assumption) only applies to a specific set of words, however (e.g.
pronouns, gradable adjectives, etc.), and it is not Sperber and Wilson’s
intention to argue that all words encode such pro-concepts. Wilson specific-
ally points out that “while the assumption that some words encode pro-
concepts is quite plausible, the idea that all of them do is unlikely” (Wilson,
2011: 16; see also Carston, 2012: 619). Carston in fact identifies some of the
limitations of her proposal herself:
Even if these abstract non-semantic lexical meanings could be elucidated, it is
entirely unclear what role they would play in the account of language meaning and
use. On the relevance-based pragmatic account of how ad hoc concepts/senses are
contextually constructed in the process of utterance interpretation, the real work is
done by the encyclopaedic information associated with a concept (a semantic
entity) and there is no further constraining or guiding role to be played by
a schematic (non-semantic) meaning. Nor does the schema appear to play any
role in a child’s acquisition of word meaning; in fact, the child’s first “meanings”
for a word are the (fully semantic) concepts/senses grasped in communication, so
the abstract (non-semantic) meaning could only be acquired subsequently by some
process of induction. Even supposing we could give an account of how this is
done, what would be missing is an explanation of why it would be done, what
purpose it would serve. (Carston, 2016b: 158)
 3.3 Concepts and Literalness 103

There are at least two points in this quote that are worth commenting upon.
First, Carston argues that the reason concepts are probably not schematic
comes from the observation that these schemas would have no particular role
in the comprehension procedure since it is the information stored in the
encyclopedic entry that constrains the derivation of ad hoc concepts. When
saying this, it is interesting to note that Carston once more gives encyclopedic
information a central role in (linguistic) communication. Although it is not her
intention, this view is fully compatible with the encyclopedic approach to
lexical semantics introduced previously. From this perspective, it is indeed
unclear what could possibly motivate the necessity of storing a single (and
independent, here) schematic meaning as well as how this meaning might be
used (see next section). The most convincing argument against meaning sche-
maticism, however, comes from the second part of the quote. Carston rightly
points out that the main difficulty is to understand exactly how these schemas
might be acquired. These schemas can only be acquired via a gradual process of
abstraction on the basis of the full-fledged concepts that one directly accesses in
context. Yet the necessity for such a level of abstraction is unclear and seems
rather counterintuitive (in the sense of less relevant, in the technical sense of the
term). Abstracting away such a schematic meaning forces us to derive systemat-
ically a specific ad hoc concept in context that we might otherwise store as such
and access directly. Intuitively, it could be more economical to store and organize
these concepts directly in one’s mind, even if some abstraction is involved (see,
for instance, footnote 14 (Chapter 2) on exemplar-based and prototype models),
rather than to abstract away from these concepts to such an extent that one may
not even need this schematic meaning during comprehension.
Carston thus concludes that the underspecification hypothesis needs to be
dropped (see also Carston, 2019, 2021). While I fully support this move, it
nonetheless raises the question of whether and how Carston still intends to
explain the theoretical paradox that her underspecification account was meant
to resolve in the first place: if words do have specific meanings attached to
them, then why aren’t these tested first for relevance? Carston sketches an
alternative approach:
This requires making a distinction between the kind of lexicon that features in
a narrowly construed I-language, with its focus on syntactic computations and con-
straints, and the lexicon of the broader public language system, which is a repository of
communicative devices whose conceptual contents are what the inferential pragmatic
system operates on. In the narrow I-lexicon, the words (or roots) listed have no meaning,
conceptual or schematic, while in the C-lexicon of the broader communicational
language system, words are stored with their polysemy complexes (bundles of senses/
concepts that have become conventionally associated with a word and perhaps others
that are not yet fully established as stable senses). (Carston, 2016b: 159)
104 3 Redefining Lexical Semantics and Pragmatics

Carston, however, does not develop this account any further; the information in
the quote only contains a basic hypothesis and is not yet developed into a full-
fledged theory.65 Unfortunately, it is not clear exactly in what sense distin-
guishing between I- and C-lexicon might help us deal with the issue identified
above. First of all, it is unclear what is meant by polysemy complexes and
bundles of senses/concepts. As mentioned several times already, there is quite
a lot of tension in Carston’s work as to exactly what concepts are. The termin-
ology used, e.g. “bundles of senses,” is often found in the literature on proto-
types, yet this is most likely not the perspective endorsed by Carston.
Importantly, placing the conceptual network at a different level of representa-
tion simply pushes the issue to a different level of analysis but does not
necessarily solve it. This is particularly true because Carston argues that it is
the C-lexicon that “provides input to the pragmatic processes of relevance-
based comprehension” (Carston, 2019: 157). That is, it remains a challenge to
understand why we should still systematically build an ad hoc concept and not
try and test first for relevance any of the stored senses of the C-lexicon.

3.3.3 Concepts and Literalness: Issues of Computation

I have argued in the previous sections that adopting a schematic view of meaning
is as undesirable as Wilson’s procedural account, and Carston herself recognizes
that this perspective is somewhat problematic. However, this means that we are
left with no specific explanation for the apparent contradiction identified earlier
on (namely, that of arguing for the relevance-based comprehension heuristics
while at the same time arguing against the “encoded first” hypothesis). Although
Carston’s (2013, 2016b) proposals raise a number of issues, she asks important
questions. In order to account for the dilemma identified by Wilson (2011),
Carston (2013) brings into the discussion experimental work by psycholinguists
so as to provide an explanation which is not only theoretically plausible within
RT but generally psychologically plausible and descriptively accurate. In par-
ticular, Carston refers to Steven Frisson (and colleagues), a psycholinguist whose
work precisely consists in looking at the processing of lexical items. The findings
of Frisson’s experiments seem to corroborate Carston’s claim that meaning is
underspecific (which then explains why ad hoc concepts are systematically
derived). In Carston (2016b), the argument is different. She looks at the same
data but this time she takes a different view and argues that meanings are not
underspecific. (In this case, however, we saw above that it is unclear how the
systematic derivation of ad hoc concepts is explained.) The results of these

65
In more recent work, Carston (2019, 2022) shows how the distinction between I- and C-lexicon
can be applied to issues in morphology (in particular in order to account for the use of cross-
categorical words). However, in those papers she does not address the issue discussed here.
 3.3 Concepts and Literalness 105

experiments will be reported on below. Then, in the next section, I will explain
how both the results of these experiments and the dilemma identified by Wilson
can be explained when adopting an encyclopedic view of lexical meaning.
The particular experiments that Carston refers to aim at a better understand-
ing of the processing of polysemous lexemes. (She explicitly refers to the work
of Frazier and Rayner, 1990; Frisson and Pickering, 2001; Pickering and
Frisson, 2001; Frisson, 2009.)66 Using eye-tracking methods, Frisson and his
colleagues have tried to pin down any differences between the processing of
polysemous words (which give access to distinct but related meanings) and that
of homonymous terms (which give access to unrelated meanings). As poly-
semy and homonymy give access to more than one interpretation, one might
expect that the same type of selection procedure may be involved in both cases.
The results of their experiments do not confirm this hypothesis, however.
Indeed, homonyms require significantly more processing time than polysem-
ous terms (which are processed much more like monosemous items). In
particular, it is shown that the different senses of polysemous items do not
compete in the way that the different meanings of homonyms do. While the
competing meanings of homonyms seem to be directly accessed, and therefore
need to be processed, this is not the case for the different senses of polysemous
terms. When interpreting the data, Frazier and Rayner (1990) argue that
polysemous terms provide only an immediate partial interpretation, i.e. some
form of common ground which can provide access to more specific senses in
context. In a similar way, Frisson and Pickering argue that these results provide
support for what they call the “underspecified account” (Pickering and Frisson,
2001: 567). In this case, polysemous lexemes are argued to give access not to
the different senses they can be used to express but to an underspecific meaning
which forms the basis from which the different senses can be arrived at in
context (via some “homing in” process). This is the reason why Carston (2013)
naturally sees these results as providing evidence for her claim that words
might only encode underspecific meanings.
The following observations are particularly relevant given the aim of this
chapter. First of all, the results of these experiments provide yet further
evidence that the meanings of lexical items are not simply accessed by individ-
uals but are instead systematically built (or constructed) in context. This is
consistent with both the relevance-theoretic and the constructionist enterprises.
These experiments are also particularly interesting since they directly chal-
lenge the notion of lexical semantics. On the face of it, it could seem as though
individuals only store some underspecific meaning and not the rich type of
66
In her Ph.D. thesis The semantics and pragmatics of polysemy: A relevance theoretic account,
Ingrid Falkum (2011) also refers to a large set of experimental work on the processing of
polysemous items, most of which provides similar results to those discussed by Carston. See
Falkum (2011: 63) for specific references.
106 3 Redefining Lexical Semantics and Pragmatics

conceptual structures defended in Section 3.2. Carston (2013) specifically

follows this line of argumentation, which not only provides evidence for her
previous claim that words encode concept schemas (Carston, 2002a) but can
also explain why the literal interpretation of a lexeme is never tested first.
Carston (2016b), however, expresses strong doubts that individuals do indeed
only store such underspecific meanings. I share Carston’s latest skepticism, and
in the next section I will show that the results of these experiments may not be
incompatible with the view adopted here in terms of rich conceptual structures.
It is worth pointing out that this possibility is actually mentioned by those who
developed the experiments in the first place:
The underspecification model is in principle compatible with both [the radical mono-
semy and the radical polysemy] views, at least as long as underspecified meanings are
also part of a polysemous lexicon. (Frisson and Pickering, 2001: 166)
The idea of underspecification is perfectly compatible with a representation of all
individual senses at some level, though the claim made here is that these individual
senses do not play a role in the earliest stages of processing. (Frisson, 2009: 119)
The different experiments discussed by Carston therefore mostly provide
evidence not against rich types of lexical semantics but in favor of relatively
complex processes of lexical pragmatics. Exactly how the type of semantics
adopted in this book easily accommodates the different questions addressed in
this chapter is the focus of the next section.

3.4 Lexical Pragmatics: Lexically Regulated Saturation

The previous sections have highlighted the difficulty of identifying exactly
what constitutes lexical semantics and how this knowledge is actually put to
use in context. The aim of this section is to try and develop an approach to
lexical pragmatics which addresses each of the issues identified earlier. It will
have become clear that in this book I am largely arguing in favor of the type of
semantics adopted in CxG in terms of rich conceptual networks of encyclope-
dic knowledge (see Sections 3.1 and 3.2). The main challenge now is to
understand exactly how this type of semantics can be integrated into a larger
framework of lexical pragmatics and answer the different questions raised
so far.
First, it is essential for me to remind the reader that, in spite of being rich, the
type of semantics adopted in cognitive linguistics is not considered to provide
context-free packages that hearers systematically access and necessarily take to
be the speaker’s intended interpretation. Rather, the conceptual material that
a lexical item gives access to is by definition highly context-sensitive. As in RT,
the idea that interpreting an utterance does not simply consist in the selection of
a particular sense within a conceptual network but rather involves the
 3.4 Lexical Pragmatics 107

systematic construction of meaning (or conceptualization, as Langacker puts it)

forms one of the central tenets of cognitive linguistics. Adopting such a rich
type of semantics, therefore, should not be perceived as a rejection of pragmat-
ics. Quite the opposite, since cognitive linguists generally fail to see the
relevance of decontextualized semantics. By comparison, as Leclercq (2022)
points out, it is precisely because they adopt a rigid (‘dictionary’) view of
meaning that proponents of RT face issues such as those discussed in
Section 3.3. Yet numerous arguments have been given against such an
approach to meaning (Reddy, 1979; Haiman, 1980; Fillmore, 1982; Lakoff,
1987; Langacker, 1987; Murphy, 1991; Pustejovsky, 1995). What is true,
however, is that the pragmatic principles that govern the process of meaning
construction, and exactly how this rich type of semantics is actually exploited
in context, are largely lacking within the cognitive framework. There is, of
course, a considerable body of work on metaphors. Outside this area of
research, however, the domain of lexical pragmatics has generally been given
little attention in cognitive linguistics and, therefore, in CxG.67
Lexical semantics, within both RT and CxG, is therefore the starting point on
the basis of which lexical pragmatics can operate, and here is how it actually
happens. The conceptual network that a lexical item provides access to is
organized as a structure in which one has stored related bundles of knowledge
(i.e. different senses) around a specific prototype via an analogical process of
family resemblance. This network provides the basis for a process of lexically
regulated saturation.
The term lexically regulated saturation was introduced by Depraetere (2010,
2014) when discussing the interpretation of modal expressions in English. In
particular, she develops this notion to reconcile monosemous and polysemous
approaches to modal meaning. She herself argues in favor of a polysemous
analysis of modal verbs. Yet she also believes that understanding modal verbs is
more complex than simply selecting one of the stored senses. Rather, she
claims that the specific senses that modal verbs encode are entirely context-
dependent and that they are systematically reconstructed by individuals on the
basis of some context-independent layer of semantics. This independent layer
of semantics forms the “semantic core” (Depraetere, 2010: 83) of modal verbs
which needs to be contextually saturated by hearers in order to arrive at one of
the (contextually-dependent) encoded senses. In this sense, understanding
modal verbs is a saturation process, since the semantic cores they give access
to need to be contextually enriched to provide the hearer with a specific
interpretation.68 This saturation process is, however, lexically regulated since
67
I am of course talking about the non-conventional type of lexical pragmatics.
68
The term saturation was first introduced by François Recanati (1989: 304). He defines satur-
ation as a linguistically mandated pragmatic process, whereby an open variable needs to be
contextually determined (e.g. reference assignment for pronouns). In Recanati’s original
108 3 Redefining Lexical Semantics and Pragmatics

it is constrained not only by pragmatic principles but also by the contextually-

dependent layer of semantics, i.e. by the specific senses that belong to the
conceptual networks attached to modal verbs.
The aim of this section is to extend the notion of lexically regulated satur-
ation beyond the field of modality and to argue that this process is central to
lexical pragmatics more generally. In keeping with Leclercq (2023), I contend
that Depraetere’s original explanation remains too mechanistic, however, espe-
cially as it also seems to (implicitly) rely on a dictionary view of meaning. Not
only do I reject the idea of a stable “semantic core” that needs to be enriched,
I also condemn the view that speakers merely need to enrich this core into one
of a set of already established senses. This leaves too little – if any – room for
novel interpretations and for language variation and change. So what exactly is
involved in lexically regulated saturation? One key ingredient is given to us in
the cognitive linguistics literature. Metaphor (and metonymy) aside, there is
a tendency to discuss the notion of “meaning construction” (or conceptualiza-
tion) mostly in terms of activation (emphases mine):
An expression’s meaning presupposes an extensive, multifaceted conceptual substrate
that supports it, shapes it, and renders it coherent. Among the facets of this substrate are
(i) the conceptions evoked or created through the previous discourse; (ii) engagement in
the speech event itself, as part of the interlocutors’ social interaction; (iii) apprehension
of the physical, social, and cultural context; and (iv) any domains of knowledge that
might prove relevant. . . . Precisely what it means on a given occasion – which portions
of this encyclopedic knowledge are activated, and to what degree – depends on all the
factors cited. (Langacker, 2008: 42)

Any given word will provide a unique activation of part of its semantic potential on
every occasion of use. This follows as every utterance, and thus the resulting concep-
tion, is unique. (Evans, 2006: 501)
Making meaning for a word like antelope involves activating conceptual knowledge
about what antelopes are like. (Bergen, 2016: 143)
It is relatively clear from these quotes that (in cognitive linguistics) the
conceptualization process involved during the interpretation of a lexeme
mostly has to do with activating (to different degrees) parts of the conceptual
knowledge associated with that lexeme.69 Langacker mentions a few factors
that are meant to explain how this activation happens. To put it simply, the

account, we are dealing with a relatively “open-ended valuation” (Depraetere, 2014: 170), since
there is no predetermined set of values that one is expected to aim for. Although linguistically
mandated, this type of pragmatic enrichment may therefore go in any direction. Depraetere’s
notion of lexically regulated saturation differs precisely in this regard: the stored senses provide
such predetermined values that one should aim for when enriching the semantic core.
69
In relation to the notion of meaning construction, the words activate, activated and activation
are also highly frequent, for instance, both in Nick Riemer’s (2016) Routledge handbook of
semantics and in Geeraerts and Cuykens’ (2007) Oxford handbook of cognitive linguistics.
 3.4 Lexical Pragmatics 109

underlying idea is that different contexts (linguistic and non-linguistic) will

activate slightly different parts of our conceptual knowledge, and this motivates
the claim that each (contextual) conceptualization is therefore unique.
However, there are a number of issues with this approach. First, Langacker
does not really elaborate on the different contextual factors that he mentions,
and it is not clear in what sense these directly affect the activation process
which lies at the root of conceptualization. More importantly, it is unlikely that
the process of conceptualization (or, in relevance-theoretic terms, ad hoc
concept creation) can be reduced merely to some activation process. Suffice
it to look at language change to understand that the interpretation of a lexeme
cannot simply be reduced to activating parts of the conceptual knowledge
which it gives access to, for otherwise meaning would never actually change
(different parts of the same conceptual network systematically getting acti-
vated). In order for language change to be possible, more than conceptual
activation is required in the first place. Like relevance theorists, I assume that
communication is primarily intentional, and that interpreting an utterance
precisely involves taking into account the speaker’s intentions. An activation
account of conceptualization, however, cannot account for this important
factor. Instead, one needs pragmatic (i.e. non-logical, non-deductive) inference
to account for this observation (see Mazzarella (2013, 2014) and references
cited therein). Within cognitive linguistics (and CxG), however, pragmatic
inferences are seldom referred to in relation to lexical meaning.70 There are
basically two contexts in which the term inference is used in cognitive linguis-
tics. It is often used as an umbrella term for all kinds of implicated content, i.e.
for the type of content which occurs in implicatures. This is, for instance, the
case in Traugott and Dasher’s (2002) work on semantic change (and in particu-
lar grammaticalization), where the term inference seems to be equated with the
notion of implicatures only. Yet it is clear in frameworks like RT that pragmatic
inferences do not only concern implicatures. In addition, the notion of inference
is often referred to in the literature on metaphors and metonymy (e.g. Lakoff
and Johnson, 1980; Lakoff, 1987), where it is argued that lexemes that are used
metaphorically inherit most of the inferences that are associated with the
conceptual domain in which they are used. Yet the inferences referred to here
are more of the logical type (i.e. entailments, presuppositions) rather than
purely pragmatic ones. Generally speaking, the notion of pragmatic inference
is barely referred to in discussion on lexical meaning in cognitive linguistics. In
spite of this observation, cognitive linguists are undoubtedly sensitive to the
primarily communicative function of language and, therefore, of meaning. This

70
One only needs to look at how the word inference is used in Geeraerts and Cuykens’ (2007)
Oxford handbook of cognitive linguistics. (Talmy’s contribution remains a noticeable
exception.)
110 3 Redefining Lexical Semantics and Pragmatics

is very clear in Traugott and Dasher (2002), for instance, who mention the
following two quotes:
As pointed out by Bartsch: “semantic change is possible because the specific linguistic
norms, including semantic norms, are hypothetical norms, subordinated to the highest
norms of communication (the pragmatic aspect of change)” (1984: 393). (p. 25)
We agree wholeheartedly with [Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk’s (1985)] claim that mean-
ings have “a starting point in the conventional given, but in the course of ongoing
interaction meaning is negotiated, i.e. jointly and collaboratively constructed . . . This is
the setting of semantic variability and change” (Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, 1985:
300). (p. 26)
It is clear for Traugott and Dasher that meaning construction is primarily
a collaborative communicative activity rather than the simple recovery (or
activation) of conventional aspects of meaning. At least, this is what those
quotes strongly suggest. And this is exactly the view I am defending here:
meaning construction involves more than activating part of our conceptual
knowledge; it involves the recovery of the speaker’s intentions and, therefore, it
requires much pragmatic inference (see Rubio-Fernández (2008) for experi-
mental evidence).71
Very much in the spirit of Relevance Theory, I want to argue that lexically
regulated saturation consists of an inferential process. This process is lexically
regulated in the sense that, naturally, in different contexts, different parts of the
conceptual network associated with a lexeme will be activated (and some
features of a concept may be so central that they systematically get activated)
and will serve as the basis for the interpretation process. These most salient
features, unlike what cognitive linguists believe, only provide evidence about
what particular interpretation might have been intended by the speaker, how-
ever. That is, they only raise awareness of the type of meaning that might have
been intended by the speaker. (In this regard, I strongly endorse Bartsch’s
(1984: 393) idea that semantic norms are only “hypothetical norms,” see the
quote above.) It is then on the basis of those activated conceptual features that
the hearer will be able to construct a relevant interpretation.72 In that sense, it is
a saturation (i.e. mandatory, inferential) process, since there is no meaning

71
By no means do I intend to diminish the role of contextual conceptual activation. George Lakoff,
for instance, has done considerable work on the role of conceptual activation (and spreading
activation) in relation to metaphorical interpretations (see, for instance, Lakoff, 2014). The aim
here is only to argue that activation is but the starting point of the interpretation process and not
the only operation involved. Recently, Pritchard (2019) and Glynn (2022) argued that the
interpretation process involves analogical (i.e. similarity-based) reasoning. My account
includes, though is not limited to, analogical thinking.
72
In a sense, this is not radically different from the relevance-theoretic perspective in which the
information stored in the encyclopedic entry enables the recovery of ad hoc concepts. The main
difference here is that the encyclopedic information is considered to be content-constitutive.
 3.4 Lexical Pragmatics 111

available to the hearer as long as a specific interpretation has not been inferred.
Exactly how hearers manage to derive the speaker’s intended interpretation is
a question for which RT provides a very good answer: the relevance-theoretic
comprehension heuristics. That is, in accordance with their expectations of
relevance, individuals follow a step-by-step inferential procedure and test vari-
ous interpretations for relevance in order of accessibility. They do so by taking
into account many factors, such as the speaker’s intentions, extra-linguistic
factors, previous discourse contexts and stored assumptions. Once an interpret-
ation provides them with enough cognitive effects to justify the effort put into the
interpretation process, they can stop searching. The result of this saturation
process may then consist in an ad hoc concept/a conceptualization that has
already been derived previously in similar contexts. This will directly lead to
the entrenchment (and, potentially, conventionalization) of this particular sense
within a conceptual network. More importantly, this process may also lead to the
derivation of relatively new ad hoc concepts which lay the foundation for
semantic change. In this regard, the type of process discussed here does not
radically differ from the type of acquisition process and strategies that children
use when hearing a particular word for the first time. The main difference is that
whereas children rely a lot (and sometimes exclusively) on extra-linguistic
factors to derive the speaker’s intended interpretation, adults who already possess
large conceptual networks can rely on this knowledge much more and therefore
(probably) more easily derive the intended meaning. Like children, however,
adults also need to infer in context what the speaker actually intends to commu-
nicate, and which interpretation seems to be the most relevant. In other words,
conceptual networks are never taken as given, but only provide solid evidence for
the type of interpretation that the speaker may intend to communicate (and
storing conceptual networks might be relevant precisely in that sense, one of
their functions being that of facilitating the saturation process). Exactly how we
manage to recover (or try to recover) the speaker’s actual interpretation is, as
argued in RT, provided by the relevance-based comprehension heuristics.
The process of lexically regulated saturation can answer many of the issues
discussed previously in this chapter. First, it can account for the observation
that in spite of storing rich conceptual networks, the encoded sense(s) are not
tested first for relevance. Indeed, the different senses that a concept gives access
to are not context-free packages that one directly has access to and from which
one needs to select the most relevant sense. First of all, different parts of this
conceptual network will get activated in different contexts. In addition, depend-
ing on which part of the conceptual network actually gets activated, the hearer
will also have to construct a specific interpretation in accordance with their
expectations of relevance. That is, the contextual activation of part of this
network does not suffice to provide the speaker’s interpretation (although it is
most probably the case, here, that the most salient features that have been
112 3 Redefining Lexical Semantics and Pragmatics

activated will be tested first for relevance). This is consistent with most of the
work carried out in psycholinguistics, such as that of Barsalou (see previous
sections), according to whom the construction of meaning is a complex con-
text-sensitive process.73 Finally, the saturation process also nicely accounts for
the type of experimental evidence discussed by Carston (see Section 3.3.3),
according to which “individual senses do not play a role in the earliest stages of
processing” (Frisson, 2009: 119). Indeed, it will have become clear that words
do not directly provide any specific sense to the interpretation process per se.
In Section 3.5, I will make final observations concerning the nature of lexical
concepts and the type of pragmatic process involved during the interpretation of
lexemes. Before doing so, I would like to point out one last consequence that
follows from arguing for lexically regulated saturation. As mentioned in
Section 3.2, this view challenges the appropriateness of using both the terms
broadening and narrowing in relation to the creation of ad hoc concepts (see
Bardzokas, 2023 for a similar observation). Indeed, by virtue of inferentially
deriving a specific meaning on the basis of the activated conceptual features, only
the term conceptual narrowing seems appropriate. In fact, it is interesting to
note that the particular way in which Barsalou himself discusses the creation of
“ad hoc categories” mostly supports a narrowing perspective (e.g. Barsalou,
1987). Yet this crucially depends on what constitutes the focus of description, and
whether one is discussing the saturation process itself or the resulting ad hoc
concept. It is true that only the term narrowing seems appropriate to describe
lexically regulated saturation, since the eventual conceptualization will (most
often) be more specific than the set of activated conceptual features on the basis
of which it has been constructed. Looking at ad hoc concepts directly, however,
and comparing ad hoc concepts with the conceptual networks from which they
are derived, it seems that both the terms narrower and broader can be used
depending on how much their content actually overlaps. The use of these terms
simply depends on whether one is focusing on the saturation process itself (a
narrowing process), or on the resulting conceptualization (which can be
narrower or broader than the encoded concept).

3.5 Lexical Semantics and Pragmatics: Setting the Story Straight

The aim of this chapter was to try and define lexical semantics and lexical
pragmatics. In the first part, I strongly argued in favor of a usage-based,
encyclopedic approach to lexical semantics according to which individuals

73
The saturation account presented here therefore provides a nice alternative to Wilson’s proced-
ural approach, since it avoids positing additional semantic constraints. While I concur with
Wilson that the meaning of a lexical item is systematically (re)constructed in context, I do not
attribute this mechanism to some encoded instruction but assume that it follows logically from
the context-sensitive nature of the conceptual material associated with lexical items.
 3.5 Lexical Semantics and Pragmatics 113

store complex conceptual networks. The challenge is to determine in what

sense such a framework integrates lexical pragmatics. In the previous section,
I have tried to show that the perspective on lexical semantics adopted here
easily combines with the view of lexical pragmatics developed within RT,
given that the conceptual networks are not seen as context-independent units
but are instead highly context-sensitive. The aim of this section is twofold.
First, I will discuss a number of assumptions about semantics which might
account for the limits identified in both RT and CxG. Then, the aim is to show
that, in spite of rejecting the type of lexical semantics RT generally adopts, its
view of lexical pragmatics so far provides the best account of how people
manage to communicate effectively.
I have shown in Sections 3.1 and 3.3 that it is difficult to determine exactly
how concepts are defined within RT. Recently, the challenge of understanding
why stored concepts are not necessarily tested first for relevance has in
particular led to some rather peculiar hypotheses concerning the nature of
lexical semantics. Generally speaking, the more RT is developed, the more
room is given to pragmatics (at the cost of semantics). As explained in
Section 3.1.1.2, the commitment to referential atomism has pushed relevance
theorists into arguing for relatively poor semantics as opposed to increasingly
more pervasive pragmatics. By contrast, in spite of recognizing the central role
of usage and pragmatics in communication, there is a tendency in CxG to view
the rich (semantic) networks of conceptual knowledge associated with
a particular linguistic unit as sufficient: they provide most of the information
communicated by an individual. In this case, much room is given to lexical
semantics, and pragmatics is often marginalized to the level of implicatures.74
Although these two analyses are in direct opposition, their respective limits
originate from a relatively common assumption about the mental status of
semantics. There is a tendency in the two frameworks to assume (more or
less implicitly) that once a particular interpretation is entrenched and conven-
tionalized, and becomes part of our “semantic knowledge,” then this know-
ledge is almost necessarily consciously available to us. In RT, this seems to be
one of the underlying reasons why Carston so strongly defends Fodor’s atomic
account (Carston, 2010: 245). She also argues, for instance, that concepts are
available to consciousness and introspection (Carston, 2016b: 156). In CxG,
and in cognitive linguistics more generally, we have seen that the “meaning
construction” process involved during the interpretation of an utterance simply
consists in the activation of parts of the network, and that inference is only
involved on the implicit side of communication. As a result, semantics and
(non-conventional) pragmatics are often put in opposition, with pragmatics
simply bridging the gap left by semantics during the interpretation of an

74
In that regard, Hoffmann (2022) is a nice exception.
114 3 Redefining Lexical Semantics and Pragmatics

utterance. This explains why, given the respective aims of the two theories,
more or less room is given to lexical semantics. Relevance theorists explicitly
focus on pragmatics (and hence reduce the role of semantics), whereas con-
struction grammarians are primarily interested in linguistic knowledge (and
hence reduce the role of pragmatics). In this section, I briefly want to argue that
this (implicit) assumption is ill-founded. As mentioned in the previous section,
semantics and pragmatics need not be put on opposite ends of some compre-
hension scale. Rather, they are two tightly intertwined aspects of the compre-
hension procedure. Therefore, it is possible to argue both for a rich type of
semantics as well as for a ubiquitous type of pragmatics.
Many issues have been discussed in this chapter. If it has taught us anything,
it is no doubt the observation that what is traditionally referred to as the
semantics (or function) of a construction is not easily brought into conscious-
ness and is not readily available for introspection. This observation explains
why it is difficult to define exactly what lexical semantics is. For this very
reason, I want to argue that it is not appropriate to discuss the function of
constructions (i.e. lexemes, or larger patterns) in terms of knowledge. That is,
the term knowledge can too easily be interpreted as though it is clear to
individuals what it is that they have stored. The semantics of a particular
construction, however, is (often) not consciously learned but unconsciously
acquired, and the actual content is only manifest to us. Of course, in different
contexts, different aspects of this content are particularly salient and accessible
to an individual. But everything that is stored and composes the semantics of
a particular construction can never be consciously accessed as a whole at
a given time. Rather, the semantics of a particular lexeme only functions as
meaning potential which is exploited in context to derive the speaker’s intended
interpretation.75 (Note that the notion of meaning/semantic potential has also
been used and discussed, though in different ways, by Halliday, 1973;
Bezuidenhout, 2002; Allwood, 2003; Fauconnier and Turner, 2003; Croft and
Cruse, 2004; Recanati, 2004; Evans and Green, 2006; Norén and Linell, 2007;
La Mantia, 2018; Verschueren, 2018; Leclercq, 2022, inter alia.) That is, to put
it slightly differently, we do not know concepts, but our minds make concepts
75
This more or less relates to the distinction in philosophy between “knowing-that” and “know-
ing-how” (see Ryle, 1946; Fantl, 2017). In simple terms, knowledge-that consists in our
propositional/theoretical understandings, while knowledge-how refers to the actual use of
a specific capacity (mental or physical). I want to argue that (most of) the concepts we acquire
originally constitute part of our knowledge-how. (I will come back to this in Chapter 4.) That is,
we do not simply understand our concepts (know-that), but we actually know how to use these
concepts in order to understand the world around us and engage in communication (know-how).
Having and using concepts is therefore primarily a capacity of the mind. In philosophy, for
instance, this perspective is defended by Robert Brandom (1998: 135). In linguistics, I believe it
is a similar (although implicit) assumption that has led some linguists to describe semantics in
terms of inferential rules (for instance). After all, the terms norms and conventions precisely
describe practices (know-how) and not merely theoretical understandings (knowing-that).
 3.6 Conclusion 115

available to us. This observation is what explains why it is possible to argue for
both a rich type of semantics as well as a rich type of pragmatics. Our minds
make available complex semantic structures which in different contexts will be
exploited differently (see previous section).76
I have argued quite strongly in favor of the rich type of semantics adopted in
CxG, the nature of which can be easily accommodated in a theory of pragmatics
such as developed in RT. In the meantime, I have given little credit to the actual
insights provided by RT on lexical pragmatics. In spite of storing complex
conceptual networks, individuals still need to work out in context exactly what
interpretation was intended by the speaker. Here, RT provides a very specific
and detailed account of how we actually manage to do so: the relevance-based
comprehension heuristics. It is important to point out that beyond making clear
predictions about how we manage to communicate, these predictions have
often been supported by empirical and experimental evidence (see
Chapter 2). The development of experimental pragmatics is in fact largely
due to the research carried out in RT when trying to test and provide evidence
for the different claims of the theory (see Clark (2018) for a discussion). Of
course, it will have become clear that I am not inclined to argue that inference is
the main provider of meaning during the interpretation of an utterance.
Nevertheless, it has been my aim to show that the underlying mechanism that
RT presents concerning the interpretation process is very convincing.

3.6 Conclusion
Understanding exactly what lexical semantics and pragmatics are as well as
determining how each of them actually contributes to the interpretation of an
utterance is no simple task. In this chapter, I have tried to combine insights from
CxG and RT to answer this difficult question. First, I tried to show the challenge
involved in identifying what relevance theorists assume lexical semantics to
consist of. It was shown that the commitment to referential atomism often made
within RT is incompatible with some of the most central developments of the
theory. I have suggested that the type of semantics adopted in CxG in terms of
rich conceptual networks seems to be best suited at both the descriptive and
theoretical levels. The difficulty with this perspective is to understand exactly

76
More generally, one could ask whether we actually know a language or whether we simply have
a language that our minds make available to us. As far as our native language is concerned, I am
inclined to argue in favor of the latter option. The fallacy that we know a language comes from
the simple fact that any use of language (i.e. linguistic performance) is directly accessible to us
and often serves as the basis for introspection. Yet we do not directly have access to the
linguistic system (i.e. linguistic competence). It is rather clear in most introductory textbooks
to linguistics that linguists look at linguistic performance to draw conclusions about linguistic
competence. This is evidence that we only have a language. This also seems an assumption
shared by Croft (to appear) who recently argued against a focus on mental representations.
116 3 Redefining Lexical Semantics and Pragmatics

how much pragmatics is involved during the interpretation process and whether
it still has a place in a theory of communication. I have strongly argued that, in
spite of storing rich conceptual networks, individuals still have to reconstruct in
context the intended interpretation in accordance with their expectations of
relevance. From this perspective, the interpretation of a lexical construction
systematically involves the complex combination of both semantics and prag-
matics. On the basis of the work of Depraetere, I have suggested that interpret-
ing a particular construction systematically requires a lexically regulated
saturation process, whereby the rich conceptual networks that constitute its
function provide the underlying structure against which the interpretation
process operates. This process, however, is primarily pragmatic, and is carried
out in accordance with our expectations of relevance following the compre-
hension procedure spelled out in RT.
4 Understanding Lexemes
The Role of the Linguistic Co-Text

Combining insights from CxG and RT might seem quite daunting for those
working in the two frameworks since, in spite of their common interest in
understanding human communication, they focus on different aspects of it. On
the one hand, the main aim of construction grammarians is to understand
language as a system and to pin down exactly what makes up linguistic
knowledge. The central claim of the theory is that speakers primarily know
constructions, i.e. form–meaning pairs. Goldberg (2003: 223) specifically
argues that it is “constructions all the way down.” On the other hand, relevance
theorists mostly try to account for the cognitive principles that, in addition to
the linguistic system, guarantee successful communication. This pragmatic
approach to (linguistic) communication is essentially based on the observation
that language alone often fails to provide us with the speaker’s intended
interpretation. Carston (2002a: 360) asserts that “it is linguistic underdetermi-
nacy all the way down.” It should therefore be clear that the two theories make
radically different predictions concerning how much knowledge an individual
actually has, and how this knowledge contributes to the interpretation of an
utterance. In the case of CxG, individuals are credited with much more
knowledge than in RT, and this knowledge is believed to play a greater role
in comprehension than is assumed in RT. Contrary to what one might think,
however, these two perspectives are not incompatible. We saw in the previous
chapter, for instance, that understanding a lexeme is a multifaceted process that
involves a complex interaction between semantics and pragmatics whereby
lexemes give access to rich conceptual networks that are exploited differently
in different contexts in accordance with one’s expectations of relevance. The
term lexically regulated saturation was used precisely to capture the observa-
tion that understanding a lexeme is neither just a semantic nor just a pragmatic
process but in fact results from the interaction of semantics and pragmatics.
The aim of this chapter is to broaden the approach to lexical semantics–
pragmatics. Further insights from CxG and RT will be integrated to arrive at
a more encompassing view. It might have occurred to the reader that the
approach adopted in the previous chapter remains relatively lexeme-centered.
Beyond the extra-linguistic environment in which lexemes are used, little
attention has been given to the linguistic co-text in which they can be found

117
118 4 Understanding Lexemes

and how it affects the interpretation of lexemes. Yet one of the very reasons
I decided to write this book in the first place was also to assess lexemes in the
broader linguistic and non-linguistic contexts and to show how this interaction
affects our understanding of lexical items. (Indeed, CxG and RT focus almost
exclusively either on the linguistic environment of a lexeme or on extra-
linguistic factors.) The goal of this chapter is to show that an adequate appreci-
ation of lexical semantics–pragmatics necessarily has to take into account the
larger linguistic structures in which lexemes are embedded. It is divided into
three sections. In Sections 4.1 and 4.2, two concepts will be discussed: the
notion of coercion discussed in CxG (see Section 2.1.3) and that of procedural
meaning introduced in RT (see Section 2.2.3.2). In Section 4.1, I will address
the notion of coercion and show that the morphosyntactic environment in
which lexemes occur directly affects their interpretation. At the same time,
the pragmatic roots of coercion will be highlighted. In Section 4.2, I will
investigate the notion of procedural meaning introduced in RT. The main aim
is to try and spell out exactly what procedures consist of and to identify the
types of unit that encode such (procedural) semantics. Eventually, a link will be
drawn between the two notions and I will suggest that they are intimately
related: constructions that have a coercive force have procedural meaning, the
specific nature of which will be redefined. In Section 4.3, I will focus on more
idiomatic (in the CxG sense of lexically fixed) patterns in which lexemes are
found and which contribute in their own way to the interpretation of an
utterance. It will be shown that while interpreting a lexeme often depends on
the recognition of such sequences, the interpretation process of idiomatic
patterns is also achieved pragmatically. In the end, a link will be drawn between
the process of lexically regulated saturation and all of the concepts discussed in
this chapter. This will enable me to show that it is lexically regulated saturation
all the way down.

4.1 Coercion
The idea that understanding the meaning of a lexeme depends crucially on its
morphosyntactic environment is a central assumption in CxG. It is assumed
that the interpretation of a lexical construction is (almost) always a function of
the larger constructions in which it occurs. Relevance theorists most probably
agree with this approach. Yet, as mentioned before, there is a clear tendency in
RT to focus on lexemes only when doing lexical semantics–pragmatics. As
a result, the same set of sentences may be analyzed completely differently in
CxG and RT. Take, for instance, the sentences in (66) and (67). In these two
sentences, a lexical item receives an interpretation which includes aspects of
meaning that are not originally part of its semantics. In the sentence in (66), for
instance, the verb behave receives an unusual metaphorical ‘manner of motion’
 4.1 Coercion 119

interpretation. In the sentence in (67), the denominal verb carrier pigeon is

interpreted in terms of a transfer.
(66) You can’t talk your way out of something you behaved your way into. You
have to behave your way out of it. (Twitter, @DougConant, 9 jan. 2016)
(67) They carrier pigeoned me an invite this morning. (Twitter, @KyleShoreBBCAN,
3 jul. 2014)
In the two frameworks, however, the origin of these interpretations is
located at two different levels. According to relevance theorists, these
examples represent two cases of lexical adjustment, the pragmatic nature
of which leads to the derivation of a context-specific ad hoc concept. In this
approach, the (re)interpretation of these lexemes is argued to be pragmatic-
ally motivated by one’s expectations of relevance. On the constructionist
account, however, the (re)interpretation process is primarily semantically
motivated. It is argued that the specific interpretation of the lexemes is due
to their being used in a larger construction the meaning of which is coerced
onto that of the lexical item, hence the term ‘coercion’ (cf. Lauwers and
Willems, 2011: 1219). In (66) and (67), it is the WAY construction and the
DITRANSITIVE construction, respectively, that determine the meaning of the
lexemes behave and carrier pigeon (see below).
These contrasting analyses naturally have to be interpreted within the frame-
work of each theory. The aim of this section is to look more deeply into the
notion of coercion as well as to investigate the possibility of a more compre-
hensive understanding of the concept.77 It will become clear that the main
difficulty is to pin down the nature of the process involved (semantic or
pragmatic). In Sections 4.1.1 to 4.1.3, I will consider the RT approach and
the CxG approach and will discuss their respective limits. It will eventually be
argued, in Section 4.1.4, that the combination of the two theories provides
interesting insights into coercion, which will be discussed in terms of
a semantically constrained pragmatic process.

4.1.1 Relevance Theory and ‘Free’ Pragmatic Enrichment

Relevance theorists look at examples that constructionists have treated in terms
of coercion, but the term coercion itself is not used in the relevance-theoretic
literature.78 As will become clear, relevance theorists generally do not distin-
guish examples of coercion from other cases of lexical adjustment, all of which
they analyze in terms of a single process of pragmatic enrichment. Before
looking exactly at what the term coercion is meant to capture in CxG, I briefly

77
Parts of this section were published in Leclercq (2019).
78
A noticeable exception is Escandell-Vidal and Leonetti (2002, 2011). See Section 4.2.2.
120 4 Understanding Lexemes

want to discuss again the relevance-theoretic approach. Consider the sentences

in (68) to (69).
(68) Buying a house is easy if you’ve got money. (Wilson and Carston, 2007: 235)
(69) I have a terrible cold, I need a Kleenex. (Sperber and Wilson, 2005: 370)
The sentences in (68) and (69) include a lexical item that receives an interpret-
ation which is either narrower or broader than the encoded concept. In the
sentence in (68), money has to be understood in the narrow sense of ‘suitable
amount of money’. Kleenex, in (69), is used in the broader sense to refer to any
disposable tissue. In Relevance Theory, these specific concepts are referred to
as ad hoc concepts, and are differentiated from the original (encoded) concept
by marking them with an asterisk: MONEY*, KLEENEX* (Clark, 2013a: 249).
What is important for our discussion is that the derivation of these ad hoc
concepts is argued to be not linguistically but pragmatically motivated. That is,
it is not the linguistic items that motivate this adjustment. Rather, they are
created online by the hearer only to satisfy their expectations of (optimal)
relevance. These concepts are therefore said to result from an inferential
process of “free” pragmatic enrichment since they are the outcome of an
optional process of enrichment.79
In this framework, examples that are treated in CxG in terms of coercion are
analyzed in the same way as those in (68) to (69). In fact, they are generally
included among other examples illustrating ad hoc concept creation, such as
those in (70) to (72).
(70) Federer is the new Sampras. (Wilson, 2003: 276)
(71) He Houdinied his way out of the closet. (Wilson, 2003: 277)
(72) The boy porched the newspaper. (Wilson and Carston, 2007: 238)
Sampras is used in the sentence in (70) not to refer specifically to the tennis
player, but more generally to the category of good (or best) tennis players, to
which both Roger Federer and Pete Sampras belong. In this case, it is argued
that the original concept SAMPRAS made accessible by the noun is broadened and
the ad hoc concept SAMPRAS* is inferentially derived by the hearer to meet their
expectations of relevance. Similarly, in (71) and (72), the interpretations of the
two denominal verbs Houdinied and porched are said to involve the creation of
the ad hoc concepts HOUDINI* and PORCH*, where both the manner of motion
interpretation of Houdinied in (71) and the action of throwing the newspaper to
the porch in (72) are assumed to be entirely pragmatically inferred.
Within Relevance Theory, therefore, the interpretation process of the sen-
tences in (70) to (72) is no different from that of the sentences in (68) to (69). In
79
See Chapters 2 and 3 for a critical discussion of this view.
 4.1 Coercion 121

both cases it is considered to be an inferential process that is pragmatically

motivated by the need for the hearer to arrive at a relevant interpretation, i.e. to
arrive at an interpretation that provides enough cognitive effects to justify their
processing effort. In CxG, however, the sentences in (70) to (72) receive
a different treatment from those in (68) and (69). It is argued that the interpret-
ation of the different lexemes is not pragmatically but linguistically motivated
by the larger constructions in which they occur, their meanings being coerced
onto the lexemes.80

4.1.2 Construction Grammar: Coercion

A central assumption in CxG is that it is not only morphemes, words or idioms
that have construction status (i.e. conventionally associate a form with
a meaning), but also the larger ‘syntactic’ structures in which they occur,
which have their own semantic or discourse functions (see Section 2.1.1).
Construction grammarians have in particular (but not only) focused on the
construction status of argument structures. It is argued, for instance, that the
sentences in (73) and (74) instantiate (among others) two specific construc-
tions: respectively the CAUSED-MOTION construction (see Goldberg, 1995: 152)
and the WAY construction (see Israel, 1996: 218).
(73) a. She put the plate in front of him. (BNC, written)
b. A child threw a stone at the horse, which bolted. (BNC, written)
c. I moved them into a tank of their own. (BNC, written)
(74) a. Craig made his way to the attic. (BNC, written)
b. Annabel wormed her way into the circle around Kezia with a plate of
smoked salmon sandwiches. (BNC, written)
c. How do you navigate your way through a forest, especially if you’re in
a wheelchair? (BNC, written)

From this perspective, the meaning ‘X causes Y to move Z’ in the sentences in

(73) is supposedly associated with the form [SUBJ V OBJ OBL], which together
form the CAUSED-MOTION construction. Similarly, it is argued that the manner
of motion meaning identified in the sentences in (74) is associated with the
form [SUBJ V one’s way OBL], which together form the WAY construction (see
Chapter 1, Section 2.1.1). It is these two constructions that explain how the verb
push, a prototypical use of which can be found in (75a), actually expresses
caused-motion in the sentence in (75b) or manner of motion in (75c).
(75) a. Excuse me, did you just push me? (BNC, spoken)
b. The lieutenant pushed the box across the table. (BNC, written)
c. Mike pushed his way into the canteen. (BNC, written)

80
See Section 4.1.5 for a comparison between the RT and CxG treatments.
122 4 Understanding Lexemes

These interpretations follow from the use of the verb in the CAUSED-MOTION
construction and the WAY construction, the respective meanings of which
contribute to the understanding of push. In this case, given that push encodes
a meaning similar to that of the two constructions in which it occurs (i.e. the
verb push also semantically involves the notion of motion), it is argued that the
lexeme is semantically compatible with the constructions and easily combines
(or fuses) with each of them (Yoon, 2012: 3).
However, lexemes and constructions are not always semantically compat-
ible. Sometimes the semantics of a particular lexical item does not fit the
semantics of the construction in which it occurs. In the sentence in (71) for
instance (repeated here in (76)), the proper noun Houdini is far from the
prototypical manner-of-motion verb that we expect to find in that position in
the WAY construction.
(76) He Houdinied his way out of the closet. (Wilson, 2003: 277)
There is a semantic (and morphosyntactic) mismatch that needs to be
resolved. And in this case, it is argued that the lexeme Houdini will be
reinterpreted in accordance with the semantics of the WAY construction.81
From this perspective, there is little overlap between the constructionist
and the relevance-theoretic accounts. According to constructionists, the
‘manner of motion’ meaning identified in (76) is not pragmatically
inferred to meet the hearer’s expectation of relevance, but is provided
by the WAY construction in which the noun Houdini occurs. That is, it is
already semantically specified. The reinterpretation of the lexeme is lin-
guistically required to solve the mismatch between the lexeme and the
construction. This is where coercion occurs: in case of a semantic (and
morphosyntactic) mismatch, the meaning of the construction is coerced
onto the meaning of the lexeme.
As mentioned in Section 2.1.3, the term coercion was used in other fields of
research before CxG adopted it. In those different frameworks, the notion is
used to describe slightly different phenomena. Nevertheless, CxG shares with
them the view that coercion is concerned with the resolution of an incompati-
bility between a selector (e.g. argument structure constructions) and a selected
(e.g. lexemes) whereby the latter adapts to the former. In CxG, this observation
has been worded by Michaelis (2004) in terms of the override principle, which

81
A reviewer pointed out that examples such as in (76) might go against a CxG account since way
doesn’t seem to be crucial and can easily be replaced by himself (as in He Houdinied himself out
of the closet). This example does not challenge the CxG approach, however, since it belongs to
the same family of RESULTATIVE constructions as that exemplified by the example with himself
(cf. Peña Cervel, 2017). The semantic similarity between the two examples is therefore to be
expected given the respective constructions used.
 4.1 Coercion 123

states that the meaning of a lexeme accommodates to that of its morphosyntac-

tic environment in case of a mismatch between the two (Michaelis, 2004: 25).
In the next sections, I will discuss some of the weaknesses that reduce the
explanatory power of each of the two theories, and I will propose a more
comprehensive understanding of coercion which merges them. In particular,
the aim is to pin down the exact origin (semantic or pragmatic) of this
phenomenon. Before doing so, I will illustrate the constructionist approach
with a couple of other examples:
(77) The people swarming around were clamoring for more beer, but the owner
was intransigent: every three beers you had to order a rice with fried fish.
(COCA, written)
(78) I think Ph.D. is the new masters. (V. Fung, p.c., 12 dec. 2016)82
(79) Ed hammered the metal flat. (Boas, 2011: 1272)
In each of these sentences, a lexical item receives an interpretation with which
it is not conventionally associated. In the sentence in (77), rice receives an
unusual countable interpretation. In the sentence in (78), masters is used
metonymically to refer to the type of degree that one needs to hold in order
to stand out in the job market. In (79), the denominal verb hammered refers to
the action of using a hammer in such a way as to make the metal become flat.
From the relevance-theoretic standpoint, one might want to argue that the
interpretation of those lexemes involves the pragmatic derivation of the ad
hoc concepts RICE*, MASTERS* and HAMMER*. From the constructionist perspec-
tive, however, their interpretation largely depends on the function of the larger
constructions in which they occur. In the case of rice, for instance, the count-
able interpretation results from its being used in the INDEFINITE DETERMINATION
construction (Michaelis, 2004: 27), further instances of which can be found
in (80).
(80) INDEFINITE DETERMINATION construction – [a NOUN]
a. We may even rent a hall. (COCA, spoken)
b. Buffer is a word. (COCA, spoken)
c. Ninety-five percent of what the President says is not a lie. (COCA,
spoken)

It is clear from these examples that this (partially schematic) construction

usually selects countable nouns. Michaelis (2004: 27) argues that countability
is inherent in the semantics of the construction. From this perspective, the
countable interpretation of rice in (77) in terms of a serving of rice simply

82
This sentence was used during a conversation on whether holding a masters degree still made
a difference in the UK, especially in terms of attractiveness on the job market.
124 4 Understanding Lexemes

follows from the fact that it occurs in the INDEFINITE DETERMINATION construc-
tion, the semantics of which is coerced onto the lexeme. A similar explanation
in terms of coercion holds for the examples in (78) and (79). The metonymic
interpretation of masters in (78), for instance, takes its root in the X is the new
Y construction (cf. Dancygier and Sweetser, 2014: 154).
(81) X is the new Y construction
a. The garden is the new kitchen. (COCA, written)
b. There was a time when raising your voice was considered okay for parents
to do, but now screaming is the new spanking. (COCA, written)
c. In case you didn’t get the message, texting is the new talking. (COCA,
written)

The examples in (81) are typical instances of the X is the new Y construction. In
this construction, the X and Y elements are systematically interpreted meto-
nymically in relation to some larger category. In (81a), garden and kitchen are
used to refer to that part of our houses in which we are ready to invest a lot of
money. In (81b), screaming and spanking refer to parenting methods that are
judged unacceptable. Finally, in (81c), texting and talking are used to talk about
the main channel of communication teenagers use. The metonymic interpret-
ation of the X and Yelements is argued to be part of the semantics of the X is the
new Y construction (Dancygier and Sweetser, 2014: 154). From the construc-
tionist standpoint, the interpretation of masters in example (78) above therefore
follows from its being used inside this construction from which the (meto-
nymic) interpretation is coerced.83
It is also coercion that can explain the use of hammer in (79), Ed hammered
the metal flat. In this case, hammer is used in the RESULTATIVE construction, and
it is the semantics of this construction that (in part) explains the interpretation
of the lexeme in terms of causality. Consider the following examples:
(82) RESULTATIVE construction – [SUBJ V OBJ RESP]
a. He licks the plate clean and looks up at us. (COCA, written)
b. These people drive me crazy. (COCA, written)
c. My mother shook my father awake. (COCA, written)

In all of these examples, the form [SUBJ V OBJ RESP] is associated with
a particular resultative (or ‘cause to become’) interpretation which together
form the RESULTATIVE construction (see Boas, 2003). For instance, in the
sentence in (82c), we understand that ‘my mother’ is the reason for ‘my father’
to be awake as a result of her having shaken him. It is the semantics of this

83
Naturally, although the metonymic framing is part of the construction’s semantics, the exact
category that the items in the X and Y positions actually refer to has to “be supplied by the hearer
from accessible knowledge or context” (Dancygier and Sweetser, 2014: 154). The pragmatic
roots of coercion will be discussed more fully in the next sections.
 4.1 Coercion 125

construction which provides (part of) the interpretation of hammer in (79)

above. The particular resultative interpretation of the lexeme comes from the
semantics of the construction in which it occurs. That is, the meaning of the
lexeme accommodates to that of the construction (i.e. coercion). Its interpret-
ation here is therefore not (solely) pragmatically motivated.

4.1.3 Creation of Ad Hoc Concepts or Mismatch Resolution: Respective

Limits
CxG and RT contribute differently to the understanding of lexical semantics–
pragmatics. The main challenge is to understand how to analyze sentences for
which they provide contrasting analyses, such as those we just saw in the case
of coercion. The aim of this section is to try and understand whether a more
comprehensive understanding of this notion is possible. In order to do so, I will
first discuss some of the weaknesses of CxG and RT. It will be shown that the
respective limits of each theory actually represent the strength of the other.
The relevance-theoretic analysis, I want to argue, suffers from not distin-
guishing between coercion and other cases of meaning adjustment, as is done
(although not explicitly) in CxG. For instance, it is argued that in all of the
sentences in (83) and (84) the interpretation of the lexeme in italics involves the
derivation of an ad hoc concept which is pragmatically inferred by the hearer in
order to meet their expectations of relevance (i.e. the derivation of these ad hoc
concepts is argued to be entirely pragmatically motivated by the search for
relevance).
(83) Either you become a human being or you leave the group. (Wilson and
Carston, 2007: 242)
(84) a. Federer is the new Sampras. (Wilson, 2003: 276)
b. Handguns are the new flick-knives. (Wilson and Carston, 2007: 237)
c. Ironing is the new yoga. (Wilson and Carston, 2007: 237)
This unitary approach can be easily explained by looking at the general scope
of the theory. Within the relevance-theoretic framework, meaning is (almost)
systematically discussed in relation to lexemes only. This is most probably due
to one of the major aims of the theory, namely to explain the nature of lexical
concepts (see Chapter 3). Comparatively little attention is given to morphemes,
idioms or larger constructions, and in particular to how they interact with one
another. It follows quite naturally from this perspective that the specific inter-
pretations of (83) and (84) should receive the same analysis since in both cases
the interpretation of the highlighted lexemes requires more than accessing their
semantic content (see underdeterminacy thesis in Section 2.2.2).
From a constructionist point of view, however, different factors affect the
interpretation of the sentences in (83) and (84). Both these factors are external
126 4 Understanding Lexemes

to the lexemes used but are of a different nature. While for (83), construction-
ists might agree that the interpretation of human being (in terms of an educated,
well-behaved person) is derived pragmatically,84 they would not agree that this
is also the case for the lexemes identified in (84). In the sentences in (84), the
lexemes Sampras, flick-knives and yoga are all understood as metonymically
referring to a more generic category they stand for (respectively here, that of
good tennis players, favorite weapons of choice and anti-stress activities).
Constructionists readily recognize that this particular meaning is not part of
the semantics of the lexemes themselves. Nevertheless, they do not fully
attribute it to pragmatics either. Rather, they consider that this meaning (i.e.
the reference to a larger, representative category) belongs to the X is the new
Y construction in which these lexemes occur (see previous section). That is,
this meaning is not entirely derived pragmatically, but it actually belongs to the
particular construction in which the lexemes occur. In other words, the meaning
is already linguistically (i.e. semantically) provided by the construction before
being coerced onto the lexeme that occurs within it.
As will become clear in the following paragraphs, one of the challenges is to
understand exactly how coercion operates, i.e. how the meaning of the con-
struction becomes part of the meaning of the lexeme. First, however, it is
important to underline that this view clearly contradicts the unitary treatment
given in Relevance Theory, that is, solely in terms of pragmatics. And more
specifically, it invites proponents of the relevance-theoretic tradition to recon-
sider their analysis of sentences like those in (84), in particular by acknowledg-
ing the construction status of (among other) argument structures, and the
semantic origin of the reinterpretation of the lexemes that occur inside them.
After all, these constructions have been given a lot of attention both within and
outside CxG, from both theoretical and empirical perspectives (see
Section 2.1.1 for references). Note that relevance theorists do not explicitly
reject the possibility that larger, more abstract constructions might exist and be
used. In fact, they most probably would agree there are such constructions. But
there is a clear lack of identification of these patterns by relevance theorists,
who prefer to play the ‘all-pragmatics’ card which, outside the pragmatics
literature, many find unattractive. As I see it, it is essential to actually integrate
larger constructions into a relevance-theoretic analysis and accept that not all
meaning adjustment can be explained via pragmatics only. Such a move will
strengthen the relevance-theoretic approach both at the descriptive and the
theoretical levels and will thus enhance its explanatory potential.85

84
In CxG, the interpretation of human being results from a conceptual mapping with the THING-FOR
-PROPERTY-OF-THE-THING-metonymy, a cognitive process which is performed pragmatically (cf.
Panther and Thornburg, 2003, 2007; see also Langacker, 2008: 40–42).
85
Recently, such a move was made by Padilla Cruz (2022) when he points out that the interpret-
ation of lexical items is not solely the result of pragmatic inferencing (i.e. of ‘free’ pragmatic
 4.1 Coercion 127

Perhaps the main difficulty for RT is to understand what type of semantics is

encoded by those constructions and how exactly they contribute to the inter-
pretation of the lexemes that occur within them. This will be discussed later in
this chapter. More generally, however, bringing the constructional ideas on
coercion within the relevance-theoretic approach seems quite feasible.
However, some have argued precisely against it. For instance, Ziegeler
(2007a, 2007b) strongly argues against adopting the constructionist perspective
on coercion for natural languages and in favor of pragmatic accounts.86
Interestingly, a critical analysis of her arguments provides a nice transition to
discussing some limits of the CxG view on the matter and how they may be
overcome. There are two main reasons why Ziegeler argues against the notion
of coercion. First, she argues that postulating coercion by referring to the
semantics of constructions is unnecessary given that the reinterpretation of
the lexemes involved can be solely explained in terms of analogy, metonymy or
metaphor (Ziegeler, 2007b). For instance, she discusses the following example:
(85) She had a beer. (Ziegeler, 2007b: 1009)
She argues that the interpretation of the lexeme beer as ‘a glass of beer’ does
not result from its being coerced by the INDEFINITE DETERMINATION construction
(a NOUN) but rather is made possible by the CONTAINED FOR CONTAINER meton-
ymy which pragmatically enables us to understand the lexeme. A couple of
points are in order here, however. First, it is true that the example in (85) can
also be explained in terms of this particular metonymy (and not only in terms of
coercion, with the INDEFINITE DETERMINATION construction projecting its count-
able semantics onto the lexeme beer). Yet it is not clear why this necessarily
provides a counter-argument to coercion by construction. There is no denying
that this metonymic pattern has a role to play in the interpretation process (quite
the contrary, see below), but it is exploited only because beer here occurs with
the indefinite determiner, which is not expected given that it is a mass noun.
Nevertheless, Ziegeler does not wish to call this a case of constructional
coercion and insists that the interpretation process involved here is purely
a matter of lexical pragmatics which involves metonymy.
In order to understand this perspective, it must be noted that Ziegeler finds
more attractive accounts that “assume no a priori syntactic constructions”
(Ziegeler, 2007b: 1024). The type of coercion presented in CxG, however,
exists only because there are ‘syntactic’ constructions and, indeed, without
such constructions, there is no (constructional) coercion. However, there is
ample evidence that individuals do store and use these more schematic

enrichment) but that it is also mandated by the linguistic environment. Besides co-textual lexical
triggers, he looks at evaluative morphemes in Spanish.
86
Note that Ziegeler does not identify herself as a relevance theorist.
128 4 Understanding Lexemes

constructions, and this challenges Ziegeler’s view.87 Gonzálvez-García (2011)

provides a detailed counter-argumentation to Ziegeler and very nicely shows
that metonymy and metaphor alone cannot always explain cases of coercion.
That is, the construction types discussed in CxG do contribute to the interpret-
ation of the lexemes. Take the following example:
(86) When a visitor passes through the village, young lamas stop picking up trash
to mug for the camera. A gruff ‘police monk’ barks them to work.
(Gonzálvez-García, 2011: 1317)

Gonzálvez-García recognizes that the use of the denominal verb barks in (86)
requires a metaphorical mapping from the domain of dogs to that of human
beings from which the ‘police monk’ can be understood as emitting particularly
loud sounds. This part of the interpretation of bark is undoubtedly pragmatic-
ally derived. However, in this context, bark is primarily used to communicate
the particular way in which the lamas are caused to go back to work by the
monk. This caused-motion part of the interpretation cannot be explained in
terms of metonymic or metaphorical mappings. It can, however, be explained
in terms of the meaning of the CAUSED-MOTION construction (i.e. [SUBJ V OBJ
OBL], see above) in which bark occurs. That is, part of the interpretation of the
lexeme bark here is made readily available by the semantics of the (argument
structure) construction in which it occurs. Constructions such as the CAUSED-
MOTION construction therefore directly contribute to the interpretation of the
lexemes found inside them (Gonzálvez-García, 2011: 1310). In other words,
Gonzálvez-García convincingly shows that Ziegeler’s view is flawed.
The recognition of the role played by metaphor and metonymy does not render super-
fluous the assumption that syntax in general and constructions in particular, understood
as meaning-function correspondences, play an essential role in the phenomenon of slot-
determined meaning in sentences involving coercion. (Gonzálvez-García, 2011:
1310)88

In spite of this observation, there is another, more fundamental, reason why

Ziegeler is uneasy with the notion of coercion (and which, in fact, is much more
consequential than that mentioned previously). When Ziegeler argues against
coercion, she seems to be arguing against the view according to which con-
structions themselves automatically coerce their meanings onto the lexemes
(Ziegeler, 2007b: 1005). In this case, coercion is a purely linguistic product
whereby constructions act upon lexemes independently of the language user.
However, Ziegeler (2007b: 999) strongly argues that it is the language user, not
language itself, that can change the meaning of a particular word. In other

87
The question of whether ‘syntactic’ constructions exist falls outside the scope of this chapter.
I largely endorse the constructionist perspective. See Section 2.1 for specific references.
88
For a similar observation, see Harder (2010: 247).
 4.1 Coercion 129

words, to use Lauwers and Willem’s (2011: 1224) terminology, she favors the
position of a ‘language-user’ coercion as opposed to a ‘systemic’ coercion.
Note, however, that although she is most probably right to consider that
coercion is not an automatic linguistic device (see below), she is wrong in
assuming that this is the perspective adopted in CxG.
It is true that there are (many) unfortunate formulations that might have led
Ziegeler to this particular conclusion. Goldberg (1995: 159), for instance, says
that some meanings “are capable of being coerced by particular constructions”
(original emphasis). In this case, she could indeed be understood to be suggest-
ing that constructions themselves change the semantics of the lexemes that
occur within them. Because of her firm cognitive (usage-based) orientation,
however, it is unlikely that Goldberg or any of her followers think of coercion
as a purely linguistic device. She explicitly attributes the creative potential of
language, which involves cases of coercion, to speakers themselves and not to
grammar: “grammars don’t generate sentences, speakers do” (Goldberg, 2006:
22)89. It is mainly construction grammarians taking a strong formal approach to
language who could be reproached for adopting a ‘systemic’ view of coercion.
Lauwers and Willem (2011: 1225) argue that this is precisely what Michaelis
(2004) does, for instance. Indeed, she refers to the “override principle” as
a “coercion mechanism” whereby the semantics of the construction simply
“wins out” over that of the lexeme (Michaelis, 2004: 25). In this case, the
language user is only a witness to the linguistic mechanism. Once again,
however, it is not clear whether Michaelis really conceives of coercion as
such a strictly linguistic device. Consider the following quote:
Coercion effects are triggered when the interpreter must reconcile the meaning of
a morphosyntactic construction with the meaning of a lexical filler. Coercion effects,
rather than representing a special form of composition, are by-products of the ordinary
significations of constructions. (Michaelis, 2004: 7; emphasis mine)

This strongly suggests that Michaelis also recognizes the role of the language
user during the interpretation process which is triggered by the semantic
mismatch.90 Consider the following example:
(87) ZAK BUSH: Talk me through your transition from professional surfer to writer.
JAMIE BRISICK: I guess you could say I back-doored my way into writing.91

89
A similar statement is made by Langacker (1987: 65), see Chapter 2.
90
It is interesting to note that Ziegeler’s (2007b) understanding of the various constructionist
perspectives on coercion differs radically from mine. One the one hand, she reproaches
Goldberg (1995) for being too systemic, and on the other, she appreciates Michaelis’ (2004)
more user-based approach. Yet it seems clear to me (as it does to Lauwers and Willem, 2011:
1225) that the more formal approach to constructions developed by Michaelis renders her view
relatively more systemic than that defended by Goldberg.
91
Zak Bush interviewing Jamie Brisick for the Outerknown Journey blog in 2017 (no longer
available).
130 4 Understanding Lexemes

When arguing that there is coercion in (87), for instance, constructionists only
refer to the semantic (and morphosyntactic) mismatch between the (poly)
lexeme back-door and the WAY construction that, in context, the hearer has
to resolve. The noun back-door is indeed not the prototypical ‘manner of
motion’ verb that one expects to find in the WAY construction. Most of the
time, the lexeme is reinterpreted in accordance with the semantics of the
construction (see override principle above). In the sentence in (87), this obser-
vation is confirmed since the denominal verb back-door indeed includes the
(metaphorical) ‘manner of motion’ sense that originally belongs to the WAY
construction. Nevertheless, it is also clear to constructionists that the resolution
process is carried out by speakers/hearers themselves in context and not by the
language. As a consequence, there is no particular reason for relevance theor-
ists not to adopt the constructional view on coercion and recognize the semantic
origin of the interpretation.92
Now, in spite of the observations just made, Ziegeler (2007a: 105) rightly
observes that constructionists “tend to pass over the role of the language user in
the interpretive process.” For instance, it is indeed not clear how the lexeme
back-door inherits aspects of meaning from the WAY construction in (87). In
a similar way, Yoon (2012: 7) says that the “the psychological process toward
the resolution [is] not dealt with.” That is, although they argue that the
resolution process is performed by the language user, construction grammar-
ians indeed fail to explain exactly how this process operates. And this is exactly
where insights from Relevance Theory become very useful. While construc-
tionists do not address in detail the role of language users, it will have become

92
It could of course be argued that viewing coercion as a language-user or a systemic process
might also depend on whether one takes the perspective of the speaker or the hearer. It is true,
after all, that while speakers are (relatively) free to choose between different options to express
the same thought (hence more user-dependent), the interpretation process carried out by hearers
is directly guided by the linguistic items used by the speaker (hence more system-dependent).
Unfortunately, the reality of how coercion operates seems more complex. First, speakers are not
entirely free to create novel expressions as they please and are in their own way also subject to
the system pressure. In CxG, it has been shown that creating novel sentences also largely
depends on a number of crucial properties of the linguistic system, which they refer to in terms
of productivity, coverage, competition and statistical preemption (see Chapter 2). Second, it is
also clear in RT that, like hearers, speakers are constrained by the ‘principle of relevance’ (i.e.
they need to provide the hearer with a relevant interpretation), and therefore they need to choose
linguistic items that will guarantee the relevance of the intended interpretation (cf. Sperber and
Wilson, 1995: 157). This has been discussed by Park and Clark (2022) in terms of a relevance-
focused production heuristics. From this perspective, speakers are therefore not so free after all.
In this book, focus is placed on the interpretation process from the perspective of the hearer. For
more information on how speakers are constrained by the linguistic system, the reader is invited
to look at the references mentioned in Chapter 2. In the rest of this chapter, it will be shown that
although constrained by the linguistic items used by the speaker, the particular interpretation
process referred to as ‘coercion’ is not performed by the linguistic system directly (and is not,
therefore, systemic) but remains primarily a pragmatic process carried out by hearers
themselves.
 4.1 Coercion 131

clear from the previous chapters that relevance theorists can. This is precisely
when a cross-theoretical understanding of coercion becomes possible and even
beneficial to both theories. Where constructionists are able to identify the
source of the reinterpretation process (i.e. the semantic mismatch between
a lexeme and a construction), relevance theorists can explain the strategy
used to resolve the incompatibility. In particular, this strategy is the relevance-
theoretic comprehension procedure mentioned in Chapter 2. What exactly does
this procedure entail? Consider again the sentence in (87), for instance. If RT
were to adopt the insights from CxG, the argument would go along the
following lines: in accordance with their expectations of relevance, on the
basis of their knowledge of the two constructions (the noun back-door and
the WAY construction), as well as taking into account extra-linguistic informa-
tion, the hearer will look for an interpretation that provides them with sufficient
cognitive effects to justify the amount of effort put into the resolution process.
From this perspective, it is relatively clear that the resolution process is more
complex than just copy-pasting (to put it simply) the meaning of the construc-
tion onto that of the lexeme. Rather, the hearer has to inferentially work out
exactly what interpretation was intended by the speaker when creatively
putting together seemingly incompatible constructions, i.e. looking for the
particular way in which the speaker is observing the principle of relevance.
This analysis receives support from experimental data (Yoon, 2012; Busso,
Perek and Lenci, 2021). For instance, Yoon (2012) conducted a series of
experiments in order to find evidence for the possibility that coercion is not
a binary distinction (that is, coercion either takes place or does not), but that
there is instead a cline of semantic (in)compatibility between constructions and
lexemes. These experiments particularly involved looking at the hearer’s
processing effort (by measuring processing time) during the resolution
process.93 Some of her results corroborate relevance-theoretic predictions (in
terms of a balance between cognitive effects and effort) as to the resolution
process. She shows that the less semantically compatible a lexeme is with
a construction, the more processing effort the resolution process requires (i.e.
more processing time). Yoon (2012: 261) obviously sees these results as
evidence that there is indeed a continuum of coercion events (more or less
compatible combinations require more or less processing effort). Yet this is first
and foremost evidence that coercion is not a purely linguistic device but that
language users are particularly involved in the resolution process, i.e. that the
meaning of the construction does not simply ‘win out’ over that of the lexeme,
in order to derive a relevant interpretation (see also Yoon, 2012: 310). If the
meaning of the construction simply won out over that of the lexeme, then
different coercion events should result in the same cognitive process regardless

93
She uses acceptability judgment tasks (Yoon, 2012: 57).
132 4 Understanding Lexemes

of the incompatibility. Yoon convincingly shows, however, that “coercion is

not a binary concept” (Yoon, 2012: 158). Rather, coercion involves inferential
pragmatic processes which require hearers to take into account extra-linguistic
factors. Here, RT can help determine exactly how this process is carried out.

4.1.4 Coercion and Context-Sensitivity: Further Evidence

It could be argued that many of the examples I used in the previous section
contradict the perspective I am trying to present here (in purely inferential
terms) and suggest that perhaps coercion does not involve the same type of
inferential process as that involved, for instance, during the process of lexically
regulated saturation discussed in the previous chapter. Indeed, many of the
examples I have used so far include only one sentence and their interpretation
seems rather clear. This could be taken as evidence that the larger (extra-
linguistic) context may not have as much of a role to play in the interpretation
of coerced lexemes. In this section, I will provide examples that challenge and
contradict this argument and I will show that the extra-linguistic context also
plays a major role in the interpretation of coerced lexemes. This discussion will
show the need to combine the constructionist and the relevance-theoretic
approaches and stress the inferential roots of coercion. It is worth noting that
the cognitive linguist Peter Harder also discusses the process of coercion in
inferential terms:
I have suggested the term “syntagmatic implicature” as a cover term for all accommo-
dation- and coercion-type adjustments, in order to stress the continuity between the
utterance-external pragmatic mechanism and the utterance-internal content-syntactic
mechanism. So what appears to be purely syntactic “coercion”, is really an utterance-
internal manifestation of interactive, functional pressure to adapt to the context in which
the coded meaning belongs. (Harder, 2010: 247)94
The use of the term implicature here explicitly refers to the primarily inferential
nature of the resolution process involved. (Although I find the relevance-
theoretic term explicature more appropriate in this context (see Chapter 2),
I share Harder’s view on coercion.) The aim of this section is to provide further
evidence for the (linguistic and extra-linguistic) context-sensitivity of coercion
as well as to show that it is necessary to combine insights from both CxG and
RT to understand how exactly coercion operates.95
Examples of various types can be used to highlight the context-sensitivity of
coercion. In the first part of this section, I want to focus on examples that cannot

94
Note that Harder is not a construction grammarian (he more generally considers himself
a cognitive linguist), so this quote does not challenge the previous arguments.
95
Mazzarella (2014) provides an interesting discussion on the reasons why inference is necessary
to pragmatics (see also Carston, 2007).
 4.1 Coercion 133

be easily interpreted out of context, i.e. cases where the resolution process can
only take place given a specific context. Consider the following example:
(88) ??Farmer Joe grew those vines onto his roof. (Goldberg, 1995: 169)
In this sentence, the verb grow occurs in the CAUSED-MOTION construction, the
particular semantics of which needs to be coerced onto the lexeme given the
semantic mismatch between the two constructions. Yet Goldberg (1995: 169)
considers example (88) to be unconventional (and perhaps unacceptable) since
the verb grow does not naturally take a directional prepositional phrase given
the absence of motion in a typical scene of growing (and watering) plants.
Nevertheless, Yoon (2012) convincingly shows that, given a specific context,
this utterance and in particular the mismatch between the verb grow and the
CAUSED-MOTION construction can be resolved by the hearer. It is the case, for
instance, “if the situation is that Joe used wires and bars to support the vines so
that they can reach the roof” (Yoon, 2012: 5). In this case, the sentence in (88) is
judged as more acceptable by speakers of English. Yoon takes this as evidence
that coercion is highly context-dependent since the context here clearly affects
the resolution process. She explicitly argues that this process consists in the
integration of both the “linguistic elements in the expressions and extra lin-
guistic context” (Yoon, 2012: 37). A similar example is discussed by Boas
(2011):
(89) ??Ed hammered the metal safe. (Boas, 2011: 1271; emphasis mine)
(90) The door of Ed’s old Dodge had a piece of metal sticking out. When getting
out of the car, Ed had cut himself on the metal and had to go to the hospital to
get stitches. The next day, Ed hammered the metal safe. (Boas, 2011: 1271;
emphasis mine)
These sentences are meant to illustrate a particular use of the RESULTATIVE
construction (see above). Boas (2011: 1271) argues that in (89) the use of safe
in the resultative matrix of hammer is generally not acceptable in English. That
is, outside a specific context, it is difficult to coerce safe here into a resultative
phrase. Yet, in the relevant context, coercion is possible. In (90), the same
combination is preceded by a specific context which makes sense of the use of
safe. In this case, the same sentence as in (89) is now judged as an acceptable
sentence of English.96 That is, provided the right context, coercion is
possible.97

96
Boas (2011) conducted a judgment task to check the acceptability of (90). Amongst 40 native
speakers of English (undergraduate students), “23 informants found (90) acceptable, 9 judged it
marginally acceptable, and 8 found the example unacceptable” (Boas, 2011: 1297).
97
This example once more shows that construction grammarians are fully aware of the context-
sensitive nature of coercion. Boas admits, however, that CxG does not yet “provide satisfactory
mechanisms capable of dealing with contextual background information” (Boas, 2011: 1275).
134 4 Understanding Lexemes

There is another set of examples that can be used to show the highly context-
dependent, inferential roots of coercion. If coercion only involved the linguistic
environment, then the same sentence should receive exactly the same interpret-
ation by different individuals (given that they access exactly the same linguistic
environment). This hypothesis is not borne out, however. Consider the follow-
ing sentence:
(91) Strong is the new skinny. (New York Post; August 15, 2013)98
This title of a New York Post article illustrates the use of the X is the new
Y construction in which the lexemes strong and skinny occur. I believe that the
interpretation of the two lexemes is relatively clear. Out of context, the first
interpretation that comes to mind is that looking strong (and muscular) is the
new physical characteristic that makes an individual particularly attractive
(instead of being skinny). In the context of this article, this interpretation is
only partly correct, however. It is true that part of the interpretation concerns
the attractiveness of muscular features. It is said that “the aesthetic is
changing . . . long and lean muscles are the new attractive.” Yet what the
linguistic environment of the sentence in (91) does not make clear is that this
actually concerns women only. That is, in this article, looking strong is said to
be the new attractive feature of women and nothing is said about men.
Therefore, understanding the use of strong and skinny in this particular article
is already quite context-sensitive and does not only depend on the use of the
X is the new Y construction. The context-sensitivity of the interpretation of (91)
goes even further than this, however. After the release of the article, the ‘strong
is the new skinny’ phrase became quite controversial and new interpretations
started to emerge to soften the misogynist blow that followed its publication. In
particular, it has been suggested instead that strong should be understood not as
the main feature of a woman’s attractiveness but as an indicator of her health.
That is, strong and skinny here are given an interpretation which requires the
metonymic derivation of a different category than that mentioned previously.
This interpretation is arrived at by taking into account different contextual
factors, such as the fact that emphasis on sports activities and health-related
issues are also mentioned in the article. This is further evidence that cases of
coercion such as illustrated in (91) are never just constrained by the linguistic
environment but also depend on the extra-linguistic context. Here is another list
of examples:
(92) a. Just in case you’re not all Biebered out already, here’s the full studio
version of “Mistletoe”. (Audring and Booij, 2016: 623)

Although he refers to particular processes of analogy, he does not explain exactly how context
(and inference) can contribute to coercion, however.
98
https://nypost.com/2013/08/15/strong-is-the-new-skinny/ (last accessed: May 31, 2023).
 4.1 Coercion 135

b. We hope this is the last time we hear any Bieber news, we don’t know
about you but we’re completely Biebered out! (ZAlebs, May 14, 2013)99
c. Selena Gomez Rehab: Was She ‘Exhausted’, ‘Drunk’ Or Biebered Out?
(INQUISITR, February 8, 2014)100

The sentences in (92) all illustrate the use of Justin Bieber’s last name in the
construction ‘be (intensifier) V-ed out’ (see Hugou, 2013; Jackendoff, 2013:
89; Audring and Booij, 2016: 623). This construction is used when the speaker
wants to communicate the particular way in which the subject is exhausted
from experiencing (to excess) the action denoted by the verb (Jackendoff,
2013: 89). Examples of this construction include the following:
(93) a. I thought I was all loved out. But my heart’s filled right up again. I love
you, Jessie. (COCA, written)
b. He’s all knitted out. [after knitting for three days solid] (Jackendoff,
2013: 89)
c. If you’re not all festivaled out this summer head for The Moors Festival.
(Audring and Booij, 2016: 624)
In the sentence in (93a), the speaker expresses their feeling of having loved too
much to be able to love again. In (93b), the subject referent is described as
having had enough of knitting. Similarly in (93c), the denominal verb festivaled
is used to communicate the particular way in which an individual might have
been to too many festivals during the summer to enjoy yet another one.
Although these examples receive different interpretations depending on
which verb is used by the speaker, they have in common a general feeling of
weariness with regards to a specific situation. In CxG, it is argued that this
meaning is attached to the form be (intensifier) V-ed out. It is this very
construction which explains the particular use and interpretation of Bieber in
the examples in (92) above. All of these examples somehow refer to the subject
referent being weary of Justin Bieber and this particular interpretation is
coerced from the construction in which it occurs. (There is indeed both
a semantic and morphosyntactic mismatch between the nominal item Bieber
and the position it occupies in that construction.)
Now, if coercion indeed involved the linguistic environment only, then the
sentences in (92) should all receive the same interpretation without any further
sensitivity to extra-linguistic context (since they all involve the use of the same
lexeme in the same construction). Yet they do not. Given the nature of Justin
Bieber’s popularity (as a singer), we could perhaps expect an interpretation
according to which one is tired of listening to his songs. This is the interpret-
ation that is found in (92a). Here, the speaker who announces Justin Bieber’s
99
www.zalebs.com/whats-hot/money-heist-at-biebers-jhb-concert/ (last accessed: May 31, 2023).
100
www.inquisitr.com/1125991/selena-gomez-rehab-was-she-exhausted-drunk-or-biebered-out/
(last accessed: May 31, 2023).
136 4 Understanding Lexemes

latest tune “Mistletoe” acknowledges that her audience might be tired of having
to listen to him. It is worth noting that it is only the second clause (here’s the full
studio version of “Mistletoe”) that actually makes it clear this is the meaning
intended by the speaker. Example (92a) already shows the context-sensitive
nature of the interpretation of Bieber in the be (intensifier) V-ed out construc-
tion. This context-sensitivity is substantiated by examples such as in (92b) and
(92c). Those examples are used to convey different meanings from that found
in (92a). In the case of (92b), the speaker is not weary of listening to Justin
Bieber but is rather weary of hearing stories about him in the news. (Whether or
not the speaker still enjoys listening to Justin Bieber is not mentioned here.)
Although the same combination as in (92a) is used (i.e. the same lexeme and the
same construction), a different interpretation is derived. This interpretation is
arrived at on the basis of the contextual evidence one has access to. First, of
course, there is the previous linguistic context (“we hope this is the last time we
hear any Bieber news”) without which this interpretation might not have been
available to the hearer. But also, this interpretation in particular follows from
being used in ZAlebs, an online tabloid about celebrities. Once more, context-
ual information is crucial to the interpretation of the lexeme. The clause we
don’t know about you but we’re completely Biebered out! alone does not suffice
to arrive at the specific interpretation intended by the speaker. The same
observation is true for the sentence in (92c). This example also comes from
an online tabloid, yet here the interpretation of Bieber radically differs from
that in (92b). In order to understand in what way Bieber is being used, one
needs to know who Selena Gomez and Justin Bieber are, that they have been in
a relationship but recently split, after which Selena Gomez went into rehab.
Here, Bieber is used to express Selena’s collapse after her relationship with the
singer. It is only on the basis of all this information (and also knowing the type
of information discussed in the particular tabloid) that one is able to recover this
particular interpretation.
What I hope is clear from the examples in (92) is that the integration of
a lexeme within a particular construction, and the resolution process that
follows from it, is not a linguistic, context-insensitive mechanism but that
extra-linguistic contextual information is crucial to the interpretation process.
In (92a) to (92c), the same lexeme occurs in exactly the same construction, yet
in their respective contexts different interpretations are derived depending on
which facets of the singer are in focus. This constitutes evidence that coercion
primarily involves inferential processes that depend on extra-linguistic infor-
mation in order to be carried out and does not simply consist in the integration
of the lexeme within a particular construction. Of course, cases of coercion
differ from other adjustment processes (such as ‘free’ pragmatic enrichment)
since the construction involved is itself meaningful and therefore greatly
 4.1 Coercion 137

contributes to the interpretation. But even this meaning, as we saw in the

examples in (92), is adjusted depending on the context.
This observation serves as a transition to the last type of example I will
discuss to highlight the primarily inferential roots of coercion. It seems
that if one assumes that coercion depends solely on the linguistic environ-
ment and not on the extra-linguistic context, then one espouses, as it were,
the systemic view of coercion discussed above. In this case, the meaning
of the construction indeed simply wins out over that of the lexeme. Yet, it
will have now become clear that the interpretation of the lexeme depends
as much on extra-linguistic information as it does on the semantics of the
construction. The semantics of the construction therefore do not simply
‘win out’. In fact, the context-sensitivity of coercion goes even deeper.
Yoon (2012) indeed very elegantly shows that the resolution process may
actually involve adapting the semantics of the construction to that of the
lexeme. This is the case for the sentence in (94), for instance, which
instantiates the DITRANSITIVE construction (SUBJ V OBJ1 OBJ2, see
Chapter 2).
(94) David broke Jen the bread 6 hours ago. (Yoon, 2012: 178)
The DITRANSITIVE construction is usually said to convey the notion of transfer.
(A typical example of the DITRANSITIVE construction is the sentence John gave
Mary the book.) Yet in (94), the verb break does not easily receive a transfer
interpretation. Rather, Yoon finds that her participants consider Jen
a beneficiary (and not a recipient) only if the action involves breaking the
bread into pieces (Yoon, 2012: 279). Here, the notion of ‘transfer’ originally
part of the meaning of the construction is dropped during the interpretation
process (Yoon, 2012: 280).101 For this reason, Yoon makes the following
observation:
Some semantic properties of the verb and construction are suppressed while the others
become more salient. This interaction challenges the one-way direction of coercion
proposed by Override Principle (Michaelis, 2005) that people try to coerce the verb
meaning into the constructional meaning. (Yoon, 2012: 279; emphasis mine)
This observation necessarily pushes us to think of coercion in terms of inferen-
tial processes. Example (94) shows that even the meaning of the construction
can be affected by the context and has no primacy over the lexeme. What is the
main defining factor during the interpretation process is the relevance of the
intended meaning, which is evaluated in context. Therefore, as Yoon rightly
points out, the override principle should be understood not as a strict rule but

101
This interpretation relates to none of the six senses of the DITRANSITIVE construction that
Goldberg (1995: 38) identifies.
138 4 Understanding Lexemes

instead as a strong tendency (see also Busso, 2020).102 This observation once
again supports the view that hearers do not simply try to force the construc-
tional semantics onto the lexeme, but rather they contextually work out the
speaker’s intended interpretation.

4.1.5 Coercion: Semantically Constrained Pragmatic Effects

In the first part of this chapter, the aim was to compare the perspectives in CxG
and RT on coercion in order to try and develop a more comprehensive under-
standing of this concept. In the previous sections, I showed that it is possible
and even beneficial (to both theories) to combine both approaches. Indeed,
while CxG can explain the origin of the reinterpretation process of (for
instance) the lexemes behave and carrier pigeon in the sentences in (66) and
(67), repeated here in (95) and (96), it was shown that RT can explain the
interpretation process itself.
(95) You can’t talk your way out of something you behaved your way into. You
have to behave your way out of it. (Twitter, @DougConant, 9 jan. 2016)
(96) They carrier pigeoned me an invite this morning. (Twitter, @KyleShoreBBCAN,
3 jul. 2014)
The reinterpretation process originates, according to constructionists, in the
semantic (and morphosyntactic) mismatch between the different lexemes and
the larger construction in which they occur: the WAY construction in (95) and the
DITRANSITIVE construction in (96). And Relevance Theory helps us to understand
that the hearer will solve this mismatch by working out the speaker’s intended
interpretation on the basis of their knowledge of the different constructions (i.e.
the lexemes and the argument structure constructions), extra-linguistic informa-
tion and, most importantly, on the basis of their expectation of relevance (i.e.
enough effects to justify the processing effort). And depending on the semantic
incompatibility between the lexeme and the construction, this process will take
more or less effort. This new perspective therefore sheds equal (or almost equal)
light on the semantics of the constructions involved as well as on the role of the
language user during the interpretation process.
In the next part of this chapter, I will look at the notion of procedural meaning
discussed in RT and identify how it relates to coercion. Before doing so, there
are a number of preliminary conclusions that I wish to draw. The first conclu-
sion directly concerns RT. Regardless of the exact nature of the resolution
process, the notion of coercion primarily rests on the observation that many

102
Ziegeler (2007b: 994) suggests that this tendency might find an explanation in the more abstract
and entrenched nature of the semantics of schematic constructions, which is less flexible than
lexical meaning. This will be discussed more fully in the second part of this chapter.
 4.1 Coercion 139

lexemes actually inherit part of their interpretation from the larger construc-
tions in which they occur. Although this observation is self-evident to most
constructionists, this is not necessarily the case in RT. To be more precise, there
is a tendency in RT not to pay attention to the larger structures in which lexemes
are found and to account for the (relatively) creative uses of lexemes solely in
terms of pragmatics. Yet it has been shown that the interpretation of a lexeme
also largely depends on the semantics of the construction in which it occurs.
Figure 4.1 lists a few of the constructions that have been discussed so far; they
are placed on the continuum of lexical fixedness introduced in Chapter 2.
As mentioned several times already, it is essential for relevance theorists
involved in lexical semantics–pragmatics not to focus on lexemes only (which
in Figure 4.1 can be found in the fixed part of the constructional continuum),
but also to take into consideration all the different types of constructions in
which they can occur (which can be found in the more schematic part of the
continuum). First, this makes for finer analyses. Constructions are indeed
strong indicators both of the intended interpretation and of the speaker’s
intentions since they provide rich clues which the hearer will use in order to
recover the speaker’s intended meaning. At a more theoretical level, the
integration of the constructionist perspective will enhance the position of RT
as an explanatory theory. Indeed, as mentioned above, the all-pragmatics
strategy adopted in RT tends to put off many who would otherwise find in
RT many interesting answers.
Another major conclusion that needs to be drawn from the previous sections
concerns CxG more directly. Although it is true that RT needs to take into
account more systematically the larger types of constructions identified above,
CxG also needs to give more room to pragmatics in its definition of coercion.
First of all, it needs to be stated more explicitly that the resolution process is not
a linguistic mechanism and that coercing the semantics of the construction onto
that of the lexeme is carried out by individuals themselves and not by construc-
tions. As a result, coercion effects emerge from pragmatic processes which

as soon as possible a Noun as ADJ as a NOUN RESULTATIVE

construction

break the ice VERB-ment be (intensifier) V-ed out

DITRANSITIVE
construction
private property NOUN-s X is the new Y
CAUSED-MOTION
roof X-ish WAY construction construction

Fixedness Openness

Figure 4.1 Lexicon–syntax continuum in CxG (2)

140 4 Understanding Lexemes

involve not only the lexeme and the construction but more largely the extra-
linguistic context in which they occur. (A number of examples have been
discussed in the previous section to illustrate this point.) In other words,
coercion entails an inferential process which is primarily carried out in accord-
ance with one’s expectations of relevance. The distinctive feature of this
process is simply that it is greatly constrained by the semantics of the construc-
tion used, which provides an indication of where relevance is to be found. This
observation constitutes the last point that will be addressed in this section.
It was argued in the previous chapter that the interpretation of a lexeme
largely consists in a systematic process of meaning construction. This process
was referred to in terms of lexically regulated saturation and is meant to
capture the observation that, regardless of the complexity of their semantics,
the content of lexical items is systematically reconstructed inferentially in
accordance with one’s expectations of relevance (see Section 3.4). I want to
argue that cases of coercion differ very little from this process of lexically
regulated saturation and only constitute a special case: cases of coercion differ
from other cases of meaning construction in the sense that the interpretation
process is not only constrained by the search for a relevant interpretation but is
also constrained by the semantics of the construction in which it occurs. But
essentially, the same process of lexically regulated saturation is involved. Upon
hearing the particular lexeme being used, the hearer will try to construct
a relevant interpretation in accordance with their expectations of relevance
and on the basis of the (activated parts of the) lexeme’s semantic potential. The
only difference is that, in addition, the hearer also has to take into account the
semantics of the construction in which the lexeme occurs and which provides
rich clues as to where relevance is to be found. I therefore completely agree
with Michaelis (2004) when she states that “coercion effects, rather than
representing a special form of composition, are by-products of the ordinary
significations of constructions” (Michaelis, 2004: 7; emphasis mine). This is
exactly the view defended here: cases of coercion are not as exceptional as they
may seem. The use of a lexeme in those particular constructions is of course
particularly innovative and gives rise to interesting interpretations. The inter-
pretation process behind it, however, is not special. It is the same process (of
lexically regulated saturation) which enables the interpretation of those lex-
emes. Constructions simply act as an additional (in this case, semantic) con-
straint for the derivation of a relevant interpretation, hence why I describe
coercion in the title of this section as “semantically constrained pragmatic
effects.”
The view adopted here thus leaves open the possibility that the process of
lexically regulated saturation (which is broader than coercion) operates every
time a lexeme is embedded in a construction. This ties in well with the results in
Yoon’s (2012: 303) paper. She shows that there is indeed a cline of coercion
 4.2 Procedural Meaning and Lexical Pragmatics 141

events and that there is no simple opposition between semantic compatibility

and semantic incompatibility. As soon as a lexeme is used in a particular
construction, and regardless of the compatibility between the two, the con-
struction acts as a constraint on the interpretation of the lexeme. I argued
previously that the lexemes fly and push in the sentences in (32) and (75b),
repeated here in (97) and (98), readily occur in the CAUSED-MOTION construc-
tion since their semantics already include the notion of motion. It follows from
the perspective adopted here, however, that these examples involve exactly the
same process as other cases of coercion: the lexeme is interpreted (via lexically
regulated saturation) in accordance with both expectations of relevance and
knowledge of the CAUSED-MOTION construction, which acts as an additional
constraint on the derivation of the intended interpretation.
(97) Our son was just three months old when we first flew him across the Atlantic.
(COCA, written)
(98) The lieutenant pushed the box across the table. (BNC, written)
That is, I want to argue that even in the case of examples like these, which not
all constructionists might view as involving coercion, the same process of
meaning construction as in other coercion-type examples is involved.103

4.2 Procedural Meaning and Lexical Pragmatics

Throughout the previous sections, the terms constrain/constraint were used to
describe the particular way in which the semantics of a construction affects the
interpretation of the lexemes it selects. Yet this terminology is not often used in
CxG. (This is to be expected since these terms suggest an asymmetric semantic
relation between the different types of construction involved, a perspective
which is at odds with the CxG view, see Section 2.1.1.) The use of these terms,
however, was a careful and deliberate choice. The idea that some constructions
might encode constraints on utterance interpretation has been widely discussed
in the framework of RT. This phenomenon is captured under the notion of
procedural encoding which was introduced by Diane Blakemore (see
Chapter 2, Section 2.2.3.2). In the rest of this chapter, I will discuss the notion
of procedural meaning and pin down exactly how it relates to the view of
coercion presented in the previous sections. The challenge involved stems from

103
Note, of course, that although the underlying cognitive process is in principle the same, I still
consider that the notion of coercion is useful as a separate concept to single out (more obvious)
mismatch cases where the interpretation of a lexeme crucially depends on the semantics of the
construction in which it occurs. After all, from the perspective of cognitive relevance, cases of
semantic mismatch necessarily require more effort and naturally beg for a high(er) number of
cognitive effects (to achieve relevance), the nature of which might be worth looking into (see
Wilson and Carston (2019) for a recent discussion).
142 4 Understanding Lexemes

the fact that in RT the notion of procedural encoding applies to lexical units
whereas in CxG, when the term is used, it occurs at a more schematic level. As
mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, I will argue that it is (semi-)
schematic constructions that have a procedural (rather than conceptual) type
of semantics, which further supports the view that coercion effects are the result
of a semantically constrained pragmatic process.

4.2.1 Procedures in RT
In order to understand the relation between the notion of procedural meaning
and the view on coercion developed in the previous section, it is important to
understand exactly what procedures are in the first place. The aim of this
section is to reintroduce this notion and to make explicit the way in which
procedures differ from concepts. In Sections 4.2.2 and 4.2.3, the aim will be to
pin down exactly what type of constructions can encode procedures as well as
to identify specifically what procedures actually consist of. Once more, insights
from both RT and CxG will prove very useful.
Of all the notions introduced in RT since the publication of Relevance (Sperber
and Wilson, [1986] 1995), that of procedural meaning perhaps best captures what
the theory is all about: the optimization of relevance. It is quite largely assumed
in RT that human communication is primarily an inferential process which the
linguistic system simply renders more efficient. Sperber and Wilson (1995: 172)
specifically argue that “languages are indispensable not for communication, but
for information processing; this is their essential function.” For relevance theor-
ists, it follows logically from this view that language might not only give us
access to specific mental representations (i.e. concepts) but also provide us with
the tools to compute these mental representations (i.e. procedures):
Linguistic decoding provides input to the inferential phase of comprehension; inferen-
tial comprehension involves the construction and manipulation of conceptual represen-
tations. An utterance can thus be expected to encode two basic types of information:
representational and computational, or conceptual and procedural – that is, information
about the representations to be manipulated, and information about how to manipulate
them. (Wilson and Sperber, 1993: 97)
From this perspective, procedural information is essentially information which
enables speakers and hearers to manipulate conceptual information and which
directly contributes to the optimization of relevance. Exactly what these pro-
cedures consist of will be discussed in section 4.2.3. So far, suffice it to say that
constructions that have procedural meaning are usually described as encoding
a constraint on inferential processes which guides the hearer towards relevance
(Escandell-Vidal, Leonetti and Ahern, 2011: xxi). In RT, the typical example of
constructions that encode procedural meaning are discourse connectives (e.g.
 4.2 Procedural Meaning and Lexical Pragmatics 143

so, after all, therefore, etc.). This is due to the fact that Diane Blakemore, who
introduced the notion of procedural meaning in RT, focused on discourse
markers (Blakemore, 1987). Consider, for instance, the following examples:
(99) a. He is a linguist. He is intelligent.
b. He is a linguist, so he is intelligent.
c. He is a linguist, but he is intelligent.

In (99a), the discourse relation between the two sentences He is a linguist and
He is intelligent is left implicit and has to be inferred by the hearer. Most often,
speakers of English will infer the particular causal relation whereby the intelli-
gence of the subject referent is considered a direct consequence of his being
a linguist.104 If the speaker considers that the hearer might not be able to
retrieve exactly this relation, however, she may decide to use a particular
discourse marker which will guide him in this direction. This is the case in
(99b), where so is used precisely to achieve that effect. Alternatively, the
speaker may also entertain the (unbelievable) assumption that linguists are
not intelligent and therefore use a marker which will signal a contrast between
the two propositions expressed. The use of but in (99c) enables the hearer to
make this particular inference. What is important for our discussion is that the
discourse markers used by the speaker contribute to neither of the two proposi-
tions they connect but only guide the hearer to recover the discourse relation
intended by the speaker and help him to draw the right inferences. In this case, it
is said that the discourse marker encodes procedural meaning in the sense that it
provides the hearer not with a particular mental representation but with
a semantic constraint that enables him to manipulate other representations
(here, the two propositions communicated by each clause) and thereby facili-
tates the optimization of relevance.
In the case of discourse markers, the procedure they encode constrains the
type of implicatures that the hearer will derive (here, the implicated premises
linguists are intelligent or linguists are not intelligent). It is clear in RT,
however, that inference does not only occur at the level of implicatures but
also permits the derivation of explicatures (i.e. enriched logical forms) as well
as higher-level explicatures (which include the speaker’s beliefs and attitudes
with regard to a proposition).105 Therefore, one might also expect some
procedural expressions to constrain the derivation of explicatures and higher-
level explicatures. This is precisely what is captured by Figure 4.2.

104
Note that this assumption is not (only) based on the personal hope that society naturally thinks
of linguists as intelligent people. Rather, this assumption (also) finds root in the empirical
observation that, in the case of implicit discourse relations, by default, a causal relation seems
to be assumed between the propositions expressed in the two consecutive clauses (see Murray,
1995, 1997; Sanders, 2005; Hoek and Zufferey, 2015).
105
See Chapter 2, Section 2.2.2.
144 4 Understanding Lexemes

Procedurally encoded

Constraints on Constraints on
explicatures implicatures

Constraints on Constraints on
proposition expressed higher-level explicature

Figure 4.2 Procedural meaning: constraints on interpretation (adapted from

Wilson and Sperber, 1993: 3)

In the relevance-theoretic literature, typical examples of expressions that

constrain the derivation of explicatures (i.e. the proposition expressed) are
pronouns and demonstratives, which are said to constrain the recovery of
a specific referent (Wilson and Sperber, 1993; Scott, 2011, 2013, 2016). At
the level of higher-level explicatures, different types of constructions have been
discussed, such as sentence types (Clark, 1991) or prosodic patterns (e.g. Imai,
1998; Clark, 2007, 2012, 2013b; House, 2009). In both cases, the constructions
involved are argued not to provide the hearer with a specific concept but rather
to guide them during the inferential phase to recover the speaker’s attitude with
regard to the proposition expressed. Other types of procedural constraints on
higher-level explicatures are discussed in Andersen and Fretheim (2000), such
as the use of the pragmatic marker like in English (e.g. Cos I need some friends
around just to like, protect me, Andersen, 2000: 30).
In comparison, the notion of procedural encoding is relatively absent in the
constructionist literature. A noticeable exception can be found in the work of
Elizabeth Traugott, who uses the term in her work on grammaticalization
(Traugott and Dasher, 2002; Traugott and Trousdale, 2013; Traugott, 2014).
Her understanding of procedural meaning, however, differs slightly from that
in RT. This will be discussed more fully in Section 4.2.3. The term procedural
is also briefly used by Bergs and Diewald (2009: 8) to describe the meaning of
the French connective parce que (‘because’). More generally, however, the
terms procedures and procedural tend not to be used within CxG.106 Rather,
when the meaning of a construction affects not the proposition directly but an
inferential process, different terms are used, such as ‘discourse function’,
‘pragmatic function’ or ‘discourse-pragmatic function’. (These terms cover
a number of phenomena such as illocutionary force, metalinguistic comments,
speaker attitudes, scalar models and discourse parameters. See Kay (2004),

106
More recently, the term also occurred in a volume by Coussé, Andersson and Oloffsson
(2018a) on grammaticalization and CxG.
 4.2 Procedural Meaning and Lexical Pragmatics 145

Nikiforidou (2009) and Cappelle (2017) for overviews.) This is the case, for
instance, in the discussion of the let alone construction discussed in Chapter 2.
Consider the following examples:
(100) They couldn’t write a complete sentence, let alone an entire essay. (COCA,
spoken)
(101) It’s difficult to get people to stop at red lights, let alone a flashing yellow light.
(COCA, spoken)

This construction, as mentioned previously, is used, first to contrast the two

conjuncts, and to provide “constraints on the distribution of informativeness
and relevance across the two propositions” (Cappelle, Dugas and Tobin, 2015:
73). In particular, the construction is used to ascribe more relevance to
the second conjunct so as to reject the first conjunct “more forcefully”
(p. 73). It is my understanding that, in RT, this particular type of meaning
would be discussed in procedural terms. Both Fillmore, Kay and O’Connor
(1988) and Cappelle, Dugas and Tobin (2015) say that this meaning contributes
to the pragmatics of the construction. Yet, as mentioned in Chapter 2, it is not
clear exactly what can count as the ‘pragmatics of a construction’.
Alternatively, the term discourse function is sometimes used in discussions
about the meaning of a construction. Koops (2007), for instance, uses that term
to describe the meaning of the INFERENTIAL construction (It is . . . that . . .), such
as in the following examples (from Koops, 2007):
(102) a. I cannot pay you back today.
b. It’s just that all the banks are closed.
(103) I look under the hood and I see all the stuff under there and I say, boy, my
chances of doing – how shall I say it? Everything’s electronic. It’s not that I’m
against at least trying, it’s just that there’s so much, you know. You can’t tune
it yourself. You can’t do anything.

In these two examples, the construction is used by the speaker “as a pragmatic
instruction to its audience to regard its clause as an interpretation of its local
context, that is, to be about, rather than of, its context” (Delahunty, 1995: 359).
In other words, the construction is used by the speaker to introduce the proposition
embedded in the that-clause as providing contextual information about the dis-
course context (i.e. an implicated premise) in order to reduce (or relocate) the range
of possible inferences. This type of instruction in RT would be described in
procedural terms. Yet Koops uses the term discourse function (Koops, 2007: 208).
In the next sections, one of the aims will be to show that the term procedural
meaning used in the relevance-theoretic literature is preferable to the different
notions used in CxG. From a purely terminological perspective, it is unclear why
and how the different terms pragmatic, discourse or even discourse-pragmatic
146 4 Understanding Lexemes

function are used in CxG (see Leclercq, 2020). They seem to be used relatively
interchangeably. For the sake of terminological consistency and precision, how-
ever, only one term should be used.107 The choice to employ the term procedural
meaning here is not arbitrary, however. It is largely motivated by the observation
that the term is used in RT in relation to a wider range of expressions and
phenomena than the constructionist terms. (This observation can arguably be
said to follow from the various degrees of attention given to pragmatics in the
two frameworks.) As mentioned in Chapter 3, there is a tendency in CxG (as in
cognitive linguistics more generally) to associate inferential processes (and the
notion of pragmatics) with the derivation of implicatures only (or mostly). It is
interesting to note that, as one might expect, the notions of discourse/pragmatic
functions in CxG have also been largely applied to constructions that provide
constraints on the derivation of implicatures. This is the case, for instance, for
both the let alone construction and the INFERENTIAL construction discussed
above. It is clear in RT, however, that inferential processes do not only occur at
the level of implicatures but also affect the derivation of explicatures and higher-
level explicatures. The notion of procedural meaning therefore applies to a much
wider range of expressions than the constructionist terms and, more importantly,
it is not associated with the derivation of implicatures only. The aim of adopting
the relevance-theoretic terminology is therefore twofold. First, as we will see in
the next sections, it is meant to account for a much wider range of constructions
than the terms used in CxG actually do. More importantly, the aim is also to
abandon the idea that inference is solely linked to implicatures.
In Section 4.2.2, I will try and pin down the type of constructions that encode
procedural meaning. In Section 4.2.3, the aim will be to identify what proced-
ures actually consist of. It will soon become clear that although I adopt the
relevance-theoretic term, insights from CxG will also prove very useful to
address these two questions. Eventually, it will be shown that there is a direct
link between the notion of procedural meaning and that of coercion discussed at
the beginning of this chapter.

4.2.2 Constructions with Procedural Meaning

In spite of the differences that can be found between RT and CxG, it is
interesting to note that the linguistic units analyzed either in terms of proced-
ural meaning or as having pragmatic/discourse functions are always

107
This is particularly true since the notion of discourse/pragmatic properties is sometimes used to
refer not to the type of meaning associated with a construction but rather to its contextual
appropriateness (i.e. features about the situation, register, genre, discourse focus, politeness
strategy, etc.). This is how Stephan Gries and Martin Hilpert seem to be using the term
discourse-pragmatic characteristics in Hoffmann and Trousdale’s (2013a) The Oxford hand-
book of Construction Grammar.
 4.2 Procedural Meaning and Lexical Pragmatics 147

grammatical constructions (i.e. constructions that serve a grammatical func-

tion). The latest theoretical discussions on procedural meaning in RT confirm
this observation (e.g. Escandell-Vidal, Leonetti and Ahern, 2011; Carston,
2016b; Wilson, 2016; Escandell-Vidal, 2017). In her investigation on the
development of procedural meaning in RT, for instance, Carston (2016b:
155) explicitly points out that the difference between conceptual and proced-
ural meaning is broadly consistent with the long-standing division “between
the substantive lexicon (open-class words such as nouns, verbs and adjectives)
and the functional lexicon (closed-class words like determiners, pronouns and
connectives).”108 The same is true for CxG, where the notion of pragmatic
function is used a lot, for instance, in relation to information structure construc-
tions (cf. Hilpert, 2019: ch. 5).
The aim of this section is to determine what types of constructions can (and
do) encode procedural meaning. To begin, it is worth noting that the idea that
there is a correspondence between grammatical constructions and procedural
encoding is a view that receives support in both RT and CxG. In RT, Steve
Nicolle has done considerable work to show the relationship between aspects of
grammaticalization and the development of procedural content (see Nicolle,
1997b, 1998b, 2011, 2015). According to Nicolle, “grammaticalization begins
with the addition of procedural information to the meaning of a construction”
(Nicolle, 2011: 407). There is therefore a clear correspondence for him between
grammatical constructions and procedural encoding (and between lexical con-
structions and concepts). It is interesting to note that it is precisely in research
on grammaticalization that the term procedural encoding is also used in CxG.
As mentioned earlier, Elizabeth Traugott and her co-authors also argue that the
conceptual/procedural distinction coincides with the lexical/grammatical dis-
tinction (Traugott and Dasher, 2002; Traugott and Trousdale, 2013; Traugott
2014). Traugott and Trousdale specifically point out, for instance, that “the
formal dimensions with which procedural meaning is usually linked are trad-
itionally known as grammatical elements” (2013: 12)109 Summing up, in both
frameworks procedural meaning, i.e. information about how to manipulate
conceptual information, is associated with grammatical constructions.
In the next section, the aim will be to identify exactly what procedural
encoding consists of (as opposed to conceptual encoding). Before doing so,
a number of questions concerning the correspondence between grammatical
constructions and procedural encoding still need to be answered. The first
question concerns the way in which the distinction between lexical and gram-
matical constructions is established in RT and CxG. In RT, for instance, there is

108
See also Escandell-Vidal and Leonetti (2000), Leonetti and Escandell-Vidal (2004) and
Escandell-Vidal (2017).
109
See Section 4.2.3 for a discussion of grammaticalization processes.
148 4 Understanding Lexemes

an ongoing debate about what type of constructions encode procedural mean-

ing. As Carston (2016b: 155) points out, it is usually assumed that this distinc-
tion broadly corresponds to that between the denotation of open-class words
(e.g. noun, verbs, adjectives, adverbs) and closed-class words (e.g. auxiliaries,
conjunctions, determiners). The categorical distinction is not always as clear-
cut as RT theoreticians might think, however.110 One of the core tenets of CxG
is that there is no such dichotomy between lexical items on the one hand and
grammatical elements on the other. Rather, the construct-i-con (i.e. the mental
repository of constructions) consists of a continuum of constructions from
(more) lexical ones to (more) grammatical ones (see Figures 2.1 and 4.1).
They are not categorically distinguished but rather form a cline from more
lexically fixed to more schematic patterns. For that reason, it might be unclear
in CxG exactly how the conceptual/procedural distinction aligns with the
lexical/grammatical cline (see Coussé, Andersson and Olofsson (2018b: 8)
for a similar observation). Therefore, although the two frameworks establish
a similar link between ‘grammatical constructions’ and ‘procedural meaning’,
they have a different understanding of what counts as a grammatical unit of the
language. As a natural consequence, this also means that the two frameworks
have different expectations of where procedural meaning is to be found.
Traugott and Trousdale (2013: 12), who work on the basis of the construc-
tional continuum, argue that, in line with the general CxG tenet, the conceptual/
procedural distinction is itself also gradual.111 From this perspective, construc-
tions encode different types of meaning that range from more conceptual to
more procedural, depending on where they are found in the continuum.
Figure 4.3 is an attempt to represent the correspondence between these two
gradients.
In this approach, not all constructions are either conceptual or procedural.
Instead, the more grammatical a construction, the more procedural its content
(and the more lexical, the more conceptual). This is the reason why Traugott
and Trousdale (2013: 13) argue that between fully contentful (e.g. red) and
fully procedural (e.g. plural -s) constructions, there are a number of ‘intermedi-
ate’ constructions that have both conceptual and procedural properties (e.g. the
WAY construction). At first sight, this view appears to face a challenge, how-
ever. Indeed, it is largely assumed in RT that the distinction between concepts
and procedures is not gradual but instead that they form two discrete categories.
Nicolle (1998b) specifically argues that “there is no information type inter-
mediate between conceptual and procedural information” (Nicolle, 1998b: 6).
Yet in Figure 4.3, the ‘intermediate’ constructions encode precisely such an
110
See Aarts (2007: 34–79) for an insightful discussion on grammatical gradience.
111
Note that Traugott and Dasher (2002: 10) specifically indicate that they prefer using the term
contentful to conceptual. (The term contentful is also used in Traugott and Trousdale, 2013.)
This will be discussed more fully in the next section.
 4.2 Procedural Meaning and Lexical Pragmatics 149

Procedural CAUSED-MOT
OTION
construction
on

INFERENTIAL
construction

WAY constr
construction
struction

X is the new Y

X let alone Y

a NOUN

be
e (intensifier) V-ed
V-ed ou
out

break the ice

Conceptual
roof

Fixedness Openness

Figure 4.3 Constructions: correlation between formal and semantic gradients

intermediate type of information, neither fully conceptual nor fully procedural.

This is not, however, what Traugott and Trousdale mean by intermediate.
Constructions that are intermediate with regard to the conceptual–procedural
distinction are simply understood as encoding both conceptual and procedural
information and form “‘hybrid’ constructions” (Traugott and Trousdale, 2013:
26). That is, the distinction between purely conceptual and purely procedural
types of information is maintained. It is simply assumed that many construc-
tions encode both types of information.
The gradient approach turns out not to be incompatible with the relevance-
theoretic view: here as well, it is argued that words can encode either a concept,
a procedure, or both types of information. In RT, typical examples of expres-
sions that encode both conceptual and procedural information are pronouns
(see, for instance, Scott, 2011, 2016).112 The main difference between RT and

112
Pronouns are procedural in the sense that they act as instructions for the recovery of a specific
referent; they are conceptual by specifying the referential category (i.e. gender, number, etc.).
150 4 Understanding Lexemes

CxG, however, has to do with the form that grammatical constructions take
and, therefore, the type of construction that is assumed to encode procedural
information. The relevance-theoretic approach is relatively lexeme-centered,
and most of the attention is therefore given to grammatical words. The attention
on the level of the lexeme most probably originates in the basic theoretical
stance, which takes “a broadly Chomskyan approach to language and . . .
Fodorian assumptions about modularity” (Clark, 2013a: 95). From this per-
spective, there are, on the one hand, the syntactic rules which belong to the
linguistic system and, on the other hand, the words of the lexicon which can be
used within these structures. The type of grammatical units that relevance
theorists have paid most attention to are grammatical words (e.g. pronouns,
discourse markers, mood particles, etc.).113 In CxG, however, there is no strict
divide between elements of the lexicon and ‘syntax’. Rather, our linguistic
knowledge is composed of a variety of (more or less complex) constructions,
i.e. form–meaning pairs, all of which equally contribute to our mental grammar
(called the construct-i-con). A direct consequence of this approach is that the
notion of grammatical constructions in CxG differs from that in other approaches.
In CxG, as is clear in Figure 4.3, ‘grammatical’ constructions are not discussed at
the atomic (lexical) level but often involve longer, phrasal or clausal, more
schematic structures. As mentioned in Chapter 2, for instance, the let alone
construction is often referred to as the X let alone Y construction, which puts
emphasis on its mainly schematic nature as well as on the clausal level. In other
words, while grammatical meaning is situated at the level of the lexicon in RT, it
pertains to the schematic (word, phrasal or clausal) level in CxG.114 Schematicity
is indeed identified by constructionists (and in the literature on grammaticalization
more generally) as a central feature of grammatical constructions (see Croft, 2001:
16; Langacker, 2008: 22; Trousdale, 2008a: 59, 2008b: 304, 2010: 51, 2012: 168;
Traugott, 2008: 34, 2015: 61; Coussé, Andersson and Olofsson, 2018b, inter alia).
Trousdale (2008a) specifically argues, for instance, that “as constructions gram-
maticalize, they become more schematic; as they lexicalize, they become more
idiom-like” (Trousdale, 2008a: 59).115 In this case, units of the language that
encode procedural information are not atomic, fully specific constructions (i.e. not
113
As mentioned previously, very recently they have started to look at morphemes as well (e.g.
Padilla Cruz, 2022; Carston, 2022).
114
It is worth noting, for instance, that Ruiz de Mendoza and Gómez-González (2014) and Erviti
(2017) generally treat discourse markers, which are central to the discussion on procedural
meaning in RT, as partially schematic constructions: X so Y construction, X but
Y construction, etc.
115
Although grammaticalization processes systematically entail constructional schematization,
there is a real debate in CxG whether all cases of schematization necessarily relate to the
development of grammatical meaning (see Noël, 2007; Traugott and Trousdale, 2013). For
reasons that will become clear in the rest of this chapter, however, I will assume that
a construction’s schematicity and grammatical meaning are interrelated (see also Trousdale,
2012: 193).
 4.2 Procedural Meaning and Lexical Pragmatics 151

words), but constructions that are formally more schematic.116 In the remainder of
this chapter, I will work on the basis of the constructionist assumption that
grammatical constructions (with which a procedural meaning is associated)
necessarily involve a level of schematicity. After all, in CxG it is precisely
(semi-)schematic constructions that enable the syntagmatic combination of lexical
items into larger phrasal or clausal units. It seems intuitively logical that procedural
information be encoded by this type of construction, which precisely enables
speakers of a language to manipulate the type of linguistic units that carry
conceptual information: lexemes. In this sense, grammatical constructions serve
both as syntactic and semantic glue.
The perspective on grammatical constructions adopted here meshes well
with the approach to coercion outlined in Section 4.1.5. All of the coercive
constructions that were discussed in Section 4.1 are (semi-)schematic construc-
tions (e.g. the INDEFINITE DETERMINATION construction, the be (intensifier) V-ed
out construction, the WAY construction or the CAUSED-MOTION construction,
etc.). In CxG, it is generally assumed that “any construction that selects for
a specific lexical class or phrasal daughter is a potential coercion trigger”
(Michaelis, 2011: 1384). That (semi-)schematic constructions should have
a coercive potential makes a lot of sense when we assume, as I do here, that
these types of construction encode procedural rather than conceptual
information.117 That is, once we assume that these constructions encode spe-
cific constraints on how to interpret the concepts that occur within them, then it
follows logically that hearers will interpret the lexemes in accordance with the
semantics of the construction in which they occur. As it happens, the only time
I came across the notion of coercion in RT is precisely in discussions about
procedural meaning. Escandell-Vidal and Leonetti (2011: 88) argue that units
which carry conceptual meaning are coercible and only units that carry proced-
ural meaning have a coercive force. This link is interesting since it provides
further support to some of the arguments presented in the previous sections,
some of which will be taken up again here.
First of all, treating schematic/grammatical constructions in procedural
terms justifies the view that coercion results from a semantically constrained
pragmatic process. This process is semantically constrained since the proced-
ural information associated with the schematic construction precisely provides
a constraint which is meant to guide the hearer towards a particular interpret-
ation during the inferential phase of comprehension. It is, however, a pragmatic
process in the sense that in spite of the semantic constraint provided by the

116
Accordingly, morphological constructions (e.g. VERB-ment in ‘government’ and ‘investment’,
NOUN-al in ‘national’ and ‘natural’, im-ADJ in ‘impossible’ and ‘impolite’) also qualify as
grammatical constructions given their partially schematic nature (see Booij and Audring, 2017;
Booij, 2018).
117
What exactly constitutes the content of this procedure will be discussed in the next section.
152 4 Understanding Lexemes

construction, it is the hearer himself who inferentially derives the speaker’s

intended interpretation (see Section 4.1.4). In that sense, I share the view adopted
by Escandell-Vidal and Leonetti (2011) when they argue that they view coercion
“not as a semantic operation, but as a pragmatic process guided and constrained
by linguistic meaning” (Escandell-Vidal and Leonetti, 2011: 95). This is what
procedures do: they only constrain the inferential phase of comprehension. In the
previous chapter, I argued that the interpretation of a lexeme can be understood
in terms of lexically regulated saturation. That is, the interpretation of a lexeme
consists of an inferential process whereby individuals systematically reconstruct
the meaning of a lexeme in accordance with their expectations of relevance and
on the basis of the (more or less rich) conceptual information made accessible by
the lexeme. The notions of procedural meaning and coercion are thus directly
related to lexically regulated saturation:
• Lexically regulated saturation (lexical level).
Hearers inferentially reconstruct the meaning of the lexical constructions that
are used by speakers.
• Procedural meaning (schematic level).
In so doing, hearers are directly guided by the procedural meaning of the
grammatical/schematic constructions in which lexical constructions occur.
• Coercion (mismatch lexical/schematic levels).
In some cases, there is incompatibility between the semantic (and morpho-
syntactic) properties of a lexical construction and the position it occupies in
a grammatical construction. These cases lead to coerced interpretations,
whereby the lexical construction is interpreted in accordance with the
meaning of the grammatical construction. (The procedural information
associated with grammatical constructions has stronger coercive force
than conceptual information (see below), hence the override principle.)
The representation in Figure 4.4 is an attempt to show more explicitly the
interaction between the three notions discussed here. Lexically regulated sat-
uration is central to the interpretation of a lexeme. The procedural semantics of
grammatical constructions facilitate this inferential process by guiding the
hearer in a particular direction. In some cases, a mismatch between the concep-
tual semantics of the lexeme and the procedural semantics of the grammatical
construction will result in coercion effects; the lexeme is interpreted in accord-
ance with the meaning of the grammatical construction.
There are two consequences that follow from the model outlined here. First,
one of the main roles of grammatical constructions is simply to facilitate the
inferential processes involved when interpreting an utterance (such as that of
lexically regulated saturation), which hearers systematically have to perform
regardless of which constructions are used by the speaker. As a result, the use of
a particular grammatical construction directly affects the optimization of
 4.2 Procedural Meaning and Lexical Pragmatics 153

Interpreting a lexeme involves:

CONTEXT-SENSITIVE INFERENTIAL PROCESSES

Grammatical Cx guide
Lexically regulated
procedural meaning saturation

potential
Coercion processing
effects

Figure 4.4 ‘Lexically regulated saturation’ and utterance comprehension (1)

relevance since it helps the hearer recover the intended interpretation. In

guiding the hearer in a particular direction, grammatical constructions reduce
the search space and the amount of cognitive effort involved in the interpret-
ation process. In this sense, I completely agree with the view defended by
Nicolle (2011):
Procedural information reduces processing effort by constraining inferential processes
that an addressee would have to perform in any case; thus, the process of grammatical-
ization can be viewed as being motivated by the principle of relevance, according to
which an optimally relevant interpretation is one which achieves adequate cognitive
effects for minimal processing effort. (Nicolle, 2011: 407; emphasis mine)
In other words, one of the motivations behind processes of grammaticalization
(and, by the same token, the acquisition and use of grammatical constructions)
simply comes from the pressure to optimize relevance. Grammatical construc-
tions increase the overall relevance of an interpretation by reducing the amount
of effort put into the interpretation process. Secondly, this perspective also
reinforces the view defended earlier that the interpretation process of a coerced
lexeme differs very little (if at all) from that of non-coerced lexemes. That is,
whether coercion is involved or not, understanding a lexeme primarily consists
in an inferential process (namely, lexically regulated saturation), which is
systematically guided by the meaning of the grammatical constructions in
which lexemes are used. Cases of coercion are more special in the sense that
the meaning of the lexeme somehow clashes with that of the grammatical
construction, but both cases of coerced and non-coerced lexemes involve the
same process of interpretation. A similar line of reasoning motivates Traugott
154 4 Understanding Lexemes

and Trousdale’s claim that probably “coercion is not needed as a concept separate
from metonymy and best-fit interpretations” (2013: 233). Unlike Traugott and
Trousdale, however, I believe the term coercion is still useful. Indeed, although the
actual process of interpretation is the same, the interpretation of a coerced lexeme
is affected by the meaning of the grammatical construction in which it occurs to
a much greater extent than that of non-coerced lexemes. Cases of coercion
therefore involve an additional linguistic requirement that non-coerced lexemes
do not have (since they already meet this requirement), hence the necessity to keep
a distinct term so as to identify cases of coercion more clearly.
The notion of coercion is also useful as a distinct concept since it enables us
to account for another observation. In CxG, the notion of coercion is often
described in relation to the override principle introduced by Michaelis (2004).
This principle states that in case of a semantic (and morphosyntactic) mis-
match between a lexeme and the schematic/grammatical construction in
which it occurs, the meaning of the lexeme will conform to that of the
grammatical construction. It was shown in Section 4.1.3 that this principle
may come across as an overgeneralization, since coercion can then be under-
stood as the result of a semantic process operated by the linguistic system itself,
disconnected from any considerations of pragmatic factors. Instead, it is prefer-
able to think of the override principle as the observed tendency that in such
situations language users indeed generally adapt the meaning of the lexeme in
accordance with the meaning of the grammatical construction. This being said,
the point remains essentially the same: it is usually the meaning of the lexeme
which is adjusted and not that of the grammatical construction (see
Section 4.1.4). Yet it is unclear exactly what motivates this relatively unilateral
tendency. When one assumes (as construction grammarians often do) that the
type of information that grammatical constructions encode is conceptual), then it
should also be possible for them to be adjusted in context somehow, but they
usually are not. (As mentioned above (footnote 102 in Section 4.1.5), this might
be due to the more abstract and entrenched nature of the semantics of grammat-
ical constructions which makes them less prone to change, but this is not
necessarily obvious.) This problem is much less of a challenge, however, when
one assumes (as I do here) that the grammatical constructions in which the
lexemes occur encode not conceptual but procedural information. From this
perspective, it is precisely the function of these constructions to constrain the
inferential phase of comprehension and to guide the hearer towards the intended
interpretation. It therefore follows from this that hearers will adjust the meaning
of the lexemes that occur within grammatical constructions, and not the other
way around. Escandell-Vidal argues that “a procedural instruction must be
satisfied at any cost. Procedural meaning always prevails” (2017: 92).118

118
It will be shown in the next section that procedural information does not “always prevail.”
 4.2 Procedural Meaning and Lexical Pragmatics 155

Indeed, it seems intuitively logical that individuals should adjust the

meaning of the item which falls under a constraint rather than the con-
straint itself, even more so since the function of these constraints is to
facilitate the use of conceptual information. The procedural semantics of
grammatical constructions can therefore account for Michaelis’ override
principle. This is why the notion of coercion is needed as a separate
concept. Although the interpretation of a coerced lexeme is pragmatically
derived, in the same way that the interpretation of a non-coerced lexeme
is, it is much more contingent on the procedural semantics of the gram-
matical construction in which it occurs than in cases of non-coerced
lexemes.
The aim of this chapter is to identify some of the ways the linguistic
environment in which lexemes occur directly affects their interpretation. This
is why the notion of coercion was discussed in the first part. It was shown that
many (partially) schematic constructions directly contribute to the interpret-
ation of a lexeme, the meaning of which is usually adjusted in order to fit that of
the construction in which it occurs. One of the main conclusions, however, is
that it is not the constructions themselves which coerce their own semantics
onto the lexemes, but rather that the resolution mechanism is primarily
a pragmatic process which is carried out by the hearer in accordance with
their expectations of relevance, and that the meaning construction process
resembles that of non-coerced lexemes. This view is particularly interesting
taking into account the fact that the schematic/grammatical constructions
involved in cases of coercion in my view do not encode conceptual but
procedural information. By definition, procedural information acts as
a semantic constraint on pragmatic inferences. Therefore, it is logical that
coercion effects should be viewed as resulting from a semantically constrained
pragmatic process. The major challenge now is to understand exactly what
procedural information consists of. This is the aim of the next section.

4.2.3 On the Nature of Procedural Encoding

It is necessary to define what procedural information consists of in order to
understand exactly how grammatical constructions constrain the inferential
processes involved during the interpretation of an utterance in general and of
lexemes in particular. As mentioned in the previous section, the notion of
procedural encoding is relatively absent in the framework of CxG. In RT, the
notion still gives rise to much debate. In this section, the aim is to provide
a critical discussion of the different views adopted in the literature. Eventually
it will be suggested that procedural information might best be described in
terms of meta-conceptual representations which function as expectation-like
constraints.
156 4 Understanding Lexemes

4.2.3.1 Procedural Meaning in CxG In CxG, the notion of procedural

encoding has been used mostly by Elizabeth Traugott and Graeme
Trousdale in their work on grammaticalization and grammatical meaning.
Elsewhere in the constructionist literature, the term is generally not used and
meaning is discussed solely in conceptual terms. It must be noted that, for
those who do establish a distinction in CxG, the idea that some constructions
essentially encode a more procedural type of information comes directly from
the work carried out in RT. Traugott and Dasher (2002: 10), for instance,
explicitly refer to RT and to Diane Blakemore’s work. As a result, the
expectation is that Traugott and Dasher essentially adopt the relevance-
theoretic perspective on what exactly constitutes procedural content.119
However, the integration of relevance-theoretic insights is mainly termino-
logical. Indeed, they assume that the nature of procedural information is also
primarily conceptual and therefore prefer to make the distinction between
contentful and procedural types of meaning (i.e. two types of conceptual
information) rather than between conceptual and procedural (i.e. non-
conceptual) types of meaning. They argue that “both procedural and non-
procedural language-specific meanings are representations of more abstract
Conceptual Structures” (2002: 10, fn. 10). In this case, however, it is less clear
(than in RT) how procedural meanings differ from contentful ones. (This will
be discussed more fully below.) Traugott and Dasher’s view somewhat
naturally follows from a long tradition in CxG which avoids differentiating
between more lexical and more grammatical units of the language. All units
of the language are argued to be meaningful, and this meaning is necessarily
conceptual. The meaning of argument-structure constructions, for instance, is
usually discussed in such conceptual terms.120 A direct consequence of this
view is that the procedural nature of grammatical expressions simply consists
in conceptual representations of a more abstract (or schematic) nature.121
This is what Langacker (2008) argues when he considers that “highly sche-
matic meanings” are “characteristic of ‘grammatical’ elements” (Langacker,
2008: 178). This is also very explicit in Trousdale (2008b):
Langacker (1987, 1991a) has repeatedly suggested that the meaning of grammatical
elements is usually quite schematic, but given the gradient nature of schematicity, it
would not be unwarranted to assume that some grammatical elements are more

119
Note that this is the case even though relevance theorists do not fully agree on what procedural
encoding means (see below).
120
Concerning argument-structure constructions, Goldberg (1995: 39) argues in favor of a “scene
encoding hypothesis,” according to which these types of constructions “designate scenes essential
to human experience.” Similarly, Langacker (2008: 33) refers to conceptual archetypes.
121
In the case of the grammatical category NOUN, for instance, Langacker (1987: 189) argues that
its “semantic pole instantiates the schema [THING].”
 4.2 Procedural Meaning and Lexical Pragmatics 157

schematic than others, and that the process by which grammatical elements become
more schematic is known more generally in linguistic theory as grammaticalization.
(Trousdale, 2008b: 317)

It is unclear whether grammaticalization can be reduced to a semantically

higher level of schematicity, however. It is generally assumed that lexical
and grammatical elements of the language serve different functions in
discourse. It is therefore reasonable to assume that the shift from lexical
to grammatical meaning also involves a change in the actual nature of the
encoded content, for otherwise it is not clear what the distinction between
lexical (contentful conceptual) and grammatical (procedural conceptual)
constructions is actually trying to capture. Later in this chapter, it will be
argued that of course some form of conceptual abstraction is involved in the
process of grammaticalization and in the development of procedural encod-
ing. There are different reasons why grammaticalization cannot be reduced
to conceptual abstraction alone, however. First of all, it is unclear at what
point a meaning is schematic enough to be considered grammatical and not
lexical anymore. One must not forget that processes of schematization/
abstraction are also involved at the lexical level. The different senses of
a lexeme are abstracted away from actual usage, and it was shown previ-
ously (Chapter 2) that some senses in a conceptual network might be
schematic relative to other senses. It follows that the level of schematicity
at which the grammatical threshold should occur has to be quite high, at
which point one might actually question its relevance. More importantly, it
has been quite extensively shown that grammaticalization does not only
involve semantic bleaching (i.e. loss of lexical/contentful conceptual prop-
erties), but it also primarily consists in semantic change. In particular,
Elizabeth Traugott has shown that the shift from lexical to grammatical
meaning often involves the conventionalization of implicatures (which she
refers to as invited inferences) as well as a process of subjectification (e.g.
Traugott and König, 1991; Traugott, 1995, 2003, 2010; Traugott and
Dasher, 2002; Hopper and Traugott, 2003; Traugott and Trousdale, 2013).
Langacker also recognizes the major role of subjectification in the process
of grammaticalization:
My central claim is that subjectification represents a common type of semantic change,
and that it often figures in the process of grammaticization, whereby “grammatical”
elements evolve from “lexical” sources. (Langacker, 1990: 16)

Although Traugott and Langacker define subjectification differently (cf.

Langacker, 1999: 149; Traugott, 1999: 187; Athanasiadou, Canakis and
Cornillie, 2006: 4), the point remains that grammaticalization is often not
solely the product of conceptual schematization (or semantic bleaching)
but also involves a shift in the semantic value of the grammaticalizing
158 4 Understanding Lexemes

item.122 Regardless of how one defines subjectification, however, the main

challenge is still there: the encoded content of grammatical constructions in
CxG (and cognitive linguistics more generally) is still assumed to be primarily
conceptual and, therefore, of the same nature as that of lexical constructions.
As mentioned earlier, I agree with relevance theorists that there must be
a difference in the actual nature of the encoded content. If (more) grammat-
ical constructions also encode conceptual information, then it is unclear how
they can still be argued to contribute to the understanding of an utterance in
a way that is different from that of (more) lexical items. It could of course be
argued that it is precisely the point of CxG to consider that there is no such
distinction and that (more) lexical and (more) grammatical elements make
a similar contribution to the interpretation process. Perhaps the process of
subjectification mentioned above suffices to distinguish between lexical and
grammatical items. Yet it is not clear that this is the view that all construc-
tionists (want to) espouse. Indeed, in spite of rejecting a clear-cut distinction
between lexical and grammatical constructions, they still often assume that
more lexical and more grammatical items serve a different function in
discourse. This is exactly what motivates the distinction between contentful
and procedural encoding in Traugott’s work in the first place, for instance. In
the rest of this chapter, it is my aim to argue that the semantics of (more)
lexical and (more) grammatical constructions actually differ in nature.
The relevance-theoretic approach to procedural encoding will be presented
shortly. Before doing so, it is important to make a couple of observations
concerning the constructionist view on the information encoded by ‘gram-
matical’ constructions. When arguing that there is a continuum of construc-
tions from more lexical to more grammatical ones, constructionists simply
assume that there is no strict distinction between words of the lexicon on the
one hand and abstract syntactic rules on the other. Rather, it is argued that
individuals store a network of more or less complex and more or less
schematic constructions, all of which are associated with a specific func-
tion/meaning. In CxG, constructions are defined as the conventional combin-
ation of a form and a meaning, and that is why, for instance, both the lexeme
roof and the DITRANSITIVE pattern equally qualify as constructions (see
Chapter 2). Unfortunately, there is one possible pitfall with this approach.
One must not forget that although the form–meaning correspondence is
indeed characteristic of both lexical and grammatical constructions, this is
as far as the similarity goes between the different types of constructions. That
is, even though everything is a construction in CxG, lexical and grammatical

122
The notion of subjectification will be addressed more fully later in this chapter. In particular,
the notion of subjectivity discussed by Traugott will prove particularly useful in defining the
notion of procedural encoding in meta-conceptual terms.
 4.2 Procedural Meaning and Lexical Pragmatics 159

constructions remain located on opposite ends of the constructional con-

tinuum. As Diessel (2019: 107) puts it, “one must not overlook the differ-
ences between lexemes and constructions.”123 On the formal side,
grammatical constructions are in general more schematic than lexical ones.
This distinction seems to have particular consequences that one cannot
ignore. Pulvermüller, Cappelle and Shtyrov (2013) provide solid experimental
evidence, for instance, that the physical brain treats lexical and grammatical
constructions differently and that distinct neurophysiological processes are
involved when using the different types of constructions (see also Divjak
et al., 2022). This strongly suggests that the form of a construction is
encoded differently by the brain depending on whether it is more lexical or
more grammatical. As a consequence, it is reasonable to assume that, simi-
larly, the semantics of these different constructions may itself also be of
a different nature and encoded differently. This does not challenge the view
that both are form–meaning pairs but, rather, the assumption that they should
capture the same type of meaning.
It is worth noting more generally that research in grammaticalization has for
a long time focused on the formal distinctions between lexical and grammatical
units. Interest in the semantic implications of this process is comparatively
more recent. Harder and Boye (2011) point out that (see also Boye and Harder,
2012)
typical definitions are circular – for instance, grammatical expressions are defined as
expressions that have grammatical meaning, but grammatical meaning is then defined
ostensively in terms of examples of expressions that most linguists would intuitively
agree are grammatical. (p. 60)
As the different contributions in Narrog and Heine (2011) illustrate, research on
the semantics of grammatical expressions has given rise to a number of
different perspectives, with varying degrees of (in)compatibility across
views. It will have become clear in this chapter that I wish to pursue the idea
put forward in RT, and in particular defended by Nicolle (2011), that grammat-
ical items encode a procedural type of meaning. Now, the aim is to identify
exactly what such a procedural content consists of. This will enable me to
explain more specifically how more grammatical constructions (i.e. schematic
constructions, be they atomic or complex) directly contribute to the interpret-
ation of lexical items and account for cases of coercion.

123
It is interesting to note that Diessel (2019: 107–108) in fact argues that unlike lexical meaning,
constructional meanings “do not directly tap into encyclopedic knowledge but . . . provide
processing instructions for the interpretation of lexical items.” This is exactly the view
developed in Relevance Theory (cf. Section 4.2.3.2), which provides further support for the
integration of the two approaches.
160 4 Understanding Lexemes

4.2.3.2 Procedural Meaning in RT In spite of the pervasive attention to

procedural meaning in RT since Blakemore’s seminal papers and books, the
notion remains relatively ill-defined. Relevance theorists disagree on its scope
of application and in what contexts it can or should be used. For instance,
although she argues the task may not be easy given the variety of expressions
which are assumed to encode procedural information, Carston (2016b: 155)
readily recognizes that RT needs a proper definition of procedural encoding.
There is some common understanding of what counts as procedural encoding.
First of all, it is relatively common in RT to describe procedural information in
terms of either semantic constraints or instructions. These two terms have been
used by Blakemore herself:
Such expressions impose constraints on the context in which the utterances containing
them must be interpreted. (1990: 363; emphasis mine)
[They] encode instructions for processing propositional representations. (1992: 152,
emphasis mine)
In both cases, however, it is left to the reader’s appreciation to understand what
the terminology used is actually meant to capture. Indeed, as far as semantics is
concerned, it is not obvious what a semantic constraint or instruction consists
of, and even less so how they might be acquired and cognitively processed.
Curcó (2011) quite rightly points out that “in the literature on procedural
meaning very little is asserted about how exactly such meaning is embodied”
(Curcó, 2011: 35).124 As a result, it is not clear what the relevance-theoretic
approach to procedural meaning consists of. Indeed, there seem to be as many
views of what constitutes procedural meaning as there are papers published on
the topic. The dominant view is as follows: at the heart of the distinction
between conceptual and procedural encoding lies the assumption that some
pieces of information directly contribute to our mental representations (i.e.
concepts) while others enable us to compute, or manipulate, these representa-
tions (i.e. procedures). The idea that procedural encoding is of a computational
format is very strong in RT. Diane Blakemore argues that procedural items
“map directly onto computations themselves – that is, onto mental processes”
(Blakemore, 1987: 144). Similarly, Wilson also argues that “the function of
procedural expressions is to activate or trigger domain-specific cognitive
procedures which may be exploited in inferential communication” (Wilson,
2011: 12). According to Escandell-Vidal (2017), “a linguistic procedure can be
modelled as an algorithm to be read by processing systems” (Escandell-Vidal,
2017: 92). In this case, the term procedural encoding is used in a quite literal

124
A similar observation has been made by Bezuidenhout (2004: 106), who Wilson argues “is
right to point out that the nature of the procedural information encoded by lexical items has
been insufficiently addressed in relevance theory” (Wilson, 2016: 10).
 4.2 Procedural Meaning and Lexical Pragmatics 161

sense since it corresponds to a cognitive procedure. Unfortunately, it is once

again not clear what it means for the semantics of a linguistic item – and in
particular here that of grammatical constructions – to consist of a mental
computation/process. As will become clear in the rest of this section, this
view has resulted in a lot of discussion within RT (see, for instance,
Bezuidenhout, 2004; Curcó, 2011).125
Another way in which these cognitive procedures have been described is in
terms of computational rules: “a procedural item triggers the application of
a specific rule represented in its entry” (Curcó, 2011: 35). From this perspec-
tive, using a procedural expression triggers the activation of a specific rule
which one naturally has to apply to the appropriate conceptual information
available in the context of use. Curcó (2011) notes that:
Given certain conceptual representations as input, the activation of a procedure instructs
the hearer to manipulate them in a specific way. The process whereby the rule is
executed produces as output conceptual representations too. (p. 36)

So, for instance, the use of the pronoun she requires the identification of
a particular female referent whom, once found, will constitute the new concep-
tual representation. Similarly, the use of the discourse marker therefore (e.g. He
is an Englishman; he is, therefore, brave) requires the hearer to represent
the second conjunct (he is brave) as being naturally entailed by the information
provided in the first conjunct (He is an Englishman), thus enabling the recovery
of a particular implicated premise or conclusion (Englishmen are brave). The
difficulty, however, remains to understand exactly, as mentioned above, how

125
Note that it has been suggested (Gundel, 2011: 224; Escandell-Vidal, Leonetti and Ahern,
2011: xx) that the difference in RT between conceptual and procedural information might
actually correspond to the distinction established between declarative and procedural memory
in neuroscience (cf. Cohen and Squire, 1980; Eichenbaum, 2002; Squire, 2004, inter alia). In
short, declarative memory contains all the stored information that one gradually acquires or
learns (e.g. the color of one’s dog, the name of one’s neighbor, etc.), while procedural memory
retains processing skills for how to perform a specific task (e.g. tying your shoes, riding a bike,
etc.). I will not go into the detail of this discussion here, but it is not clear whether the parallel
can be so easily drawn between the two, however. It is simply worth pointing out that there are
quite a number of questions that this view naturally raises, from trying to understand exactly
what it means for a linguistic item to give access to such a type of procedural memory, as well
as pinning down the extent to which it can actually capture specific nuances between similar
but distinct grammatical expressions (such as so and therefore, for instance). More specifically,
it is important to note that procedural memory has been generally identified as sustaining the
whole of linguistic performance, i.e. as generally providing support for language use (see
Bybee, 1998; Paradis, 2009). This is particularly true on the formal side of language, whereby
procedural memory particularly enables the use (and combination) of both lexical and gram-
matical expressions (cf. Paradis, 2009: 14) and accounts for the generativity of language
(though see Divjak et al., 2022 for recent discussion). It is therefore unlikely that procedural
memory is only related to the subtype of semantic encoding that RT describes as procedural
information. In spite of the terminological similarity, procedural encoding as used in RT must
be given a definition of its own.
162 4 Understanding Lexemes

such rules are actually embodied. In the different suggestions that have been
made (see Bezuidenhout, 2004; Curcó, 2011; Wilson, 2016), these rules are
generally assumed to be “either purely dispositional or formulated in a sub-
personal ‘machine language’ distinct from the language of thought” (Wilson,
2016: 11). In other words, these rules have their very own format, the exact
nature of which is not accessible to us. Curcó (2011) has explicitly argued
against the approach defended by Bezuidenhout (2004) in terms of causal
dispositions126 and suggests that the rules encoded by procedural expressions
might actually be of a conceptual type.127 Only the use of those rules would
require distinct abilities (e.g. of a dispositional nature) which enable us to
access them and perform the required action. Curcó herself points out, how-
ever, that the perspective she puts forward is but one possibility among many
others (Curcó, 2011: 44). Whichever format these rules might take, a rule-based
approach to procedural meaning simply fails to win unanimous support in RT.
For instance, Wharton (2009: 65) has expressed strong doubts about this idea.
He argues that although the notion of rule encoding might apply easily to some
procedural items (e.g. discourse connectives), it does not easily extend to all the
different types of expressions that have been described in procedural terms (e.g.
pronouns, mood indicators). He admits that procedural expressions primarily
serve to indicate “the general direction in which the intended meaning is to be
sought” (Wharton, 2009: 63), but this need not be in the format of a rule or
instruction.128
The conclusion so far is that it is not obvious even to relevance theorists
themselves exactly what constitutes the content of procedural expressions and
that there is little consensus among those who address the question. There is
only agreement that procedural information is used to “indicate, guide, con-
strain, or direct the inferential phase of comprehension” (Carston, 2002a: 162).
In the rest of this section, it is my aim to try and define the procedural
meaning of grammatical constructions, be they atomic or complex, many of
which directly affect the interpretation of lexical items. I have expressed strong
doubts that the function of grammatical constructions consists of the same

126
Dispositions are not representations (i.e. concepts) but are embodied “as ways in which the
system acts on representations” (Bezuidenhout, 2004: 109), i.e. as potential action triggers.
127
In earlier work, Groefsema (1992: 220) also suggests that these rules are encoded as concepts.
The notion of pragmatic features in Moeschler (2016) also seems to go in that direction.
128
In addition, one must not forget that for many relevance theorists, concepts consist of three
entries, one of which (the logical entry) gives access to deductive rules that are used to compute
the logical forms in which a concept occurs (cf. Chapter 2). I have argued against this view in
the previous chapter. Nevertheless, for those who maintain that concepts give access to such
rules, it becomes essential to spell out exactly in what sense the rules encoded by procedural
expressions differ from those encoded by concepts. This is particularly true since it has been
argued that many expressions actually encode both conceptual and procedural information. It is
unclear exactly how the content of these expressions might then be acquired and how the
different types of rules they simultaneously give access to can possibly be computed.
 4.2 Procedural Meaning and Lexical Pragmatics 163

conceptual type of information as lexical items, as is assumed in CxG. At the

same time, the more computational model presented in RT also fails to be
entirely convincing. I assume that, like concepts, procedural encoding remains
of a relatively representational format, in the sense that it consists of some
information available to us rather than a cognitive process located in a sub-
personal system. The challenge for this view is that representations are usually
assumed to be conceptual. This might be why, as mentioned above, Traugott
argues that procedures also consist of conceptual structures. It is exactly what
motivates Bezuidenhout (2004) to argue that procedures are therefore not
representational but dispositional. It could be argued that maintaining
a representational format for procedural encoding thus contradicts my previous
claim that unlike lexical items, grammatical expressions most probably do not
encode concepts but a different type of information. This need not be so,
however. As mentioned above, I want to suggest that the content of grammat-
ical constructions might best be understood in terms of meta-conceptual know-
ledge which provides background information on which to compute lexical
concepts. This view will be outlined in the rest of this section.129

4.2.3.3 Procedural Meaning: New Hypothesis The hypothesis is inspired

by the following observation: the common denominator in relevance-theoretic
approaches is that procedural encoding provides specific constraints on infer-
ential processes.130 They are commonly used to reduce the search space during
inferential processes and, therefore, to optimize relevance. Unfortunately, to
argue that some expressions encode particular constraints on interpretation is
rather uninformative in a framework like RT. Indeed, the ostensive-inferential
approach to communication adopted in RT (see Chapter 2) rests on the assump-
tion that language provides support for the inferential processes that enable the
recovery of a speaker’s intentions and is therefore largely used to indicate
where relevance is to be found.131 From this perspective, even expressions that
encode concepts can be thought of as constraints on inferential processes.
Sperber and Wilson’s (1995: 168) analysis of the sentences in (104) and
(105) supports this view.
(104) George has a big cat.
(105) George has a tiger.

129
Note that the main focus of this book remains lexical semantics–pragmatics. Therefore, the
hypothesis briefly formulated in the rest of this section constitutes more a suggestion for further
research than a definite claim and full-fledged proposal.
130
After all, the notion of procedural encoding was introduced to RT in a book called “Semantic
constraints on relevance” (Blakemore, 1987; emphasis mine).
131
Wilson and Sperber (1993: 102) argue that “linguistic decoding feeds inferential comprehension.”
164 4 Understanding Lexemes

They argue that, in the case that George possesses a tiger, the sentence in (105)
is more relevant than the one in (104) since it obviously enables the faster
recovery of the speaker’s intended interpretation (i.e. that George owns a tiger
and not a domestic cat). Here, choosing the conceptual expression tiger instead
of big cat therefore directly affects the inferential process involved during the
comprehension phase. So it appears that conceptual items also put constraints
on the inferential phase of comprehension. This is particularly true, for
instance, since the use of (105) also makes accessible specific assumptions
which enable the derivation of a number of implicatures with regard to the
situation. These examples are meant to illustrate that in order to keep the notion
of procedural meaning distinct from conceptual encoding, it is necessary to
specify exactly in what sense procedural expressions act as constraints on
inferential processes (i.e. how they do so differently compared to items that
encode concepts).
One of the earliest descriptions of procedural information which appears
most appealing is that in Wilson and Sperber (1993) when they argue that
constructions that encode procedural information provide “information about
how to manipulate [conceptual representations]” (Wilson and Sperber, 1993:
97). That is, these expressions are used to put concepts together and form larger
representations. This description is particularly interesting since it corresponds
very closely to most of the descriptions that are generally given of the seman-
tics of grammatical constructions (which I argue encode procedural informa-
tion, see previous section). For instance, von Fintel (1995: 184) argues that the
semantics of grammatical expressions constitute “a sort of functional glue tying
together lexical concepts.” Similarly, Langacker (2011) argues that:
Despite the absence of a definite boundary, lexicon and grammar serve different primary
functions. Lexical items have a descriptive function: their conceptual content serves to
specify some portion of the objective situation. The role of grammar is to abet and
supplement their description. Grammatical constructions sanction and symbolize the
integration of lexical content to form more complex conceptions. . . . This supplemen-
tary function corresponds to what Boye and Harder (2009; see also Harder and Boye,
2011) identify as the basic feature distinguishing grammar from lexicon, namely the
“coding of secondary information status.” (p. 82; emphasis mine)

These two quotes illustrate the general tendency to think of grammatical

function in terms of the mental organization (and manipulation) of particular
conceptual representations into larger, more complex conceptions. It is this
particular view which inspires me to argue that the procedural content associ-
ated with grammatical constructions consists of meta-conceptual information.
Indeed, it implies that the grammatical/procedural function primarily provides
an indication of how the embedded lexical concepts are to be employed. Yet in
order to achieve this type of conceptual arrangement, it is necessary to adopt
 4.2 Procedural Meaning and Lexical Pragmatics 165

a specific perspective on these concepts. That is, acquiring the meaning of

grammatical constructions cannot simply consist in abstracting away from
lexical concepts (since in spite of their more abstract nature, the function of
grammatical concepts is essentially of the same type as those of lexical
concepts), but rather has to involve some form of mental stepping back from
them. It is in that sense that grammatical constructions seem to be convention-
ally associated with meta-concepts: they provide access not to mental repre-
sentations but to “mental representations of mental representations” (Sperber,
2000b: 3).132 In other words, the information provided by grammatical con-
structions does not simply complement that of lexical constructions but rather
directly serves to compute lexical concepts.
An approach in meta-conceptual terms is in line with some of the findings
discussed in the literature on the function of grammatical constructions (be they
atomic or complex). For instance, as opposed to basic representations, meta-
representations are often described as constituting representations of a higher
(or second) order (cf. Sperber, 2000c). Grammatical constructions have been
discussed in such terms as well. For instance, the cognitive psycholinguist
Michael Tomasello, advocate of the usage-based approach adopted in CxG,
refers to grammatical constructions as second-order symbols: “these may be
seen as basically second-order symbols because they indicate how the first-
order symbols are to be construed” (Tomasello, 1992: 6). This view also
receives support from research in neuroscience where grammatical construc-
tions are also argued to provide “second-order constraints” (Bergen and
Wheeler, 2010: 156).133 Bergen and Wheeler argue that they use the
term second order in the following sense:
We use the term “second-order” here because in this function, grammar serves not to
directly propose content to be mentally simulated, but rather operates over this content.
(p. 156)
It is exactly in this sense that I understand the notion of meta-concepts. Support
for the view advocated here also comes from research on theory of mind (ToM)
abilities, introduced in Chapter 2. It has been observed that the acquisition of
ToM abilities involves incremental stages, where more advanced ToM abilities
gradually develop throughout childhood (see Zufferey, 2010: 30–35). In par-
ticular, it is often argued that a critical stage in their acquisition precisely

132
Note that the notion of meta-representations is also discussed in RT, but mostly in relation to
meta-represented thoughts or propositions such as in the case of irony or meta-linguistic
negation (see Allott (2017) for a detailed overview), and usually not in relation to grammat-
ical/procedural meaning.
133
It has also been suggested in developmental biology that “the development of second-order
cognition is a necessary prerequisite for the formation of fully grammatical language” (Langer,
1996: 269) and that this is most probably what makes human language different from other
animal communication systems (such as that used by chimpanzees, for instance).
166 4 Understanding Lexemes

concerns the ability to use meta-representations (e.g. (false) beliefs and atti-
tudes), at around three or four years of age,134 at which point ToM abilities are
often assumed to be fully developed. It is worth making a couple of observa-
tions here. First of all, research in the field of language acquisition shows that
adultlike grammatical knowledge develops and starts to be productive at about
the same age (Tomasello, 2003; Clark, 2009).135 This therefore constitutes an
interesting observation for the hypothesis presented here whereby grammatical
meaning consists of meta-representations. The link between grammatical con-
structions and meta-representations also receives support from clinical linguis-
tics. Some individuals show abnormal developments of ToM abilities such as,
for instance, individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). It has been
observed that one of the skills affected by ASD is theory of mind. In particular,
most ASD subjects lack meta-representational abilities (cf. Baron-Cohen,
Leslie and Frith, 1985; Baron-Cohen, 1989, 1995; Zufferey, 2015: 164). It
appears that a majority of ASD individuals also suffer from language impair-
ment and particularly lack grammatical skills (see, for instance, Eigsti,
Bennetto and Dadlani, 2007; Zufferey, 2010; Eigsti et al., 2011; Wittke et al.,
2017, and references cited therein). This further suggests that meta-
representational abilities and grammatical function are related.136 Finally, as
mentioned earlier, the assumption that grammatical constructions (atomic or
complex) give access to meta-conceptual information is also consistent with
the observation that their development typically involves a process of subjecti-
fication. Traugott (1995: 31) uses the term subjectification to refer to the
process whereby “meanings become increasingly based in the speaker’s subjective
belief state/attitude toward the proposition”, in other words, towards what the speaker
is talking about. (Traugott, 1989: 35)
This perspective once more seems to go hand in hand with the meta-conceptual
hypothesis presented in this section. Indeed, the attitude expressed towards
a specific proposition naturally imposes a particular representation (the atti-
tude) onto another representation (the proposition) and therefore consists of
a meta-representation. Ronald Langacker also uses the notion of subjectivity in
relation to grammatical constructions but, as mentioned earlier, does so differ-
ently from Traugott. According to him, grammatical constructions are more

134
Exactly at what age children manage to use meta-representations remains a bit of a debate. For
a critical discussion of this issue, see Zufferey (2010: 33–34).
135
Naturally, children acquire a number of word-combination patterns (such as formulaic phrases,
pivot schemas and item-based constructions) at earlier stages, but these bear “no communica-
tive significance” (Tomasello, 2003: 115) and most often only act as “usage-based syntactic
operations” (p. 307).
136
It also reinforces the view that acquiring grammatical constructions (or failing to do so) does
not only involve a process of abstraction/generalization (contra Johnson, Boyd and Goldberg,
2012).
 4.2 Procedural Meaning and Lexical Pragmatics 167

subjective than lexical constructions in the sense that their conceptual construal
does not explicitly represent the subject of conceptualization as constituting its
content but is rather located “offstage,” “inhering in the very process of
conception without being its target” (Langacker, 1999: 149). That is, the
conceptual material provided by grammatical constructions provides tools for
conceptualization (which Talmy (2018: 4) refers to as a “conceptual struc-
ture”), which is once more consistent with the meta-conceptual view adopted
here.
When the procedural semantics of grammatical constructions are described
in meta-conceptual terms, one can more easily explain in what sense grammat-
ical constructions act as constraints on interpretation processes. Grammatical
constructions precisely serve to provide information about the concepts that
occur within their open slots, thus directly providing an indication to the hearer
of where relevance is to be found. The types of grammatical constructions
discussed in the section on coercion provide information about the types of
lexical concepts that typically occur in a given slot, and hence directly affect the
recovery of the explicature (i.e. the proposition expressed). As mentioned
previously, however, procedures also constrain the recovery of higher-level
explicatures and implicatures. Grammatical constructions that constrain the
recovery of higher-level explicatures provide information about the type of
attitude or speech act intended by the speaker (e.g. sentence types; Clark,
1991). Grammatical constructions that constrain the recovery of implicatures
provide information about the type of links between different propositions (e.g.
discourse connectives; Blakemore, 1987, 2002).
The aim of this section was to spell out more explicitly what constitutes the
semantics of (atomic or complex) grammatical constructions in order to pin
down more specifically the way in which they constrain the interpretation of the
lexemes that are used within them and to better understand the notion of
coercion discussed in the previous section. It was shown that neither of the
two views adopted in CxG and RT is fully convincing. Nevertheless, given their
respective arguments and on the basis of additional evidence, it has been
suggested that procedural/grammatical content might consist of meta-
conceptual representations, i.e. information about the (lexical) concepts that
are embedded within these structures.137 When described in meta-conceptual
terms, procedural information is understood as providing information of
a secondary status, the role of which is to provide a structure against which
the concepts that fall within its scope can be mentally construed. This view is
fully compatible with and, in fact, helps to explain the perspective on coercion
137
Exactly how these meta-concepts are embodied has not been spelled out. This constitutes
a topic for further research and will not be explored here. An interesting hypothesis, following
Curcó (2011: 44), might be to consider that procedural/meta-conceptual information simply
involves a kind of mental bracketing (i.e. encapsulation) different from conceptual content.
168 4 Understanding Lexemes

adopted in Section 4.1.5. First of all, as mentioned above, it can account for the
relative unidirectionality (captured by the override principle) of the resolution
process. Indeed, in this case the function of the lexical item and that of the
grammatical construction with which there is a mismatch do not have exactly the
same status and contribute in different ways to the interpretation process. It
seems intuitively more logical that concepts should conform to the way in which
they are meta-represented rather than the other way around. This is particularly
true since the meta-conceptual information provided by grammatical construc-
tions supposedly provides a more rigid structure against which the process of
meaning construction operates (since they are based on higher-level cognitive
abilities and therefore less amenable to change). It is interesting to note that in
RT, rigidity is considered to be the main property of procedural information (cf.
Escandell-Vidal and Leonetti, 2011). This view can therefore explain the natural
tendency captured by the override principle (and left relatively unexplained in
CxG). At the same time, by virtue of remaining in the format of an information
(rather than a cognitive process), the view adopted here still makes it possible for
the procedural information associated with grammatical constructions to change.
That is, in spite of being more rigid than lexical concepts (i.e. less easily prone to
contextual modulation), procedural encoding is not as change-proof as it is often
assumed to be in RT. It has been shown in Section 4.1.4 that in some cases, it is
precisely the meaning of the construction which is adjusted in accordance with
the meaning of the lexical concept. This directly follows from their being
acquired and learned in context on the basis of the conceptual elements which
occur in them, i.e. from their usage-based origin. As a result, the lexemes used
and the context in which a (more) grammatical construction occurs might
sometimes have greater coercive force than the grammatical construction itself,
which therefore directly affects the meta-representation associated with it. In
CxG, it is taken for granted that the function of grammatical constructions can
change given that language is assumed to emerge from usage and to be “con-
stantly changing” (Bybee, 2013: 49.)138 Finally, and perhaps most importantly,
defining the function of grammatical constructions in terms of meta-conceptual
representations further supports the view that coercion effects are the result of
a semantically constrained pragmatic process. Indeed, as mentioned several
times already, coercion is semantically constrained given that the meta-
conceptual information associated with the grammatical constructions provides

138
It must be noted that, from a usage-based approach, ‘regular’ cases of coercion (where it is the
meaning of the lexeme which adapts to that of the grammatical construction) must also affect
the function of the grammatical construction used. That is, although in this case coercion
mostly has an impact on the meaning of the lexeme, its eventual interpretation most certainly
also deviates (even slightly) from the meta-conceptual information stored by the grammatical
construction and therefore leaves a trace in its representation (and thus contributes to its
possible change). Bybee (2010: 186) has explicitly defended this perspective.
 4.3 Lexemes and Idioms 169

a structure against which to understand the lexical concepts that occur within
them. At the same time, this meta-conceptual information does not itself consti-
tute the content of these concepts (or the proposition to which they contribute)
but simply acts as additional background information on the basis of which the
pragmatic process of lexically regulated saturation (see previous chapter) can be
carried out by the hearer (independently of whether there is a mismatch between
the concept encoded by the lexeme and the meta-conceptual information associ-
ated with the grammatical construction, see Section 4.1.4).

4.3 Lexemes and Idioms

The aim of this chapter is to identify and explain the ways in which the
interpretation of a lexeme is affected by its linguistic environment. A central
assumption is that interpreting a lexical construct systematically involves the
inferential process of lexically regulated saturation. In Sections 4.1 and 4.2, it
was shown that this process is directly constrained by the procedural semantics
of the grammatical constructions in which lexemes occur, which sometimes
leads to coercion effects. In this section, it will be shown that interpreting
a lexeme also largely depends on the hearer’s ability to recognize the use of
larger (fixed) sequences to which the lexical item may belong, namely idioms.
It is widely acknowledged in linguistics that on top of knowing specific lexical
units, speakers of a given language also store a number of rather fixed lexical
sequences, often referred to as idioms or idiomatic expressions, which are
associated with a specific interpretation. The term idiom can be found in both
CxG and RT, which provides an interesting basis for comparison. The chal-
lenge is twofold, however. First, CxG and RT have opposite understandings of
what idiomaticity consists of and they do not pay an equal amount of attention
to idioms. Second, they focus on different facets of idiomatic expressions. In
CxG, the main goal is to identify their formal and semantic properties; in RT, it
is the interpretation process of idioms that constitutes the main focus of
attention. This section aims to integrate the two perspectives and to provide
a cross-theoretical understanding of the interaction between lexical construc-
tions, idioms and the process of lexically regulated saturation.
Although in RTsome research addresses the underlying cognitive strategies used
by hearers to interpret idioms (e.g. Vega Moreno, 2001, 2003, 2005; Eizaga
Rebollar, 2009), these papers stand out as exceptions since the contribution of
idiomatic expressions is otherwise never discussed in the relevance-theoretic
literature.139 This is to be expected given that RT adopts a Chomskyan view of

139
The terms idiom, idiomatic and idiomaticity figure in none of Sperber and Wilson (1995),
Carston (2002a), Wilson and Sperber (2012) or Clark (2013a), all of which I consider to be
reference books in RT.
170 4 Understanding Lexemes

language, where idioms are considered to be “a relatively marginal phenomenon”

(Jackendoff, 2002: 167).140 In the papers that do address idioms, the term is used in
a rather technical sense to refer to (relatively) lexically fixed sequences that usually
receive figurative interpretations. This includes patterns such as in (106) to (108).
(106) to kick the bucket – [to die]
a. They’re waiting for me to kick the bucket cause then they’ll get more
money. (COCA, written)
b. I will work hard to make a niche for myself and wait until one of the old
doctors kicks the bucket. (COCA, written)
(107) to spill the beans – [to reveal secret information]
a. Jones tried to get him to spill the beans about his true allegiances, but he’s
not talking. (COCA, written)
b. But since Bill and Monica have spilled the beans, you might want to recast
your votes. (COCA, written)
(108) to be barking up the wrong tree – [to be wrong]
a. If you’re looking for good nutrition in a hot dog, you’re barking up the
wrong tree. (COCA, written)
b. Most of them agreed with us that TV news “stars” are barking up the
wrong tree when they focus on their “great” good looks, rather than on the
news and the reportorial task at hand. (NOW)

In CxG, idioms of this type have been referred to as core idioms (Wulff,
2008: 2). They are so called because constructionists assume that typical
features of idiomaticity (i.e. non-compositionality and formal fixedness) are
actually shared by a much larger range of constructions than those discussed
here. This actually follows from a strict application of the central CxG idea that
“any construction can be conceived of as idiomatic” (Wulff, 2008: 18), since
most are either formally or semantically unpredictable. Wulff (2008) makes the
following observation:
Construction grammar is indeed all about idioms – not in the sense that its scope
is restricted to the analysis of phrases like kick the bucket or red herring, but in
the sense that construction grammar defines idiomaticity as a property that is
inherent in all linguistic items regardless of their size and degree of schematiza-
tion. (p. 18)

For this reason, the terms idiom and idiomatic are extremely frequent in CxG
research.141 From an external standpoint, such a perspective naturally chal-
lenges the necessity of keeping the notion of idiom as a separate concept. It is
my understanding that construction grammarians might argue this is precisely
the point of CxG, and that idioms do not constitute a distinct category of
140
Note that Jackendoff is critical of this view.
141
CxG was after all developed on the observation that features of idiomaticity pervade linguistic
knowledge (Fillmore, Kay and O’Connor, 1988).
 4.3 Lexemes and Idioms 171

constructions (see Wulff, 2013). There are reasons to believe that the notion of
idiom is still useful as a distinct concept, even in a theory like CxG. First, there
is a general consensus that the term idiom does not refer to atomic constructions
(i.e. the word-level) but necessarily entails formal complexity (Wulff, 2013:
287). Second, it is also (tacitly) assumed that idiomatic phrases involve
a certain level of lexical specification; they are not fully schematic (Wulff,
2013: 287). This is exactly how Goldberg (2006: 5) uses the term. She applies
the notion only to fixed (e.g. going great guns, give the Devil his due) and semi-
fixed (e.g. jog < someone’s > memory, send < someone > to the cleaners)
constructions. This view is also explicitly spelled out in Wulff (2013):
First, constructions differ in terms of their complexity: morphemes and words are
simple constructions, whereas idioms and grammatical frames are increasingly
complex. Second, constructions differ in their degree of schematization or lexical
specification: words are fully lexically specified, whereas grammatical frames are
maximally unspecified with regard to the lexical material that can be inserted.
Idioms occupy the space in between these two extremes, with some like shoot the
breeze being fully lexically filled and others like pull X’s leg being only partially
specified. (p. 278)

The term idiom here refers to any construction that is formally complex and
lexically (semi-)fixed (see also Croft and Sutton, 2017: 2–3). This view offers
an interesting trade-off between what may come across as two extreme views.
On the one hand, it enables us to keep the notion of idiom distinct from that of
construction, i.e. not all constructions are idioms. On the other hand, it also
enables one to extend the scope of the concept to constructions other than those
identified in (106) to (108). From this perspective, all of the following con-
structions can also be viewed as idiomatic phrases: global warming, wide
awake, all of a sudden, from now on, answer the door, fall in love, cost
a fortune, catch a bus, run a business, pay < someone > a visit, drive < some-
one > crazy, etc. Some of these constructions show little (formal or semantic)
irregularity and might simply be referred to as collocations rather than as
idioms.142 Yet, although these lexical patterns are semantically more transpar-
ent than core idioms, they too are acquired and stored by speakers of English as
individual constructions. It is for that reason that the term idiom (or idiomatic
phrase) is used for any substantial pattern that ranges “from collocations to
[core] idioms” (Wulff, 2013: 287). A direct consequence of this view is that
idioms do not constitute marginal cases but rather pervade language: “there are
thousands of them – probably as many as there are adjectives” (Jackendoff,
2002: 167). Goldberg (2019: 53) also argues that “the use of lexically specified
constructions is a hallmark of native-like speech.”

142
See Schmid (2014: 254–259) for a detailed overview of the terminology used.
172 4 Understanding Lexemes

The idea that speakers of English store such a wide variety of idiomatic
phrases (i.e. more or less fixed lexical sequences) has long since become
a central tenet of CxG. This is not the case in RT, however. Apart from the
core idioms, few linguistic units other than lexemes have been given much
attention in RT. This naturally follows from the Chomskyan view of language
on which the theory was developed. At the same time, the focus on the lexical
level in RT is not motivated by a fundamental objection to the existence of
larger lexical patterns. That is, in spite of their largely Chomskyan approach,
it is my understanding that many relevance theorists would share the assump-
tion that such patterns exist.143 It is crucial to understand that the identifica-
tion of such sequences is not meant to diminish the role played by pragmatics
during the interpretation of an utterance (see below). Rather, the aim is only to
show that the meaning of a lexical construct in an utterance may also be
determined by idiomatic phrases in which it is embedded. Consider the verb
open, for instance. Carston (2002a: 65) lists a number of examples (e.g. open
the window, one’s mouth, a book, a briefcase, the curtains, a wound) to show
that the lexical item can be used to express a variety of (slightly) different
meanings in different contexts and argues that each interpretation is arrived at
via pragmatic inference in accordance with the principle of relevance, i.e. the
hearer systematically has to derive an ad hoc concept OPEN*. While I admit
that the interpretation of open typically depends on the process of lexically
regulated saturation, there are cases where the interpretation of the verb is
determined by the idiomatic phrase in which it occurs. Considers the follow-
ing examples:
(109) open the bidding – [make the first offer]
a. I open the bidding at five thousand dollars. (COCA, written)
b. He was glad he had opened the bidding low. (COCA, written)
(110) open one’s mouth – [say something]
a. Don’t open your mouth before the dealer does. (COCA, written)
b. Every time he opens his mouth, he gets more popular than the rest of them.
(COCA, spoken)
(111) open the door to something – [make something possible]
a. If we deny anyone’s humanity, we open the door to unimaginable horror.
(COCA, written)
b. But what actually opened the door to Globalization was the economic
collapse of 1973-the depression that never was. (COCA, written)

143
There might be relevance theorists who will prefer to ignore idiomatic phrases given the
complexity of understanding the underlying cognitive principles that make their use possible.
(It is due to a lack of a “strong guiding principle” that Carston (2002a: 219) rejects
a polysemous approach to meaning.) But I doubt that all relevance theorists are willing to do so.
 4.3 Lexemes and Idioms 173

In these examples, the verb open receives different interpretations. It might be

tempting to argue that those interpretations are pragmatically derived in
accordance with the hearer’s expectations of relevance. I believe, however,
that the patterns I identified in (109) to (111) are actually stored as individual
constructions by English speakers,144 and therefore that the particular meaning
retrieved is not (solely) the product of pragmatic processes. That is, the
hypothesis is that interpreting a lexeme also largely depends on the hearer’s
ability to recognize the idiomatic phrases in which lexemes are embedded (and
which provide their own conceptual information). Here are some further
examples:
(112) answer the door
a. That morning, my doorbell rings. So I jump up and I go answer the door,
and I look out and I see a bunch of officers. (COCA, spoken)
b. Funny phrase, “answer the door.” Excuse me, door, what exactly was your
question? (COCA, written)
(113) paralyzed with fear
a. Some women, like Moyer, also become paralyzed with fear and concern
for the baby’s safety. (COCA, written)
b. And I remember just sitting there. And I was paralyzed with fear. I didn’t
know what to do. (COCA, spoken)
(114) shining example of
a. This couple was a shining example of two people who have been married
for 63 years, and have together, constructed a story of positive reflections
and lifelong commitment. (COCA, written)
b. You know, the BBC stands as a shining example of what can be done by
radio broadcasting. (COCA, spoken)

In these examples, the lexemes answer, paralyzed and shining are not interpreted
literally but receive a more specific interpretation. In (112), the verb answer is
used in the sense of opening the (front) door for someone. In the examples in
(113), paralyzed does not refer to a medical diagnosis but simply indicates one’s
inability to perform an action. In (114), the adjective shining is used to refer to
a particularly good example. If one focuses on the lexical level only, then it could
be argued that these interpretations require the pragmatic derivation of the ad hoc
concepts ANSWER*, PARALYZED* and SHINING*. However, I want to argue, in
accordance with CxG, that the patterns identified in (112) to (114) actually
constitute idiomatic phrases that speakers of English store individually from
the lexemes themselves, and that the particular interpretations just mentioned are
made directly accessible by these patterns. In other words, the resulting inter-
pretations are not solely the result of pragmatic inferencing.

144
Entries for each of them can be found in dictionaries such as, for example, the Cambridge
Dictionary.
174 4 Understanding Lexemes

There is no reason why relevance theorists would reject this view. It is not in
contradiction with any of the core RT assumptions. The only rightful objection that
relevance theorists might raise is that, although it provides a more accurate view of
the type of constructions that contribute to the interpretation process, this account
does not explain exactly in what way these idiomatic phrases enter the interpret-
ation process. In other words, it is one thing to posit the existence of such
constructions, but another to explain how the hearer manages to interpret utterances
that contain them. CxG does not provide an answer to this question. In the rest of
this section, it is my aim to show that RT can help shed some light on this issue.
One possibility consists in arguing that the meaning encoded by this type of
idiomatic construction is directly accessed and systematically prevails over that
of the lexemes found inside them. This is most probably due to the exact same
intellectual shortcut that leads many to falsely believe that coercion in CxG is
viewed as a systemic mechanism, namely that the hearer understands the utter-
ance “because they know the construction.” This I want to refer to as the
grammarian’s fallacy. Such a view can be found in previous research. The corpus
linguist John Sinclair, for instance, argues that this is one of the implications of
what he calls the idiom principle (Sinclair, 1991: 110–115). However, the
interpretation process involved must be more complex: understanding utterances
that contain idiomatic phrases certainly involves elaborate cognitive processes
that go beyond simple recognition of those patterns. Consider, for instance, the
construction “open the door to < something >” discussed previously. This
construction is typically used by a speaker to express a meaning along the lines
of ‘making something possible’. The two examples in (115) are typical instanti-
ations of this idiomatic phrase. In this case, it could be tempting to argue that the
hearer’s interpretation of the sentence simply follows from their knowing the
“open the door to < something >” construction. Examples such as in (116)
challenge this perspective, however.
(115) a. There was adamant opposition to anything that might open the door to
government encroachment into school governance, admission,
curriculum, or operations. (COCA, written)
b. Such a definition challenges Catholic doctrine on gender role
“complementarity” and opens the door to acknowledging different sexual
orientations. (COCA, written)

(116) I could think of no more reasons to delay. I took a deep breath and opened the
door to the exam room where the police were waiting. (COCA, written)

In this case, although the formal make-up of the sentence in (116) corresponds
exactly to that of the construction found in the two previous examples, it is not
interpreted in accordance with the description given above. This necessarily
calls into question the interpretation process of these sequences, and in particu-
lar the ways in which one actually recognizes a sequence as being an
 4.3 Lexemes and Idioms 175

instantiation of a particular construction (thus leading to one particular inter-

pretation) or not. It is precisely my aim now to sketch a brief proposal of how
utterances containing these patterns might be interpreted.
By and large, the view adopted here is that interpreting an utterance which
contains a sequence of words that might be identified as an instantiation of
a specific idiomatic phrase involves a similar type of process as that involved in
the case of homonymy (i.e. ambiguity): there are two conflicting interpretations
available but one is contextually (dis-)preferred. Applied to the analysis of
sentences like (115) to (116), the idea is that hearers’ recovery of the speaker’s
intended interpretation therefore systematically involves a relative conflict
between a regular syntactic parsing of these sentences and the recovery of the
function associated with the pattern “open the door to < something >”. How
one is to decide whether or not a particular sequence of words is best analyzed
as an instantiation of an idiomatic phrase is then determined in context in
accordance with the principle of relevance. Together with the linguistic envir-
onment, the extra-linguistic context in which this sequence occurs makes one
interpretation more relevant to an individual than another. As a result, one may
not even test the meaning of the idiomatic construction for relevance if its
function is contextually obstructed, such as in example (116). This means that
we need not postulate the primacy of the idiomatic phrase’s meaning, let alone
the need to cancel this meaning if it is deemed irrelevant.145 The approach
adopted here makes syntactic parsing an equal candidate during the search for
relevance and, therefore, the overall interpretation process is viewed as being
much more context-sensitive than previously assumed.
This view is entirely consistent with the relevance-guided comprehension
procedure adopted in RT discussed earlier. Whether or not a particular string of
words is recognized as an instantiation of a particular construction really
depends on whether, during the search for relevance, its meaning is easily
accessed and satisfies one’s expectations of relevance. In RT, Vega Moreno
(2001, 2003, 2005), who analyzes core idioms from a relevance-theoretic
approach, provides a detailed and well-documented argument that supports
this analysis. Her approach is captured very well in the following quote:
This paper argues in favour of an account of idioms which is not committed to the
existence of different processing modes in language understanding. It pursues the view
that speakers do not aim at literalness (Bobrow and Bell, 1973) or at figurativeness
(Gibbs, 1994) but at optimal relevance (Sperber and Wilson, 1995). The comprehension
of idioms is achieved through just the same processing mechanisms as the comprehen-
sion of non-idiom strings. That is, in understanding an idiom, as in understanding any
other instance of language, the hearer is guided by the relevance-theoretic
145
In other words, like RT rejects the “encoded-first” hypothesis, I hereby reject the “idiom-first”
hypothesis (i.e. the idea that the meaning encoded by the idiomatic phrases is always tested
before the meaning of the individual words that compose the idiom).
176 4 Understanding Lexemes

comprehension procedure. Since utterance processing is not optional, both the concepts
underlying the individual constituents in the string and the concept underlying the idiom
as a holistic unit are activated as the idiom is heard. Precisely which of this activated
information is accessed follows from considerations of relevance. (Vega Moreno,
2001: 100)

A consequence of this perspective is that although there might be contexts in

which the meaning of the idiomatic phrase is tested first then rejected (thus
giving rise to garden-path effects; see Slattery et al., 2013), there must also be
contexts in which it is not even tested and only the interpretation obtained via
regular syntactic parsing is considered (as seems to be the case in example
(116)). This view is consistent with most of the work carried out in cognitive
science on the processing of sentences containing idioms (see Jurafsky, 1992,
1993, 1996; Tabossi, Fanari and Wolf, 2009; Beck, 2020, and references cited
therein). The overview provided by Jurafsky (1993: 3) convincingly shows that
the processing of this type of sentence is indeed both parallel and context-
sensitive.
Essentially, the main assumption here is that upon hearing (or reading)
sentences like (115) to (116), one cannot entirely escape the process of lexically
regulated saturation introduced in the previous chapter (which applies to
atomic lexical items). That is, whether or not a particular utterance contains
a more lexically fixed/idiomatic pattern, the early stages of the inferential
process (which makes possible the recovery of the speaker’s intended inter-
pretation) will typically involve reconstructing the meaning of lexical items in
accordance with one’s expectations of relevance. Depending on a number of
factors, such as contextual accessibility and relevance, recognizing one of the
more idiomatic phrases will have an impact on the interpretation process and
may redirect the hearer’s cognitive resources to new inferential paths to
reconstruct the meaning of the idiom. In this case, the process of lexically
regulated saturation is simply suspended, and the hearer relocates their cogni-
tive resources in such a way as to optimize the relevance of the interpretation
(by managing the amount of cognitive effort required to obtain sufficient
cognitive effects). There will be contexts, of course, where the meaning of
these (idiomatic) constructions will be so salient that it might be tested for
relevance almost immediately during the inferential phase of comprehension
(thus giving the impression that the interpretation process is therefore ‘short-
circuited’, as Cappelle and Depraetere (2016) argue). The main assumption
here, however, is that the meaning of these idiomatic phrases will not system-
atically be tested first for relevance and only canceled in inappropriate contexts.
A direct consequence of this view is that lexically regulated saturation
therefore lies at the heart of the interpretation process of a lexeme, in the
sense that it is systematically performed during the inferential phase of com-
prehension. This is, of course, not to say that lexical processing necessarily
 4.3 Lexemes and Idioms 177

precedes idiom processing (as mentioned above, these are seen as running in
parallel). Rather, the claim is that, in the early stages of the comprehension
phase, idiom processing does not ipso facto block lexical processing. These
processes involve context-sensitive cognitive procedures that require the
hearer to determine in context which construction (i.e. the lexeme or the
idiomatic phrase) is being used in order to recover the speaker’s intended
interpretation. As a result, early stages of the comprehension process system-
atically involve lexically regulated saturation, which may simply be suspended
(i.e. in the sense of interrupted) if processing the meaning of the idiom seems
more relevant to the hearer. The representation in Figure 4.5 is an attempt to
visualize the (relatively) central role of lexically regulated saturation during the
interpretation phase of an utterance.
The left part of Figure 4.5 captures the approach introduced in Section 4.2.2:
lexical constructions are systematically interpreted via the inferential process
of lexically regulated saturation, which is guided by the procedural meaning of
the grammatical constructions in which they occur and as a result of which
coercion effects sometimes emerge. In addition, the right part of this figure is
meant to capture the observation made in this section according to which the
interpretation of an utterance also often involves parallel processing of lexical
constructions and the larger idiomatic patterns in which they occur, an inferen-
tial process which may lead to the suspension of lexically regulated saturation
during the search for relevance in favor of idiom processing. Once more,
therefore, I hope to have shown how complementary Construction Grammar
and Relevance Theory are when it comes to providing cognitively accurate
descriptions of language use. Reconstructing the meaning of an utterance is
neither fully the result of pragmatic inference (RT), nor simply the recovery of

Interpreting a lexeme involves:

CONTEXT-SENSITIVE INFERENTIAL PROCESSES

guide runs parallel to

Grammatical Cx Lexically regulated
Idiom Cx
procedural meaning saturation recognizing

potential processing effects

Coercion Suspension

Figure 4.5 ‘Lexically regulated saturation’ and utterance comprehension (2)

178 4 Understanding Lexemes

a construction’s encoded meaning (CxG), but is a complex interaction of these

two aspects.

4.4 Conclusion
This chapter started off with the simple observation that a negative conse-
quence falls out of the respective aims of CxG and RT: CxG tends to over-
emphasize the role played by an individual’s linguistic knowledge whereas RT
tends to minimize it in favor of inferential processes. I have shown that these
two aspects contribute equally to the (construction and) interpretation of an
utterance in general, and lexemes in particular. In the case of lexemes, the
process of lexically regulated saturation discussed in the previous chapter is
meant to capture this very observation. The discussion of this process remained
relatively lexeme-centered, however, and the central aim of this chapter was
precisely to investigate the role played by the linguistic and extra-linguistic
context in which lexemes are used and identify exactly how it affects the
interpretation of lexical constructions (i.e. how it affects the process of lexically
regulated saturation). In order to do so, a number of notions were discussed. In
Sections 4.1 and 4.2, I focused on the concepts of coercion and procedural
meaning. In Section 4.3, I looked at ‘idiomatic’ constructions.
It is a central assumption in CxG that in addition to specific lexemes,
language users know a large variety of more schematic constructions in
which lexemes are used and which have their own function (e.g. the
DITRANSITIVE construction, the CAUSED-MOTION construction, the WAY con-
struction, etc.). Therefore, understanding a lexeme also crucially depends on
the semantics of the construction in which it occurs. Of course, one could
naturally expect the meaning of the lexeme to be compatible with that of the
construction. This is not always the case, however. There is often a semantic
(and morphosyntactic) mismatch between the lexeme and the particular slot of
the construction in which it is used. CxG argues that in such a case the meaning
of the lexeme (almost) systematically conforms to the semantics of the larger
construction. These have been referred to as cases of coercion, since the
meaning of the construction is coerced onto that of the lexeme. The notion of
coercion proves particularly interesting since it shows that not all cases of
lexical adjustments are therefore necessarily pragmatically (i.e. non-
linguistically) motivated, as is often argued in RT. Rather, the interpretation
of a lexeme is also a function of the semantics of the constructions in which it
can be used and is, therefore, slightly more language-driven than is assumed in
RT. The challenge is to understand exactly how the meaning of the construction
is coerced onto that of the lexeme. CxG does not offer any explanation,
however. By virtue of being a usage-based theory, most constructionists
agree it is the language user that coerces the meaning of the construction
 4.4 Conclusion 179

onto the lexeme (and not the construction itself), but none explain exactly how
this process is actually carried out. This is when insights from RT become
essential. Cases of coercion are best described as the result of an inferential
process whereby the hearer constructs a relevant interpretation on the basis of
their linguistic knowledge as well as taking into account the speaker’s intention
and extra-linguistic factors. In particular, I have argued that the process
involved during coercion is exactly the same process as in non-coerced cases:
lexically regulated saturation. The difference is that in the case of coercion, this
process is constrained by the semantics of the construction in which lexemes
are found to a greater extent than in the case of non-coerced lexemes (hence the
need to keep coercion as a distinct concept).
In RT, the idea that some linguistic items might provide particular constraints
during the interpretation process is usually discussed under the notion of
procedural meaning. Items that have a procedural function do not contribute
to the proposition expressed directly but simply affect the inferential process
involved during its recovery. Given the particular perspective on coercion
adopted here (in terms of semantic constraints), it therefore seemed interesting
to identify to what extent the two notions actually overlap. It has been shown
that there is a relation. First, both frameworks identify coercion and procedural
meaning as associated with grammatical constructions. Unfortunately, CxG
and RT have a different understanding of what counts as a grammatical unit of
the language. Nevertheless, it has been argued that procedurality is particularly
characteristic of the more schematic constructions identified in CxG (precisely
those that are involved in the process of coercion). To treat these grammatical
constructions in procedural terms provides further support for the view that
coercion involves a semantically constrained pragmatic process since it is
precisely the function of procedural expressions to act as constraints on infer-
ential processes. The main challenge of course is to understand exactly what
procedural encoding consists of and how it actually constrains the interpret-
ation process. It was shown that the respective views developed in CxG and RT
fail to be entirely convincing. For this reason, building on various arguments,
a tentative hypothesis was put forward. I argued that the procedural content of
grammatical constructions might best be described in meta-conceptual terms.
In this case, the information associated with a grammatical construction is
viewed as having a secondary status in that it is primarily used as background
information to manipulate the concepts which occur within its scope.
In the third part of this chapter, it was shown that the interpretation of
a lexeme also largely depends on whether it is embedded in a larger, idiomatic
phrase. This naturally requires us to define what counts as idiomatic, and
I argued that the term idiomatic phrase can be used to refer to any fixed lexical
sequences that one stores as an individual construction (e.g. global warming,
answer the door, spill the beans). These constructions make available a specific
180 4 Understanding Lexemes

interpretation for the lexemes that are found inside them which directly influ-
ences the process of lexically regulated saturation. The challenge is to know
exactly in what way the meaning of these patterns enters the interpretation
process. I argue that the meaning of idioms does not have priority over the
meaning of the individual lexical items found inside them, but rather that
interpreting a sentence that contains idiomatic phrases involves a complex,
parallel process largely determined by considerations of relevance. In other
words, early stages of the interpretation process involve lexically regulated
saturation, which only gets suspended when the meaning of the idiom is
contextually more relevant.
Generally, I hope to have shown that the interpretation of a lexeme system-
atically involves the pragmatic process of lexically regulated saturation. In the
meantime, although pragmatic in nature, this process remains largely con-
strained linguistically by many schematic constructions in which lexemes
occur (sometimes giving rise to coercion effects) or by the more idiomatic
phrases in which they are embedded. There is a real equilibrium, therefore,
between the contribution made by a speaker’s linguistic knowledge and infer-
ential pragmatic processes to the interpretation of a lexical item. Bringing
together insights from CxG and RT thus once more proves beneficial to the
understanding of lexical semantics–pragmatics. Although they share the intu-
ition that the interpretation of a lexeme can largely be influenced by the
semantics of the larger structures in which it occurs, it was shown that neither
theory fully explains the role played by these constructions and the cognitive
mechanisms that enable the integration of the different levels of meaning in
context. Critical evaluation of the different arguments led to a new proposal
regarding the complex nature of the interaction between lexically regulated
saturation, procedural meaning, coercion and idioms.
5 Conclusion

The aim of this book was to provide a new perspective on the semantics–
pragmatics interface by combining insights from Construction Grammar and
Relevance Theory. The main driving force behind this work was the commit-
ment to obtaining cognitively accurate descriptions of language use. As men-
tioned in the introduction, such a commitment to cognitive plausibility and
descriptive accuracy led to the development of the two frameworks. Given their
respective domains of interest, however, they sometimes make different pre-
dictions and provide opposite analyses of the same linguistic phenomena. In
Construction Grammar, more room is given to knowledge than in Relevance
Theory, in which greater emphasis is placed on inferential processes. As
a consequence, this naturally questions their capacity to achieve descriptive
accuracy. The main challenge of this book was therefore twofold. Primarily,
this contribution to the field can be viewed as an attempt to identify where
descriptive accuracy actually lies. More generally, though, the aim was also to
identify the extent to which the integration of the two frameworks generates
further and better insights into the underlying mechanisms of verbal communi-
cation. It was not the aim of this book simply to act as a judge as to which
framework is better at achieving descriptive accuracy, and therefore to draw up
a list of concessions that the other theory has to make. Rather, my aim has been
to enhance the explanatory power of each framework through their combin-
ation; the new model presented consists of more than just the sum of the two
different approaches.
Needless to say, this integration first requires a thorough examination of the
two theories and their respective strengths and weaknesses. This is why
I introduced each of the frameworks individually in detail in Chapter 2.
In Chapter 3, the main focus was on lexical semantics–pragmatics. In this
case, it was shown that CxG and RT have radically different understandings of
the degree to which semantics and pragmatics actually contribute to the
interpretation of a lexeme. First, it became apparent that a critical analysis of
the notion of ‘concept’ was necessary. Both frameworks use this term, but in
radically different ways. Moreover, it was shown that in RT the standard (i.e.
referential atomic) view is incompatible with some of the central tenets of the
theory. I argued that the best alternative is to define concepts in terms of (a rich

181
182 5 Conclusion

body of) encyclopedic knowledge. The main challenge from this perspective is
to explain exactly how this type of conceptual information enters the interpret-
ation process of a lexeme. I have shown that viewing the interpretation of
a lexeme as depending on both very rich semantics and strong pragmatic
principles is possible and, in fact, actually accounts for the various observations
made in the literature on lexical processing. This view was articulated around
the notion of lexically regulated saturation (a term borrowed from Depraetere,
2010, 2014), which captures the complex relation between semantics and
pragmatics: in spite of the very rich semantics that a lexical item makes
accessible, its actual function is systematically reconstructed in context in
accordance with the principle of relevance. This naturally requires adopting
a particular view on what counts as semantic content and pragmatic inferen-
cing. The suggested analysis makes for a more powerful analysis than either of
CxG or RT alone can.
In Chapter 4, the aim was to understand more specifically how the direct
linguistic environment in which a lexeme occurs can affect the interpretation
process of lexically regulated saturation. In RT, little attention is given to larger
linguistic structures. By contrast, constructionists prefer to identify the larger
structures in which lexical constructions are embedded. In the first part of the
chapter, I focused on more grammatical (i.e. schematic) types of constructions.
In CxG, the term coercion is typically used when a lexical item inherits part of
its content from the grammatical construction in which it is used. The only
problem with this notion is that CxG fails to explain in detail how the lexeme
inherits the meaning associated with the grammatical construction. It was
shown that RT can help to describe the exact nature of coercion. First,
I argued that coercion is itself also primarily a pragmatic process carried out
by the language user. More precisely, I argued that the actual nature of the
interpretation process behind coercion is the same as in non-coerced cases,
namely that of lexically regulated saturation, and that the function of the
constructions in which lexemes occur is simply to act as an additional con-
straint on the recovery of the intended interpretation. The next step was to spell
out exactly what the role of the constructions involved in the process of
coercion is. It was shown that coercive constructions are formally (semi-)
schematic (i.e. grammatical) and have a procedural function. This view in
turn required defining what counts as procedural meaning. It was shown that
there is as yet no clear and uncontroversial definition of this notion. I compared
various approaches to procedural meaning (and grammatical encoding more
generally) and put forward the tentative claim that the procedural nature of
schematic constructions follows from their encoding meta-conceptual infor-
mation, i.e. information about the type of concept which is expected to occur in
a given position of a construction. This actually resulted in adjusting the strong
views adopted in both CxG and RT with regard to the nature of coercion and
 5 Conclusion 183

procedural encoding (that the meaning of the grammatical constructions usu-

ally, though not systematically, wins over that of the lexemes found in them). In
the final part of that chapter, I focused on more idiomatic (i.e. lexically fixed)
constructions. It was shown that the interpretation of a lexeme is also often
determined by larger sequences in which it occurs. The main challenge was to
understand how these constructions enter into the interpretation process and
how they affect the process of lexically regulated saturation usually performed
for the individual words that occur in these patterns. In accordance with the
approach developed in RT, I argued that interpreting utterances that contain
idiomatic constructions also primarily involves pragmatic processes that are
guided by the principle of relevance. That is, interpreting a sentence containing
an idiomatic construction consists in a context-sensitive reconstruction of the
most relevant interpretation, the function of the construction being a strong
candidate but not the only possibility. When the hearer reconstructs the mean-
ing of the idiomatic patterns, there are felt to be contextual effects whereby
lexically regulated saturation is ‘suspended’. What the chapter therefore shows
is that the pragmatic process of lexically regulated saturation is central to the
interpretation of lexical constructions. This process is guided by the procedural
semantics of the grammatical constructions in which lexemes occur, which can
lead to coercion effects. Also, lexically regulated saturation may be suspended
when the hearer recognizes the use of an idiomatic construction in which the
lexeme is embedded. In each case, this involves an intricate interaction between
one’s rich linguistic knowledge and relevance-guided pragmatic processes.
This approach was then represented as in Figure 5.1.
Once more, this book was therefore meant to be an illustration that com-
bining insights from the two theories helps to increase the overall explanatory

Interpreting a lexeme involves:

CONTEXT-SENSITIVE INFERENTIAL PROCESSES

guide runs parallel to

Grammatical Cx Lexically regulated
Idiom Cx
procedural meaning saturation recognizing

potential processing effects

Coercion Suspension

Figure 5.1 ‘Lexically regulated saturation’ and utterance comprehension (2)

184 5 Conclusion

power of each framework. Of course, this book contains a mainly theoretical

investigation, and critics might rightly argue that the resulting model still
needs to be put to the test. However, in a chapter in Depraetere et al.’s recent
book, Models of Modals, I actually used this theoretical apparatus to look at
modal verbs in English (Leclercq, 2023), and the discussion reveals that
greater precision can be obtained when combining CxG and RT as I have
done in this book. While emphasizing the inferential nature of the interpret-
ation of modal verbs (in terms of lexically regulated saturation), I showed that
a vast network of modal constructions in fact intervenes in the process. For
instance, speakers of English also know a great number of modal ‘idioms’,
such as those in (117) and (118), which may short-circuit lexically regulated
saturation.
(117) SUBJ must surely VP
She must surely be the most beautiful in the world. (Cappelle, Depraetere and
Lesuisse, 2019: 231)

(118) I can’t tell you how . . .

Sweet loyal Jack. I can’t tell you how good it is to see you. (Leclercq,
2022: 239)
The ‘SUBJ must surely VP’ construction typically triggers a strong epistemic
interpretation of must, as is the case in (117). Likewise, the verb can in (118) is
not simply used (if at all) to communicate the speaker’s inability to be specific
about all sorts of (metaphorical) quantities, but it actually puts emphasis on
their extremely positive feelings with regard to the situation at hand, a function
that is associated with the ‘I can’t tell you how . . . ’ construction. So the
interpretation of these verbs is not just a matter of lexically regulated saturation.
At the same time, understanding sentences like these does not simply consist of
the recovery of these constructions and their function but rather results from the
context-sensitive reconstruction of the speaker’s intended interpretation in
accordance with one’s expectation of relevance. That is, understanding sen-
tences like (118), for instance, is more complex than simply recovering the
function of the pattern ‘I can’t tell you how . . . ’, which then only gets canceled
in inappropriate contexts. Rather, understanding this sequence of words con-
sists in a parallel, context-sensitive reconstruction of the speaker’s intended
interpretation via considerations of optimal relevance.
In addition, Leclercq (2023) shows that modal verbs can also be used in more
schematic modal patterns from which they inherit their function (i.e. whose
function can be viewed as being ‘coerced’ onto the modal verbs). This is the
case of the sentences in (119) and (120), for instance.
(119) SUBJ MOD be COMPL
It’s so incredible what your mother did. She must be a saint. (COCA)
 5 Conclusion 185

(120) I don’t think we MOD VP

I don’t think we may consider Trump as a “coronabuster”, on the contrary, but
at least the cartoon is well rendered.146
The pattern in (119) is typically associated with an epistemic interpretation,
which the verb must here receives. Also, comparing corpus data from different
sources, Leclercq (2023) establishes that speakers of English most probably
store the construction identified in (120), which typically conveys an invitation
not to perform the action denoted by the VP. In this pattern, it is usually
necessity verbs that are used (e.g. I don’t think we should change things now,
Cappelle, Depraetere and Lesuisse, 2019: 232; And let me be clear on this.
I don’t think we need to have our boots on the ground, Leclercq, 2023: 74),
which means that the modal value is typically rather strong. The sentence in
(120) inherits the general function of this construction, and the verb may, whose
modal value is typically rather weak, seems to express a stronger kind of
possibility meaning. Once again, this means that the interpretation process is
not solely the result of lexically regulated saturation. At the same time, the
resolution process involved, although undeniably being constrained by the
semantics of both the modal verb and the construction in which it occurs, is
again context-sensitive and only contextual relevance enables the hearer to
derive the exact interpretation intended by the speaker. As mentioned in
Chapter 4, the pragmatic (i.e. inferential) understanding of may in this sentence
follows naturally from the procedural semantics encoded by the (grammatical)
construction in which may occurs, the exact function of which precisely
constrains the inferential process of lexically regulated saturation involved
while interpreting the lexeme.
Modality is of course one domain of application, and further research is
needed to show the benefits of combining CxG and RT. Still, beyond the
various theory-internal developments suggested throughout this book, I hope
to have shown that a better understanding of linguistic communication (and
human cognition more generally) can be achieved when integrating insights
from frameworks whose primary commitment is cognitive plausibility.
A number of further conclusions fall out from my investigation. On the
question of whether it is possible to combine insights from CxG and RT, I hope
to have convinced the reader that the answer is positive. More importantly,
concerning the explanatory power of this integration, the various arguments
developed show quite clearly that a deeper understanding of the semantics–
pragmatics interface (in particular) and of verbal communication more gener-
ally is possible and that the respective approaches can indeed benefit from one
another in order to achieve even more descriptive accuracy. It was shown that

146
From: https://twitter.com/LatuffCartoons/status/1265597766186786816 (last accessed: May 31,
2023).
186 5 Conclusion

this sometimes requires articulating various aspects of language use in more

complex ways than is sometimes the case in either framework. The aim of this
book was not to provide a simple model, however, but one which makes more
cognitively accurate predictions than CxG and RT manage to do on their own.
Instead of reducing the domain of application of each framework, I believe this
work therefore opens up a wide array of new research possibilities within (and
across) these two already far-reaching theories. Here are some of the directions
for future research.
Concerning the semantics–pragmatics interface, it might be important to
carry out additional experimental work to test the hypothesis that the function
of the (idiomatic) patterns does not necessarily have priority over that of the
individual lexemes found inside them. The literature in psycholinguistics
already seems to support this view, yet more evidence might be needed to
further substantiate this claim. In addition, the discussion in Chapter 4 on the
nature of grammatical constructions and procedural encoding also leaves open
a number of questions. It was shown that providing a specific definition for
what grammatical/procedural encoding consists of is necessary. I put forward
the hypothesis that this type of meaning consists in a form of meta-conceptual
encoding. This particular hypothesis also needs to be elaborated further and has
to be tested experimentally. More generally, there are other areas of research
that I think could benefit from integrating CxG and RT. For instance, I think it
would be interesting to see how much the principle of relevance affects the
gradual process of language acquisition and, therefore, the development of the
construct-i-con. This observation applies equally well to the domain of lan-
guage variation and change. In a similar spirit, it might also be interesting to
investigate the extent to which combining CxG and RT can contribute to
a better understanding of the cognitive strategies used by individuals with
particular language impairments (e.g. dyslexia, aphasia, autism, Alzheimer’s,
etc.). Finally, in more applied approaches to language, this integration might
also be fruitfully applied in the context of discourse analysis when looking
at the various strategies that speakers use in order to direct their speech in
a particular direction.
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 Index

“all pragmatics” strategy, 60, 64 encyclopedic view, 21, 94, 96–97, 105
“free” pragmatic enrichment, 53, 120, innate concept, 71–72
136 pro-concept, 52, 102
“encoded first” hypothesis, 58–59, 97–104 conceptual content, 3, 17, 50, 58, 67–106, 164
“idiom-first” hypothesis, 175 conceptual network, 21–24, 87, 93–94, 104,
106–117, 157
accessibility, 13, 43, 49, 111, 176 conceptual structure, 17–24, 90, 167
activation, 108–114, 161 conceptualization, 17, 21, 106–112, 167
ad hoc categories, 52, 77, 112 construal, 18, 75, 167
allostruction, 15 construct, 12–13, 25, 179
alternation, 16 construct-i-con, 13, 148, 150, 186
causative alternation, 16 construction
dative alternation, 15–16, 33 ADJ-ish, 8
locative alternation, 16 as ADJ as a N construction, 12, 14
analogy, 93, 127, 134 AUX V construction, 14
analytic truth, 86 be (intensifier) V-ed out construction,
argument structure construction, 15, 122, 135, 151
138, 156 Can you X? construction, 26
attitude, 44–46, 49, 62, 143–145, 165–167 CAUSED-MOTION construction, 7–10, 15,
29–31, 60, 121–122, 128, 133, 141,
categorization, 12–13, 93 151, 178
causal dispositions, 162 DITRANSITIVE construction, 10–20, 32, 119,
classical definitions, 85 137, 138, 178
closed class words, 146–148 How ADJ! construction, 14
coercion, 12, 31–33, 63, 118–180, 182 I can’t tell you how . . . construction, 184
cognition, 1–2, 9, 34, 36, 38, 53, 185 INDEFINITE DETERMINATION construction, 123,
cognitive effects, 37–44, 53, 63, 111, 121, 127, 151
131–132, 153, 176 INFERENTIAL construction, 145
cognitive environment, 37, 44 It-CLEFT construction, 12
cognitive linguistics, 10, 17–22, 75, 87, 90, 94, many a day, 7
98, 106–109, 113, 146, 158 RESULTATIVE construction, 124, 133
competence, 1, 40, 59, 115 SUBJ must surely VP construction, 184
competition, 33, 130 To-DATIVE construction, 15–16
concept TRANSFER-CAUSED-MOTION construction, 16
ad hoc concept, 52–125, 172–173 WAY construction, 7–10, 29–31, 119,
atomic concept, 48, 51–53, 55–56, 69–82, 93 121–122, 130–131, 138, 148, 151, 178
atomism, 47, 70, 75–82, 113, 115 What’s X doing Y? construction, 25–27
concept schemas, 101, 106 X is the new Y construction, 8, 14, 60, 124,
conceptual broadening, 55, 77–79, 83, 84, 126, 134
85, 94 X let alone Y construction, 25–27, 145, 150
conceptual narrowing, 53, 55, 77–79, 83, 84, Construction Grammar, 5–34
85, 94, 112 contextual implication, 37

215
216 Index

conventional pragmatics, 24–28, 34 implicature, 25, 26, 40–45, 62, 63, 69, 73, 84,
conventionalization, 58, 94, 111, 157 101, 109, 113, 132, 143, 146, 157,
conversational pragmatics, 27 164, 167
coverage, 33, 130 impliciture, 42
indeterminacy, 96
declarative memory, 161 inference, 26, 40, 42, 49, 60, 62, 64, 72, 90, 96,
denotation, 48, 53–55, 70, 79–80, 148 109, 113, 115, 143, 146, 155, 172, 177
descriptive fallacy, 10 inferential phase, 69, 84, 142, 144, 151, 154,
disquotational lexicon hypothesis, 48, 58 162, 164
domain, 18 inferential process, 2, 36, 42, 44, 53, 60–61,
67, 90, 110, 120–121, 132, 136, 140, 142,
elegance, 58 144, 146, 152, 153, 155, 163, 169,
encyclopedic entry, 49–56, 67–68, 75, 176–179, 185
77–92, 103 inference rules, 49, 50, 75, 83, 90
encyclopedic knowledge, 20–22, 33, 48, 50, 75, inferential rules, 50, 68, 85, 87, 93
79, 90–97, 106, 108, 182 information structure, 147
encyclopedic information, 21, 50, 68, 69, 78, input, 12, 36–41, 104, 142, 161
84, 85, 87, 88–90, 103 intention, 1, 39, 44, 74, 96, 102, 109–111, 139,
entrenchment, 13, 94, 111 163, 179
exemplar, 12, 21–23 invited inference, 157
expectation-like constraints, 155
expectations of relevance, 43, 51, 98, 100, 111, knowledge-how, 114
116, 117, 119, 120, 125, 131, 139–141, knowledge-that, 114
152, 155, 173, 175–176
explicature, 42–45, 53, 62, 63, 69, 73–74, 77, language change, 24, 94, 109
80, 84, 92, 101, 132, 143, 146, 167 language of thought, 36, 48, 162
extra-linguistic context, 132, 134–137, 140, language use, 1, 12, 14, 19, 177, 181, 186
175, 178 lexical construction, 147, 152, 157–159, 165,
167, 169, 177, 182
frame, 18, 49, 171 lexical entry, 49, 51, 67–69, 83, 88
lexical semantics–pragmatics, 3, 95, 117, 118,
generativity, 17, 28, 161 125, 139, 180, 181
grammarian’s fallacy, 174 lexically regulated saturation, 3, 107–112, 116,
grammatical construction, 3, 10, 11, 146–179, 117–118, 132, 140, 152, 169–185
183, 186 lexicon, 9, 12, 72, 81, 101, 103, 106, 147, 150,
schematic construction, 3, 9, 14, 128, 142, 158, 164
151, 152, 155, 158, 178, 180, 182 lexicon–syntax continuum, 9, 12, 14
grammatical function, 147, 164, 166 linguistic convention, 2, 32, 40
grammatical meaning, 150, 156, 159, 166 linguistic environment, 3, 117, 134–137, 155,
grammaticalization, 24, 109, 144, 147, 150, 169, 175, 182
153, 156–159 linguistic knowledge, 1, 5–34, 59, 64, 114, 117,
150, 178, 180, 183
higher-level explicature, 45, 62, 143, 146, literal–loose–metaphorical continuum, 55
167 logical entry, 49–51, 55, 68, 75, 78, 79, 82–89
homonymy, 81, 105, 175 logical form, 36, 40, 42–44, 48–50, 53, 73–74,
homonymous, 105 80, 85, 86, 87, 102, 143

idealized cognitive model, 18 meaning construction, 95–98, 108, 110, 113,

idiom, 5–8, 14, 121, 125, 150, 169–178, 140, 141, 155, 168
180, 184 construction of meaning, 107, 112
idiomatic expression, 5, 169 meaning potential, 114
idiom principle, 174 semantic potential, 108, 114, 140
illocutionary force, 144 mental files, 69, 75
image schemas, 19 mental representation, 13, 36, 44, 61, 86, 93,
96, 115, 142, 143, 160, 165
 Index 217

meta-conceptual representation, 155, 167, productivity, 32, 33, 130

168 prototype, 21, 48, 49, 85, 87, 90, 93, 103, 107
metaphor, 55, 64, 107–108, 109, 127–128
metonymy, 108, 109, 126, 127–128, 153 radial network, 21, 93
mind-reading, 44 referential semantics, 70, 73, 79, 82
mismatch, 30, 31–33, 122, 129–131, 133, 135, referential approach, 73, 75, 79
138, 152, 154, 168, 178 referentialism, 73, 76, 80, 84
modes of presentation, 75 relevance-theoretic comprehension heuristics,
modular, 10, 75, 209 44, 51, 55, 57, 63, 72, 98, 100, 104, 111,
modulation, 91, 94–96, 168 115, 131, 175
monosemy, 57–59, 68, 81, 106 Relevance Theory, 34–64
monosemous, 57, 64, 82, 105, 107 relevance-focused production heuristics, 39, 130
Moore’s paradox, 46 rule/list fallacy, 13
mutual parallel adjustment, 44
saturation, 107
non-conventional pragmatics, 24, 27–28, 34 scene encoding hypothesis, 156
non-predictability, 6, 7 schematic network, 21, 93
semantic coherence, 30
open-class words, 147–148 semantic constraint, 61
optimal relevance, 39–45, 52, 53, 58, 60, semantic correspondence, 30
175, 184 semantic knowledge, 3, 113
ostensive stimuli, 39, 43 semantically constrained pragmatic
ostensive-inferential communication, 40, 44, effects, 140
46, 61 semantically constrained pragmatic process,
override principle, 31, 122, 129, 137, 152, 119, 142, 151, 155, 168, 179
154–155, 168 semantics–pragmatics interface, 1, 3, 16, 17,
24, 34, 48, 101, 181, 185, 186
path of least effort, 43, 98, 101 speech act, 26, 45, 167
performance, 1, 115 statistical preemption, 33, 130
point of access, 20, 48, 89, 90 subcategorization frame, 11
polysemy, 23, 33, 57–59, 68, 72, 81, 87, 91–96, subjectification, 157, 166
105, 106 surface structure, 15
polysemous, 57, 62, 81, 96, 105, 107 synthetic truth, 86
principle of no equivalence, 16
principle of no synonymy, 16 theory of mind, 44, 165
principle of relevance, 3, 35, 38–40, 43, 59, 63, truth-conditions, 18, 27, 73, 74, 75, 80
71, 131, 153, 172, 175, 182, 183, 186 real semantics, 74
procedural meaning, 3, 27, 47, 60–63, 99, 104,
118, 138, 141–186 underdeterminacy, 41, 96, 101, 102
instruction, 61, 99, 145, 154, 159, 160, 162 underdeterminacy thesis, 41, 51, 73–74, 92, 96,
semantic constraint, 143, 151, 155, 160, 179 97, 101, 125
procedural memory, 161 linguistic underdeterminacy, 102, 117
processing effort, 37–40, 43, 99, 121, 131, usage-based, 5, 12, 15, 24, 27, 32, 90, 92, 93,
138, 153 97, 112, 129, 165, 168, 178