According to recent work in the new field of lexical pragmatics, the meanings of words are frequently pragmatically adjusted and fine-tuned in context, so that their contribution to the proposition expressed is different from their lexically encoded sense. Well-known examples include lexical narrowing (e.g. 'drink' used to mean ALCOHOLIC DRINK), approximation (or loosening) (e.g. 'flat' used to mean RELATIVELY FLAT) and metaphorical extension (e.g. 'bulldozer' used to mean FORCEFUL PERSON). These three phenomena are often studied in isolation from each other and given quite distinct kinds of explanation. In this chapter, we will propose a more unified account. We will try to show that narrowing, loosening and metaphorical extension are simply different outcomes of a single interpretive process which creates an ad hoc concept, or occasion-specific sense, based on interaction among encoded concepts, contextual information and pragmatic expectations or principles. We will outline an inferential account of the lexical adjustment process using the framework of relevance theory, and compare it with some alternative accounts.

I propose that an account of metaphor understanding which covers the full range of cases has to allow for two routes or modes of processing. One is a process of rapid, local, on-line concept construction that applies quite generally to the recovery of word meaning in utterance comprehension. The other requires a greater focus on the literal meaning of sentences or texts, which is metarepresented as a whole and subjected to more global, reflective pragmatic inference. The questions whether metaphors convey a propositional content and what role imagistic representation plays receive somewhat different answers depending on the processing route. or insightfulness of the metaphor (its accuracy in capturing an experience or feeling) would be to the point, and the same might hold also for the more prosaic (5).Clearly, some of the examples are more familiar, more frequently used (even conventionalized), than others: (1) tops the list in this respect, (2), (4), (5) and (6) are based on fairly familiar metaphorical schemes, and (3), 2 (7) and (8) are the most unusual and inventive, although the 'fog as a cat' has occurred before in English poetry. Some are spontaneous, spoken and conversational while others are highly wrought, extended over a length of text and clearly literary or poetic. I've tried to present a good range of linguistic forms rather than just the 'X is a Y' construction that sometimes dominates discussions. This is a frequent form in conversational metaphors where the aim is often to achieve a strong swift expression of praise or blame ('She's a saint/angel/bulldozer/pig/mouse/battle-axe/ dragon/block of ice/etc.'). It is also an easy form to convert into a corresponding simile, so serves well the purpose of those who want to explore the simile-metaphor relation. 3 In fact, there seem to be few, if any, formal linguistic restrictions on where a metaphorically used expression can appear in an utterance.Some of these properties seem to cluster together: being conversational, spontaneous, conventional, single-word metaphors and having a propositional content, on the one hand; being literary, carefully crafted, extended and developed, expressive of a feeling or sensation, highly imagistic, on the other hand. So it may seem that there are two kinds of metaphor, the 'ordinary' and the 'literary', and that we should not expect a single account that applies to both. While I don't think that there is a clear-cut distinction between two kinds of metaphor, I will argue that there are two different routes to the understanding of metaphors-a quick, local, on-line meaningadjustment process and a slower, more global appraisal of the literal meaning of the whole.As a philosophical backdrop to the dual processing account that I will present, the next section sets out two broad positions on the 2 The example in (3) is a line from a poem which is quoted more fully (in translation) in §v.3 Virtually every possible relation between a metaphor and its corresponding simile has its advocates: metaphors as elliptical similes, sim...

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:  The interpretation of metaphorical utterances often results in the attribution of emergent properties, which are neither standardly associated with the individual constituents in isolation nor derivable by standard rules of semantic composition. An adequate pragmatic account of metaphor interpretation must explain how these properties are derived. Using the framework of relevance theory, we propose a wholly inferential account, and argue that the derivation of emergent properties involves no special interpretive mechanisms not required for the interpretation of ordinary, literal utterances.

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Within the philosophy of language, pragmatics has tended to be seen as an adjunct to, and a means of solving problems in, semantics. A cognitive-scientific conception of pragmatics as a mental processing system responsible for interpreting ostensive communicative stimuli (specifically, verbal utterances) has effected a transformation in the pragmatic issues pursued and the kinds of explanation offered. Taking this latter perspective, I compare two distinct proposals on the kinds of processes, and the architecture of the system(s), responsible for the recovery of speaker meaning (both explicitly and implicitly communicated meaning).

A distinction between saying and implicating has held a central place in pragmatic s since Grice, with 'what is said' usually equated with the (context-relative) semantic content of an utterance. In relevance theory, a distinction is made between two kinds of communicated assumptions, explicatures and implicatures, with explicatures defined as pragmatic developments of encoded linguistic meaning. It is argued here that, given a context-free semantics for linguistic expression types, together with the explicature/implicature distinction, there is no role for any minimally propositional notion of 'what is said'. Robyn Carston1 I leave aside here any discussion of the Gricean notion of 'conventional implicature', a category which simply does not arise within Relevance theory and which is currently seen, across various pragmatic frameworks, to be in need of radical reworking. For instance, relevance theorists have reanalysed most of the linguistic devices allegedly generating conventional implicatures as encoding procedural constraints on the inferential processes involved in deriving conversational implicatures (see, for instance, Blakemore (1987), ( 2000), (forthcoming), and Iten ( 2000)) . Bach (1999), on the other hand, sees certain of these devices as contributing to 'what is said', where this is construed as an entirely semantic notion (see discussion of his concept of 'what is said' in section 7 of this paper). Note that, on both of these very different accounts, the phenomenon at issue is treated as falling on the semantic side of a semantics/pragmatics distinction. This is emphatically not how the explicit/implicit distinction is drawn within the relevance-theoretic account of utterance understanding, a basic difference being that pragmatic processes play an essential role on both sides of the distinction. The relevancetheoretic account is rooted in a view of human cognitive architecture according to which linguistic semantics is the output of a modular linguistic decoding system and serves as input to a pragmatic processor. This 'semantic' representation (or logical form) is typically not fully propositional, so does not have a determinate truth condition, but consists of an incomplete conceptual representation which functions as a schema or template for the pragmatic construction of propositional forms. The pragmatic system is in the business of inferring the intended interpretation (or 'what has been communicated'); this is a set of propositional conceptual representations, some of which are developments of the linguistically provided template and others of which are not. The former are called 'explicatures', the latter 'implicatures'; this is the explicit/implicit distinction made within relevance theory and it plainly does not coincide with the distinction between linguistically decoded meaning ('semantics') and pragmatically inferred meaning.The title of this paper notwithstanding, the terms 'saying' and 'what is said' do not feature in relevance theory, and the territory covered by the concept of expl...

This paper has two main parts. The first is a critical survey of ways in which the explicit/implicit distinction has been and is currently construed in linguistic pragmatics, which reaches the conclusion that the distinction is not to be equated with a semantics/pragmatics distinction but rather concerns a division within communicated contents (or speaker meaning). The second part homes in on one particular way of drawing such a pragmatically-based distinction, the explicature/implicature distinction in Relevance Theory. According to this account, processes of pragmatic enrichment play a major role in the recovery of explicit content and only some of these processes are linguistically triggered, others being entirely pragmatically motivated. I conclude with a brief consideration of the language-communication relation and the limits on explicitness.