Negotiating about lexical meanings

Abstract

One central issue in the generative lexicon approach is how to account for the context dependence of certain aspects of the meanings of lexical items. Pustejovsky (1995, 2005), Ginzburg (to appear) and Ginzburg and Cooper (2004) exemplify how the interpretation of lexical items is influenced by the context of use. An interesting source of data comes from conversations in which the participants spontaneously comment on the appropriateness, or lack of appropriateness, of a particular word or phrase in the given situation. These comments are often introduced by locutions like It depends on what you mean by X or Qu’est-ce que vous entendez par X? In Swedish there is a lexicalized grammatical construction which functions as a cue to this kind of negotiation about the meaning of lexical items, the x-och-x construction. In this paper we show how the xoch- x construction is used in spontaneous conversations and informal writing as a means for questioning and clarifying aspects of meaning. The conventionalized x-och-x construction thus provides us with a tool to investigate which aspects of meaning language users are aware of and tend to negotiate about. One hypothesis that we will explore is that logical terms like negation and grammatical function words like complementizers are less likely to give rise to negotiations. However, when they are used in the x-och-x construction, the negotiation may reveal important aspects of their use in ordinary language.