The pragmatics of count-mass polysemy

Ingrid Lossius Falkum (University of Oslo)

In this talk I discuss a subtype of systematic polysemy which in English (and several other languages) appears to rest on the distinction between count and mass uses of nouns (e.g., shoot a rabbit/eat rabbit/wear rabbit). Traditional computational semantic approaches have analysed such sense alternations as being generated by an inventory of specialized lexical inference rules. In this talk I discuss some evidence that the linguistic component provided by count-mass syntax leaves a more underspecified semantic output than is usually acknowledged by rule-based theories, and argue in favor of an analysis which treats count-mass syntax as a procedural constraint on NP referents, combined with a single, relevance-guided lexical pragmatic mechanism that can cover the same ground as lexical rules, as well as those cases in which rule-based accounts need to appeal to pragmatics.