Ad Hoc Concepts, Polysemy, and Verbal Disputes

Michelle Liu (Monash University)

Polysemy in the Evalutive Sphere is a seminar pertaining to the project Slurs and the Lexicon: A Rich-Lexicon Approach to Slurs and Other Evaluative Expressions - LEXISLUR (https://danzeman.weebly.com/lexislur.html) featuring monthly talks by specialists in polysemy. We cordially invite you to the first talk of the seminar series, to be given by Michelle Liu (Monash University) and entitled "Ad Hoc Concepts, Polysemy, and Verbal Disputes" (see the abstract below). The event takes place online on Friday, OCTOBER 31, 11.00-12.30 Western European Time (WET). Please write to [email protected] for the Zoom link.

All welcome!

ASBTRACT:

A speaker often uses a word to communicate what linguists call an "ad hoc concept", an occasion-specific meaning that is different from the word’s stable, encoded meaning, and the hearer can usually construct the intended ad hoc concept through pragmatic inference (e.g. Carston 2002). It is sometimes suggested that certain forms of polysemy find their origins in ad hoc concepts. In this talk, I will explore the relationship between ad hoc concepts and polysemy. I will also consider how these two related phenomena can provide a framework for theorising the cognitive-linguistic mechanisms underpinning verbal disputes. As an example, I will focus on verbal disputes about racism, drawing on recent work by Liao and Hansen (2023) on the semantics of "racist".