Chapter 16
Why it’s hard to construct ad hoc number concepts
Lexical meanings are routinely adjusted in order to
evoke ad hoc concepts. But number words pose a unique challenge. Carston (2002) discusses two
relevant interpretative processes in this connection. Broadening (as
in metaphorical uses) introduces an ad hoc concept by incorporating
interpretations that fall outside the lexeme’s linguistic meaning, and
narrowing (e.g., interpreting finger as ‘index
finger’) restricts the lexical meaning to a subset of its senses. I
here argue that number words impose restrictions on the construction
of such ad hoc concepts: (i) (nonround) number words cannot undergo
narrowing, and (ii) when broadened (interpreted as ‘approximately N’),
number words typically require explicit marking (e.g., about
N). Both restrictions stem from a single fact: Number
words lack a prototype category structure (Lakoff 1972; Rosch & Mervis 1975). I support these
claims with corpus analyses (The Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken
American English, The Longman Corpus of Spoken American English and
the British National Corpus).
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Ad hoc construction of broadened (approximate) number
concepts
- 2.1The crucial role of rounders
- 2.2Skewed broadeners for number words
- 3.No narrowing for number concepts
- 3.1No narrowed ad hoc concepts for number words
- 3.2No sorta and kinda ad hoc number concepts
- 4.Conclusions
-
Notes
-
References
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Cited by
Cited by 1 other publications
Ariel, Mira & Natalia Levshina
2024.
The counting principle makes number words unique.
Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 0:0
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