Linguistics Seminar Talk - Nicholas Allott & Mark Textor

Title: Radical pragmatics and the literal/figurative distinction

Abstract:  

According to radical pragmatics the meaning of lexical words is routinely modulated in use (Carston & Powell 2006). Since many such modulated uses are non-figurative this casts doubt on the literal/figurative distinction (Wilson & Carston 2007): deviation from lexically encoded meaning is the norm, not an exception. But the literal/figurative distinction matters to accounts of communication because literal uses carry information that figurative ones don’t: if used literally “John is a gorilla” tells us about gorillas, but not when it is meant as a metaphor (Searle 1979). The distinction is also needed to state the plausible view that compositional linguistic semantics outputs a constraint on what proposition a sentence can be used to literally express (Collins 2017; Harris 2022). We propose a Non-Conformity View of Non-Literal Use: literal uses of a word are made with the intention to continue a ‘tradition’ of using a word; figurative uses are made with the intention to deviate from the tradition (Allott & Textor 2022). A recent paper argues the distinction is instead between quantitative and qualitative deviation from linguistically encoded senses, and provides arguments against our view (Genovesi & Hesse 2025). We evaluate their arguments and raise some problems for their view. This leads to discussion of lexical semantic representations and the (several) varieties of polysemy.