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<Paper uid="W96-0308">
  <Title>Lexical Rules is Italicized</Title>
  <Section position="1" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="abstr">
    <SectionTitle>
1.0 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> In this paper we present three types of arguments for a pragmatics-based approach to treating the phenomenon of lexical polysemy (lexical sense extension) and rebut three types of arguments that have been used against pragmatics-based approaches.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> In particular, we argue that what have been claimed to be rules of lexical sense extension operating on lexical items are instead to be accounted for by a process of reference transfer by which the referents of lexical items (and phrases) can be used to refer to related things, as governed by pragmatic rules of conversation and contextual knowledge. By contextual knowledge we include that information provided by the surrounding language, by the salient facts about the non-linguistic context and by the general knowledge about the world that can be presumed to be shared by the participants in the conversation.1 We except morphological rules, which apply to lexical items, but we argue that these rules are more productive and the semantics less precise than that suggested by the lexical rule approach, which often treat a single morphological process as a number of rules, subdivided according to the semantic category of the base or derived item.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> The structure of the paper is as follows. Section 2 provides some background material on lexical rules and their hypothesized grammatical status and contrasts this with our approach to such phenomena. Section 3 presents arguments against the lexical nature of sense extensions rules and for their status as reference transfer rules. These arguments show that the domain of polysemous usage is not lexical items, but rather their referents. Section 4 examines the arguments made for their lexical status, which we find wanting. We argue that it is indeed possible to separate semantic from morphological phenomena, that blocking or pre-emption can be explained pragmatically, and that, barring syntactic and cultural differences, the range of polysemous usage is not language specific. Section 5 provides a conclusion.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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