TF Colloquium: Tamara Dobler

Speaker: Tamara Dobler (VU Amsterdam)

Date and time: Thursday November 20 from 15:30-17:00

Location: Janskerkhof 13, room 0.06

Title: Polysemy and the semantics-pragmatics distinction

Abstract: Polysemy has long been at the centre of debates about the interface between lexical semantics and pragmatics. A persistent question is whether the multiple aspects of meaning associated with words like book, school, or city are encoded in their lexical semantics, or whether they arise pragmatically in context (Recanati 2017; Vicente 2018; Carston 2020). Dual-nature approaches (Asher 2011; Gotham 2022) attempt to capture logical polysemy by positing type distinctions at the semantic level, while critics (Liebesman & Magidor 2023) argue that such approaches systematically mispredict certain data. This paper develops a new framework for understanding polysemy, grounded in a radical constructivist approach to the FLN-lexicon and a reconceptualization of dot-types. I argue that this model captures problematic data that challenge dual-nature accounts, such as the quantificational puzzle raised by Liebesman & Magidor (2023). If correct, this view reshapes the semantics–pragmatics distinction: semantics is not a matter of assigning determinate types to lexical items but of structuring conceptual files in ways constrained by core cognition. Pragmatics operates downstream, shaping how these structures are deployed in communication.