More than words

Abstract

According to a line of thought favoured by semantic contextualists, a proper account of cases of communication featuring figurative discourse would involve the notion of ad hoc concept, namely, a temporary representation created on the fly out of contextual inputs. Assuming that there is no sharp distinction between literal and figurative discourse, these theorists conclude that concepts in general are ad hoc representations in this sense. This paper proposes an alternative account of figurative discourse, according to which, at least in core cases, the context doesn't do as much as to create a new concept; rather, it helps us associate an already existing, stable but non-lexicalized concept with a word, which may provide the audience with a cue for retrieving it. The alternative stable-concept view advocated here invokes two levels for the explanation of communication: the level of word meanings and the level of concepts. I will therefore defend the view that concepts are not identical with word meanings. Concepts are more numerous, or - as is often said - they are sliced more finely than word meanings. The two-level stable concept view provides an explanation of cognitive cross-context generalizations, which is not readily available to ad hoc concept views. It also avoids the conclusion that conceptual creativity comes cheap, given the pervasiveness of figurative speech (and a fortiori, given the claim that there is no literal-figurative boundary). Third, it may receive indirect support from recent psychological work on the relationship between linguistic and non-linguistic categorization.