6th International Conference on Intercultural Pragmatics and Communication University of Malta Valletta Campus, 30 May – 1 June 2014 Plenary talk abstract PRAGMATICS, POLYSEMY AND THE LEXICON ROBYN CARSTON, UCL LONDON & CSMN OSLO On the one hand, work in lexical pragmatics has shown the range of different senses a word may be used to communicate on different occasions of use and the way in which new (ad hoc) concepts or senses can be pragmatically inferred in context. On the other hand, work in lexical semantics has shown that words can have a range of related conventionalised senses (the phenomenon of ‘polysemy’), which has raised a number of questions, including: How is polysemy (as distinct from homonymy) represented in the lexicon? What, if anything, do all the related senses have in common? In this talk, I aim to do two things: (a) To relate the pragmatic phenomenon of ad hoc concept construction to the apparently semantic phenomenon of polysemy, including cases that cross syntactic categories (e.g. ‘you can stopv a car’ and ‘you can pull out the stopsn on an organ’); (b) To consider what polysemy indicates about the nature of standing (encoded) word meaning: whether it is (i) fully conceptual (semantic), or (ii) non-­‐conceptual, so semantically underspecified -­‐ either schematic, so always requiring enrichment in context, or overly rich, so always requiring selection/filtering in context, or (iii) essentially non-­‐existent, involving just a pointer or a link to a ‘grab-­‐bag’ of materials, which may include both conceptual and imagistic information.