Confessions of a Nasty Gricean

One good thing about being a Gricean is that you can convert people into Griceans so that you can later turn non-Gricean and have an apt opponent for your games (vide "Grice -- and the Play Group plays", this blog).

A Kilgarriff is a charmer. He wrote, "I don't believe in word senses". He is familiar with a very bad dictionary I'm ALSO familiar with. The Longman!

I once looked up in the Longman

'the cat is on the mat'

It turned out to translate as

'the nasty prostitute is being badly punished by his pimp'

If you go by the use of 'fig.' in that thing.

Kilgarrif comments. "I'm the one to blame there". "When I worked for Longman, we used eight criteria for distinguishing senses."

It's a pity Grice was unaware of one!

Kilgarriff goes on:

"'(fig)' in front of an example. According to the User's Quide: some words are used in an imaginative or 'figurative' way, to suggest a meaning that is not the literal meaning, but has some similarities with it. If a word is often used in such a manner, the examples will include a figurative use, as is shown by the note (fig.) (page F36). Example, materialise 1 (fig.) 'I'd arranged to meet him at seven, but he never materialised''. There will always be a continuum between figurative uses of
a word and distinct senses which have their origins in figurative usage, since at any point in time many word usage patterns will be in flux between extremes of originality and conventionality. Where a lexicographer draws the line between the two types of cases will always be somewhat arbitrary" (A. Kilgarriff, 'Dictionary Word Sense Distinctions: An Enquiry into their Nature', Computers & The Humanities 1993 26 365-387).

I told me, "And what about 'Kilgarriff'? You are not saying it has one of the Longman silly senses, too, are you?

Etc.