Hotel Implicature

Where HOTEL stands for that horrid Berkeleianism,

History Of The English Language

L. Horn writes in section

"Quantity-based and Relevance-based processes in
language change" in

his 'Toward a new taxonomy of pragmatic inference',

in A. Kasher, _Implicature_, London: Routledge -- Pragmatics: Critical Concepts.

something that Pettyt repeats in his History of the Spanish Language, so this is not just HEL (History of the English Language): it's all metaphtonymy.

"Pehaps the clearest lexical correlates of the clash and resolution of the
Relevance vs. Quantitity conflict are in the area of diachrony."

i.e. in everything that Saussure -- and most Griceans -- find otiose.

"... One
complex area of language change, involving the interaction of
Relevance-based and Quantity-based processes, is that of lexical shifts."

"Two traditional categories of lexical change (discussed by Paul 1909 and
Breal 1900 inter alia) worth mentioning in this area are narrowing (or
reduction) of meaning and broadening (or expansion) of meaning."


Horn puned elsewhere on this

From H. Paul to Herbert P.

---

"Narrowing generally involves a Relevance-based shift from a set denotation
to a subset (or member) of that set, representing the SALIENT or
STEREOTYPICAL exemplar of the general category. Examples cited in the
standard works (cf. Breal 1900, Stern 1931) which fit this definition
include 'poison' (cognate with 'potion'), 'liquor' (cf. 'liquid'),
'undertaker' (from 'one who undertakes' to 'mortician') and 'corn' (used
for whatever grain is the most important cereal or a particular region,
e.g. 'wheat' in England, 'oats' in Scotland, 'maize' in Australia or the
New World)."

"In these instances, the shift has become virtually complete (although the
original, broader extension may persist in marginal uses)."

"Other cases
manifest the intermediate stage of 'autohyponymy', in which the basic,
general sense survies in privative opposition with a specific sense derived
from it. Autohyponyms which have developed their specific meaning
(indicated in parentheses) through Relevance-based narrowing include the
following: "colour" (for 'hue', i.e. the range of colours excluding blacks,
whites, and grays): in 'colour', 'colour TV'; "temperature" (for 'fever');
"number" (for 'integer'); "drink" (for 'alcoholic drink'); "smell" (for
'stink')."

"Narrowing of a lexical item may be either Relevance-based (the spontaneous
delimitation of a general term to a sense representing a salient exemplar
of the category denoted by that term) or Quantity-based (the motivated
specialisation of a general term triggered by the prior exience of a
hyponym of that term)."

"The converse process -- lexical broadening or
expansion -- is _always_ Relevance-based: the generalisation of a term for
a species to cover the encompassing genus, from genus to phylum, from
subset to superset."

"Thus Latin 'pecunia' originally denoting 'property or
wealth in cattle' (cf. 'pecu', livestock cattle), generalised to signify
'wealth' and eventually 'money', a shift paralleled in the English cognate
'fee' (from OE 'feoh', cattle -> property)."

"Broadening tends to apply regularly with palce names; examples include the
expansion of 'New Yorker' to designate someone from the state at large,
rather than specifically from its major city."

"An even more productive
source of lexical broadening involves trade names, which have lost their
capital letters and become genercis, including 'xerox', 'jello', 'good
humour', 'kleenex', 'thermos', 'toll-house cookies', 'scotch tape',
'vaseline', and 'hoover'."

"Broadening and narrowing often operate in tandem within a given language,
or in complementary fashion across related languages."

"Thus German 'Tier'
has broadened from 'wild animal' to include domestic livestock and pets as
well as man."

"At the same time, its English cognate has turned
autohyponymous through narrowing. OE 'deor' ME 'deer' orgiginally
designated beasts in general, especially 'objects of chase'., then became
restricted to single out the object of chase par excellence, fam. Cervidae."

"By the early modern period, the general use of 'deer' had been largely
supplanted by the Romance loans 'beast', 'brute' and 'animal'.""

Cfr. "Grice: A Zoological Study" by yours truly. (Where I expand on figurative uses of the name in Scots for pig).

"We also find broadening and narrowing operating hand-in-pand until the
eventual division of labour is arrived at. OE 'dogca', referring to a
particular breed of dog, represented a hyponym of the general term 'hound',
then denoting the entire kind 'dog'."

"Sometime around the fourteenth
century, 'dog' and 'hound' were presumably both autohyponyms. Eventually,
'hound' was totally displaced by 'dog' in its general application, but
continued to retain its specialised use (originally developed via
Relevance-based narrowing in the vocabulary of hunters, for whom hounds
were the salient representatives of the species, dogs par excellence)."

Etc.