A Grammar of Spoken English Discourse - The Intonation of Increments

The Psychological Foundations of the Grammar 83

subject to quarantine. In any case, regardless of which explanation is
preferred, use of the core lexical element is more marked than use of the
superordinate in the context of examples (47) and (48).
Carter (1987: 39) states that which lexical items operate as core lexical
items is always a matter of stylistic choice and is relative to the dynamic and
negotiable unfolding context. The following well known examples, from
Brown and Yule (1983: 125), demonstrate clearly that while lexical relations
play a role in defi ning lexical items, co-text also plays a role:

(49) I like Sally Binns, she’s tall and thin and walks like a crane

(50) I can’t stand Sally Binns, she’s tall and thin and walks like a crane

The lexical items tall, thin, and walks like a crane clearly realize radically
opposed communicative values in (49) and (50).
There is some support in the psycholinguistic literature for the view that
the meaning of ambiguous lexical items is, at least in part, disambiguated
by contextual effects. Tabossi and Zardon (1993: 359) note that the most
frequently occurring content lexical items are potentially ambiguous
but yet are rarely so in discourse. They argue that ‘context’^37 guides the
correct interpretation of potentially ambiguous lexical items, and provide
an informative summary and critique of the three principle theories out-
lining the relationship between ‘context’ and lexical access (ibid. 360–1)
summarized in Table 3.4.
All three theories are consistent with the view that ‘contextual’ effects
help to disambiguate lexical meaning. Tabossi and Zardon (ibid. 362),
based upon the results of their own experiments, where their subjects heard
sentences and subsequently performed a lexical decision task on a target

Table 3.4 The relationship between lexical access and ‘context’

1. The exhaustive theory: which claims that hearers access all the possible meanings of the
   ambiguous lexical item and then at a later post-access stage choose the meaning
   appropriate to the ‘context’.


2. The ordered search theory: which claims that the meanings of ambiguous words are serially
   searched starting with the dominant (most frequent meaning).* The search continues
   until a lexical meaning is found which matches the ‘context’.


3. The ‘context’ sensitive theory: which claims that lexical access is sensitive to ‘contextual’
   information; only the meaning of the lexical item which matches the ‘context’ is
   selected.

• A criticism of all the proposed psycholinguistic theories is that while all are dependent on the concept of
  the dominant, none of them has produced an objective methodology in discovering what the most fre-
  quent meaning of a lexical item actually is. The dominant appears to be the meaning which, in the
  introspective judgement of the individual author, is the most frequent.