How to marry a star: probabilistic constraints for meaning in context

This flexibility is often characterised by distinguishing the'context-independent' meaning of a lexical item (its definition(s) in a dictionary) and its'speech act' or'token' meaning - the one it acquires by virtue of being used in the context of a particular sentence (Grice 1968). The generation of a token meaning goes well beyond word sense disambiguation and typically involves speakers' knowledge of the world as well as their linguistic knowledge. For instance, Searle (1980: pp.222-223) reminds us that to cut grass and to cut a cake evoke different tools in the mind of the comprehender (a lawnmower vs a knife). The question of context dependence is associated with long-standing debates in both linguistics and philosophy, with theoretical positions ranging from semantic minimalism to radical contextualism. Our goal in this paper is not to take a side in those debates, but rather to give an integrated account of the many different ways context interacts with lexical meaning.