Abstract

Draft 4/01: not for citation By deferred interpretation (or "deference") I mean the phenomenon whereby expressions can be used to refer to something that isn't explicitly included in the conventional denotation of that expression. The interest in these phenomena stretches back to Aristotelian discussions of metaphor, and while the study of the mechanisms of deference has made considerable progress in the interval, that (literally) classical framework still underlies a lot of the assumptions that people bring to the phenomena. So it will be useful to address some of these legacies from the outset. Traditional approaches tend to regard figuration (and by extension, deference in general) as an essentially marked or playful use of language, which is associated with a pronounced stylistic effect. For linguistic purposes, however, there is no reason for assigning a special place to deferred uses that are stylistically notable — the sorts of usages that people sometimes qualify with a phrase like "figuratively speaking. " There is no important linguistic difference between using redcoat to refer to a British soldier and using suit to refer to a corporate executive (as in "A couple of suits stopped by to talk about the new products").

Citations