Contextual modulation of meaning
The examples of noun-incorporation we have just seen show the meaning of words and other morphemes varying according to their collocation, the immediate linguistic context in which they occur. This sort of variation is found throughout language. We can see a similar phenomenon in English, where the meanings of verbs seem to vary slightly depending on the noun which they govern. If I cut my foot, for example, I am doing some thing that is rather different from what I am doing when I cut the grass, or when I cut a cake, cut someone’s hair, cut the wood, cut a diamond, cut a deck of cards, cut a disc or cut a notch. The nature of the event, the means by which it is accomplished, its typical object, and the extent to which it is deliberate may all vary in these different uses. Despite this variation, we have the strong sense that essentially the ‘same’ meaning of cut is involved in all those cases (in other words, we do not usually think of this verb as polysemous; see 5.3). Cruse (1986: 52) refers to this phenomenon as the contextual modulation of meaning. The degree of semantic ‘distance’ gets even greater if we consider more ‘extended’ meanings, like cut a deal, cut corners, cut a paragraph or cut prices.
This type of phenomenon poses an interesting descriptive and theoretical problem: do the differences in meaning of the different collocations arise compositionally or not? Are the meanings of the collocations just the results of the combinations of the meanings of their parts, or are the whole collocations themselves the meaning bearing units? In other words, which of the following two possibilities gives the best semantic description of English:
• one which lists the meanings of cut, foot, grass, cake, hair, etc., and sees the specific meanings of the collocations cut one’s foot, cut the grass, cut a cake, etc., as derived compositionally from the meanings of the parts; or
• one which just lists all the different collocations in which cut appears, and specifies a different meaning for the entire collocation?
We will examine each possibility in turn.
