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.Here, `[xxx]' is meant to stand for a representation (conceptual, sensory or kinaesthetic) of the surgeon's manner of cutting flesh.Sensory and kinaesthetic representations are themselves a source of conceptual information which may provide premises for inference (Sperber 1985).For more detailed analysis of this example, see Vega Moreno (2004, 2005); Sperber and Wilson (forthcoming).For an analysis using a cognitive linguistic framework, see Coulson and Oakley, 2005.An alternative possibility which we will not pursue in connection with this example is that the intended contextual assumptions and implications involve not the literal concept flesh but the broadened (`metaphorical') concept meat*, whose denotation includes both dead meat and (some) live, human flesh.We will consider this sort of possibility briefly in our analyses of (9a) and (9b) below.According to Tourangeau and Rips, the interpretation of (10) might involve a further narrowing, from the general concept vicious (etc.), which applies to both wolves and (some) humans, to a more specific concept vicious** (etc.), which means vicious in the human way (etc.).If so, we would treat it as resulting from inferential interaction between the metaphor topic (`men') and the constructed ad hoc concept wolf*, whose denotation would not itself be affected by the interaction.For interesting discussion, which brings out the significance of Asch's work, see Rakova (2003).As this discussion shows, the interpretation of even a fairly standard metaphor such as `Sally is a block of ice' is to some extent vague and open-ended, a point which is often overlooked in philosophical and pragmatic accounts.For discussion of how this open-endedness can be dealt with in an inferential account, see e.g.Sperber and Wilson (1986, chapter 4, section 6); Pilkington (2000), Carston (2002a), Sperber and Wilson (forthcoming).It's worth noting that the Bank of English corpus (which contains 56 million words of naturally occurring text and discourse) contains only three metaphorical uses of `bulldozer': one a reference to a football player pushing people aside, and two references to Jacques Chirac being nicknamed `the bulldozer' (Kolaiti, 2005).4443
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