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    Grice's Razor (a parsimony principle) favors positing pra... — Carmelics
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    Challenges→Ambiguity plays a more central and widespread role in sentence, utterance, and discourse interpretation than previously assumed.

    Grice's Razor (a parsimony principle) favors positing pragmatic inference over lexical ambiguity when a unified semantic entry suffices.

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    1 reason for
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    Reasons For

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    Reason for
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    • 1.Unified semantic entries reduce cognitive processing load during comprehension, making pragmatic derivation more efficient than storing multiple lexical meanings.
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    • 2.Pragmatic inference is productive and generative, explaining how speakers understand novel uses; lexical multiplication cannot predict creative extensions.
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    • 3.Postulating ambiguity multiplies entities unnecessarily when context and inference rules already explain interpretation without additional dictionary entries.
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    Reasons Against

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    Reason against
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    • 1.Conventionalized meanings (e.g., 'book' as physical object AND informational content) may be lexicalized despite derivability, reflecting actual mental representation.
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    • 2.Pragmatic inference requires substantial inference machinery and contextual reasoning that may be cognitively costlier than direct lexical retrieval for frequent uses.
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    • 3.The principle conflates semantic parsimony with psychological reality; economy of description doesn't entail economy of mental lexical storage or processing.
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    Ambiguity plays a more central and widespread role in sentence, utterance, and d...Conventionalized meanings (e.g., 'book' as physical object AND informational con...Postulating ambiguity multiplies entities unnecessarily when context and inferen...Pragmatic inference is productive and generative, explaining how speakers unders...
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    Pragmatic inference requires substantial inference machinery and contextual reas...The principle conflates semantic parsimony with psychological reality; economy o...Unified semantic entries reduce cognitive processing load during comprehension, ...

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