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    It is not the case that Zeugmatic infelicity can arise from pragmatic incongruity between predications rather than semantic ambiguity in the predicate itself.

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    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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    • 1.Pragmatic incongruity presupposes we've already isolated semantic meaning, but zeugma fundamentally disrupts that isolation in the first place.
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    • 2.Distinguishing 'semantic ambiguity' from 'pragmatic incongruity' requires a clear boundary that doesn't hold—pragmatics constrains semantic interpretation.
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    • 3.Most zeugmatic infelicity cases involve predicates with genuinely polysemous or context-dependent meanings, not mere contextual clash of fixed meanings.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
    ?
    • 1.Zeugma like 'He lost his keys and his mind' feels awkward due to pragmatic clash (abstract vs. concrete loss), not semantic ambiguity in 'lost'.
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    • 2.Speakers can comprehend identical semantic meanings while finding predications pragmatically incongruous—suggesting these are distinct phenomena.
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    • 3.Contextual factors (salience, type-coherence, domain-mismatch) systematically predict zeugmatic infelicity independent of polysemy or ambiguity.
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