Content-Shifting Between Ordinary and Legal Contexts from the Perspective of Minimal Semantics

Abstract This paper addresses two questions: 1) which phenomena best explain shifts in the content of expressions between ordinary and legal contexts, and 2) what kind of cognitive architecture underlies competence in using legally relevant contents. To address the first question, the paper surveys the range of phenomena in which a single expression has more than one content and identifies those that best account for content shifts under discussion. To answer the second, the paper examines how these shifts can be accommodated within minimal semantics, according to which truth-evaluable, semantic content of utterance is generated through compositional operations on lexical meanings alone. Ultimately, the paper draws two conclusions: 1) that expressions whose content shifts between ordinary and legal contexts cannot be uniformly classified, since some are best treated as homonyms while others are better characterised as instances of irregular polysemy; and 2) that competent use of legally relevant contents requires more than the standardly recognised semantic competence to retrieve and compositionally combine lexical meanings, since it additionally requires a pragmatic competence whose role, nonetheless, is limited to either selecting the legally relevant lexical entry from the mental lexicon or generating the legally relevant implicature.