Building Categories in Interaction

Lexical meanings are routinely adjusted in order to evoke ad hoc concepts. But number words pose a unique challenge. Carston (2002) discusses two relevant interpretative processes in this connection. Broadening (as in metaphorical uses) introduces an ad hoc concept by incorporating interpretations that fall outside the lexeme’s linguistic meaning, and narrowing (e.g., interpreting finger as ‘index finger’) restricts the lexical meaning to a subset of its senses. I here argue that number words im