In addition to lexical entailments, another important aspect of word meanings has to do with constraints on specific word combinations. These constraints are referred to as selectional restrictions. The sentences in (9) all seem quite odd, not really acceptable except as a kind of joke, because they violate selectional restrictions.
(9) a. #This sausage doesn’t appreciate Mozart.
b. #John drank his sandwich and took a big bite out of his coffee.
c. #Susan folded/perforated/caramelized her reputation.
d. #Your exam results are sleeping.
e. #The square root of oatmeal is Houston.
f. My Feet Are Smiling (title of guitarist Leo Kottke’s sixth album)
g. “They’ve a temper, some of them — particularly verbs: they’re the proudest…” [Humpty Dumpty, in Through the Looking Glass]
As we noted in (7), denying an entailment leads to a contradiction. In contrast, violations of selectional restrictions like those in (9) lead to dissonance rather than contradiction.4 Chomsky (1965: 95) proposed that selectional restrictions were triggered by syntactic properties of words, but McCawley, Lakoff and other authors have argued that they derive from word meanings. If they were purely syntactic, they should hold even in contexts like those in (10). The fact that these sentences are acceptable suggests that the constraints are semantic rather than syntactic in nature.
(10) a. He’s become irrational – he thinks his exam results are sleeping.
b. You can’t say that John drank his sandwich.
The lexical entailments of words which occur in questions or negated statements can often be denied without contradiction, as illustrated in (11). Selectional restrictions, in contrast, hold even in questions, negative statements, and other non-assertive environments (12). This suggests that they are a special type of presupposition, and we will assume that this is the case.5
(11) a. John didn’t kill the Mayor; the Mayor is not even dead.
b. Is that a dog, or even an animal?
c. John is not a bachelor, he is happily married.
d. The snowflake did not fall, it floated upwards.
(12) a. #Did John drink his sandwich?
b. #John didn’t drink his sandwich; maybe he doesn’t like liverwurst.
c. #Are your exam results sleeping?
d. #My feet aren’t smiling.
Selectional restrictions are part of the meanings of specific words; that is, they are linguistic in nature, rather than simply facts about the world. Cruse (1986: 21) points out that hearers typically express astonishment or disbelief on hearing a statement that is improbable, given what we know about the world (13–14). This is quite different from hearers’ reactions to violations of selectional restrictions like those in (9). Those sentences are linguistically unacceptable, and hearers are more likely to respond, “You can’t say that.”
(13) A: Our kitten drank a bottle of claret.
B: No! Really? (Cruse 1986: 21)
(14) a. A: I know an old woman who swallowed a goat/cow/bulldozer.
B: That’s impossible!
b. #I know an old woman who swallowed a participle/prime number
It is fairly common for words with the same basic entailments to differ with respect to their selectional restrictions. German has two words corresponding to the English word eat: essen for people and fressen for animals. (One might use fressen to insult or tease someone — basically saying they eat like an animal.) In a Kimaragang6 version of the Christmas story, the translator used the word paalansayad to render the phrase which is expressed in the King James Bible as great with child. This word correctly expresses the idea that Mary was in a very advanced stage of pregnancy when she arrived in Bethlehem; but another term had to be found when someone pointed out that paalansayad is normally used only for water buffalo and certain other kinds of livestock.
It is sometimes helpful to distinguish selectional restrictions (a type of presupposition triggered by specific words, as discussed above) from collocational restrictions.7 Collocational restrictions are conventionalized patterns of combining two or more words. They reflect common ways of speaking, or “normal” usage, within the speech community. Some examples of collocational restrictions are presented in (15).
(15) a. John died/passed away/kicked the bucket.
b. My prize rose bush died/#passed away/#kicked the bucket.
c. When we’re feeling under the weather, most of us welcome a big/#large hug.
d. He is (stark) raving mad/#crazy.8
e. dirty/#unclean joke
f. unclean/#dirty spirit
Violations of a collocational restriction are felt to be odd or unnatural, but they can typically be repaired by replacing one of the words with a synonym, suggesting that collocational restrictions are not, strictly speaking, due to lexical meaning per se.
4 Such violations are sometimes called “category mistakes”, or “sortal errors”, especially in philosophical literature.
5 The idea that selectional restrictions can be treated as lexical presuppositions was apparently first proposed by Fillmore, but was first published by McCawley (1968).
6 An Austronesian language of northern Borneo.
7 We follow the terminology of Cruse (1986: 107, 279–280) here. Not everyone makes this distinction. In some work on translation principles, e.g. Beekman & Callow (1974), a violation of either type is referred to as a collocational clash.
8 Jim Roberts, p.c.
