Lexical Rules Is Italicized

In particular, we argue that what have been claimed to be rules of lexical sense extension operating on lexical items are instead to be accounted for by a process of reference transfer by which the referents of lexical items (and phrases) can be used to refer to related things, as governed by pragmatic rules of conversation and contextual knowledge. By contextual knowledge we include that information provided by the surrounding language, by the salient facts about the non-linguistic context and by the general knowledge about the world that can be presumed to be shared by the participants in the conversation.1