Non-lexicalised concepts and degrees of effability: Poetic thoughts and the attraction of what is not in the dictionary

Some concepts — and hence the thoughts that contain them — are relatively ineffable. Some literary communication nevertheless attempts to eff these concepts. This article is interested in the nature of such concepts and the extent to which pragmatics can deal with them. I discuss the idea, familiar from Relevance Theory and developed in Carston (1996; forthcoming), that pragmatic inferencing is involved in on-line ad hoc concept construction, certainly in the case of concept narrowing, but also possibly in the case of concept loosening. I then discuss the relative effability of non-lexicalised concepts, borrowing from Sperber and Wilson (1998) and focussing on phenomenal concepts (or concepts with a significant phenomenal component). I then define poetic thoughts as thoughts containing such concepts.