The mechanisms of interpreting the implicative verb manage: a relevance-theoretic perspective

Abstract

The implicative verb manage has long been discussed in semantic and pragmatic theory, particularly because it appears to involve potential semantic elements such as effort, difficulty, and unexpectedness. However, standard accounts overlook the structure of a core encoded meaning and the complex pragmatic mechanisms that determine how both core and potential elements are interpreted. This study investigates these issues by drawing on relevance theory and lexical pragmatics. A set of naturally occurring examples from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) was examined to illustrate the insights developed here. These examples were qualitatively analyzed to identify the interpretative mechanisms that underlie the verb’s meaning in context. The study demonstrates that manage has a two-layered conceptual structure: a core (obligatory) layer, and an outer (potential) layer. The core meaning encodes an (animate) subject reaching a positive outcome. Two additional figurative meanings, i.e. those involving non-volitional subjects and unintended negative outcomes, arise through pragmatic broadening and appear to have become conventionalized. The outer layer consists of three conceptual elements: [effort], [difficulty], and [unexpectedness/unlikelihood]. These elements are not encoded but are activated through free pragmatic enrichment, varying in type, degree, and communicative strength. Crucially, they contribute to the explicated proposition rather than forming separate implicated propositions. These findings suggest that the meaning of manage is more dynamic, fine-grained, and context-dependent than traditional accounts acknowledge. The study contributes to theories of lexical semantics and pragmatics by showing how encoded meaning interacts with graded contextual enrichment. The approach may also be applied to other implicative verbs.