Pragmatics

Pragmatics

1. Intro: Lecture 14

   • The study of those aspects which do not seem to come directly from the compositional semantics
   • Context-dependent meaning
   • Non-literal
   • Inferred meaning
   • Meaning minus semantics

2. Grice: Lecture 14

   • KEY PROPOSAL
     • Distinction between what is SAID (encoded directly) and what is IMPLICATED (meaning derived)
   • CO-OPERATIVE PRINCIPLE
     • Verbal communication is OSTENSIVE
     • Ostensive communication is INTENDED in order to co-operate with the principle
     • Social theory of communication: pragmatic reasoning is derived through social function
   • MAXIMS & FLOUTS
     • QUALITY: Make your contribution true, do not say what you believe to be false, or what you lack evidence for
       • Flout: Speaker is not trying to make a truthful contribution. Examples include IRONY, SARCASM, and UNCERTAIN responses
     • QUANTITY: Give as much information as is required & make contributions efficiently informative
       • Flout: Speaker does not give the right amount of information. Examples include SHORT REFERENCES and UNINFORMATIVE responses
     • RELEVANCE: Make your contributions relevant
     • MANNER: Avoid ambiguity and obscurity, and be orderly and precise.
       • Flout: Also similar for relevance, speaker is purposefully being ambiguous. Examples include literary style and euphemisms
     • Flouts
       • Flouts are intentional violations of maxims, and assuming Co-operative Principle is being obeyed, the hearer assumes the speaker had a good reason to violate.
       • When a flout is heard, it is assumed the speaker is trying to communicate something that is not directly encoded, and this is a conversational implicature
       • From speaker-oriented perspective

3. Sperber & Wilson's Relevance Theory: Lectures 16-18

   • CRITIQUE OF GRICE
     • Stipulative & not embedded in a psychologically plausible theory of mind
     • The calculation of 'what is said' does not involve pragmatic inferencing
     • No criteria for identifying the maxims, and essential concepts are left undefined
   • PROPOSAL
     • Analyse the maxims under Relevance alone, intending to communicate shows what we have to say is relevant and therefore worth the processing effort
     • Continue to work --> Sufficient pay off received. Work=processing info by pragmatic inferencing, Pay off = 'positive cognitive effects' & set of implicatures. No pay off = effort wasted = Stimuli considered not relevant
   • COGNITIVELY PLAUSIBLE THEORY
     • Must model the role of context and the role of intention recognition
     • Based on Fodor (1983), the theory should be COMPUTATIONAL, SYMBOLIC, MODULAR & REALIST
   • PRINCIPLES OF RELEVANCE
     • INFERENTIAL model of communication = linguistic info is only one source of evidence for determining the interpretation; other stimuli & info can also play a role
     • Yields "positive cognitive effects"
       • True contextual implications (additional true propositions)
       • Warranted strengthening (propositions that come with strengths)
       • Revisions of existing propositions (changed with incoming new info)
     • 1. "Human cognition tends to be geared to the maximisation of relevance"
       • Human cognition is efficient because of evolution. Evidence includes face recognition and identifying speech sounds. It's possible that this relates to specific brain modules.
     • 2. "Every act of overt communication conveys a presumption of its own optimal relevance"
       • The idea that what we have to say is relevant and worth processing.
   • Cognitive theory that considers brain activity as the key element in deriving implicatures
   • Effects of co-operative principle deduced from general cognitive pressures to derive useful stimulus from the environment
   • Hearer-oriented perspective

4. Implicatures: Lectures 14, 15 & 21

   • CONVENTIONAL
     • Committing oneself to X being the case, without actually saying something that would be false if the implicatures was false
     • Distinguishes between what the speaker is committed to and what is actually true
     • Describe the non-truth-conditional aspects of the meaning of certain lexical items
     • Examples include the COUNTER-EXPECTUAL aspect of 'but' in 'She is poor but honest' and the SEQUENTIAL aspect of 'and'
     • Triggers can consist of presupposition triggers, which indicates the overlap
       • Additive particles like 'too'
       • Discourse particles
       • Implicative verbs like 'fail'/'manage'
       • Intonational contours
   • CONVERSATIONAL
     • Inferences drawn on the basis of the assumption of co-operation
     • Part of the inferred meaning, NOT the encoded meaning
     • Meaning derived from the inferences of flouts
   • SCALAR
     • Example: 'some' implies 'not all'
     • This part of the meaning goes beyond what is directly encoded, so it provides additional meaning
     • Horn Scales (1972)
       • Horn proposes the Gricean analysis that scalar implicatures are proposed on the basis of co-operation and is avoiding violating as many maxims as possible
       • Set of scale alternatives given by conventional meaning of scalar items.
       • <all, most, many, some>
       • If the scalar item appears in the scope of negation, or other downward-entailing environment, the scale REVERSES, so we use lower scale alternatives
       • Believes that individuals will differ in their assessment of the scale relations because they are lexically defined
     • Exclusivity Implicature
       • Sentences with disjunction of 'or', the truth table states that both p+q could be true, but this meaning is different to what we usually assign to or. We usually assume that both is not an option for 'or'
   • Not truth-conditional meaning, and so speakers can distance themselves from them. This means that they are CANCELLABLE.
   • Subset of inferences

5. Presuppositions: Lectures 19-21

   • TRIGGERS
     • ASPECTUAL TRIGGERS: aspectual predicates like 'continue'/'stop', attitude predicates like 'regret'/'know'
     • ANTI-UNIQUENESS TRIGGERS: indefinite articles
     • EXISTENTIAL TRIGGERS: definite determiners, demonstratives, proper names, pronouns, quantifiers
     • EXCLUSIVE TRIGGERS: words like 'only'
     • FACTIVE TRIGGERS: clefts
     • SCALAR TRIGGERS: words like 'even', imply the likelyhood
     • IMPLICATIVE TRIGGERS: words like 'fail'/'manage' imply there was an attempt
     • EVIDENTIAL TRIGGERS: Modal 'must' implies there is a lack of direct evidence
   • KEY PROPERTIES
     • Not truth-conditional: the propositions do not need to be true to be presupposed
     • Backgrounded: Not the main point of a proposition, but it is assumed in the background. Evidence: it's very hard to pick out presuppositions & object to them in discourse. This distinguishes them from conventional implicatures.
     • Projective: Preserved under negation and other operators, which do NOT preserve entailment.
       • Antecedent of a conditional
       • Yes/no questions
       • Under a possibility adverb
       • Under a belief predicate
     • Pluggable: Some predicates plug presuppositions, meaning they stop them being attributed to the speaker, by projecting them out of the embedded clause.
     • Uncancellable: Presuppositions seem to be cancellable, but negation is difficult
     • Require dynamic accommodation: Presuppositions impose a demand upon the hearer to modify their context model, especially if they weren't aware of the 'shared' assumption.
       • Stalnaker (1974) modelled the shared set of presuppositions as THE COMMON GROUND - presuppositions as pre-conditions on common ground updates
         • Assertions: 'proposals to update the common ground'
         • Presuppositions: 'conditions which need to be met for updates to the common ground to work'
       • Conditions for accommodation are when we don't want to make a fuss/don't necessarily care (SOCIAL ASSUMPTION)
       • Presuppositions can sometimes be INFORMATIVE - possessives give rise to the form 'X has Y'
   • FAILURE
     • The situation where an expression which gives rise to a presupposition is used in a situation where it is not met.
     • Example includes a failure to satisfy the UNIQUENESS PRESUPPOSITION in which definites seem to give rise to
     • We tend to make an effort to rectify the failure & satisfy the presupposition conditions by considering what the unique proposition could refer to

6. Explicatures: Lecture 18

   • Sperber & Wilson use the term 'explicatures' to distinguish what is said from what is merely encoded.
   • Used to describe the proposition which is explicitly communicated by a given utterance - the proposition we arrive at once the context fills in the gap in the encoded message
   • Developments of logical forms which correspond to 'what is said' in a RT framework
   • Pragmatic processes involved in deriving explicatures include: disambiguation, saturation (reference assignment), free enrichment (adding unarticulated constituents) and 'ad hoc concept construction' (narrowing meaning)
   • Carston (2002): 'What the speaker meant'
   • Situations where explicated meaning is important include: sequential and, where the idea of 'and then' is meant

7. Lexical Ambiguity & Reference Assignment: Lecture 16 & 20

   • Instance where context is important for communication
   • Ambiguous lexical items with double meanings need to be modulated by the context in order for us to process the correct meaning. This is ultimately a matter of REFERENCE ASSIGNMENT. Pragmatics is required to enrich the proposition and fill in the content
   • Filling in process primarily involves associating parts of grammatical representation with entities in context
   • Example includes assigning reference to pronouns, Some pronouns are referential, such as 'Every boy thinks he is nice'. This is known as a BOUND pronoun, and it has VARIABLE REFERENCE
   • ANAPHORA
     • Deep: pronouns can be filled in by anything
     • Surface: ellipsis must be filled in by a linguistic antecedent