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Contents of Volume 4
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Theoretical Pragmatics: An Introduction
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The last decade witnessed a surge of new research in pragmatics, fuelled by the emergence of new theoretical frameworks, an increased interest in the semantics-pragmatics interface, and the establishment of experimental pragmatics as a new research paradigm. Many of these developments concern the line of pragmatics which originated with the work of H. Paul Grice. Of new theoretical frameworks, we may mention different variants of optimality and game theoretic approaches, localist semantic theories of embedded implicatures, logical globalist formalisations of Gricean pragmatics, and multi-layered semantics for conventional implicatures. At the same time, research in older frameworks such as Neo-Gricean and Post-Gricean pragmatics continued, and new investigations of speech act and presupposition theory emerged. This development led to a diversification of theoretical approaches, a synthesis of which is desirable but not to be expected in the near future. This issue is intended as a contribution to the enhancement of mutual awareness and the discussion of each other’s results.
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A Solution to Soames’ Problem: Presuppositions, Conditionals, and Exhaustification
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This paper focuses on sentences like Nixon is guilty, if Haldeman is guilty too, first discussed by Soames (1982) and Karttunen and Peters (1979), which raise three problems. First, they are felicitous and do not appear to have presuppositions. However all major theories of presuppositions predict that they should presuppose what the antecedent presupposes (e.g., the sentence above should presuppose that Nixon is guilty). Second, there is a contrast between these sentences and the corresponding sentence-initial conditionals like if Haldeman is guilty too, Nixon is guilty. Finally, a way to solve the problem would be to locally accommodate the presupposition in the antecedent. However, this wrongly predicts tautological truth-conditions. In the case above, the predicted meaning could be paraphrased as “Nixon is guilty, if both Haldeman and Nixon are guilty.” As a solution to these three problems, I propose that the presupposition is nonetheless locally accommodated in the antecedent and furthermore that the sentence is also interpreted exhaustively, which gives rise to a non-presuppositional and non-tautological meaning analogous to Nixon is guilty, only if both Haldeman and Nixon are guilty. Furthermore, I argue that the degraded status of the sentence-initial case is an independent fact rooted in the topic-focus structure of sentence-final conditionals. Finally, the present proposal can also be extended to treat related non-presuppositional cases like I will go, if we go together.
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Lexical Pragmatic Adjustment and the Nature of Ad hoc Concepts
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According to truth-conditional pragmatics, a word may contribute an ad hoc concept to the proposition expressed, that is, something that differs from the concept the word encodes (the lexicalized concept). In relevance-theoretic lexical pragmatics, ad hoc concepts are treated like a species of concepts proper. Concepts as well as ad hoc concepts are taken to be atomic. Lexical pragmatic adjustment is conceived as the formation of an ad hoc concept that is narrower or broader in extension (or both) than the lexicalized concept involved. We argue that difference in extension should not be taken as the crucial feature of lexical pragmatics, since ad hoc concepts can have the same extension as the lexicalized concept. In contrast, we propose a positive view of ad hoc concepts as clusters of information poised to be used in inference. (Surprisingly, ad hoc concepts turn out not to be concepts at all.) The cluster account drops the assumption that ad hoc concepts are atomic and can therefore provide a satisfactory explanation of lexical pragmatic adjustment.
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Rich Lexical Represe ntations and Conflicting Features
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This paper argues that interpretations are fine-grained and that, to come to a full understanding of meaning, it is important to find out more about how such detailed interpretations are derived. As a first step towards answering this question it is insightful to look at the interpretation of metaphors. Psycholinguistic experiments have shown that the interpretation of metaphors involves the suppression of irrelevant or incompatible features. These studies could be taken as an indication against the common view that word meanings are underspecified and enriched in a context. In contrast with this underspecification view, this paper suggests a view of the lexicon in which words come with very rich semantic representations. When two representations are combined, a conflict may arise when elements of the representations are incompatible. This paper argues that such a conflict is best analyzed in Optimality Theory. The optimization process of combining rich lexical representations is illustrated with an analysis of the adjective-noun combination stone lion.
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On Assertoric and Directive Signals and the Evolution of Dynamic Meaning
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Basic speech-act distinctions apply quasi-universally across languages, but little attention has been paid so far to formally modelling the evolution of these. Even worse so, standard models of language evolution from evolutionary game theory deliver functionally ambiguous meanings: evolved meanings in Lewisean signalling games seem hybrids between assertions and directives. This has been noted by Lewis (1969) already, but has only recently received renewed attention (Huttegger, 2007; Blume and Board, 2011; Zollman, 2011). Contrary to previous modelling attempts this paper argues that a functional distinction in formal models should be based on criteria that linguistic typology uses to distinguish clause types cross-linguistically. The paper then offers two simple models that delineate assertoric and imperative meanings once by semantic denotation and once by pragmatic effect. The latter requires us to go beyond standard modelling techniques: in order to account for the dynamic meaning element of “giving a directive” we need a mechanism of co-evolving meanings and norms.
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Modelling the “Aoristic Drift of the Present Perfect” as Inflation An Essay in Historical Pragmatics
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In this article, the diachronic tendency of present perfect forms to become more and more past tense-like is analysed in terms of an inflationary process within an Iterated Learning Model. The paper proposes to improve on current accounts of the diachrony of present perfects (mostly set in the framework of grammaticalisation theory) by making explicit a selfreinforcing causal mechanism that drives the process, namely that speakers overestimate the current relevance contribution of their utterances. The main theoretical issue is to develop an explicit account of language change where modifications in a linguistic system are long-term effects of the use of language, or, put differently, of speaker-hearer interaction and the biases that act upon them.
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Notes on Contributors
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