Sergio Maruenda Bataller, Universitat de València (Spain)
Contents
2 Relevance Theory and Generalizad Conversational
Implicatures
2.1 The principles and the maxims
3 Lexical Semantics and Pragmatics
3.2 Lexico-pragmatic processes
Communication
is traditionally defined as the transfer of information from a sender to a receiver
by means of a (linguistic) code. This classical definition belongs to what
Sperber & Wilson (1986) call the code model. Specifically, this
model presupposes that the hearer’s retrieval of a codified meaning ‘packed up’
in a linguistic string is such that the speaker and the hearer will share exactly
the same thought once the process of decoding is completed. The aim of
pragmatics since the 1960s is to show that at the discourse level—and recently
at the lexical level—there is no one-to-one mapping between linguistic meaning
and utterance meaning. In other words, there is a gap between
semantically-underspecified meaning and speaker meaning that can only be
bridged by pragmatic inference. Consider:
(1)
a: Did you?
b: Hey, who wouldn’t? (based on Yule
1996).
(2) a. Where is the chicken?
b. Where is the kitchen?
(3)
Mother to child: ‘If you do that
again...’ (Wilson UCL notes).
In
spite of the underspecification of (1a) and (1b), it is not hard to imagine a
context in which communicators recover a complete propositional form and can
arrive at the intended interpretation. The same is true of the case of a slip
of the tongue in (2). This is not only done by linguistic decoding, but by
forming hypotheses about what the speakers could have meant. We are even good
at understanding what could happen to the child in (3) if she goes on
misbehaving.
Along
with Speech Act Theory (Austin 1962, Searle 1969), Grice’s work on the Cooperative
Principle (CP henceforth) initiated the current interest in pragmatics and
led to its development as a privileged discipline within linguistics. For
Grice, linguistic meaning can be partly explained in terms of
intention-recognition, the key concept in inferential communication:
‘[S] meant
something by x’ is roughly equivalent to ‘[S] intended the utterance of x to
produce some effect on the audience by means of the recognition of this
intention’ (Grice 1971: 58).
For
(4)The
Cooperative Principle and conversational maxims
The
Cooperative Principle
‘Make
your contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the
accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged’.
The
Maxim of Quality
‘Try
to make your contribution one that is true’ specifically:
‘Do
not say what you believe to be false’
‘Do
not say that for which you lack adequate evidence’.
The
Maxim of Relation (Relevance)
‘Be
relevant’
The
Maxim of Quantity
‘Make
your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of
the exchange)’
‘Do
not make your contribution more informative than is required’
The
Maxim of Manner
‘Avoid
obscurity of expression’
‘Avoid
ambiguity’
‘Be
brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity)’
‘Be
orderly’ (Grice 1989: 26-7)
In
(5) we assume that A would have no problem in inferring the meaning that B is
tired enough not to go out for dinner even though s/he does not answer
literally A’s question. Rather than treating B’s move as uncooperative, A
assumes that an appropriate meaning is there to be inferred. The question is
how this implicit meaning is generated and how can B assume that A will
understand the intended meaning. In Grice’s terms, the maxim of Quantity (‘Make
your contribution as informative as is required’) has been flouted. Only under
the expectation that the speaker is being cooperative can the hearer restore
the conversational equilibrium by assuming that an implicature has been
generated.
(5) A: Do you want to go out for dinner?
B: I’m tired
Recent
developments in Relevance Theory (Carston 2002, 2003; Sperber & Wilson
2002, Wilson & Sperber 2002, Wilson 2000, 2002, forthcoming) lay
great stress on the minimum (but much-needed) interaction between Gricean
pragmatics and psychological literature on theory of mind. They argue in favour
of an evolved, specialized, ‘dedicated’ submodule, within a general
theory-of-mind module, responsible for the comprehension of linguistic
utterances. Pressure in human evolution towards cognitive efficiency and the
exploitation of this tendency in communication favoured, Sperber & Wilson
argue, the emergence of a relevance-based module, which is put forward as an
explicit procedure for the interpretation of ostensive stimuli.
Grice’s
inferential model, CP and conversational maxims are basic tenets in pragmatics,
yet their interpretation is often controversial, leading to much debate still
in a constant state of flux. In this section, we aim to contrast two radically
opposing theories stemming from the Gricean paradigm: Relevance theory (Sperber
& Wilson 1986/1995) and the theory of Generalized Conversational
Implicature (GCI henceforth) (Levinson 1983, 2000). The former departs
substantially from Grice by proposing a pragmatic theory deeply rooted in
cognitive psychology. The latter, within the neo-Gricean drift, revises
exhaustively the scope of the Gricean paradigm, but preserving the original
framework.
Grice
himself admits that the vagueness in the characterization of the CP and maxims
reduces the explanatory force of his system, which is seen by some scholars as
an unsourmountable flaw of the Gricean paradigm. For Sperber & Wilson
(2002), Grice is rather “non-committal” about the source and the nature of the
CP and maxims, and they wonder whether some other principles could be generated
ad hoc when communicators opt out of the CP (for example, a politeness
principle à la Leech 1983, conceived as a necessary complement of
Grice’s principle). Moreover, post- and neo-Gricean agree that the scope of the
theory is too restrictive. Whereas there is an essential connection between the
CP and the generation of implicatures, there is sufficient evidence for the use
of pragmatics in explicit communication (i.e. in determining ‘what is said’).
This is what Levinson (2000: 186) calls the Grice’s circle.
On
the Gricean side, Davies (2000: 1) argues that the criticism of the CP and
maxims misses the point, since a close study of Grice’s writings shows the
concept of cooperation to be “peripheral to his thought”. The aim of Grice
(1975), Davies argues, is to undermine the formalists’ argument for the
imperfections of natural language by showing, on the one hand, that there is a logic
to the operations of conversations and, on the other hand, that the language of
philosophy and science is too simple to account for the wide range of shades of
meaning that only natural language can transmit. Therefore, the driving force
that triggers the implicature process is the concept of rationality:
I am enough
of a rationalist to want to find a basis that underlies these facts, undeniable
though they may be; I would like to be able to think of the standard type of
conversational practice not merely as something that all or most do IN FACT
follow but as something that it is REASONABLE for us to follow, that we SHOULD
NOT abandon (Grice 1989b: 29).
So for
Davies (2000: 18):
Hearers
assume that an utterance addressed to them is intended to be meaningful,
therefore if the utterance does not have an appropriate conventional meaning,
they will look for a more useful (and non-conventional) interpretation.
As far as the hearer is concerned, the speaker providing an uninterpretable
(meaningless) utterance would be pointless, and therefore irrational (my
emphasis, SM).
What
transpires from the vagueness of the italicised words is that rationality and a
notion of relevance (either in the Gricean or in the Sperber-Wilson sense) go
hand in hand. However, as with cooperation, if rationality is key to the fact
that utterances raise some expectations on interpreters, it has to provide an
explicit procedure to account for how (a) speakers make particular choices at
the utterance level and (b) hearers select the intended interpretation among
the range of possible ones (that satisfy the CP) they are weighing up. The sort
of complex, rational, conscious reasoning process that Grice provides to
calculate conversational implicatures runs contrary to the psychological
evidence that shows that children are involved in inferential communication in
pre-verbal stages.
Relevance
theory locates the source of inferential communication not in a
socially-acquired principle of cooperation or a series of maxims that rational
communicators must uphold, but in a non-representational property of relevance
they do not need to be aware of to follow (let alone violate). Relevance is not
a rule or instruction that needs to be known, but it is derived from ‘an
exceptionless generalisation’ about human psychology: human cognition tends to
allocate our perceptual and inferential systems to the most relevant
information available. One obvious advantage of this psychological approach is
that cases of metaphor, hyperbole, irony, loose use and other tropes used
aesthetically are not derived from not speaking maxim-wise, but follow quite
straightforwardly from considerations of relevance.[1]
Therefore, Sperber & Wilson’s non-maxim-based approach is centred on
one mega-principle: the principle of relevance:
(6) Cognitive Principle of Relevance
Human
cognition tends to be geared to the maximisation of relevance (Sperber &
Wilson 1995: 260).
One
further advantage is that this model is more explicit than the one based on
cooperation and rationality as regards how expectations are created. Human
orientation towards cognitive efficiency allows us to metarepresent the mental
states of others and act accordingly. This tendency is exploited in
communication by covertly and overtly invoking specific thoughts on the hearer,
knowing that the hearer has exactly this expectation. Ostensive attempts at
communicating—by deliberately providing evidence of one’s intention to
lead the audience towards a certain conclusion—create expectations of
relevance, which guarantee that the hearer will spend the effort needed in
comprehension because the linguistic stimulus automatically impinges on
attention and triggers, at the same time, a process of interpretation. These
ideas are gathered in a specific principle for ostensive communication:
(7) Communicative Principle of Relevance
Every
act of ostensive communication communicates the presumption of its own optimal
relevance (Sperber & Wilson 1995: 260).
The
fact that an utterance creates some expectations of relevance sheds light on
how hearers may identify the intended interpretation, given that mutual
expectations can serve to limit the search space. Specifically, Sperber &
Wilson put forward an explicit procedure, based on their criterion of
relevance, which, they argue, is powerful enough to exclude all but one
interpretation, allowing no possibility for co-occurrence. The hearer assumes
that the first interpretation tested and found consistent with this criterion
is the intended interpretation, and stops processing. This is guaranteed by the
Relevance-theoretic Comprehension Procedure and the Presumption of
Optimal Relevance:
(8) Relevance-theoretic Comprehension Procedure
Follow a path of least effort in
computing cognitive effects
(a) Consider possible interpretations in
order of accessibility
(b) Stop when your expectations of
relevance are satisfied
(9) Presumption of Optimal Relevance
(a) The ostensive
stimulus is relevant enough to be worth the addressee’s effort to process it
(b)
The ostensive stimulus is the most relevant one compatible with the
communicator’s abilities and preferences (Sperber & Wilson 1995: 275).
Unlike
Grice’s reasoning process, this comprehension procedure is automatically and
unconsciously applied, which fits quite straightforwardly with the fact that
children are involved in inferential communication very early. As mentioned
above, this is the basis of a pragmatic module evolved from a more general
metarepresentational module responsible for the attribution of beliefs,
intentions and desires (cf. Sperber 1996; 2000).
One
way to solve the problem raised by the nature of the maxims is to think of them
as inferential heuristics, rather than behavioural norms (Levinson 2000:
35). The purpose of such inferential heuristics (Levinson 2000: 28-ff, 34) is
to get round the articulatory bottleneck of human communication created
by the slow rate of human speech encoding and the high speed of the human mind
to process linguistic messages. Given that physiological constraint of our
articulatory system, humans have developed these heuristics to amplify the
informational load of any coded message, thus overcoming the difficulties raised
by the limitations of linguistic transmission. Levinson (2000: 4) argues that
to explain the recovery of the speaker’s intentions on the basis of what is
said is implausible, and therefore the efforts of current theories of utterance
interpretation (including his own) “are pretty much stabs in the dark”. The non-monotonicity
of inference systems prevents the reconstruction of the speaker’s intention by
simply working “backwards” from the conclusion to the premises (as Relevance
theory assumes), since there may be an indefinite number of premises that may
yield the same conclusion. Therefore, the heuristics give a set of default
constraints (unless there are indications otherwise) that limit the search
space of implicit premises and only help to resolve the logical problem
of recovery of intention.
To
account for the phenomenon of Generalized Conversational Implicature
(henceforth GCI), which, Levinson argues, can determine what these rules of
interpretation consist of, he puts forward a reduction of Grice’s maxims to
three (see Figure 1).[2]
|
Q-Heuristic What isn’t said, isn’t |
Quantity 1 Make your contribution as informative as is required |
|
I-Heuristic What is expressed simply, is stereotypically
exemplified |
Quantity 2 Do not make your contribution more
informative than is required |
|
M-Heuristic What is said in an abnormal way, isn’t normal |
Manner 1 Avoid obscurity of expression Manner 4 Avoid prolixity |
Figure 1: Levinson’s
heuristics and Grice’s corresponding maxims
The
Q-heuristic (‘What isn’t said, isn’t’), closely related to Grice’s first maxim
of quantity (‘Make your contribution as informative as is required’), is
characterized by establishing sets of salient contrasts which differ in
informativity, grouped in what have been called ‘Hornian scales’ (e.g.
<some, all>, <none, not all>, <since-p-q, if-p-q>, etc).
According to this heuristic, speakers select the most informative alternate
that is consistent with the facts:
(10)
Some of Jane’s friends came to the party.
Q-implicates:
Not all of Jane’s friends came to the party.
(11)
There are three bottles of red wine on the table.
Q-implicates: There are exactly
three bottles of wine on the table.
Q-implicatures
have two essential characteristics: (1) they are metalinguistic in the sense
that what is implicated refers to a set of contrasting expressions in
opposition; (2) they are negative propositions: the chosen expression rules out
the state of facts expressed by the rival expressions (i.e. the state of facts
presumed by the implicature is not the case).
The
I-heuristic (‘What is expressed simply, is stereotypically exemplified’),
related to Grice’s second maxim of quantity (‘Do not make your contribution more
informative than is required’), allows hearers to provide a
maximally-informative, most stereotypical interpretation of a minimal, unmarked
description:
(12)
Peter opened the door and sat down in the sofa.
I-implicates:
Peter opened the door in a stereotypical way (say, with the key) and walked in
and sat down in the sofa in a normal way.
(13)
John went into the room and he sat down.
I-implicates:
John went into the room and John sat down (preferred local coreference).
The
I-heuristic, describing stereotypical exemplifications, needs to be
complemented with another one: if an utterance is constructed using marked or
prolix forms, this signals that what is described is unusual or has special
properties. This is what the M-heuristic says: ‘What is said in an abnormal
way, isn’t normal’, related to Grice´s M1 (‘Avoid obscurity of expression’) and
M4 (‘Avoid prolixity’). Consider:
(14) Peter pushed the door and dragged himself to
the sofa.
M-implicates:
Peter opened the door in an unusual way and sat down in the sofa
non-stereotypically.
(15) John went into the room and the man sat
down.
M-implicates: John≠the
man (disjoint local coreference).
Bearing
in mind the complementarity of the instructions given by the I- and the M- principles
or heuristics, one can assume that the use of simple, unmarked forms gives rise
to stereotypical interpretations, whereas the use of marked or prolix
linguistic expressions license hearers to search for alternative
interpretations. This contrast is exemplified in the pairs (12-14) and (13-15),
respectively.
For
Levinson, these powerful heuristics give us preferred interpretations
regardless of speakers’ intentions, particular contexts of utterance or
metarepresentation of others’ mental processes. In contrast to Particularized
Conversational Implicatures (henceforth PCI), which crucially depend on
particular contexts of utterances, these GCIs are intimately tied to, and
dependent on, the linguistic content:
Generalized
Conversational Implicature
An implicature i is
generalized iff (an utterance) U implicates i unless there are unusual specific
contextual assumptions that defeat it.
Particularized
Conversational Implicature
An implicature i from an
utterance U is particularized iff U implicates i only by virtue of specific
contextual assumptions that would not invariably or normally obtain (Levinson
2000: 16, adapted).
Then,
GCIs are part of a third level of analysis that neo-Griceans deem necessary in
a theory of meaning, midway between the semantic sentence meaning
(codified, more abstract) and the pragmatic speaker meaning or utterance-token
meaning. This third level is called utterance-type meaning and
refers to “matters of preferred interpretations [...] carried by the structure
of utterances, and not by virtue of particular contexts of utterance” (Levinson
2000: 3). Semantically, this level is characterized for being partly
codified—which would explain our default interpretation of some
linguistic elements—and, pragmatically, it shares with PCIs the condition of
cancellability of implicatures, as shown in the second part of (16):
(16) A: How many students took the exam?
B: Some did. Well, no, in fact all of
them did.
The
new framework of this theory of utterance-type meaning raises some questions
concerning the role of the maxims of quality and relevance and the CP in the
overall system. Levinson himself (2000: 74) says that the reason for leaving
out truthfulness and relevance rests on the nature of GCIs as ‘default’
inferences. The maxim of quality is secondary in the generation of GCIs. The
solution to Grice’s circle forces neo-Griceans to rethink the
semantics-pragmatics distinction. The pragmatics module inferentially enriches
the underdetermined aspects of the semantic representation on the basis of the
default assumptions given by the heuristics/principles of the GCIs (Gricean
pragmatics I). Then, the semantics module provides semantic interpretations
that will determine truth-conditions, entailments and other classic semantic
relations. Levinson dubs this new relationship between the semantic and
pragmatic component pragmatic intrusion or presemantic and
postsemantic pragmatics.
In
this section we have outlined and contrasted the main tenets of Relevance
Theory and the theory of GCI to show that these two competing paradigms
coincide in the fact that the semantics/pragmatics distinction must be
rethought by maximising the role of inference in determining either ‘what is said’
(in Gricean terms) or the ‘explicature’ (in the Sperber-Wilson sense). It also
follows from this section (and we have tried to put the stress on it) that
neo-Griceans seem to have moved towards a more cognitive approach based on
inferential heuristics, thus leaving aside the social approach that
characterised their earlier writings (cf. Brown & Levinson 1987 Politeness
Theory). In the following section, we aim to apply both paradigms to solve
some of the problems traditional lexical semantics has had to face in
accounting for word meaning. In doing this, we also aim to gain insights into
the possibility of expanding the semantics/pragmatics distinction to the level
of concepts and words.
One
of the basic problems that lexical semantics has to tackle to account for word
meaning is where the line between linguistic and encyclopaedic knowledge is to
be drawn. On lexicographical grounds, it seems that such a distinction is quite
arbitrary. The difficulty arises from the multiplicity of uses of a single word
form due to its situational relations (Carston 2002; Cruse 1986; Sperber &
Wilson 1995, 1998, 2000; Wilson & Sperber 2002a,b). The basic idea is that
a single, very general sense can be adjusted in an unlimited number of ways,
each context (linguistic or non-linguistic) making certain aspects of meaning
vary in accessibility. Consider:
(17) A: Oh! It’s late. I’ll miss my flight.
B: Don’t worry. John has a GOOD car
(=fast).
(18) A: Does Ann have a good salary?
B: Well, she has a GOOD car
(=expensive).
(19) Paul (seeing Jane in
trouble to cut a steak, ironically): This is a GOOD knife, isn´t it? (=blunt).
(20) John hit Paul in his MOUTH.
(21) We saw the bear near the MOUTH of the cave.
(22) John opened the bottle by sawing off its
MOUTH.
In
the examples (17)-(19) above, the polysemous adjective encoded by “good” works
as an adnominal functor, that is its meaning depends on the nominal head it is
pre-modifying[3],
as is also true in good umbrella, good meal, good weather,
etc. In (20)-(22) the local senses of the concept MOUTH are determined
by their participation in distinct conceptual fields: mouth of a person,
mouth of a cave, mouth of a bottle. The problem with this
strategy is that communicators need to create a new entry in their minds’
lexicon for each novel sense they encounter. Some scholars (see for example
Pustejovsky 1995) have argued against such a move because it does not account
for any kind of systematicity, which threatens the allegedly non-negotiable
principle of compositionality (see Fodor 2001).
As
an alternative to this sense enumeration view (Pustejovsky 1995), some
researchers (see Blutner 1998, 2002; Carston 2002: 360-ff; Pustejovsky 1995: 43-ff)
argue that the retrieval of the speaker’s meaning starts from an underspecified
(non-ambiguous) lexical (semantic) representation that could be further
enriched either by the linguistic context or by pragmatic effects in the
situation in which it is used. For Carston (2002: 360), the idea that some
concepts are not really full-fledged but rather concept ‘schemas’ is compatible
with the Relevance Theory view that logical forms are abstract ‘semantic’
representations which may be inferentially enriched before they are fully
propositional. Such a level of abstraction, Carston argues, is also true at the
lexical level.[4]
Intuitively
at least, both the semantic and the pragmatic solutions are not exempt of
difficulties. First, in seeing how, for example, the concept GOOD modifies in a
specific phrase it remains to be cashed out how to discriminate between world
knowledge and knowledge of meaning derived from the semantics of the
noun being modified. In such cases, Pustejovsky (1995: 43) argues that “deploying
commonsense inference seems unnecessary and heavy-handed”. However, it remains
for lexical semantics to explain how this abstract, very general sense features
in composition. Second, from a purely pragmatic point of view, it is not clear
whether communicators actually have thoughts in which a very general concept
features as a constituent, or indeed what the properties of such a concept are
as opposed to more specific ones:
But when we
try to think about the general concept OPEN and to have a thought in which such
a general concept features, as opposed to any of the more specific concepts
that we grasp in understanding “open one’s mouth”, “open the window”, “open a
can”, “open a discussion”, etc., the experience is an odd one, as we seem to
have no definite thought at all.” (Carston 2002: 361).
Odd
as such an experience certainly is, we think there has to be a concept that
features in thought, at least if we intend to preserve compositionality. There
is of course an encoded concept OPEN, perhaps a scalar one, that has a very
general sense and gives access to a wide range of encyclopaedic assumptions
about opening windows, opening wounds, opening curtains, etc., all of them
leading to certain implications and consequences. These more specific concepts
are somewhat stored in memory (probably under the encyclopaedic entry of OPEN),
and it is perhaps necessary in some situations to finetune the concept, as it
were, to meet certain implications, some of which may have been triggered by
the context.
The idea of
an abstract, single or superordinate sense captures quite well the sense
correlation of the various realizations of an ambiguous form, thus avoiding the
computational undesirability of sense enumeration. However, leaving aside the
difficulty of finding a paraphrase of the supposed superordinate sense [the
language of thought is abstruse], this idea of sense ‘generation’ may be ruled
out by the zeugmatic nature of instances such as (23) and (24), adapted from
Cruse (1986):
(23) The ice-cream entered John’s mouth
at the same time that the bear entered that of the cave.
(24) John and his driving licence expired
last Thursday.
The
oddity of these sentences lies in the fact that independent senses are
antagonistic to one another; they cannot be brought into play simultaneously.
This raises the question of whether it is possible that independent senses are
stored in the mind’s lexicon in separate entries, since it is difficult to see
how pragmatic processes (either by default inference or contextual relevance)
can rule out the semantic anomaly of such examples.
Another
of the phenomena widely treated in the literature on lexical semantics is that
of logical metonymy (Lascarides & Copestake 1998; logical
polysemy Pustejovsky 1995), exemplified in (25) and (26) below.
(25) (a) Most of our students enjoyed the book.
(b) Most of our students enjoyed
reading the book.
(26) (a) I began a new novel last night.
(b) I began reading a new novel last
night.
(c) I began writing a new novel last
night.
For
the Generative Lexicon view (Pustejovsky 1995), the correct interpretation of
(25a) and (26a) must be derived co-compositionally and it is constrained by the
combinatorial peculiarities of the semantics of the verb and the noun. The idea
is that the interpretation is calculable on semantic grounds by means of a
system of operators (the qualia structure) that affects the semantic content of
noun phrases. Thus, by a semantic operator of type coercion, the
‘reading’ interpretation in (26b) depends on the telicity of the noun novel,
whereas the ‘writing’ enrichment depends on the agentive role. However, since
this analysis rests on semantic (non-defeasible) lexical information (see
Blutner 1998), the inferential step from ‘enjoyed the book’ to ‘enjoyed reading
the book’ is seen as a necessary entailment. It is not difficult, however, to
come across instances in which the restrictiveness of the coercion mechanisms
make the wrong predictions as regards co-composition[5]:
(27) John
began a telephone directory
(28) Susan
wants a dictionary
Some
alternative semantic-pragmatic analyses coincide in that the interface between
the lexicon and pragmatics is via a partially-defeasible (semantically
underspecified) logical form, where the interaction with real world knowledge can
override the defaults that are proposed lexically (Lascarides & Copestake
1998) or inferentially by means of maxims or heuristics (Grice 1989; Levinson
2000). Blutner (2002) follows Relevance Theory in arguing in favour of an
inferential (non-compositional) mechanism of contextual enrichment controlled
by non-representational means such as salience and relevance (for example, it
may be the privileged status of writing and reading with regard
to novel in a given context that gives the appropriate enrichments).
However, he believes that such cost factors are best explained by means of
default inferences without giving (sounding) reasons for abandoning the Sperber
& Wilson model.[6]
For
Relevance Theory (see Carston 1996, 1998, 2000, 2002; Sperber & Wilson
2000; Wilson & Sperber 2002a,b;
In
this section we have sketched some of the difficulties that purely lexical
semantics approaches have in discriminating semantic from pragmatic knowledge
in word meaning. Pustejovsky’s generative lexicon provides a series of
operators that are designed to determine the scope of semantics and its
capacity of generating meaning. However, we have seen that such mechanisms are
not general and systematic enough, nor can they be separated from the intentions
of speakers. In the following section, we aim to describe some lexico-pragmatic
processes put forward by Relevance Theory and contrast them with GCIs to see
whether pragmatic intrusions in semantic content are best explained by a
default implicature or a once-off inference.
It
follows from the previous sections that the contribution of semantics to the
overall interpretation of an utterance is more restricted than it was
originally thought. This idea leads to the interesting conclusion that it is
also possible to think of a lexical pragmatics, whose function is to endow a
word with meaning in a particular utterance or communicative situation. In
fact, lexical pragmatics is a rapidly growing research field that tries to
account for pragmatic phenomena that are connected with the semantic
underspecification of lexical items. The latest developments of Relevance
Theory (Carston 2002; Sperber & Wilson 2000; Wilson & Sperber 2002a,b;
Wilson forthcoming) have enormously contributed to the development of
the field and their proposals have aroused great interest, especially as
regards the lexico-pragmatic processes that impinge on explicit communication.
For Relevance Theory, then, the semantics-pragmatics distinction is also true
at the lexical level. Thus, the linguistically codified concept not only gives
rise to certain implicatures, but it can also be pragmatically enriched in
order to get a full-fledged propositional form (or explicature).
Grice
pioneered the belief that “not all facts about word use give direct insight
into word meaning”. However, his strict distinction between what is said
(semantics) and what is implicated (pragmatics) does not take account of
pragmatic processes in determining what is said and, consequently, of a
lexical pragmatics affecting explicit communication. For Levinson (2000), as we
have seen (section 2), GCIs are the best candidates for pragmatic intrusion
into semantic content, since they are triggered by linguistic information.
However, Levinson warns about the fact that the generalized character of
implicatures is dubious at the lexical level. Notwithstanding that, he puts
forward the following as examples of GCIs impinging on the lexical level:
(29) Her house is on the corner
I-communicates: Her house, of
the normal variety, is on the corner.
(30) Her residence is on the corner
I-communicates:
Her inmodest, pretentious house is on the corner
(Levinson
2000: 138).
(31) He lectures on Wednesdays
I-implicates: As
far as the speaker knows, he does not lecture on Thursday (Levinson 2000: 101).
Pons-Bordería
(2001) argues that the difference in informativeness between house and residence
in (29) and (30) is determined by semantics, not by a generalized implicature. And
in fact it is hard to see a GCI arising in all cases in which communicators use
these concepts. Such is also the case in (31). Levinson states that the use of
a term on a scale implicates the inapplicability of another term on the same
scale due to the Q-principle (the speaker cannot be more informative than
that). It is not hard to find examples in which the Q-principle would make the
wrong predictions if unconstrained by the speaker’s intentions. Consider:
(32) A: I’ll buy Jane some flowers for her birthday.
B: That will be nice.
FLOWERS make acceptable presents (based on Cruse 1986)
Predicted scalar
implicature: Roses / dandelions do not make acceptable presents.
In
(32), whereas the generalized implicature correctly predicts the
inapplicability of the hyponym concept DANDELIONS (since they do not make
acceptable presents), such prediction is incorrect, at least intuitively, in
the case of the concept ROSES. What prevents the quantity implicature from
arising in the latter case is that even tough the speaker could have made a
stronger statement, the informationally-weaker statement is sufficiently
relevant (Carston 1998: 190). Some may nonetheless argue that (32) could be
considered a case of a genuine I-implicature and that the hearer must amplify the
informational content of the speaker’s utterance, finding a more specific
interpretation “up to what he judges to be the speaker’s m-intended point”
(Levinson 1987a: 68). We can envisage two problems with such a move. First, the
speaker’s m-intended point is, in Levinson’s paradigm, only available at the
level of implicature, since it is part of the secondary pragmatic process.
Second, this model obviates the fact that sometimes speakers are unwilling to
be cooperative or more relevant, as in (33) below:
(33) I just saw a HORRID ANIMAL in the larder
(Levinson 2000: 101)
(34) Where is the CHICKEN?
Where is the KITCHEN?
(35) a. It’s too LIGHT for me to lift
b. It’s too HEAVY for me to lift.
Following
the I-heuristic, (33) implicates that the speaker does not know the name of the
animal, otherwise she would have said. However, this account obviates that
speakers sometimes are unwilling to be more specific. This is a tendency much
exploited in the flow of ordinary conversation. In particular, the speaker of
(33) may be using the superordinate due to its expressive (euphemistic)
character to avoid the potential face threat of some possible tabooized
hyponyms. Therefore, I agree with Pons-Bordería (2002) that it is dubious to
claim that the superordinate is less informative than the hyponym, because of a
social, stylistic or affective sense that is absent in the hyponym. It is also
difficult to see how hearers can follow an enrichment rule to interpret (34a)
and (35a) correctly as (34b) and (35b), typical cases of a slip of the tongue,
regardless of the speaker’s intentions and contextual relevance.
Narrowing
is a process whereby a word is used to convey a more specific sense than the
encoded one by restricting its linguistically-specified denotation (
(36) Mary (to John): OPEN the bottle
Stereotypical interpretation:
Uncork the bottle
(37) John WALKED towards the door a minute ago.
Stereotypical interpretation:
He did it in a normal, stereotypical way.
However,
we have also seen that the literal uses of these verbs may communicate quite
distinct concepts in particular situations, the linguistic context being simply
insufficient to account for the wide range of possible interpretations.
Consider:
(38) Mary (giving John a hammer): OPEN the
bottle
Intended interpretation: Open
the bottle by hitting its neck.
(39) Mary is looking for
John, who is knocking back booze: Have you seen John?
Peter: John WALKED towards the
door a minute ago.
(Possible) intended
interpretation: John STAGGERED towards the door a minute ago.
For
Relevance Theory, the pragmatic process of narrowing for (38) and (39) may
proceed along the following lines. Having accessed the lexical concepts OPEN
and WALK in the given context, which makes available their logical and
encyclopaedic information, the hearer uses a subset of this information to
construct the more specific (ad hoc) concepts OPEN* and WALK*, in a
relevance-rendering manner, in the search for cognitive effects. The extension
of the concept pragmatically constructed is a subset of the extension of the
lexical concept from which it has been derived and it may include assumptions
about opening bottles by hitting their necks and ways of walking when one is
drunk, respectively. The fact that the intended concept can be part of the
propositional content (by means of a parallel process of mutual adjustment of
explicit and implicit content; see Wilson & Sperber 2002 for details) has
some important consequences. In the first place, given the context, it is
probable that the assumptions “opening
the bottle by hitting its neck” and “staggering towards the door” will be more
highly activated/accessible than the prototypical ones (and, consequently, retrieved
in the first place), which at least casts some doubts, as regards the
desirability of extra-cost factors, on the fact that the linguistic content
triggers a GCI firstly that may be later ruled out by the context. Following
the principle of relevance, the hearer adds the lexical entry of this
newly-built concept to the propositional form and its encyclopaedic entry to
the context and starts deriving cognitive effects. Provided that these
assumptions give rise to a satisfactory range of cognitive effects, the
narrowed concept is attributed as the intended one and the process should stop.
In the second place, whereas in the Gricean approach these assumptions have the
status of implicatures, for relevance-theorists narrowing contributes to the
explicit level of communication and, therefore, to the truth-conditional
content.
Neo-Griceans
(see Atlas & Levinson 1981; Gazdar 1998; Horn 1989/1998; Levinson 1989,
2000) often analyse narrowing as a case of a default inference whereby generic,
maximal expressions are specified to stereotypical interpretations by means of
the I-heuristic. The basic idea is that it is a tendency commonly exploited in
communication that speakers produce the minimal information sufficient to
achieve their communicational ends. Such being the case, then, and given the peculiarities
of the context in (38) and (39), it is not necessary for the speaker to state
what is obvious, that is the non-stereotypical interpretation, since hearers
are able to amplify the informational content of the speaker’s utterance—after
the process of semantic decoding—by finding the most specific interpretation
“up to what [they] judge to be the speaker’s m-intended point” (Atlas &
Levinson 1981: 36; Levinson 2000: 114). For neo-Griceans, this is one advantage
over the allegedly unconstrained pragmatic inference of relevance-theorists:
The nature of semantic compositionality remains intact because the ‘default
meaning’ provided by the GCI allows the process of interpretation to proceed
step by step, and, Levinson argues, there is no need to postulate
lexico-semantic templates or abstract semantic representations that are
enriched by a psychologically implausible process of backwards inference.[7]
The correct interpretation is guaranteed because generalized implicatures can
be overriden by contextual relevance.[8]
Deirdre
Wilson (pc, forthcoming) argues that Levinson’s approach leaves many
aspects of the narrowing process unexplained. On the one hand, there may be
several possible degrees or directions of narrowing as in (40) below, where happy
may be narrowed to ecstatic or to the particular emotional state
caused by finding a well-paid job, etc, or (41), where bird is
narrowed in different ways in different contexts.
(40) Lucy is HAPPY.
(41) a. As I worked in the garden, a BIRD perched
on my spade.
b. BIRDS wheeled above the waves.
c. At Christmas, the BIRD was
delicious (Carston 2002, adapted)
For
On
the other hand, following the Enrichment Rule granted by the I-Principle
(Levinson 2000: 114), interpreters should use the appropriate degree or
direction of narrowing by finding the most specific interpretation up to what
they judge to be the speaker’s meaning (i.e. the speaker’s m-intended point), a
judgement that remains unexplained and that inherits the vague character of the
Gricean CP and conversational maxims[10].
As one can gather from the examples (36)-(41) above, the fact that semantics
and pragmatics can be combined at the explicit level of communication suggests
that some of the assumptions of the CM of communication must also be rethought
lexically. Since it is inconceivable to have a one-to-one mapping between words
and concepts, the idea that the speaker’s intended concept can be replicated in
the hearer’s mind is simply untenable. The following examples argue in favour
of the latter and against the idea of a stereotypical narrowing:
(42) Mother: Did you win the race?
Child: I’m quite FAST.
(43) Mother: Have you finished your
homework?
Child: I’m quite FAST.
In
both cases the child is expressing two different propositions, not only because
the context is different but also because she communicates two different
concepts of ‘fast’. In (42), the mother, given her expectations of relevance,
narrows the denotation of the linguistically-specified concept FAST,
constructing on the fly a new, ad hoc concept FAST* that may be
paraphrased (bearing in mind that a language of thought is abstruse) as “fast
enough so as to have won the race”. This pragmatic enrichment is guaranteed by
the necessity of deriving from the child’s utterance an implicated answer to
the mother’s question. In (42) it can be safely assumed that there is a high
degree of resemblance between the concept that the child communicates and the
one retrieved by the mother and that the implication that the child is quite
fast so as to have won the race is quite straightforward. In (43) the child’s
intended concept has nonetheless a certain degree of indeterminacy, as we can
see in (44):
(44) FAST**
· Enough
to have already finished her homework?
· Enough
to start doing it after watching TV?
· Enough
to finish it the following morning before class?
· Enough
to finish it before going to bed?
Which
of these assumptions, or others that may be accessible at the time, the mother
will select to construct and ad hoc concept FAST** that she could
attribute to her child? It is highly improbable that the mother will capture
all of her child’s preferences in retrieving the intended interpretation, so
probably the concept TIRED** is quite far away from the one the child has in
mind. This means that the degree of indeterminacy that characterises certain
implicatures can also be true in the process of constructing an ad hoc
concept that contributes to explicit communication, being greater the
responsibility on the hearer’s part. It is difficult to see how the direction
of narrowing would proceed to stereotypical interpretations in such cases
regardless of the speaker’s intentions. And this is also further evidence for
the fact that “where the borderline between semantics and pragmatics is falls
in individual cases is not always clear, and it may be drawn in different ways
in the mind of different individuals” (
...the fact
that a public word exists, and is successfully used in communication, does not
make it safe to assume that it encodes the same concept for all successful
users; and in any case, the concept communicated will only occasionally be the
same as the encoded [...] it does not much matter whether a word linguistically
encode a full-fledged concept, and, if so, whether it encodes the same concept
for the speaker and the hearer. Even if it does, comprehension is not
guaranteed. Even if it does not, communication need not be impaired (my
emphasis, SM).
In
conclusion, the fact that there is no direct correspondence between public
words and concepts (a drawback of the CM that Levinson seems to assume) makes difficult
to think of a generalized implicature arising in all cases leaving aside (a
cognitive principle or a conversational maxim of) relevance. For Relevance
Theory, the stock of concepts is much greater than the stock of words, which is
not only remarkable in cases of polysemy. Flexibility and creativity of the
human mind allow the creation of new, on-line, ad hoc concepts whose
dependence on situational factors prevents their meanings from becoming
stabilised in the language and in the mind’s lexicon. In the next section, we
will look at another lexico-pragmatic process that appears to be just a strong
tendency as narrowing, but that is not seen as giving rise to a default
implicature by neo-Griceans: concept broadening. The idea is that an approach based
on the I-principle cannot generalise to concept broadening simply because they
are blatant violations of the maxim of truthfulness.
The
aim of this section is to see how the same relevance-theoretic inferential
process of ad hoc concept construction works for loose, imprecise or
figurative uses of language. We have seen that in cases of concept narrowing
the defining properties in the logical entry of the concept are retained during
the whole process, the variation taking place in the extension (the
encyclopaedic entry) of the linguistically-specified concept. In the cases of
concept broadening, as we will see, at least one of these inferential rules (or
meaning postulates) must be dropped to apply the concept to objects or referents
not falling under its linguistically-specified denotation. Consider the
following examples:
(45) Ronaldinho is a BEAST (metaphorical use).
Implicates: ‘his talent for
playing football is extraordinary’
(46) A: How was work today?
B: I’m DEAD! (hyperbolic use).
Implicates: ‘B is exhausted’
(47) Go out of the bus station
and turn left. Go along the street until you see a huge ROUND fountain.
(48) (Dentist to patient): This injection will be
PAINLESS (Wilson UCL notes).
For
Grice[11]
the maxim of quality guarantees a minimal distance between
linguistic/semantic meaning (‘what is said’) and the propositional content
(‘what is implicated’), since a rational and cooperative communicator must not
say what she believes to be strictly speaking false. Therefore, the first
hypotheses that the interpreter of (45) and (46) must consider is that the
linguistically-codified concept and the intended concept are identical.
Consequently, if he assumes that the maxim of quality is operating, he believes
that Ronaldinho is literally a beast or that B is literally dead, which clearly
goes against our intuitions as communicators engaged in everyday conversation.
In these cases of figurative use, the hearer must abandon these initial
hypotheses and assume that the speaker is intentionally flouting the maxim of
quality to convey a true implicature that complies with the overarching CP. In
the case of the metaphorical use in (45), such an implicature is a simile based
on what is said, whereas in (46) what is implicated is a weaker proposition as
regards informativeness (that B is exhausted).
Relevance
Theory has pointed out that the loose (or broad) and non-figurative use of
concepts, such as those in (47) and (48), is so common in the flow of everyday
discourse that communicators do not perceive them as violations of a maxim of
truthfulness, which casts serious doubts on its existence. This type of
examples, not treated by Grice, pose a problem for a maxim-based approach. The
reason is that, even though they do not correspond to any of the typified cases
of violation of the maxim of quality (i.e. metaphor, irony, hyperbole, etc), if
we assume, given our knowledge of the world and of the particular situation,
that the concepts ROUND (in its mathematical sense) and PAINLESS express their
literal meanings, then these utterances are strictly speaking false.
For
Sperber & Wilson, loose use, metaphor and hyperbole do not result from
maxim violation but are alternative routes that the speaker puts at the
hearer’s disposal in the search for optimal relevance and, therefore, they are
only derived from this principle (extra effort guarantees the gain of extra
cognitive effects). What distinguishes loose use from metaphor or hyperbole is
the degree of resemblance between the linguistically-specified meaning and the
one intended. Relevance Theory assumes that the concepts encoded by
BEAST, DEAD, ROUND and PAINLESS are literal, but the concepts communicated
are constructed ad hoc following the same process we have described for
concept narrowing. The fundamental difference between narrowing and broadening
is, as we have pointed out at the beginning of this section, that in the former
the defining features in the logical entry of the concept are maintained,
whereas in the latter at least one of such features is dropped. For example, in
(46), the inferential rule in (49) below that restricts the inclusion in the
encyclopaedic entry of this concept of features attributed to ‘people alive’
and ‘people alive and extremely tired’ is dropped, its new extension being
denoted by the concept DEAD*.
(49) X – DEAD => X – NOT ALIVE
Those
readers who are quite familiar with the theses of Relevance Theory will have
noticed that the use of ad hoc concepts to account for loose use,
outlined by Sperber & Wilson and Robyn Carston in their most recent
writings (see Carston 2000, 2002; Sperber & Wilson 2000; 2002; Wilson &
Sperber 2002), implies a substantial change of the earlier model. The
difference is that, in the former paradigm, the speaker expressed a literal
proposition that she abandoned (and didn’t communicate): it was just the
starting point retrieving weak implicatures. In the new account, the speaker communicates
a proposition which is a long way off literal meaning (by means of the
inclusion in that proposition of the newly-built ad hoc concept) and
sticks to that proposition (and its implicatures). This treatment produces
better results:
a.
The fact that the hearer does not compute first the hypothesis of a literal
interpretation means that processing effort is substantially reduced, which
fits quite nicely with the presumption of optimal relevance.
b. It
explains how the construction of and ad hoc concept to account for loose
and figurative uses impinges on the determination of the explicit content and
contributes to the truth conditions of the utterance.
c.
It explains why the instances of loose use arise unconsciously and
spontaneously, which renders a quality maxim totally unnecessary.
Then
for Relevance Theory our inferential abilities play a much greater role, and
the meaning encoded by a concept is just a clue to the intended meaning. How
these clues work is what still remains to be cashed out. What the hearer
expects is not an identity relation between the encoded meaning and the intended
meaning, but a relation of resemblance (in the sense that both share part of
their logical and encyclopaedic entries). The exploitation of resemblance plays
a fundamental role in verbal and non-verbal communication: I can use a
cigarette box, a lighter and an ashtray that happens to be on the table at the
moment to represent a car crash. Often, original and representation
share certain properties but nobody expects them to be identical. The same is
true of verbal communication:
...what
you are entitled to infer is that some of the properties of the representation
are shared by the original, but not necessarily all. This is how clues work: by
putting you on the right track (Deirdre Wilson Issues in Pragmatics lectures,
UCL notes 2001).
If
for Grice the hearer starts from the literal meaning to retrieve a
less-than-literal interpretation if the initial hypothesis yields
counter-productive results, for Relevance Theory the strategy is the other way
round: the expectations of relevance are normally satisfied with a
less-than-literal interpretation, and the hearer arrives at a literal
interpretation if the amount of cognitive effects do not satisfy the
presumption of optimal relevance. (48) above illustrates the construction of an
ad hoc concept to account for loose use, and explains the different
hypotheses that the hearer may test to retrieve the intended meaning in the
search for optimal relevance[12]:
(49) a. I will feel no pain at all.
b. I will experience some discomfort
when the needle goes in.
c. I will have to brace myself when
the needle goes in.
d. I will groan when the needle goes
in.
e. I may lose my dignity by screaming,
etc.
If
we assume that the dentist is abiding by the maxim of quality, then the most
accessible interpretation must be the strictly literal one in (49a) codified by
PAINLESS. This interpretation would be relevant enough and then (49b-e) would
be discarded. However, our particular knowledge of the situation (part of which
is derived from our previous experience with dentists and needles) allows us to
add the fact that a dentist tends to speak loosely in such cases, so not all of
(49b-e) would be discarded. It is not much effort for the hearer to construct
an ad hoc concept PAINLESS* in which the assumption (49b) is optimally
relevant, and stop processing. Assuming a greater degree of looseness (which
requires, in its turn, greater processing effort), the patient may also include
(49c) in the ad hoc concept if the amount of cognitive effects are worth
the effort. The greater the distance between the encoded concept PAINLESS and
the concept PAINLESS*, the greater the effort and, consequently, the fewer the
cognitive effects, until the concept communicated is relevant at all, since the
dentists may have used the concept PAINFUL instead. This would happen if the
expectations of relevance were satisfied by (49d-e).
The
use of ad hoc concepts to account for the contribution of the principle
of relevance to explicit communication has two straightforward consequences. In
the first place, it helps to explain how loose use, metaphor, hyperbole or
irony arise unconsciously and spontaneously without needing to acquire or learn
social maxims or norms. In the second place, the fact that such uses contribute
to explicit communication is favoured by the use of a single pragmatic
principle, cognitive in nature, that explains all cases. There is no need to
postulate two different pragmatic processes to account, respectively, for
literal and figurative meaning. Truth conditions are subsumed by the principle
of relevance. Consider the following examples adapted from Spanish:
(50) Doctor:
Tómese algo de paracetamol
(Doctor:
Take some paracetamol)
(51) (en la declaración de Hacienda) Ingresos:
12.000€, euro arriba euro abajo
(filling
in the income tax return form) Income: 12.000€, more or less
(52) A:
¿Cuánto dinero ganas al mes?
B:
(que gana exactamente 897,13) 900€
(A: How much
is your salary?
B: [who earns exactly 897,13] 900€).
In
a medical prescription such as that in (50) or filling in an income tax return
such as that in (51) going loosely (by means of indefinite expressions such as algo
de o euro arriba, euro abajo) is utterly irrelevant, differently
from (52), where it is fully justified. The reason for sticking to literalness
in some cases and not in others is not a maxim of truthfulness. In medical or
legal contexts, the minimal difference in a dose or in yearly income are
relevant enough to be worth mentioning, that is why higher literalness is
required: because a change in the content of the utterance can make the
implications vary in substantially.
In
this new approach in which pragmatic theory comes down to the semantic arena,
Relevance Theory seems to extend the characterisation of pro concepts,
whose content is determined inferentially in a particular context, to most of
the linguistically-specified concepts. The problem with this strategy is that
linguistic semantics does not play any significant role in determining the
propositional content. Its role is restricted to supply logical forms or
incomplete semantic representations derived algorithmically from syntactic
information. This is what Levinson (2000: 190) calls the semantic retreat
and implies a reconsideration of traditional semantics, since most of the
processes studied in it lie outside relevance-theoretic semantics.
However,
the flexibility and generality of the relevance-theoretic model helps to
explain those cases where a concept is used either attributively/metarepresentationally
or in a defective way (i.e. without a full descriptive content). A child
constantly listens to utterances containing unknown words, some of which
correspond to concepts she has not yet acquired. Despite this, the child is
able to retrieve some of the logical and contextual implications of such
concepts, constructing a defective ad hoc concept to refer attributively
to the full-fledged concepts used, for example, by her parents. Adults also
possess this ability:
(53) Juan padece una ENCEFALITIS MIÁLGICA
(John suffers from sleeping
sickness)
(54) Se
enfrenta a un juicio por AGRAVIO
FALTAS
DOLO
(He is facing a trial for GRIEVANCE
DEFAULT
FRAUD)
(53)
is in Spanish an example of a technical concept that is used deferentially.
Even though it may not be completely unknown for a given speaker that the
concept ENCEFALITIS MIÁLGICA refers to the sleeping sickness syndrome, we are
surely not able to diagnose a case, and we have to defer to the knowledge of
experts, who have a full-fledged concept. In the case of (54), as communicators
we know that the concepts AGRAVIO, FALTAS y DOLO are used to refer to illegal
acts, but most of us cannot say which illegal acts they denote.
In
conclusion, the relevance-theoretic model of lexical pragmatics has
implications for (and opens some yet-to-be-explored directions of research in)
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[1] For a
general overview of the relevance-theoretic approach to figurative uses, see
Levinson (1983) [the Gricean approach], Carston (2000, 2002), Sperber &
Wilson (1981; 1986/1995, chapter 4, sections 7, 9), Wilson & Sperber
(1992),
[2] Relevance
theorists (see especially Carston 1990, 1995; Wilson & Sperber 2002)
question the theoretical significance of GCIs as a constitutive part of a
theory of meaning. For them, there is no need to invoke two distinct pragmatic
processes: one for GCIs and another for particularized implicatures. On the
relevance-theoretic comprehension procedure, relevance varies invariably with
effort, and therefore the fact that an interpretation is easily accessible
gives an initial degree of plausibility (Wilson & Sperber 2002).
[3] This idea could
be further extended to gradable adjectives such as tall, short, long,
etc., whose meaning also vary depending on the class of object to which they
are applied.
[4] In a similar
vein, Blutner (2002: 7) says that underspecified lexical representations are
represented in a formal semantic language by means of free variables which have
the status of place holders. A proper account of contextual enrichment would
explain how the free variables are instantiated (in fact ‘generated’) in the
appropriate way. For arguments against this view, see the following sections.
[5] There are also
serious challenges to a pragmatic account based on generalized or default
implicatures, since it is difficult to see how the hearer chooses between the
interpretations (26b) and (26c) without the aid of contextual factors.
[6] In fact,
Blutner (1998) acknowledges in a quotation that his rejection is based on Levinson’s
belief that Relevance Theory is inadequate to explain Generalized
Conversational Implicatures.
[7] For Levinson
(2000: 30), the non-monotonicity of inference systems prevents the
reconstruction of the speaker’s intention by simply working ‘backwards’ from
the conclusion to the premises, since there may be an indefinite number of
premises that may yield the same conclusion. This is what Levinson calls the
logical problem. For him, there have to be a set of default constraints
(heuristics) that limit the search space of implicit pemises.
[8] I will postpone
the problem of the scope of semantics compositionality for the concluding
section.
[9] For a review of a
prototypical view of word meaning see Smith & Medin 1981; Osherson &
Smith 1981; Lakoff 1987; Margolis & Lawrence 1998. For arguments against
see Fodor 1981; Barsalou 1987, 1992; Sperber &
[10] Levinson (1989)
argues that the principle of relevance and the notions of cognitive effects and
processing effort are not empirically measurable and, therefore, they have no
theoretical significance. It is curious to see how the same criticism can also
be applied to his inferential heurisitcs.
[11] Up to this point
I will no longer refer to the neo-Gricean framework put forward by Levinson
(2000). The reason for this is that he assumes that the Q, M and I heuristics
only work at a primary (and pre-semantic) pragmatic level that only gives rise
to stereotypical interpretations by enriching maximal expressions. As it can be
gathered from the Levinsonian paradigm, Levinson uses, following Grice,
‘secondary’ pragmatic processes to accont for indirectness, irony, metaphor,
hyperbole, etc., they are regarded as cases of implicature.
[12] I owe this
example to Deirdre Wilson’s Issues in Pragmatics lectures, held at
University College London during the first term of the academic year 2001-2002.
For the present purposes, some modifications have been made.