Jacques Moeschler, Unige
One of the most challenging issues in cognitive pragmatics is to explain how the audience can faithfully entertain secure beliefs about the speaker’s informative intention, his propositional attitude and his commitment. The classical answer is to ascribe a convention to the intended speech act and the speaker’s commitment and propositional attitude (Searle 1979 for instance). However, as soon as verbal communication is defined as a complex device implying both code and inference, the conventional answers fail to explain how an audience can entertain minimal confidence in the speaker’s informative intention.
A classical cognitive solution, stated in Relevance (Sperber & Wilson 1986, chapter 2) consists in defining an algorithm ascribing degrees of strength to the intended propositional form. This solution is formally interesting, because it is based on an intuitive and plausible cognitive principle: the strength of an inferred proposition should be at most equal or at least lower than the lowest proposition entertained in the context.
Although this solution is acceptable from a computational point of view, it is problematic because it says nothing on how a speaker can communicate a propositional force with different kinds of commitment. He can be certain about a fact, convincing in his argument (with a marked prosody), or, on the contrary, less than convincing (hesitations, pauses, weak voice etc.); but in any case he should give (linguistic and non-linguistic) indices, unless he wants to mislead his audience, on how an audience should ascribe a force to the propositional form he is communicating.Traditionally, degrees of force are located in implicatures: the classical definition of an implicature is a non-truth-conditional meaning, that is, a proposition that can be negated without contradiction. Now, if the level at which propositions are pragmatically evaluated is an explicature (basic and higher-ordered), then the issue is to which extent the audience can rely on and infer the force of the communicated explicatures. For instance, are basic and higher-order explicatures independently computed or are they triggered by what Relevance defines as ‘mutual adjustment’? If they are independently computed, how can an audience rely on a propositional form and access an illocutionary force and a propositional attitude? Could the audience, for instance, simultaneously assign an assertion and a weak belief to the truth of the asserted proposition? Moreover, how can the audience be sure about the value of a presupposition? If, on the contrary, the layers of explicatures are entangled, how is the computational device able to work out explicatures and in which order?
In this presentation, I will suggest that unmarked utterances bear weak force of commitment: One way of strengthening the force of commitment and explicatures, the other being the use of pragmatic devices as pragmatic markers. Negation and discourse connectives will be tested in their strengthening function.
References
Saussure L. de & Oswald S. (2009), Argumentation et engagement du locuteur: pour un point de vue subjectiviste, Nouveaux cahiers de linguistique française 29, 215-243.
Searle J.R. (1969), Speech Acts, Cambridge, CUP.
Sperber D. & Wilson D. (1986), Relevance. Communication and Cognition, Oxford, Blackwell.