Verona 2018

PhD students classes

Types of meaning

Meaning is the property of language which enable speakers to talk about the world, to require information, to ask to make things, but also to express their own mental states. It is commonly assumed that what makes natural languages so special as regards other systems of communication is the gap between sentence meaning, that is, how meaning is encoded in the lexicon and in sentences, and speaker meaning, that is, what the speaker intends to communicate with her utterances. Since Grice’s seminal paper on implicatures, it is generally assumed that this difference equals the difference between what is SAID (truth-conditional meaning), and what is IMPLICATED (non-truth-conditional meaning). However, for about thirty years, this classical division of labor between semantics and pragmatics, resumed in ‘s famous equation PRAGMATICS = MEANING – TRUTH-CONDITIONS, has been challenged and the question of the semantics-pragmatics interface has been raised within different theoretical frameworks.

In this series of courses, devoted to types of meaning, I would like to show how semantic meaning can be detected and what pragmatic meaning adds to sentence meaning. The goal of the course is mainly to show how entailment, presuppositions, explicatures and implicature are intertwined. The first three classes are based on three chapters from the textbook written by Zufferey S., Moeschler J. & Reboul A. Implicatures, CUP, under review.

Introduction: Theoretical foundations

Readings

  • Berwick R. C. & N. Chomsky. 2016. Why Only Us? Language and Evolution. Cambridge. MIT Press.

  • Chomsky N. 1995. The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

  • Ducrot O. 1981. Langage, métalangage et performatifs. Cahiers de linguistique française 3: 5-34.

  • Grice, H. P. 1989. Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press.

  • Hauser M., N. Chomsky & W. T. Fitch 2002. The faculty of language. What is it, who has it, and how did it evolve? Science 298, 1569-1579.

  • Horn, L. R. (1984). Toward a new taxonomy for pragmatic inference. In D. Schiffrin (Ed.), Form and use in context: Linguistic applications (pp. 11–42). Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.

  • Langacker R. W. 1991. Concept, Image, and Symbol. The cognitive Basis of Grammar. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

  • Levinson S. C. (2000). Presumptive Meanings: The Theory of Generalized Conversational Implicature. Cambridge: MIT Press.

  • Moeschler J. In preparation. Non-Lexical Pragmatics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Introduction.

  • Newmeyer F. J. 2017. Form and Function in the Evolution of Grammar. Cognitive Science 41 (2), 259–276.

  • Reboul A. 2017. Cognition and communication in the evolution of language. Oxford, Oxford University Press.

  • Saussure F. de. 1977. Course in General Linguistics. Glasgow: Fontana/Collins

  • Schlenker 2004. Context of thought and context of utterance: A Note on Free Indirect Discourse and the Historical Present. Mind & Language 19(3): 279–304.

  • Sperber D. & Wilson D.. 1995. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Class 1: Pragmatics and linguistic theory (Thursday 3 May, 9-12h)

This course is devoted to the discussion on how and why pragmatics has been put aside by most of linguistic theories. Formalist (Chomskyan) and functionalist (cognitive linguistics) approaches will be discussed, as well as the Montagovian tradition in formal semantics. The main issue is the following: which types of linguistic theory does map which type of pragmatic one? The answer to this question will make a crucial distinction between two types of functions attributed to natural languages (social vs. cognitive) and two types of communication models (the code model and inference model). The straightforward separation between four types of linguistic and pragmatic theories will allow making some assumptions about the possible types of semantics-pragmatics interfaces.

Readings

  • Andor J. 2004. The master and his performance: An interview with Noam Chomsky. Intercultural Pragmatics 1/1, 93-111.

  • Newmeyer F.J. 2017. Form and Function in the Evolution of Grammar. Cognitive Science 41 (2), 259–276.

  • Wilson D. & Sperber D. 2012. Introduction: Pragmatics. In Meaning and Relevance, 1-27. Cambridge: CUP.

Class 2: Presupposition and conventional implicatures (Thursday 3 May, 14-16h)

One type of conventional meaning has been traditionally described under the label presupposition, which refers to background or old information triggered by lexical items or constructions and is left unchanged under ordinary negation. On the other hand, conventional implicatures have been described as non-truth-conditional conventional meanings, that is, non-defeasible meaning triggered by lexical items without being dependent on any pragmatic principles (as the cooperative principle and the conversational maxims). Many attempts have been made to merge these two concepts, that is, to reshape presuppositions in terms of conventional implicatures. We will see that this attempt has left aside the issue of what is backgrounded vs. foregrounded in speaker meaning and gives no real answer to the semantics-pragmatics interface.

Readings

  • Grice H.P. 1975. Logic and Conversation. In P. Cole & J.L. Morgan (eds.), Syntax and Semantics 3 (pp. 41-58). New York: Academic Press.

  • Moeschler J. 2018. Conventional implicatures and presuppositions. In F. Liedke (ed.), Handbuch Pragmatik. Stuttgart, Metzler Verlag. In Press.

  • Potts C. 2005. The Logic of Conventional Implicature. Oxford: OUP, chapters 1 & 2.

  • Sadock, J. M. (1978). On testing for conversational implicature. In: P. Cole (ed.): Syntax and Semantics 9: Pragmatics, pp. 281-297. New York: Academic Press.

Class 3: Generalized conversational implicatures (Tuesday 8 May, 9-12h)

Pragmatics has mainly developed a type of conversational implicatures described by Grice as generalized, because they are triggered by lexical items, but are not conventional whereas defeasible. This category of conversational implicatures (as opposed to particularized ones) have been the center of interest in most pragmatic theories, mainly within neo-Gricean pragmatics (Horn, Levinson). Among the large set of GCIs, scalar (or quantitative) implicatures have given rise to most works in pragmatics, mainly because they raise the issue of semantic scales and the relations between lexical items belonging to scales, as (downward) entailment and (upward) implicatures. Alternative models, more radically Gricean, have been proposed, mainly based on reasoning on sets of alternatives and a global (syntactic) vs. local (lexical) treatment. Finally, we will examine a radically opposed approach to scalar implicatures, relevance theory, which defines most of GCIs as explicatures, that is, developments of the logical form of the utterances. This reconfiguration of the architecture of pragmatic meaning has as a main consequence the drastic reduction of the domain of implicatures to particularized conversational implicatures, that is, nonce implicatures.

Readings

  • Gazdar G. 1979. Pragmatics. Implicature, presupposition, and Logical Form (chapter 3, pp.37-62). New York: Academic Press.

  • Horn, L. R. (1984). Toward a new taxonomy for pragmatic inference. In D. Schiffrin (Ed.), Form and use in context: Linguistic applications (pp. 11–42). Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.

  • Levinson, S. C. (2000). Presumptive Meanings: The Theory of Generalized Conversational Implicature (chapter 3, pp. 165-260). Cambridge: MIT Press.

  • Moeschler, J. (2012). Conversational and conventional implicatures. In: H.-J. Schmidt (ed.), Cognitive Pragmatics (pp. 407-434). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Class 4: Types of meaning (Tuesday 8 May, 14-16h)

Entailment, presuppositions, explicatures and implicatures raise the question of how semantic and pragmatic meanings interplay and why natural languages have such a complex meaning configuration. One collateral question is “what must be minimally grasped for communication to be successful?”. The picture which will be discussed presents two main issues: (i) a layered approach to meaning and how it is structured; (ii) the semantics-pragmatics interface, that is, how semantic meaning is interplayed with pragmatic one. The first question raises the issue to what extent all layers of meaning have or have not to be filled in utterance comprehension; the second issue is more concrete: where must these types of meaning be located, and what type of linguistic and cognitive organization do they imply? Issues as efficiency and economy in utterance comprehension will be discussed, mainly with data coming from the processing of negative utterances, containing descriptive as well as metalinguistic negation.

Readings

  • Moeschler J. 2017. The Semantics-Pragmatics Interface: How It Works, Why We Need It and Where It Is. In P. Saint-Germier (ed.), Language, Evolution and Mind. Essays in Honor of Anne Reboul. London: College Publications. To appear.