Proyecto de Investigación

Bart Geurts and Karen S. Lewis have separately defended a Gricean explanation for subsentential pragmatics. I see them as close allies to my view. Thus, let me introduce their views briefly.

Geurts (2010) argues that Gricean reasoning can explain different types of lexical interpretation:

(...) lexical interpretation tends to be viewed as a rather passive affair, the basic idea being that, in order to determine the meaning of a word, all the hearer has to do is look it up in his mental dictionary. The foregoing observations paint a rather different picture. Interpreting a word is very much an active process, in which the hearer continually has to select between large numbers of possible meanings and has to construct new meanings on the fly. The dynamics of this process is Gricean: the logic that underwrites the selection and construction of word meanings is similar to that of conversational implicatures. (Geurts 2010, p.184)13

What Geurts points out is the need for Gricean reasoning at the phrasal level. When forming a sentence, there might be several candidates for a constituent. A speaker should consider a candidate in terms of both its semantic contribution and the pragmatic inferences it causes in a given context, and she should choose the most appropriate candidate. The interpreter needs to go through similar reasoning in interpreting why a particular phrase is chosen by the speaker. I will develop these preliminary remarks below.

Lewis (2012) targets the dynamic semantic approaches. On a dynamic approach, the way in which a given expression would change the context is built in to the semantics of the expression. Accordingly, the semantic values of sentences are their context change potentials (CCPs). Against these approaches, Lewis argues that static semantics reinforced with a new interpretation of the Gricean framework will do better than dynamic approaches (Lewis 2012, p.314-5).

13_{Geurts and Rubio-Fern´andez (2015, p.447) also argue for the same idea:}

In his writings on pragmatics, Grice confined his attention to one particular type of illocutionary act, namely assertions, and his choice of maxims mirrors this limita- tion. In particular, the Quality maxims, which urge the speaker to be truthful and have adequate evidence for his utterances, are obviously restricted in their application. However, it is equally obvious that Gricean pragmatics extends not only to other illo- cutionary acts, but also to such linguistic acts as the production and interpretation of words, grammatical constructions, and intonation contours (...)

One of the problems Dynamic Semantics is interested in is novelty. Consider the following:

(20) a. A woman walked in. b. She ordered lunch.

It is clear in this example that the speaker, by uttering “a woman”, introduces a new referent into the discourse. This novelty feature, however, is not expressed in the traditional semantics of indefinites. The semantic value of an indefinite in traditional semantics is the existential quantifier, but the existential quantifier signals nothing about whether the person referred to in (20) has been mentioned previously in the discourse. Nevertheless, the indefinite seems to indicate a new referent has been introduced into the discourse for discussion. This and some other shortcomings of traditional semantics lead some theorists to adopt a dynamic approach. They argue for a new semantic system in which, the novelty feature of indefinites is captured directly in the semantics. The dynamic semantics approach identifies the semantic values of constituents of sentences with their CCPs. To put it crudely, the semantic value of an indefinite dictates that a new object is added to the discourse context (Lewis 2012, p.316-7).

The dynamic semantical solution to novelty is elegant but also radical, but it seems also theoretically costly. It suggests the elimination of the traditional seman- tics. If the solutions to the problems of traditional semantics can be found within the traditional framework, most theorists would find those solutions more appealing. Lewis argues for such traditional solutions. In her view, if the Gricean framework is extended to subsententials, we will obtain solutions to the problems within the scope of the classical semantics-pragmatics framework. The Gricean-style reasoning Lewis suggests for the novelty feature is the following:

Co-operative conversational participants, in an effort to track the conversation, may ask themselves how the speaker’s utterance of [(20)a] relates to the conversational context. Does the speaker want to convey information about a woman already under discussion, or is this woman novel to the discussion? If the speaker had wanted to pick out a particu- lar woman already under discussion, she had a much better way to do so, one far less prone to interpretive error: she could have used a pronoun, definite description, demonstrative, or name. But the speaker didn’t do so. So unless there is some other clear reason for the speaker making an existential claim rather than one containing a definite expression, [(20)a] is indicative of a plan to convey information about a new woman under discussion. (Lewis 2012, p.327)

Lewis points out the need for the notion of non-propositional subsentential implica- ture. She calls the implication of novelty “the novelty implicature”. This implicature is cancellable. That is, in certain contexts the novelty of the object in question is not implied. Since only conversational implicatures are cancellable, we can conclude that the novelty implicature is a conversational one.

To summarise, I wish to quote the following passage from Lewis, in which she expresses her support for subsentential Gricean pragmatics clearly:

(...) I think the important question is to ask whether subsentential expressions have a conversational purpose. The basic idea in Gricean pragmatics is the co-operative principle, that conversational participants will make contributions appropriate to the purpose of the conversation, or stage of the conversation. If we accept that (at least certain) sub- sentential expressions make conversational contributions, then the same sort of reasoning that can be performed on the contents of full sentences can also be performed on the contents of subsentential expressions. Sub- sentential expressions do seem like the sorts of things that interlocutors can grasp and reason about, and I think that this gives us good reason to think that pragmatic effects occur based on sub-sentential expressions. (Lewis 2014, p.244)

Geurts and Lewis seem to be very promising allies to my project. 14 _{In the next}

14 _{Two theorists I need to mention here are Kenneth A. Taylor and Herbert H. Clark. Taylor}

discusses the problem of unarticulated constituents and concludes that it can be explained in terms of Gricean subpropositional pragmatics (Taylor 2001).

Clark (1983), in his classic piece of work “Making Sense of Nonce Sense” discusses the pragmatics of subsententials. Although he does not use the Gricean terminology, his view can be considered to be Gricean. On this view, there are different kinds of expressions which have “nonce sense”, that is, “do not possess a finite number of senses that can be listed in the parser’s lexicon.” (Clark 1983, p.298) (“A ‘parser’ is a device, either human or mechanical, that is designed to analyse a person’s utterances as a part of deciding what that person meant.” (Clark 1983, p.297)) Clark calls them “contextual expressions”. A contextual expression can possess a literal or direct meaning, but in different contexts it can mean non-denumarable different things. For example, the use of “teapot” in “He tried to teapot a policeman” is such an expression. It is a noun which literally have all teapots in its extension, but in this context, it is used as a verb to mean something else. This type of contextual expression is called “innovative denominal verb” (Clark 1983, p.301). Other types of contextual expressions include possessives and eponymous verbs such as “do a Napoleon” in “The photographer asked me to do a Napoleon for the camera” (Clark 1983, p.302-4).

Clark draws a parallel between contextual expressions and indirect illocutionary acts. They are similar in these five respects:

(1) Simultaneous meanings (Two separate meanings are expressed: one is liteal and direct, whereas the other is indirect)

(2) Logical priority of direct use (3) Literalness of direct meaning

section, my aim is to develop and systematise their ideas, and in the next chapter I develop a metaphor account along these lines.