From the quotes given above, this is especially apparent in Cole’s, who uses the terms literal and non-literal as synonymous to conventional and non-conventional, respectively.
In fact a third possibility has been proposed, namely that semantics DOES indeed have both the properties of dealing with context-independent meaning only and for sentences determining the propositions expressed by them. However, the thus determined level of meaning is taken to be distinct from Grice’s level of what is said. For a detailed discussion of the various different approaches to the semantics/pragmatics distinction, see chapter 3.
See chapters 3 and 4 for further details.
Note that in what follows, on the semantics side, I am primarily interested in assumptions made in the programme of formal semantics.
In this section, I will mainly be concerned with two of the three properties literal meaning is standardly claimed to exhibit, namely that it is context-independent and primary to non-literal meaning. Also, I will concentrate on complex expressions, leaving the discussion of the nature of lexical meaning to section 2.3.
See below, however, for formal semantic approaches that also take into account contextual information.
Cf. Chierchia and McConnell-Ginet (2000), Braun (2010) for accessible introductions to these notions.
Note that Searle is not referring to the fact that the sentence in (3) additionally contains indexical elements. That is another matter.
This is Searle’s context: ‘The mat is in its stiff angled position, as in [figure 2.4], and it is part of a row of objects similarly sticking up at odd angles - a board, a fence post, an iron rod, etc. These facts are known to both speaker and hearer. The cat jumps from one of these objects to another. It is pretty obvious what the correct answer to the question “Where is the cat?” should be when the cat is in the attitude depicted in [figure 2.4]: The cat is on the mat.’ (Searle 1978, cited from Searle 1979, p. 125).
Note that this fact is independent of the assumption that what is said constitutes the level of meaning from which conversational implicatures are determined. That is, even if what is said is not viewed as wholly semantic, the standard pragmatic view could still hold in that what is said still forms the basis for drawing further inferences and thus has to be determined first.
Having said this, one might wonder whether under such circumstances it is actually still possible and useful to differentiate literal from non-literal meaning. It is if one wants to capture the fact that non-literal meaning, even if conventionalised, is perceived as in some sense non-basic or derived.
This is a somewhat sloppy use of the term metaphor. What is meant is that expressions where investigated that could either be interpreted metaphorically or literally and for which the metaphorical interpretation is rather common.
It should be mentioned that the original experiment was carried out in Hebrew. Unfortunately, neither Giora (1999) nor Giora and Fein (1999) give examples for any of the original material. Thus, the critical points I will make below concerning the material and the differentiation of idiom from metaphor could just be an artefact of the English translation. However, as an Hebrew informant tells me, the criticism also holds when considering the Hebrew equivalents.
One would probably be inclined to say that break carries the metaphoric meaning, however, then the question arises of whether this reading of break can be described without referring to the expression head.
See also Dascal (1989), who also questions the appropriateness of assuming that reaction times reflect what happens early on during interpretation.
Also see Nunberg (1978, esp. ch. 4) for a characterisation of conventionality that is gradient.
Note that Busse also argues against an absolute differentiation between literal meaning and non-literal meaning, which conceals the fact that in most concrete cases, the dividing line cannot be drawn according to general, objective features. However, he also acknowledges that the differentiation is one that is made by normal speakers on an everyday basis. That is, it corresponds to some intuition about language and thus should not be ignored by theory.
Cp. Stern (2006, p. 250), who makes a similar point.
This is, of course, not to say that there are no idioms which are clearly perceived as ‘derived’ in their meaning.
Giora takes conventionality to be only one graded property among others that influence an expression’s meaning’s salience, such as frequency of use. Nevertheless, conventionality seems to play an important role. That is, other things being equal, the more conventional an expression’s meaning is, the more salient it will be. Moreover, from the kind of conventionalisation process that Busse suggests, conventionality seems to be closely connected to the frequency of use of an expression with a particular reading. Thus, it can be argued that it is increased frequency of use that leads to a shortening of the inference chain ending in a conversational implicature.
This point will be taken up in section 2.3.3.
This is not to say that there is no metonymical interpretation possible in principle. Thus, in a suitable context The book in (16d) could, e.g., be interpreted as ‘product-for-producer’.
The same, of course, holds true for particular cases of systematic polysemy. That is, for examples such as in (i) and (ii), the sentential context alone does not make it clear which particular reading of newspaper and school, respectively, is intended.
(i) He is not interested in the newspaper.
(ii) She paid particular attention to the school.
Note that while coercion phenomena, on a first blush, may not seem to be relevant to the question of how much semantic information is lexically given, considering how the phenomena are explained in different approaches, it turns out that they are relevant after all.
Since here we are mainly interested in the interfaces between syntax, semantics and pragmatics, in the representation of lexical information the phonetic information will sometimes be neglected.
Actually, his example sentence is John began a novel.
Egg (2005) mentions a context in which it is known that Max is a professor of literature, where (24b) might reasonably be understood as referring to Max’s beginning of a lecturing process on some novel. Crucially, this interpretation intuitively does not seem to require the revision of a previously computed reading or writing interpretation.
Incidentally, similar arguments can be made concerning such information as argument and event structure. That is, the question is whether the knowledge we seem to have about the number and type of obligatory or optional participants involved in some event needs to be reflected in our lexical knowledge.
Note that in Egg (2005)’s approach this problem does not arise since the process of semantic composition as such is characterised by the fact that it produces a semantic structure that is underspecified with respect to scope. For details of that approach, see below.
For applications and further developments of the Two-Level-Approach see, e.g., Bierwisch and Lang (1987), Dölling (1997, 2005), Lang (1991, 1993, 1994), Maienborn (2000, 2001, 2003), Wiese (1999, 2004).
However, it is not clear what it means for the SEM of some expression to determine a family of concepts as possible readings for the expression at hand.
This term was first introduced in Relevance Theory, more on which see below.
SF is the abbreviation Dölling uses, following Bierwisch, for semantic form, here generally abbreviated to SEM.
See also (Dölling 2003a,b, 2013) for more details on how various instances of aspectual coercion are treated in his approach.
Note that Dölling (2000) uses the same operator (in a slightly different form) to compose metonymic or metaphoric readings of nouns (see section 4.1.1).
Qn and Cn as well as Sn are SF-Parameter which need to get fixed during interpretation, Qn by either ∀ or ∃, Cn by → or =, respectively and Sn by a predicate of relations between elements of two sorts of entity.
Note that due to the fact that in Dölling’s approach generally verbs are highly underspecified regarding their semantics, additional operators are necessary (i.e., θnom, θakk ) that introduce the arguments with which the respective verb occurs in a particular sentence.
This is the operator used to integrate the semantic contribution of potential adjuncts into the semantic form of the complex expression under consideration. Note that this operator is solely semantic, i.e., it is not the meaning of some overt syntactic element.
For particulars, please refer to Dölling (2005).
Note that these two processes are very similar in kind to those that in relevance-theoretic terms are called narrowing and loosening, respectively.
Incidentally, consider also the following quote from Sperber and Wilson (2008, p. 12) talking about the interpretation of temperature in I have a temperature: ‘This concept has a parameter that can take a range of values...’ (my emphasis).
See also Assimakopoulos (2008) for a discussion of RT’s original conception of encoded meaning and its problems.
Remember that RT takes the content of a concept – ignoring the lexical entry, which has already been identified as problematic – to consist of both an encyclopaedic and a logical entry. In assuming that it actually is the encyclopaedic entry alone that the semantic form of an expression ‘points’ to, I follow a suggestion made by Groefsema (2007), who, in my view, gives a range of convincing arguments to this effect.
For an actual ME-approach, one that denies that words actually consist of both sound form and meaning but rather assumes that phonological form merely represents conceptual content (hence the name representational hypothesis), cp. Burton-Roberts (1994, 2000, 2007a), Burton-Roberts and Poole (2006), Chng (1999).
Following Egg (2002) and Egg (2003), I ignore the topmost hole and its dominance relations here.
Note that although this study did not take into account the possibility of an underspecification approach, Klepousniotou (2002)’s arguments for a core meaning approach are compatible with an underspecification approach as well.
For example, there are two homonymous words bank, one with a meaning that might be glossed as ‘river bank’, the other with a meaning glossed as ‘financial institution’. For the latter, different senses are possible like ‘building’ or ‘institution’.
More recently, Klepousniotou et al. (2012), using the EEG methodolgy, again attained results that suggest a difference between homonymy and polysemy at a neuronal level, corroborating the findings of the two MEG studies and providing evidence that the results from earlier behavioural studies were not due to post-lexical processes.
See also Frisson and Pickering (1999) where no significant differences were found in processing place-for-institution (i) and place-for-event metonymies (ii) as compared to the ‘literal’ senses of the respective expressions.
(i) That blasphemous woman had to answer to the convent.
(ii) A lot of Americans protested during Vietnam.
However, it seems that there is not much difficulty involved in extending the number of senses of an expression, if the extension is systematic (cf. Frisson and Pickering 2007).
It should be noted that this argument only holds true for semantic approaches that are entirely type-driven and where restrictions on the type of semantic role required of the arguments do not influence the process of semantic composition.
Note that by utterance-type Grice not only referred to sentences, phrases or words; rather, he intended his explications to apply to non-linguistic utterance-types as well. However, in what follows, I will only mention specifically linguistic utterance-types.
Note, however, that in the original typescript of the William James Lectures, Grice writes of (ii) that one would maybe prefer that the utterer implied it, which means that it actually belongs to the utterer’s occasion meaning.
See, however, Wharton (2002), who argues that from the way Grice differentiated the four types of meaning, he might have had another notion of saying (and thus, what is said) in mind.
Thus, the GCI (ii) of the utterance in (i) is only drawn, if the hearer does not already know that (ii) is not the fact.
(i) Some of the students went to the party.
(ii) Not all of the students went to the party.
Note that in different articles, Bierwisch uses different abbreviation terminology. For the sake of consistency, I shall use one set of terminology throughout.
With respect to the discussion so far, the term Two-Level-Semantics which came to be applied to Bierwisch’s particular approach seems rather misleading since he actually differentiates three levels of meaning. (see Taylor 1994, 1995). However, what that term does reflect is the fact that Bierwisch differentiated two types of cognitive structure: semantic structure (SS) and conceptual structure (CS), more on which see section 2.3.2.
Cp. Nunberg (1995, 2002)
However, as mentioned above, what Grice intended the notion of occasion meaning of utterance-type to capture as different from utterer’s occasion meaning, is far from clear. Therefore, in my summary, I will only refer to the notion of utterer’s occasion meaning.
Cp. Kaplan (1989a) on the role of directing intentions for fixing the referent of true demonstratives.
in the sense used here
At the risk of seeming inconsistent, in this section, I use the terms expression meaning and utterance meaning with a less specific characterisation than intended by Bierwisch. Thus, expression meaning is the context-independent meaning of simple and complex expressions, with no assumptions made as to whether this level of meaning is characterised by a high degree of underspecification. Utterance meaning is that level of meaning which forms the basis for drawing further pragmatic inferences. As such, I assume that it is propositional, however, there are no particular assumptions made as to the kinds of processes involved in determining this level. My reason for doing so is that the different approaches I discuss here all assume (slightly) different characterisations for the level of meaning that forms the basis for further pragmatic inferences and they also have different views concerning the exact nature of the level of context-independent meaning. Therefore, I want to be able to refer to those two general levels of meaning without yet making commitments as to their specific aspects.
The characterisation of narrow context and broad context follows that given by Bach (2012).
The ‘version’ of Relevance Theory figuring in this book essentially is that as put forward by Robyn Carston, which, as she indicates (p.c.), does not necessarily correspond to the views of all scientists working within that paradigm.
Cf. Perry (1998) for a first introduction to the phenomenon of unarticulated constituent.
Thus, a rough paraphrase of what Kato might have intended to convey is: ‘O.J. Simpson was sad and angry to a certain degree, but he was not sad and angry to a degree that led him to killing his wife.’
Cp. Burton-Roberts (2005, p. 404): ‘...if “word meaning” is not a concept but merely a pointer TO concepts, do we need – in fact, can we have – any notion of either “narrowing” or “loosening” ? Surely, those notions only make sense if “word meaning”is taken to consist in “a concept”... ’.
The term minimal proposition, more on which below, is taken from Recanati (2004).
For another defence of the idea that explicatures are not cancellable, see Capone (2006, 2009).
For a reply to Burton-Roberts (2006) in defence of explicatures being cancellable, see Carston (2010); for a reply to that and more arguments of the non-cancellability of explicatures – and genuinely speaker-intended pragmatic inferences in general – see Burton-Roberts (2013).
that is, the meaning of a sentence relative to a (narrow) context of utterance as Bach conceives of it
For his notion of ‘shorthand’, see Stanley (2000). An example is an utterance of ‘nice dress’ by some passer-by on the street to some woman, where this can plausibly be taken to be a ‘short-hand’ of the statement ‘This is a nice dress.’. However, as noted by Stainton (2005), this is a very vague notion and according to Stainton (2005, p. 404), Stanley has given it up.
This is Recanati’s example context: ‘...imagine a situation in which rain has become extremely rare and important, and rain detectors have been diposed all over the territory (whatever the territory – possibly the whole Earth). In the imagined scenario, each detector triggers an alarm bell in the Monitoring Room when it detects rain. There is a single bell; the location of the triggering detector is indicated by a light on a board in the Monitoring room. After weeks of total draught, the bell eventually rings in the Monitoring Room. Hearing it, the weatherman on duty in the adjacent room shouts: “It’s raining!!”’
However, see Pagin (2005) for a critique to the effect that even in the case of an occurrence of the simple sentence it is raining the prefixed form ‘in l (it rains)’ has to be assumed as its logical form, in which case the additional variable would no longer be optional.
See, however, section 5.2.1 for a view where the location variable is not taken to be part of the semantics of the verb but may still enter into the interpretation of an utterance involving that verb, albeit not ’freely’.
The discussion of these examples will be taken up once more in section 5.2.1.
This is similar to the TODAY interpretation of ‘I’ve had breakfast’, where when this standard interpretation is cancelled by saying ‘I’ve had breakfast, but not today’, the speaker will still be understood to have expressed that he has had breakfast in the past, but will be understood as not including the day of utterance in that time span. Thus, in this example, the time span is pragmatically adjusted as well, but it was originally introduced by the past tense and not totally pragmatically supplied.
Although, as noted for to rain, one might actually argue that the location variable does form part of the verb’s semantic form – and Stanley probably would do so in any case – if it is understood as expressing a particular type of event.
Thus, compare this to Levinson’s M-heuristic (more on which in section 4.1.3): what is said in an abnormal way, is not normal (marked messages indicate marked situations).
Strictly speaking, Stanley’s approach also falls into the category of approaches discussed in this section. Thus, the characterisations of semantics and pragmatics given here also hold for his approach. However, there are some crucial aspects in which his general approach differs from Borg’s and Cappelen and Lepore’s, which, I think, justify treating the respective approaches separately.
Bach’s approach does not fit in this section, because, although he also assumes that semantics is not concerned with context-independent meaning exclusively, he does not require of sentence meaning even relative to a (narrow) context that it be fully propositional.
Borg’s term for the proponents of approaches such as put forward by Sperber and Wilson, Carston or Recanati.
Borg (2004b) does not use the term utterance meaning, but rather sticks to the traditional Gricean term what is said.
Note that throughout their book Cappelen and Lepore (2005) ignore tense, thus, their version of the truth conditions for these sentences actually do not refer to a context of utterance.
For a similar concern cp. Pagin and Pelletier (2007).
Remember that for Borg as well as Cappelen and Lepore pragmatic does not simply mean context-dependent, as they assume of semantics that it deals with context-dependent meaning aspects at least up to a certain degree. Moreover, and as mentioned above, they use the term mainly to pick out Grice’s functional characterisation of what is said, namely that it is the level of meaning that is the basis for further pragmatic inferences (e.g. my utterance meaning).
‘In deciding whether a pragmatically determined aspect of utterance meaning is part of what is said, we should always try to preserve our pre-theoretic intuitions on the matter’ (Recanati 1989, p. 310).
Note that Gibbs and Moise (1997), following RT, assume that GCIs are part of what is said rather than ‘proper’ implicatures which are only part of what is meant by an utterance.
Cp. Bezuidenhout and Cutting (2002),who replicated Nicolle and Clark (1999)’s results.
Note that this also makes the appropriateness of Recanati’s distinction between different types of non-literal meaning doubtful (more on which below), since the distinction again is based on the availability principle. For a general critique of assuming such a principle, see e.g., Bach (2001b).
Remember Grice’s differentiation of the four levels of meaning and the formulation ‘U meant by uttering x that ...’.
Thus, although, e.g., conventional implicatures also play a role at this level, the discussion will center on the notion of conversational implicature and the phenomena originally subsumed under it.
...again, in the broadest sense, i.e. including information due to reasoning about the speaker’s potential intentions in making her utterance...
Wilson and Sperber (Cf. 2000, p. 221)
This point will be taken up in section (4.1.2)
See, however, Stern (2006), who argues against RT’s treatment of metaphor in terms of ad hoc concept-formation and generally the view according to which metaphor is only one point in a continuum of strictly non-literal meanings.
To be precise, actually what is narrower or broader due to ad-hoc concept formation is the denotation of the resulting adjusted concept.
Talking about aspects of mental concepts is, of course, somewhat imprecise, as it is aspects of the encyclopaedic entry associated with the atomic concept SOLDIER accessed that are activated to different degrees.
Cp. Stern (2006, p. 248, footnote 3), who argues that RT ‘plays down the intuitive figurativity of metaphor by placing it on a continuum with loose use’.
This is acknowledged by Carston (2012)
For similar results, supporting the attributive category approach to metaphor interpretation, see McGlone (1996). For an attributive category-supporting study investigating the neural correlates of metaphor interpretation, see Stringaris et al. (2007).
See however Schmidt and Seger (2009, p. 385) who investigated the effect of figurativeness, familiarity and difficulty on metaphor processing, using fMRI. They too suggest that ‘...[t]he quality of being figurative may not be the crucial factor in determining the neural activation during metaphor processing.’
A post hoc analysis of the second experiment had suggested that aptness might play a role in the case of low-familiar metaphors, but apparently does not have any effect on the processing of highly familiar metaphors.
Two further experimental studies in which this hypothesis was tested and confirmed are Gernsbacher and Robertson (1999), Gernsbacher et al. (2001).
And he does not seem particularly interested in this question either: ‘From the perspective of the semantics, all that is significant is that they are presupposed, abstracting away from their psychological sources’ (Stern 2009, p. 17).
It should be noted, however, that the tests put forward by Cappelen and Lepore (2005) have been claimed to actually not differentiate between the expressions the authors claim are context-sensitive and those of which they want to show that they are not. Cf., e.g., Bezuidenhout (2006).
Of course, this argument only works if one accepts that the propositions given in (114a) and (114b) actually are the semantic contents of the respective utterances. See Stern (2009, pp. 9) for a defence of this view.
This line of argument is taken by Wearing (2010) in her defence of RT’s approach to metaphor interpretation. Thus, she writes ‘...the difficulties with metaphor exhibited by some speakers with autism can be explained as the result of having to interpret while lacking crucial information, rather than as a defect in the processing abilities required to understand a metaphor correctly’ (Wearing 2010, p. 207).
Sn and Rn as well as Qn are SF-Parameter which need to get fixed during interpretation, Sn by a predicate of sorts of entities, Rn by a predicate of relations between elements of two sorts of entity and Qn by some quantifier.
The complexity of the operator is due to the fact that there can be chains of metonymy which need to be captured.
Thus, the default value for Qn is ∃, that for Sn is ENT (for ‘entity’) and that for Rn is =.
That is, in Stern’s approach the utterance of (i) might be a token either of the expression type in (ii) or the metaphoric expression type in (iii).
(i) Juliet is the sun.
(ii) Juliet is the sun.
(iii) Juliet Mthat[is the sun].
The material that is fixed by default values and thus, in a sense, cancelled out, is not stated.
TIER* and TIER** denote particularly restricted sets of animals, namely such that their flesh is typically edible (TIER*) and such that their fur can typically be used for coats (TIER**).
ART is a predicate of the domain of kinds and ÄHNL is a predicate for the relation of similarity relative to the set of features M.
‘The cognitive or pragmatic conditions, which determine the selection of the respective features, on the one hand, and the choice of the metaphorically used expression, on the other, have to be investigated.’
Compare this to Borg (2001), who seems to assume that metaphor is based on the proposition literally expressed by an utterance – i.e., its minimal semantic content – and involves a set of associated propositions.
For another, more recent defence of metaphorical interpretation belonging to the level of what is said, see Nogales (2012).
Cf. Borg (2001)
See, however, Dynel (2013) for a defence of the Gricean account of irony and a neo-Gricean categorisation of various types of irony.
For more recent articulations of their view on irony, see Wilson and Sperber (2012) and Wilson (2012).
In Wilson and Sperber (2012) and Wilson (2012), the authors provide further arguments for their echoic theory of irony, claiming that it not only explains that irony is associated with the expression of a particular attitude on the part of the speaker, but also that it has a normative bias and a particular tone of voice associated with it.
Cf. example (131) below.
According to this condition on well-formed discourses, each proposition that is expressed in a discourse should be either as or more informative than the proposition preceding it.
Compare this to Dews and Winner (1999)’s Tinge Hypothesis, according to which ‘...irony mutes the evaluative meaning conveyed in comparison to literal language. Thus, ironic criticism is less critical than is literal criticism, and ironic praise is less praising than is literal praise’ (Dews and Winner 1999, p. 1580).
Cp. also Wilson and Sperber (2012, p. 129), where the authors actually write: ‘...the speaker has in mind a certain thought held by others (or by herself at another time) and wants to convey her attitude or reaction to it’ (my emphasis).
See also more recently Sportono et al. (2012) on the activation during irony comprehension of brain areas assumed to be involved in theory of mind reasoning and Bryant (2012) for a general argument that metarepresentation is at the heart not only of irony comprehension, but of ostensive-inferential communication in general.
This is also corroborated by the findings from neuroimaging studies on metaphor and irony, meta-analysed in Bohrn et al. (2012, p. 2680), indicating that ‘...irony and sarcasm processing rely to a stronger degree on theory of mind and mentalizing functions than other types of figurative language.’
However, this is not to say that the ability of second-order metarepresentation is the only relevant factor in irony understanding. Thus, Pexman and Glenwright (2007) point out that such factors as neural maturation and social learning also play a role in children’s development of irony understanding.
It has been suggested, e.g. by Leslie (1987), that engaging in pretense requires the capacity for second-order metarepresentation.
In the case of the example above, probe words were generous (literally related), stingy (ironically related) and sleepy (unrelated control).
In Giora et al. (forthcoming), the authors did a corpus analysis to investigate whether an expression used ironically in a text is referred back to by the irony’s “author” later in the text by addressing its salient, but contextually inappropriate interpretation. The results show that the salient, though contextually incompatible meaning of an expression used ironically is activated and retained – not only by comprehenders, but also by producers of ironies, allowing them to refer back to them at a later stage of the text.
This is also shown by the results of Giora et al. (2009)’s study, which investigated the influence of providing an ‘ironic situation’ on the interpretation of the target utterance as ironical.
In fact, Levinson refers to the traditional two-fold distinction between sentence meaning and speaker meaning, of which he argues that it cannot properly accommodate the notion of GCIs and other related phenomena.
Note that he uses the term not in the sense Grice did.
Compare this to Horn (1984), who reduces Grice’s maxims to two conversation principles Q and R and claims that they are sufficient to explain all pragmatic inferences.
Thus, this second semantics component, then, does capture the semantic relations holding between the concepts a speaker expresses in a particular utterance situation.
Thus, Chierchia’s proposal does not apply to GCIs in general, but only to one subtype, namely scalar implicatures.
The superscript S stands for ‘strong’; DE abbreviates downward-entailing.
Strength Condition: ‘...the strong value cannot become weaker than the plain value.’ (Chierchia 2004, p. 62).
We already saw that ‘development’ cannot be understood in terms of entailment (cf. Burton-Roberts 2005).
Recanati (1989, p. 325) calls this scope principle.
Recall the definition of FA in (144) which is an ‘if x then y else z’ instruction.
The EEG in the experiment was recorded for 1100ms, starting 100ms before presentation of the last word in each sentence.
Note, however, that this generalisation may not hold, since what was tested in the experiment were scalar implicatures only. Thus, it might be that other types of GCI behave differently and might lead to different results (cp. Garrett and Harnish 2008).
As before, this particular experiment tested only scalar implicatures.
Note, however, that these differences might be explained by assuming – as is done and experimentally investigated by Barner et al. (2011) – that children have difficulties in interpreting scalar implicatures because they lack knowledge of the internal structure of and constraints on the relevant underlying scales.
For experimental results that support such a view, see the discussion of Huang and Snedeker (2009, 2011) below.
Recall, however, footnote 57, where a different explanation is offered.
For a similar suggestion with respect to the level of what is said and using the term ‘revisabil-ity’, see Korta (1997).
Note, however, that originally the idea was that it is a characteristic of all pragmatically informed inferences that they are cancellable.
Cp. Storto and Tanenhaus (2005) for similar results concerning the inclusive/exclusive interpretation of or.
Compare Garrett and Harnish (2009, p. 100) who make a similar general point concerning the interpretation Breheny et al. (2006) give their results: ‘Is the [scalar implicature] processing following the explicit trigger [i.e. only K. B.] faster than it is following the implicit trigger? If the latter is delayed (but does occur), the interpretation of the increased readings times at the forcing region [i.e., the rest K. B.] would be affected.’
This point will be taken up in section 5.2.1.
This does not, of course, hold true for all types of speech act. Thus, for the action of naming to be successfully carried out, an utterance has to be made by the appropriate person in appropriate circumstances, where that utterance has to include the expression christen or name.
Thus, note that whereas in (156) it would be possible to add please, thereby overtly indicating the intended speech act, this is not permissible in the examples in (157).
However, the studies cited did not test whether indirect speech acts are also initially processed even when there is contextual information available that biases the interpretation towards a direct one, a behaviour characteristic for familiar metaphors.
As mentioned, e.g. Bach (1994a) holds this view. It should be noted, however, that in order for the intended correlation between what is said by an utterance and an indirect speech report thereof to hold, certain restrictions on the form of the indirect speech report apply. The critique remains, though, that such restrictions obscur the fact that in reality, indirect speech reports may take a multitude of forms.
Examples are taken from Borg (2004b) and, due to their subject matter, are somewhat dated.
‘When you get in these people, when you get these people in, say: “Look, the problem is that this will open the whole Bay of Pigs thing, and the president just feels that,” ah, without going into the details ... don’t, don’t lie to them to the extent to say there is no involvement, but just say this is sort of a comedy of errors, bizarre, without getting into it, “the president believes that it is going to open the whole Bay of Pigs thing up again, and ah because these people are plugging for, for keeps and that they should call the FBI in and say that we wish for the country, don’t go further into this case.” Period. That’s the way to put it, do it straight.’
Cp. Gross (2006) for similar worries.
The terms sub-personal and personal level are taken from Dennett (1969).
This is why Recanati’s approach is called the availability based approach. See above for the formulation of the availability principle.
For a thorough discussion of Recanati’s differentiation of primary and secondary pragmatic processes see Carston (2007).
Where the phrase literal meaning here should be interpreted as the utterance meaning or what is said by an utterance.
See also Garcia-Carpintero (2006) for another critique of Recanati’s availability principle.
Thus, of the answers given by children in the control group, only two involved numbers higher than 50 (namely 70 and ‘hundreds’). In contrast, in the subject group, eight children gave numerical responses over 50. In fact, their answers involved such unlikely quantities as ‘million’, ‘zillion’ and even ‘infinity’.
In fact, Capone (2005, p. 7) goes further in that he assumes that the utterance as such is going to be understood differently from its use in another context: ‘...this example nicely instantiates the view that the context is the total social setting in which the speech event takes place, the meaning of an utterance being determined by its place in an interactional sequence.’ It should be clear that I disagree.
Note, however, that the discussion of GCIs will be taken up once more in chapter 5, leading to a somewhat different characterisation.
t stands for (expression) type
In this respect Recanati’s view differs significantly from Borg’s, since the latter considers all meaning aspects that go beyond the m-literal meaning as non-literal. She does not differentiate between non-minimal meanings that are perceived by the hearer as deviating from some underlying primary meaning and such that are not.
Even though, as we saw, at least some aspects of the underlying meaning remain active and thus play a role during the interpretation of a non-literal meaning.
‘The interpretation of both conversational implicatures and indirect speech acts involves an inference from the utterance’s primary meaning to its derived meaning’ (Recanati 2001, p. 266).
See, however, Burton-Roberts (2007b)’ critique of the symmetric treatment of what do seem to be two distinct processes.
Note that Ariel (2002) uses the term ambiguous to refer to homonymous expressions. However, since the notion of ambiguity usually is understood to encompass both homonymy and polysemy, to avoid confusion, I will consistently use the term homonymous where Ariel (2002) has ambiguous .
However, Giora emphasises that the notion of salient meaning cuts across the traditional literal/non-literal distinction.
This idea might be modelled by assuming that the particular reading determined by the interpretation process and due to a particular use of an expression does leave a trace in memory on each occasion it is determined by the interpretation process. The more such traces exist, the easier it will be to activate this particular reading. (Cp. Hintzman 1986).
Or at least that they get fixed in the course of the application of such processes.
Note that Glucksberg and McGlone (1999)’s attributive category approach faces the same problem.
This is fully acknowledged by Carston (2002b), who suggests a few directions in which to turn for a possible solution to the problem, but does not clearly offer one herself.
This is so because traditionally, the lexical meanings that are composed into the sentence meaning of the complex expression uttered are necessarily literal. Cp. also Recanati’s category of m-literal meaning.
However, as I already suggested above, under the assumption that lexical meaning actually is underspecified, what is contributed to utterance meaning by such processes as conceptual shift and conceptual differentiation does not necessarily only involve primary or literal readings of a particular expression.
Recall that Recanati assumes of free enrichment that it is a primary pragmatic process, where one of the latter’s characteristic is that it operates on sub-propositional forms. However, Recanati, in a sense, is forced to this treatment of free enrichment, since he takes the process to be sub-personal and thus not available to consciousness. See, however, Carston (2007) for a criticism of this view.
Cp. Borg (2001).
This fact might actually be taken to show that what we have here is in fact not genuine cancellation. See, however, below for a general critique of the cancellation test.
Note incidentally, that in Levinson’s classification of implicatures, bridging inferences actually are treated as a type of I-implicature.
For an illustration of a semantic frame, consider the KILLING frame in figure (5.2) evoked by the lexical unit murder used in (193).
For reasons of space, these relations are omitted in figure 5.2.
In this particular case, this relation is due to the inheritance relation between the KILLING frame and its parent frame TRANSITIVE_ACTION, which, amongst others, has the two core-FEs AGENT and PATIENT, which are inherited by the KILLING frame as the core-FEs KILLER and VICTIM, respectively.
In the case of (193), this being BACKGROUND.
Unfortunately, FrameNet as yet has not specified the inheritance relations of the ATTENDING frame to other frames.
This identification is based on the principle introduced by Cohen (2006) Equality by Default: Two discourse referents are assumed to be equal, unless it can be proven that they are distinct. As this is a very general principle and as such prone to overgeneralisation, it should be mentioned that there exist quite a number of more specific principles that constrain the applicability of this particular principle. See, e.g., Irmer (2009) for more information on the interaction of this principle and more specific ones.
Although this is not specified in FrameNet, the idea would be that INGESTIBLES and REFRESHMENTS are related with respect to their semantic sorts. The problem here is that the two frames the respective FEs are part of are not in any inheritance relation, which actually makes it difficult in FrameNet to relate them to one another other then by intuition.
Note that FrameNet only lists the verb to breakfast, which, however, does evoke the INGESTION frame.
Once again it should be noted that the two frames EXPERIENCE_BODILY_HARM and OBSERVABLE_ BODYPART are not in any inheritance relation. However, the informal characterisation of the FE EXPERIENCER in the former frame entails that the referent filling this role be a possessor of the referent filling the FE BODY_PART.
as, e.g., the principle Equality by Default mentioned below.
Note also that the preferred reading involves a model of the world that is more minimal than the model for the dispreferred reading, as the former involves a smaller number of discourse referents than the latter (i.e., the FE VICTIM). As Irmer (2009, secion 5.2) points out, the notion of minimality of models plays an important role in discourse interpretation. Thus, the preferrence for a particular reading of an ambiguous expression may be traced back to the fact that the model for that reading is more minimal than the model for the alternative reading(s).
Thus, recall the example sentences such as repeated below, where the preferred interpretation of the respective IMA is taken back but the general element this IMA is taken to be the value of is still felt to be present.
(i) It is raining, but not here.
(ii) I had breakfast, but not today.
(iii) John broke a finger, but not one of his own.
It is important to stress, however, that under the RH, phonology has to be taken to be much richer than traditionally assumed. Thus, for instance, it also includes the convention rules governing the representation of concepts by phonological forms.
Recall that Klepousniotou (2002) found that subjects were faster in their lexical decisions for polysemous as compared to homonymous target words. She explains this result by assuming that in case of homonymy, two distinct lexical entries are initially activated and compete with one another.
Thus, the only fragmentary graphic illustration of that approach in figure 5.7.
possibly with the exception of demonstratives, whose resolution may require reasoning about what the speaker intended to demonstrate