Pragmatics [addendum]
A major focus of post-Gricean pragmatics is the role that pragmatic inference plays in determining the explicit content of utterances (as opposed to their conversational implicatures). As well as disambiguation and reference fixing, there are pragmatic processes of propositional completion, as in the examples in (1), and, more controversially, processes of "free" enrichment, as in (2):
| (1) | a. | It's too late. | [for what?] |
| b. | Cotton is better. | [than what?] |
| (2) | a. | I've had breakfast. | [today] |
| b. | John's car hit Tom's and Tom stopped illegally. | [causal relation] |
The pragmatic completions in (1) are mandated by aspects of the linguistic semantics of the sentences, specifically by the lexical items too and better. However, this does not seem to be the case for the examples in (2), which express complete, truth-evaluable propositions without the bracketed addition. These pragmatic inferences seem to be entirely pragmatically motivated (i.e., "free" from linguistic indication); they are undertaken in order to satisfy standing communicative presumptions concerning the informativeness and relevance of utterances. For instance, (2a) is strictly speaking true provided the speaker has had breakfast sometime in her life, but in most contexts a speaker intends a more specific proposition and relevant implications hinge on the enriched content (e.g., "that she is not hungry at this moment"). Another kind of free pragmatic process is "lexical modulation": the encoded meaning of a word may be narrowed down in context (e.g., drink used to mean "alcoholic drink"), broadened (e.g., square used to mean "squarish") or metaphorically extended (e.g., nightmare used to mean "unpleasant experience").
The view that "free" pragmatic inferences can affect explicit content in these ways is labeled "truth-conditional pragmatics" and is held by pragmatists across different theoretical persuasions. Various accounts of the phenomenon and its relation to conversational implicature are being developed. Stephen Levinson (2000) argues for a system of "default" pragmatic inferences triggered by particular linguistic forms (e.g., and, some, drink), which are distinct from the kind of inferences responsible for more context-specific implicatures. François Recanati (2003) makes a different distinction between two kinds of pragmatic processes: "primary" processes, such as free enrichment, which contribute to truth-conditional content, are a matter of local associative processing, whereas "secondary" ones, which account for implicatures, are cases of global propositional inference, constrained by Gricean maxims. Relevance theorists, led by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, argue that all pragmatic inference can be accounted for by a single principle geared to the recovery of an "optimally relevant" interpretation and that pragmatic enrichment of explicit content often occurs in order to ensure an inferentially sound basis for an antecedently derived conversational implicature.
An alternative, more semantically oriented position, represented by Jason Stanley (2000), denies the existence of processes of "free" pragmatic enrichment and claims that all aspects of an utterance's truth-conditional content are indicated in its linguistic form. So the examples in (2) are to be explained in the same way as the examples in (1): There is a covert indexical element in their linguistic form and it is this that triggers the pragmatic process of finding the relevant contextual value.
Which of these views is correct (if either) remains to be seen.
Bibliography
Bach, Kent. "Speaking Loosely: Sentence Nonliterality." In Midwest Studies in Philosophy. Vol. 25, Figurative Language, edited by Peter French and Howard Wettstein. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, 2001.
Carston, Robyn. Thoughts and Utterances: The Pragmatics of Explicit Communication. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, 2002.
Levinson, Stephen. Presumptive Meanings: The Theory of Generalized Conversational Implicature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000.
Recanati, François. Literal Meaning. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Stanley, Jason. "Context and Logical Form." Linguistics and Philosophy 23 (2000): 391–434.
Wilson, Deirdre, and Dan Sperber. "Relevance Theory." In Handbook of Pragmatics, edited by Laurence Horn and Gregory Ward. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, 2004.
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