PROCEDURAL MEANING STATE OF THE ART AND POTENTIAL FUTURE DIRECTIONS Stavros Assimakopoulos stavros@ugr.es Granada, 9/3/2010
RELEVANCE THEORY (SPERBER & WILSON 1986/95) Relevance is a psychological property, a property of cognitive input to mental processing. Relevance of an input to an individual Other things being equal, the greater the processing effort expended, the lower the relevance of the input to the individual at that time. Other things being equal, the greater the positive cognitive effects achieved by processing an input, the greater the relevance of the input to the individual at that time. “The goal of the interpretation process as we see it is […] to work out the logical consequences of adding it to a pre- existing stock of beliefs and assumptions to which the hearer has access”. (Wilson & Sperber 1985:83)
RELEVANCE THEORY This is achieved via non-demonstrative inference: a process that takes a set of premises as input and yields as output a set of conclusions which follow logically from, or are at least warranted by, the premises. Sets of conclusions: Positive cognitive effects An input provides cognitive effects when it strengthens some existing assumption in the context of processing. contradicts an assumption in the context of processing and eliminates it from it. provides new contextual implications, i.e. new assumptions deductively inferred from the unification of the input with the context.
RELEVANCE THEORY Two principles of Relevance: Cognitive Principle of Relevance Human cognition tends to be geared to the maximization of relevance. Communicative Principle of Relevance Every act of ostensive communication communicates a presumption of its own optimal relevance. Presumption of optimal relevance The ostensive stimulus is relevant enough to be worth the addressee’s effort to process it. The ostensive stimulus is the most relevant one compatible with the communicator’s abilities and preferences.
RELEVANCE THEORY Communicative Principle of Relevance: Communication recognised as deliberate is automatically treated as optimally relevant. “Communicators do not ‘follow’ the communicative principle of relevance; and they could not violate it even if they wanted to. The principle of relevance applies without exception”. (Sperber & Wilson 1995:162) So, how does the relevance-driven comprehension module work? Relevance-theoretic comprehension procedure Follow a path of least effort in computing cognitive effects: Test interpretive hypotheses (disambiguations, reference resolutions, implicatures, etc.) in order of accessibility. Stop when your expectations of relevance are satisfied.
MEANING IN RELEVANCE THEORY Remember: Inference is a process that takes a set of premises as input and yields as output a set of conclusions which follow logically from, or are at least warranted by, the premises. Premises for inference in linguistic communication: The content of the sentence uttered The context of utterance The context of an utterance: a psychological construct, a subset of the hearer’s assumptions about the world. It is these assumptions, of course, rather than the actual state of the world, that affect the interpretation of an utterance. (Sperber & Wilson 1995:15)
MEANING IN RELEVANCE THEORY What about the content of the uttered sentence? “The semantic representation of a sentence deals with a sort of common core of meaning shared by every utterance of it”. (Sperber & Wilson 1995:9) The linguistic underdeterminancy thesis: Linguistic meaning underdetermines what is said. (Carston 2002) A sentence encodes a logical form . Upon utterance, the sentence’s logical form needs to be enriched pragmatically to gain full propositional content explicature(s). - Basic explicature : the proposition expressed by an utterance. - Higher-level explicatures : speech-act and propositional- attitude descriptions. What is conveyed without being said: implicature.
MEANING IN RELEVANCE THEORY “Semantic representations are not recovered as a whole and then worked on by the pragmatic inferential system; rather, the mechanisms here (the parser and the pragmatic system) are performing on-line, millisecond by millisecond, so that very often pragmatics is making a hypothesis about an intended word sense, or an indexical referent, or even an implicature, before the entire acoustic stimulus has been processed by the linguistic system”. (Carston 2004:820) There are two types of encoded meaning in Relevance Theory: - Conceptual meaning : fully-propositional, representational content (including pro-concepts, such as ‘my’, ‘near’). - Procedural meaning : computational content which guides the interpretation process by foregrounding certain contextual assumptions and cognitive effects over competing ones.
MEANING IN RELEVANCE THEORY Information conveyed by an utterance (Wilson & Sperber 1993:3) Ostensively communicated Non-ostensively communicated Linguistically communicated Not linguistically communicated Linguistically encoded Not linguistically encoded Conceptually encoded Procedurally encoded Contributes to Contributes to Constraints on Constraints on Explicatures Implicatures Explicatures Implicatures Contributes to Contributes to Constraints on Constraints on proposition higher-level proposition higher-level expressed explicatures expressed explicatures
MEANING IN RELEVANCE THEORY Information conveyed by an utterance (Wilson & Sperber 1993:3) Ostensively communicated Non-ostensively communicated Linguistically communicated Not linguistically communicated Linguistically encoded Not linguistically encoded Conceptually encoded Procedurally encoded Contributes to Contributes to Constraints on Constraints on Explicatures Implicatures Explicatures Implicatures Contributes to Contributes to Constraints on Constraints on proposition higher-level proposition higher-level expressed explicatures expressed explicatures
CONCEPTUAL MEANING Conceptually encoded information that contributes to the proposition expressed (truth-conditional content): Most regular content words (e.g. cat, dog, table, run etc.) Conceptually encoded information that contributes to higher-level explicatures: Various types of sentence and illocutionary adverbials (e.g. Ifantidou 1993, 2001, Wilson & Sperber 1993) e.g. “Frankly speaking, she is one of the most charismatic personalities I have ever met”. “Unfortunately, we lost the game”. Conceptually encoded information that contributes to implicatures: More or less , the usual Gricean scenario.
PROCEDURAL MEANING Procedurally encoded information that constrains the derivation of the proposition expressed (truth-conditional content): - Pronominals (e.g. Wilson & Sperber 1993, Hedley 2007): their character is procedural and their content is conceptual. - ‘And’ (e.g. Carston 1988, 1993, 2002, Blass 1990, Wilson & Sperber 1998): best analysed not as implicature but as pragmatically derived aspect of truth-conditional content. e.g. I took out my key and opened the door. John dropped the glass and it broke. They planted an acorn and it grew. Peter left and Mary got angry. It’s always the same at parties: either I get drunk and no- one will talk to me or no-one will talk to me and I get drunk.
PROCEDURAL MEANING Procedurally encoded information that constrains the derivation of higher-level explicatures - Interjections (e.g. Wilson & Sperber 1993, Wharton 2003) e.g. “You like the cake, eh?”. “He is smart, huh!” - Parentheticals (e.g. Wilson & Sperber 1993, Ifantidou 2001, Wilson 1998, Blakemore 2006) e.g. “This is, I suppose, true.” Procedurally encoded information that constrains the derivation of implicatures: - Discourse connectives such as ‘but’, ‘although’, ‘so’ etc. (e.g. Blakemore 1987, 2000, 2002, 2006, 2007, Iten 2005, Hall 2007) e.g. He is lazy; so, he didn’t clean the room. He is lazy; after all, he didn’t clean the room.
PROCEDURAL MEANING Procedurality tests (Wilson & Sperber 1993, Blakemore 2002) Procedural encodings are difficult to define or provide paraphrases for. Procedural encodings do not have synonymous truth- conditional counterparts. Procedural encodings cannot be semantically complex in the same way that expressions which encode conceptual meaning are. Other procedural expressions: ‘Let’ and ‘Let’s’ (Clark 1993), ‘well’ (de Klerk 2005), ‘believe’ (Jary 2008), “the’ and ‘a’ (Breheny 1999)
PROCEDURAL MEANING Other types of procedural units: 1) Grammatical aspects: e.g. Non-declarative verbal mood as a constraint on the identification of speaker propositional attitude (e.g. Wilson & Sperber 1988, Clark 1991, Rouchota 1994, Jary 2004, Ahern 2006) 2) Phonological properties e.g. Intonation and prosody (e.g. Escandell Vidal 1998, Fretheim 1998, Wilson & Wharton 2006)
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