Utterance Interpretation and Cognitive Models, Volume 20

Utterance Interpretation and Cognitive Models Current Research in the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface Series Editors:...

Author: Philippe De Brabanter | Mikhail Kissine

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Utterance Interpretation and Cognitive Models

Current Research in the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface

Series Editors: K. von Heusinger, University of Stuttgart, Germany K. Turner, University of Brighton, UK Other titles in this series: MOSEGAARD HANSEN TURNER (ed.) JASZCZOLT GEURTS JASZCZOLT (ed.) PEETERS (ed.) PAPAFRAGOU LEEZENBERG NE´METH & BIBOK (eds.) BRAS & VIEU (eds.) GUTIE´RREZ-REXACH (ed.) KAMP & PARTEE (eds.) PEREGRIN (ed.) DOBROVOL’SKIJ & PIIRAINEN WEDGWOOD BULTINCK VON HEUSINGER & TURNER (eds.) ALONI et al. (eds.) PIETARINEN (ed.)

Particles at the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface The Semantics/Pragmatics Interface from Different Points of View Discourse, Beliefs and Intentions: Semantic Defaults and Propositional Attitude Ascription Presuppositions and Pronouns The Pragmatics of Propositional Attitude Reports The Lexicon-Encyclopedia Interface Modality: Issues in the Semantics-Pragmatics Interface Contexts of Metaphor Pragmatics and the Flexibility of Word Meaning Semantic and Pragmatic Issues in Discourse and Dialogue From Words to Discourse: Trends in Spanish Semantics and Pragmatics Context-Dependence in the Analysis of Linguistic Meaning Meaning: The Dynamic Turn Figurative Language: Cross-cultural and Cross-linguistic Perspectives Shifting the Focus: From Static Structures to the Dynamics of Interpretation Numerous Meanings: The Meaning of English Cardinals and the Legacy of Paul Grice Where Semantics Meets Pragmatics Questions in Dynamic Semantics Game Theory and Linguistic Meaning

Utterance Interpretation and Cognitive Models EDITED BY Philippe De Brabanter Institut Jean-Nicod, Paris 4-Sorbonne France Mikhail Kissine F.R.S.-FNRS, Universite´ Libre de Bruxelles Bruxelles, Belgium

United Kingdom – North America – Japan India – Malaysia – China

Emerald Group Publishing Limited Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK First edition 2009 Copyright r 2009 Emerald Group Publishing Limited Reprints and permission service Contact: [email protected] No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without either the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying issued in the UK by The Copyright Licensing Agency and in the USA by The Copyright Clearance Center. No responsibility is accepted for the accuracy of information contained in the text, illustrations or advertisements. The opinions expressed in these chapters are not necessarily those of the Editor or the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-84855-650-8 ISSN: 1472-7870 (Series)

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Current Research in the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface (CRISPI)

Series Editors: K. von Heusinger, University of Stuttgart, Germany and K. Turner, University of Brighton, UK Editorial Advisory Board: N. Asher, USA B. Birner, USA C. Casadio, Italy M. Dascal, Israel B. Fraser, USA T. Fretheim, Norway B. Gillon, Canada P. Gochet, Belgium J. Groenendijk, The Netherlands Y. Gu, PRC L. Horn, USA Y. Huang, New Zealand A. Kasher, Israel M. Krifka, Germany S. Kubo, Japan C. Lee, Korea S. Levinson, The Netherlands T. McEnery, UK F. Nemo, France P. Pelyvas, Hungary J. Peregrin, Czech Republic A. Ramsay, UK R. Stalnaker, USA M. Stokhof, The Netherlands J. van der Auwera, Belgium R. van der Sandt, The Netherlands G. Ward, USA H. Zeevat, The Netherlands The aim of this series is to focus upon the relationship between semantic and pragmatic theories for a variety of natural language constructions. The boundary between semantics and pragmatics can be drawn in many various ways; the relative benefits of each gave rise to a vivid theoretical dispute in the literature in the last two decades. As a side effect, this variety has given rise to a certain amount of confusion and lack of purpose in the extant publications on the topic. This series provides a forum where the confusion within existing literature can be removed and the issues raised by different positions can be discussed with a renewed sense of purpose. The editors intend the contributions to this series to take further strides towards clarity and cautious consensus.

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Contributors List Peter Bosch University of Osnabru¨ck Institute of Cognitive Science Albrechtstr. 28 49069 Osnabru¨ck Germany Lewis Bott Cardiff University School of Psychology, Tower Building, Park Place Cardiff CF10 3AT UK Coralie Chevallier Laboratoire de Neurosciences Cognitives 29 Rue d’Ulm 75005 Paris France Florelle Chevaux DDL-UMR 5596 ISH 14 Avenue Berthelot 69363 Lyon Cedex 07 France Philippe De Brabanter Institut Jean Nicod 29 Rue d’Ulm 75005 Paris France

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Marc Dominicy Universite´ Libre de Bruxelles CP 175 50, Avenue Franklin Roosevelt B-1050 Bruxelles Belgium Mark Jary Roehampton University Roehampton Lane London SW15 5PH UK Mikhail Kissine F.R.S.-FNRS, Universite´ Libre de Bruxelles CP 175 50, Avenue Franklin Roosevelt B-1050 Bruxelles Belgium Elisabetta Lalumera Universita´ di Milano-Bicocca Piazza Dell’Ateneo Nuovo, 1 20126 Milano Italy Fernando Martı´ nez-Manrique University of Granada Departamento de Filosofı´ a, Edificio de Psicologı´ a Campus Cartuja Granada 18071 Spain Julien Musolino Rutgers University 152 Frelinghuysen Road Piscataway, NJ 08854 USA Ira Noveck Laboratoire Langage, Cerveau and Cognition (L2C2) Institut des Sciences Cognitives CNRS – Universite´ Lyon 1

CONTRIBUTORS LIST / ix 67 Bld. Pinel Bron 69675 France Stefano Predelli Department of Philosophy, University of Nottingham Nottingham Nottinghamshire NG7 2RD UK Galit W. Sassoon Organisation 1 Ben Gurion University of the Negev P.O.B. 653, Beer-Sheva 84105 Israel Organisation 2 The Institute of Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) ILLC Office University of Amsterdam Plantage Muidergracht 24 1018 TV Amsterdam The Netherlands Marina Terkourafi Department of Linguistics University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 4080 Foreign Language Building 707 S. Mathews Avenue, MC-168 Urbana, IL 61801 USA Agustı´ n Vicente UPV/EHU Departamento de Lo´gica y Filosofı´ a de la Ciencia Av. Tolosa, 70 20018 Donostia-San Sebastiań (Gipuzkoa) Spain


Contents Contributors List

vii

Acknowledgments

xiii

Introduction

xv

1

On the Psychological Reality of Minimal Propositions FERNANDO MARTIŃEZ-MANRIQUE AND AGUSTIŃ VICENTE

1

2

What Use Is ‘What Is Said’? MARINA TERKOURAFI

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The Contextualist Surprise STEFANO PREDELLI

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More than Words 75 ELISABETTA LALUMERA

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Predicate Indexicality and Context Dependence PETER BOSCH

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Semantics with Clusters of Properties GALIT W. SASSOON

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Discourse Evocation: Its Cognitive Foundations and Its Role in Speech and Texts 179 MARC DOMINICY

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Children’s Enrichments of Conjunctive Sentences in Context 211 IRA NOVECK, CORALIE CHEVALLIER, FLORELLE CHEVAUX, JULIEN MUSOLINO AND LEWIS BOTT

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Relevance, Assertion and Possible Worlds: A Cognitive Approach to the Spanish Subjunctive MARK JARY

235

Acknowledgments This volume originated in a workshop organised in Brussels on June 23–24, 2006. We would like to thank all the participants, the friends who provided assistance (notably Gre´gory Bochner and Stefan Goltzberg), and, especially, the Laboratoire de linguistique textuelle et de pragmatique cognitive, Universite´ Libre de Bruxelles, without whose support the organisation of this workshop – hence the publication of this volume – would have been impossible. We would also like to thank our contributors for being the nice people they were throughout the publication process. Thanks are also due to three anonymous reviewers for providing valuable feedback on the structure of the present volume. Finally, we are extremely grateful to the general editors of the CRiSPI series for their constant support and help. Mikhail Kissine’s research is funded by a postdoctoral researcher grant from the Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique de la Communaute´ Franc- aise de Belgique (FNRS), and is also carried out within the scope of the ARC project 06/11-342 Culturally modified organisms: ‘‘What it means to be human’’ in the age of culture, funded by the Ministe`re de la Communaute´ franc- aise – Direction geńe´rale de l’Enseignement non obligatoire et de la Recherche scientifique.

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Introduction

Utterance Interpretation in the Light of Cognitive Models In the last two decades, there has been an increasing consensus about the need for a transdisciplinary perspective among researchers working on the mechanisms underlying interpretation of natural language utterances. As far as the semantics/pragmatics interface is concerned, the chief reason is probably the now universally accepted fact that knowledge of syntactic rules and of semantic relations does not suffice for communication – in other words, linguistic meaning does not exhaust the meaning of sentence tokens (e.g. Recanati, 1989, 2004; Bach, 1994a; Sperber and Wilson, 1995; Levinson, 2000; Carston, 2002). Since it is indisputable that in order to make sense of utterances hearers have to take extralinguistic facts into account, much research has been devoted to integrating the interaction between worldknowledge and linguistic knowledge within models of utterance interpretation. And such models cannot be built without making further claims about the cognitive underpinnings of our interpretative competence. The ubiquity of extralinguistic context during the derivation of meaning from utterances thus calls for psychological accounts of pragmatics. So much is accepted by virtually everyone working in the field. What has been the matter of a fierce debate, however, is the theoretical stage at which the context needs to be brought into play. There is a consensus that semantic content is derived from syntactic form (even if this is a theoretical shortcut for what is, in reality, a nonsequential process). Disagreements arise, first, as to how semantic content has to be described, and second, as to the relationship between semantic content and utterance content. Let us begin with the first dispute. Some scholars (most notably Bach, 1994a, b; Soames, 2002) contend that the output of the semantic xv

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interpretation of a sentence sometimes falls short of being propositional. Others – the so-called ‘semantic minimalists’ – maintain that semantic interpretation always results in a full-fledged proposition (Borg, 2004; Cappelen and Lepore, 2005). Both camps, however, admit that a certain amount of contextual information is needed in order to go beyond sentence meaning; for the linguistic meaning of indexicals – I, here, now and possibly others – is an instruction to look for a contextual value – the speaker, the location, the time of the utterance, etc. Context, so understood, is not an intuitive notion: it is an abstract set of values required by the semantic apparatus to derive the content of sentences which contain indexical expressions (Kaplan, 1989). The difference between such an abstract conception of context and a more intuitive – pragmatic – notion lies at the heart of the second debate alluded to above. On the pragmatic conception, the context consists of those assumptions about the extra-linguistic communicative setting that are necessary for the interpretation process (e.g. Stalnaker, 1978; Sperber and Wilson, 1995). Now, although the two positions described in the previous paragraph can be characterised as ‘semantically conservative’, even their proponents grant that broad contextual assumptions come into play when we try to figure out what the speaker meant by her utterance. The question is whether the semantic content constructed without any recourse to the broad context is a psychologically motivated notion. According to people who share the ‘conservative’ views of either Bach or Cappelen and Lepore, it is. According to what can be called ‘contextualism’, it is not: sentence meaning plus broad context is all there is to utterance interpretation. Semantic content, be it sub-propositional or propositional, is not something that a cognitive model of utterance interpretation should bother about. While the theoretical wars are still raging (Turner, 1999; Preyer and Peter, 2005, 2007; Szabo´, 2005), we believe that some concrete research questions should be asked. Are there empirical phenomena that are better analysed with the help of the notion of semantic content? If yes, which phenomena and which notion of semantic content? What kind of contextual parameters are needed? At which stages of the interpretation process? And what is the relationship between contextual and linguistic information? In sum, how do we integrate our accounts of the meanings of utterance – or their components – within a psychologically plausible perspective? These questions constitute the background against which the contributors to this volume have approached the various particular phenomena or more general questions that are the focus of their

INTRODUCTION / xvii articles. As we already said, it is hardly news that there is no way to avoid adopting this perspective. Our ambition in gathering the papers of this volume is merely to systematically impose this constraint on our authors. As indicated above, one of the main debates around utterance interpretation is the question whether semantic processing outputs propositions or something less than propositions. Fernando MartıńezManrique and Agustıń Vicente take this issue seriously and subject the minimalist notion of ‘minimal proposition’ to close scrutiny. They start from the hypothesis that the minimal proposition can be associated with three different theoretical commitments: ‘minimal-first’, ‘minimal-too’ and ‘minimal-if’. They conclude that only the last position, which gives the most peripheral role to minimal propositions, is tenable. Along the way, they make a case that there is not, as yet, enough evidence substantiating the existence of a ‘semantic module’ for processing utterances, suggesting that one can do with a syntactic and a pragmatic module instead. They also argue that there may be no principled way for determining what ‘the minimal proposition’ consists in, thereby further undermining the minimalists’ claims. Marina Terkourafi’s contribution sheds a different light on this debate. The author contends, contra contextualists but in agreement with Bach, that the output of semantic interpretation – even though it may be less than propositional – can be psychologically relevant. Drawing on experimental work on how hearers respond to and recall indirect speech acts, she argues that, although hearers often bypass the literal meaning of such acts, they do sometimes process it. Taking pains to differentiate this literal meaning from mere sentence meaning, Terkourafi equates it with the notion of ‘what is said’ advocated by Bach (1994a, b, 2005). She also suggests that the role played by what is said is itself context-dependent: it appears to be sensitive notably to the degree of conventionalisation of the indirect speech act and the extent to which the hearer is attending to the wording of the utterance. Both the papers just outlined accept a premise that has triggered numerous recent research programmes on the psychology of utterance interpretation: that the truth-value, hence the meaning, of many – if not all – natural language expressions depend on the context in which they occur. It is claimed that the need for a psychologically motivated account of how context affects meaning arises from the fact that traditional semantic machinery, qua mapping from expressions to extensions (in a circumstance of evaluation), fails to provide a correct picture of our conversational practices. Yet, this basic contention is disputed by Stefano Predelli in the only paper in this collection that

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denies that traditional semantic models suffer from neglecting broad contextual assumptions. In his paper, Predelli distinguishes between three ‘unsurprising’ ways for the context to affect utterance content: structural ambiguity, indexicality and semantic contingency. According to Predelli, only the latter is crucial for the present debate, and it boils down to the fact that the same expression can be true at some circumstances of evaluation and false at others. That kind of ‘unsurprising’ context dependency suffices for dealing with contextualist challenges. In other words, the author takes it that the traditional semantic apparatus is suitable for describing our semantic competence. In his view, the general mistake consists in assuming a one-to-one relationship between possible worlds and circumstances of evaluation. With the next paper, we move from the relationship between sentences and propositions to the nature of the elements entering into truth-conditional composition. A recent influential proposal has it that word meanings are concepts that undergo ad hoc modulation ‘on the fly’. That is, the content conveyed by a word – as it occurs within an utterance – is often not a literal concept which is fixed out of context (e.g. Wilson and Carston, 2007). Thus, in utterances of sentences like All politicians drink or I’m not drinking tonight, the claim is that the meaning of the verb drink will often be modulated in such a way as to express a narrowed concept DRINK* whose meaning is ‘drink (large amounts of) alcohol’. In opposition to this, Elisabetta Lalumera’s contribution argues for a separation between word meanings and concepts. She maintains that certain instances of apparent ad hoc concept construction can be accounted for without appeal to ad hoc concepts (nor, for those who reject the assimilation of meanings with concepts, to ad hoc word meanings). The idea is that, in particular contexts, an unnamed but stable concept can form a nonce association with a particular lexical item. If correct, Lalumera’s account has the advantage that – at least in certain ` la Wilson and Carston types of cases – it can do the same job as theories a while preserving the sort of (conceptual) stability assumed to be necessary for keeping track of representational categories across time. Like Elisabetta Lalumera, Peter Bosch does not equate word meanings with concepts. The question he addresses, focusing on the meaning of predicates, is how much world-knowledge is included in word meanings. Against the rich conventional meaning assumed by compositional theories of lexical meaning such as the ‘Generative Lexicon’ (Pustejovsky, 1995), he argues that the lexical entries associated with natural language predicates are underspecified. Lexical items may exhibit either ‘index dependence’ or ‘context dependence’. When indexdependent, their conventional meaning specifies a parameter of the

INTRODUCTION / xix index (for instance for a comparison group). When context-dependent, they denote different concepts in different contexts of use, a property that is not part of their conventional meaning. Some predicates, notably gradable adjectives, display both types of dependence. Interestingly, though these two kinds of dependence are handled by different modules of the language comprehension device – context dependence by the conceptual or pragmatic module, index dependence by linguistic competence – the latter is contingent upon the former. There is another aspect of the relationship between lexical semantics and concepts that calls for a cognitively informed linguistic investigation: clusters of properties. On the one hand, the long-standing tradition according to which our concepts consist of an array of features – clusters of non-necessary properties – has received considerable empirical confirmation. On the other hand, a no less respectable strand in philosophy of language and semantics emphasises the inadequacy of cluster approaches when it comes to issues such as compositionality or ‘aboutness’. In her paper, Galit Sassoon offers a model that encompasses both the psychological viability of cluster theories and the theoretical advantages of formal, intensional semantic accounts. She claims that predicate interpretation consists in determining not only an intension, but also a contextually dependent cluster of membership properties, as well as a contextually dependent typicality ordering on these. In doing so, Sassoon aims at a theoretical model that accounts for linguistic facts such as the semantic workings of different universal quantifiers, and, at the same time, for the psychology of concepts. Not every word is associated, within the mind of the hearer, with a widely defined concept. First, as has been well acknowledged since Putnam (1975), we sometimes use words whose precise content is beyond our epistemic grasp – thus trusting some knowledgeable experts. Second, not all utterances are meant to be interpreted by assignation of a semantic content. Sperber (1975, 1996) argued forcefully that some linguistic stimuli trigger a process of evocation, with no principled end. In order to get a clear and unified view of these issues, Marc Dominicy starts by building a novel hierarchy of mental representations, in which each level – percepts, quasi-concepts, occurrence-gathering concepts and individual-gathering concepts – is articulated with either episodic or semantic-encyclopaedic memory. The role of evocation is then assumed to ensure the transition from one level to the next, and/or the corresponding transformation of one kind of mental representation into another. The paper by Ira Noveck and collaborators is the epitome of the sort of work that can be done at the interface of linguistics and

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cognitive psychology, and is a valuable contribution to the recent research programme known as ‘Experimental Pragmatics’ (for a representative sample, see Noveck and Sperber, 2004). Building on and refining earlier experimental studies into the meaning of conjunctions, they confirm a developmental trend previously observed for scalar expressions. Children’s tendency to pragmatically enrich the logical meaning of both types of expressions increases in the course of linguistic and cognitive development. These results provide further evidence that, pace Horn (1989) and Levinson (2000), pragmatic effects – such as the sequential interpretation of and or the reading of some as some, and not all – are not defaults built into conventional meaning. Although much of the work done on the literal interpretation of utterances deals exclusively with sentences in the indicative mood, other grammatical moods constitute an extremely important research area. Mark Jary’s paper deals with a particularly well-documented phenomenon – the alternation between the indicative and the subjunctive moods in Spanish. Jary surveys previous accounts, which divide neatly into two categories: those centred on the pragmatic notion of assertion, and those situated within the formal modeltheoretical semantic framework. The ambition of this contribution is to show that in order to integrate the merits of both approaches, a cognitive theory of utterance interpretation is needed. To this end, Jary uses the tools supplied by Relevance Theory, and argues that the subjunctive mood signals that the propositional content is not ‘relevant in its own right’.

References Bach, K. 1994a. Conversational impliciture. Mind and Language 9:124–162. Bach, K. 1994b. Semantic slack: What is said and more. In S. Tsohatzidis, ed., Foundations of Speech Act Theory: Philosophical and Linguistic Perspectives, pp. 267–291. London: Routledge. Bach, K. 2005. Context ex machina. In Z. G. Szabo´, ed., Semantics Versus Pragmatics, pp. 15–44. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Borg, E. 2004. Minimal Semantics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cappelen, H. and E. Lepore. 2005. Insensitive Semantics: A Defence of Semantic Minimalism and Speech Act Pluralism. Oxford: Blackwell. Carston, R. 2002. Thoughts and Utterances: The Pragmatics of Explicit Communication. Oxford: Blackwell. Horn, L. 1989. A Natural History of Negation. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

INTRODUCTION / xxi Kaplan, D. 1989. Demonstratives. In J. Almog, J. Perry, and H. K. Wettstein, eds., Themes from Kaplan, pp. 481–563. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Levinson, S. 2000. Presumptive Meanings: The Theory of Generalized Conversational Implicature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Noveck, I. and D. Sperber. (eds.). 2004. Experimental Pragmatics. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Preyer, G. and G. Peter. (eds.). 2005. Contextualism in Philosophy: Knowledge, Meaning, and Truth. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Preyer, G. and G. Peter. (eds.). 2007. Context-Sensitivity and Semantic Minimalism: New Essays on Semantics and Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pustejovsky, J. 1995. The Generative Lexicon. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Putnam, H. 1975. The meaning of ‘meaning’. In K. Gunderson, ed., Language, Mind and Knowledge, pp. 131–193. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Recanati, F. 1989. The pragmatics of what is said. Mind and Language 4:295–329. Recanati, F. 2004. Literal Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Soames, S. 2002. Beyond Rigidity: The Unfinished Semantic Agenda of ‘Naming and Necessity’. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sperber, D. 1975. Rethinking Symbolism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sperber, D. 1996. Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Sperber, D. and D. Wilson. 1995. Relevance: Communication and Cognition, 2nd edn., Oxford: Blackwell. Stalnaker, R. 1978. Assertion. In P. Cole, ed., Syntax and Semantics, vol. 9, pp. 315–322. New York: Academic Press. Szabo´, Z. G. (ed.). 2005. Semantics Versus Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Turner, K. (ed.). 1999. The Semantics/Pragmatics Interface from Different Points of View. Oxford: Elsevier. Wilson, D. and R. Carston. 2007. A unitary approach to lexical pragmatics: Relevance, inference and ad hoc concepts. In N. Burton-Roberts, ed., Advances in Pragmatics, pp. 230–260. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Philippe De Brabanter Mikhail Kissine Editors


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On the Psychological Reality of Minimal Propositions FERNANDO MARTIŃEZ-MANRIQUE

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AGUSTIŃ VICENTE

Abstract One of the issues at stake in the dispute between minimalism and contextualism regarding the psychological reality of their proposals is whether there is something that corresponds to a minimal proposition at some stage of utterance processing. This paper addresses this issue from the point of view of its empirical testability. We distinguish three degrees of commitment to a psychologically realistic minimal proposition: as a necessary first step of any utterance interpretation, as a proposition that is entertained simultaneously with other interpretations of an utterance and as a proposition that is obtained only in conditions in which the interpreter is deprived of vital contextual information. We discuss two alleged sources of empirical evidence. One comes from considerations in favour of a modular semantic system, which would support the strongest commitment. The second arises from experiments that purportedly support the idea that minimal propositions are processed in parallel with nonliteral meanings, thus favouring a moderate commitment. We argue that the alleged evidence does not warrant the conclusion in either case, and that the idea of a minimal proposition is in need of clarification in order to be testable. Thus, we examine the conceptual assumptions that underlie the empirical framework regarding what counts as evidence for the psychological reality of the probed propositions. We end with some remarks in support of the weakest sort of Utterance Interpretation and Cognitive Models. Philippe De Brabanter and Mikhail Kissine (eds.). Current Research in the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface, Vol. 20. r 2009 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited. All rights reserved.

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commitment, which regards minimal propositions as psychologically real under special circumstances. Keywords: contextualism, minimalism, minimal proposition, modularity, cancellability, entailment.

1.1

Introduction

One of the key arguments in the dispute between minimalism and contextualism is whether the respective proposals are psychologically realistic (cf. Carston, 2002; Recanati, 2004). For instance, the debate about the psychological (ir)realism of semantic minimalism has to do with the question whether there is something that corresponds to a minimal proposition at some stage of the interpretive process. Following roughly Cappelen and Lepore (2005: 144ff), we can characterize the minimal proposition expressed by sentence S as the proposition (i.e. truthconditional structure) semantically expressed by any utterance of S. It is obtained compositionally from the context-independent semantic values of all the expressions that make up S. A few of those expressions (the context-sensitive ones) have their semantic values contextually assigned, but this assignation is always grammatically triggered. To use a classical example of what is at stake, Cappelen and Lepore claim that a sentence such as ‘John is ready’ always has a certain minimal content that any utterance of it conveys – and that any competent speaker grasps in hearing the utterance – namely, the content that John is ready, period. Contextualists, in contrast, contend that this content is not psychologically realistic in the sense that what the speaker says – and what the hearer grasps – is something more specific than the suggested minimal proposition; i.e. in order to have appropriate truth-conditions, one has to be able to specify what John is ready for. According to contextualism, the minimal proposition is unintelligible – and hence plays no psychological role at all – because one does not know what sort of thing it is to be ready simpliciter (see discussion in Bach, 2006; Recanati, 2006). Yet Cappelen and Lepore contend that this is a metaphysical demand that ought not to concern semantics. Semantics can be satisfied with the idea that ‘being ready’ expresses whatever truth-making property to which it is associated – perhaps simply the property of being ready. Although the notion of psychological realism is not entirely clear, we think that if one works with mentalistic, representationalist assumptions, and one claims to be a realist in that respect, one will be typically committed to maintaining that, in the process of

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interpreting an utterance, there are mental representations that correspond to the structures posited in one’s theory of interpretation. However, there are several ways of being committed to the psychological reality of the minimal proposition in this sense. We want to draw attention to three, presented in order of strength, which we will call minimal first, minimal too and minimal if. The strongest commitment, minimal first, is to regard the minimal proposition as a necessary first step to be taken in order to arrive at an interpretation of an utterance. In other words, regardless of how one conceives of what is said/explicated/implicited, etc., by an utterance, the idea is that a minimal proposition is always constructed as a first building block that is subsequently subject to processes of enrichment, inference and the like. The strong commitment is typical of serial approaches to linguistic processing, in which mental mechanisms exercise a number of successive transformations on different linguistic representations (e.g. phonetic onto phonological representations, phonological onto syntactic ones and so on). The view we call minimal too assumes a moderate commitment: the minimal proposition is one among several representational structures that are entertained almost simultaneously when an utterance is processed. This view dispenses with the idea of seriality, but not with necessity. In other words, a hearer cannot help but entertain a minimal proposition in her mind even if it does not (always) play a role in obtaining further interpretations. The weakest commitment drops the idea of necessity. The view that results allows for the possibility of entertaining a minimal proposition, but only under special circumstances. For instance, we have suggested elsewhere (Martıńez-Manrique and Vicente, 2004) that cases in which an interpreter is deprived of vital contextual information (e.g. someone overhearing a conversation) may drive her to build an interpretation based purely on syntactic structure and very abstract semantic information (more on this below). So the interpretation can be minimal if the interpreter has no other resources to exploit but the uttered sentence itself. There is an interesting connection between the claim of the psychological reality of minimal propositions, on the one hand, and the possibility of providing empirical evidence to back that claim, on the other. The basic idea is that different commitments to such a claim lead to different models of utterance processing, and that these models (together with certain processing or architectural assumptions) make different predictions on how subjects will behave in order to interpret utterances. The growing literature in what has been termed experimental pragmatics (Noveck and Sperber, 2004) shows a number


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of methods that have been used to test competing models and, consequently, to support or undermine the theories that underlie them. This paper addresses the question of the psychological reality of the minimal proposition in the light of several problems that arise concerning its empirical testability. We will limit ourselves to two (alleged) sources of empirical evidence. One comes from Borg’s considerations in favour of the modularity of a semantic system, which would lend support to the strongest commitment to the reality of the minimal proposition. The second arises from experiments by Bezuidenhout and Cutting that purportedly support the idea that minimal propositions are processed in parallel with nonliteral meanings, thus favouring a moderate commitment. We think that the alleged evidence does not warrant the conclusion in either case. However, we do not wish merely to dispute or reinterpret the empirical evidence, but to examine the conceptual assumptions that underlie the empirical framework regarding what does, and does not, count as evidence for the psychological reality of the probed propositions. The trouble, we think, is that the very idea of a minimal proposition is in need of clarification in order to be testable. Although we think that neither of the views examined makes a good case for the reality of that proposition at the levels that we called ‘minimal first’ and ‘minimal too’, we end the paper with some remarks about the role that minimal propositions may actually play in cognition – a role that brings them closer to the commitment endorsed by the ‘minimal if’ position.

1.2

Minimal First: The Modularity of Semantics

Borg (2004) wants to defend a formal semantic theory, according to which ‘it is possible to deliver an account of the propositional or truthconditional content of a sentence in natural language simply via formal operations over the syntactic features of that sentence, that is, over the lexical items that it contains and their mode of composition’ (2004: 3). This account is not merely an exercise in theoretical linguistics: it fits nicely with the idea that there are mental mechanisms responsive to those formal features, and not to others. In other words, our semantic competence is grounded in a modular system devoted to the extraction of linguistic meaning. This computational system relies on a proprietary lexicon and a set of rules that operate on it. This modular configuration seems to provide a model for what we called the ‘minimal first’ commitment. We can conceive of the semantic module as a system that is located at a level of processing intermediate between syntactic and pragmatic processes. Its input consists of local

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syntactic features corresponding to the logical form of a particular sentence with which the system is fed. Its output is a truth-conditional representation that corresponds to the meaning obtained by applying rules of composition to the elements of such a logical form. Presumably, different syntactic features will trigger different rules of composition, and the ingredients to be composed are a subset of the full conceptual system – a subset that specifies general mappings between lexical items and language-of-thought components. The representation thus obtained is the minimal proposition, from which the global, nonmodular processes that constitute the pragmatic skills are able to reach contextually appropriate interpretations.1 The marriage between formal semantics and modularity makes the former appear as an enterprise that is relevant for cognitive explanations: claims made by minimal semanticists are open to empirical evidence, given that there are a number of properties associated with modularity that one can use as a test for the existence of such a system. The point is thus to evaluate whether semantic processing exhibits such modular properties. There are three properties that can be taken as crucial: domain specificity, informational encapsulation and specific patterns of breakdown. We will focus on the latter, after a few brief remarks on the other two. Information encapsulation and domain specificity can be regarded as the hallmark of modularity. In Fodor’s conception of modularity (Fodor, 1983), encapsulation allows for the individuation of modules vis-a`-vis the central system(s); in other words, a system is modular inasmuch as it is impervious to information coming from other mental systems. As for domain specificity, it accounts for the individuation of a module vis-a`-vis other modules; a system is a specific module inasmuch 1

This is, we think, a model that is entirely compatible with Borg’s modularist story. Yet Borg herself does not explicitly endorse the ‘minimal first’ strategy. She seems to regard the pragmatic skills as supported by a number of systems that strive to construct interpretations independently of the semantic processes, something that becomes apparent when these processes malfunction (see row B in Table 1). Those systems may work perfectly on fragments of meanings and hearers may ‘simply stop thinking about semantic content before the language faculty has had a chance to deliver sentence-level content’ (Borg, Forthcoming: 11). So the output of the semantic module would not necessarily have to be a minimal proposition for pragmatic processes to take place. As she acknowledges (Borg, Forthcoming: footnote 14), this point implies that the semantic module cannot be as encapsulated as she claimed in Borg (2004). Nevertheless, our criticism of Borg’s semantic module will still apply to the new, more moderate version of her theory. The reason is that we are going to question the empirical evidence (and her interpretation of this evidence) that is claimed to back her general view, i.e. evidence related to the patterns of disruption of the different kinds of processes.

6 / FERNANDO MARTIŃEZ-MANRIQUE TABLE 1

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Patterns of breakdown in utterance processing systems

Syntactic

Semantic

Pragmatic Resulting condition

A B C

X X X

X X OK

X OK X

D

X

OK

OK

E F G

OK OK OK

X X OK

X OK X

H

OK

OK

OK

Complete impairment Stroke victims, aphasics Unverifiable or dysphasia/specific language impairment Unverifiable or dysphasia/specific language impairment Unverifiable Unverifiable Asperger, schizophrenia, frontal lobe damage (Williams) Normal speaker

Source: Abridged from Borg (2004: 100).

as it is in charge of processing a specific kind of information (e.g. visual, auditory, linguistic, etc.).2 Borg offers some considerations in support of the view of an encapsulated, domain-specific semantic processing system. For instance, the main reasons for the domain specificity of semantics are (a) that semantic interpretation is specialized to a narrow range of stimuli, namely, the set of meaningful sentences, and (b) that a competent speaker is able to make assessments of meaning for a sentence, ‘even if she knows little or nothing about who produced it or when’ (p. 88). Encapsulation, on the other hand, can be observed in the fact (c) that ‘semantic comprehension seems to be independent of how I expect the world to be’ (p. 90). We do not find these arguments very persuasive. The specificity pointed out in (a) could be a side effect of the range of stimuli to which the syntactic system responds. The ability alluded to in (b) can be explained in terms of the adaptability of the pragmatic interpretation system to abnormal circumstances (more on this below). Finally, the independence of semantic comprehension from extralinguistic information alleged in (c) does not count as a piece of evidence because it is precisely what is at stake in the debate with contextualism. So the most important property to assess the modularity of semantics in an independent manner will be the existence of specific patterns of 2 Other accounts of modularity (especially those put forward in the context of evolutionary psychology, see Sperber, 1994) content themselves with domain specificity as the distinctive modular characteristic. But Borg follows a classical Fodorian line on modularity.

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breakdown. The rationale behind this claim is that if there are disorders in which a particular ability is retained while another ability is impaired, together with disorders in which the converse pattern appears, this could count as evidence for the presence of two different systems that can be selectively impaired and that can function independently, at least to some extent. Borg consequently devotes most of her attention to the putative evidence for those patterns. Borg’s basic hypothesis is that syntactic,3 semantic and pragmatic knowledge constitute three separate systems. Each of them may be in two possible states, either normal or malfunctioning, so there is room for eight possible patterns of breakdown (see Table 1). In order to back the existence of the semantic system, Borg offers two kinds of evidence, which correspond to patterns B and G in the table. On the one hand, there is evidence for pattern B in conditions where grammatical knowledge (syntax and semantics) is impaired while general comprehension (pragmatic information) is spared. This is evident in the case of stroke victims and certain types of aphasia (particularly, those traditionally called Broca aphasias, i.e. states where comprehension is relatively well-preserved while the patient is unable to articulate grammatically coherent sentences). On the other hand, she claims that evidence for pattern G can be found in subjects such as autistic patients, sufferers of Asperger syndrome, certain schizophrenic persons or people suffering from certain kinds of frontal lobe damage. What they have in common is that all of them ‘appear perfectly normal in their comprehension of literal meaning and yet they are often unable to move beyond this level of interpretation’ (p. 103). They typically fail at tests that probe their mindreading abilities (i.e. intentional explanations for the behaviour of others), yet they are able to grasp the linguistic meaning of what is uttered to them. According to Borg, this ‘literalism’ shows a general impairment of the pragmatic component with relative preservation of syntactic and semantic processing. However, from a modularist perspective, there are two patterns of breakdown that would be crucial to lend support to Borg’s hypotheses: (i) patterns in which semantic processing is intact while the other kinds of processing are damaged, and (ii) patterns in which semantic processing is damaged and the other two kinds are intact. So the strongest evidence for a semantic module would appear in the rows that reflect patterns (i) and (ii), namely, rows C and F, respectively. Yet all the evidence considered

3 She refers to this generically as ‘lower level linguistic skills’, but then focuses on syntactic processing.


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by Borg is related to patterns B and G in the table because she regards the patterns that we deem crucial, especially F, as unverifiable. In the case of C (and also D), the alleged cause of unverifiability is that once syntactic processing is lost, there is nothing for the semantic module to operate on, so it would be impossible to tell whether it is effectively working as it should – although there might be some weak evidence arising from cases of dysphasia or Specific Language Impairment. In the case of F (and also E), the problem arises from the impossibility that experimental subjects grasp the conditions of a linguistic test, given that they lack the minimal semantic competence required to understand it. Let us grant that Borg is right in her assessment of the unverifiability of patterns C and F. In our view, the problem is that, once they are discarded, the alleged evidence for B and G is insufficient to support the modular autonomy of semantic processing. First, there are troubles concerning the evidence itself. With respect to row B, her main source of evidence comes from production aphasias, i.e. aphasic patients with global communicative skills who are unable to put what they want into words. Even if this type of aphasia involves some impairment in syntactic and semantic abilities to produce coherent speech, it does not show a parallel impairment in these abilities with respect to speech processing: those patients are typically able to understand what they are told. Relevant evidence for row B ought to come from cases in which the subjects are unable to grasp the literal meanings of sentences while they have some pragmatic access to their contents. This sort of evidence may be sought, perhaps, in aphasias related to comprehension deficits. As things stand, such evidence is lacking. With respect to row G, the evidence is controversial. On the one hand, if we attend to MacKay and Shaw (2004), little work has still been done in assessing the figurative speech of people with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), such as Asperger syndrome. Their work supports the idea that people with ASD show a better performance in grasping meaning than in grasping speaker’s intent, but this is not uniform across different kinds of figures of speech. On the other hand, de Villiers et al. (2007) offer extensive evidence that there are many spared pragmatic abilities in ASD, in particular those related to what Recanati (2004) calls primary pragmatic processes. In addition, Robbins (2007) discusses the possibility that there are spared mindreading skills in both Asperger and Williams syndrome, yet what is spared is a different pragmatic component in each case (inferential vs. perceptual mindreading abilities). There is also controversial evidence with respect to the semantic and pragmatic abilities of schizophrenics – for instance, Titone et al. (2002) argue that their failures to understand idioms arise from lack of control

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to inhibit literal interpretations rather than from deficits in global idiom processing. Altogether, the evidence provided by Borg is clearly insufficient to support the existence of an independent semantic module. Furthermore, even if there were more solid evidence for patterns B and G, we think that there could be a more parsimonious hypothesis to explain such patterns. Suppose there are just two components, one that deals with syntactic features of the input and another (call it the interpreting system) devoted to obtaining a meaningful interpretation. Suppose also (as Borg does) that they can show different degrees of malfunction. Then damage to the syntactic component together with preservation of the interpreting system would exhibit pattern B of disruption. The opposite situation, in which the syntactic system is spared while the interpreting system presents (degrees of) impairment, would account for pattern G. There is no need to posit a third, intermediate system. One may object to this bicomponential account by arguing that it does not explain the alleged literalism that affects groups of subjects included in pattern G: if what we have is just one system that is malfunctioning in different degrees, one may expect to find a variety of manners in which this malfunction manifests itself. Yet it seems that all the affected subjects show a similar pattern that suggests a common mechanism preserved in all of them. Let us make just two remarks on this possible objection. First, it seems unclear to us that what unites all those cases is what they preserve; rather, they seem to be alike with respect to what they lack, namely, an operative system for mindreading abilities. This is consistent with the fact that most of the interpretive problems of those subjects have to do with their inability to figure out the mental states of others, so as to include them among the factors leading to contextually appropriate interpretations of utterances. The other remark, which we will elaborate on later, is that literalism does not necessarily show the existence of a semantic system that works independently of pragmatic abilities. It may well be a consequence of the operation of an interpreting system that has to cope with information in unusual circumstances. The point, of course, is that this ‘interpreting system’ could be thoroughly pragmatic. We think that the instability of the alleged semantic module is a consequence of a tension between two demands on the function of this module: (i) It must operate following closely formal syntactical features of the sentences with which it is fed. (ii) It has to deliver the truth-conditional meaning of the sentence.


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If you pull in the direction of demand (i) then you find a system that works just as the syntactic module. If you pull in the direction of (ii) then you find more and more pressure from pragmatic intrusions that seem to be required to find any psychologically plausible truthconditions. Hence, the notion of a semantic module is always on the verge of collapsing onto one of the modules that the theory necessarily locates before or after it. So the idea of a minimal proposition that comes first in the processing of an utterance seems to rest on unstable foundations. We will see that this tension will resurface at the end of the next section, arising from a different set of considerations.

1.3

Minimal Too: Experimental Tests on Minimal Propositions

Let us turn to a different way of testing minimalist hypotheses, illustrated by Bezuidenhout and Cutting’s (2002) set of experiments. They want to test predictions derived from two different views on utterance understanding: the first one contextualist and the other Gricean in spirit. Contextualist views, in general, contend that pragmatic intrusions appear across the board in the process of determining what is said by a particular utterance. The Gricean view predicts a lesser role for pragmatic factors in recovering what is said by an utterance, so it is committed to postulating propositions that are less dependent on context. The first obstacle in devising an experimental procedure to contrast predictions from both hypotheses is, of course, to define what counts as a case in which the minimal proposition is playing some psychological role. The way Bezuidenhout and Cutting (henceforth B&C) deal with this – typical of experimental work by others in whose footsteps they are following, e.g. Gibbs and Moise (1997) and Nicolle and Clark (1999) – is to present their subjects with a scenario along with a target sentence, and then ask them which interpretation in a given set best captures what the target sentence says. Among the interpretations offered, one is meant to correspond to the minimal proposition, and the others correspond either to an explicature or to different levels of implicature. Here is an example of a story context used in one of the experiments, with some of the choices offered to their subjects (B&C, 2002: 441): Jane was planning to spend a week in Memphis. She couldn’t decide which of her friends, Brian or Paul, to stay with. Jill, who knew that Jane was allergic to animals, said, ‘Brian has three cats’.

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(Minimal proposition) . . . Brian has at least three cats.4 (Explicature paraphrase) . . . Brian has exactly three cats. (Strong implicature) . . . Jane should stay with Paul.

The idea is that if subjects choose the minimal proposition as the preferred interpretation, then the Gricean model would be partially vindicated, whereas if they choose the explicature, contextualist theories will have a head start. The results of B&C’s experiments provide evidence against a minimal first model in which minimal propositions are systematically retrieved at initial stages of processing. Instead, they favour a model of the ‘minimal too’ view on the psychological reality of minimal propositions. It is what they call the Ranked Parallel model, which holds that ‘in all contexts both minimal and enriched interpretations are simultaneously processed, but the enriched interpretation is usually more accessible’ (2002: 444). So subjects typically prefer the enriched explicature to the minimal proposition as a more appropriate rendition of what was said, unless the context primes an interpretation closer to the minimal proposition.5 Interestingly, one may read Cappelen and Lepore as endorsing something like a ‘minimal too’ view, if one considers the central thesis of their Speech Act Pluralism: ‘One of the many propositions asserted by an utterance is the semantic content of that utterance (the proposition semantically expressed)’ (2005: 200). However, before concluding that the experimental results vindicate their position, one should note that their idea of the minimal proposition does not coincide with the notion explored in the experiments we are discussing, given the way in which Cappelen and Lepore differentiate their position from the Gricean view: Our semantic content (the proposition semantically expressed) is not identical to what the speaker said. It cannot, and is not meant to, play the roles that what the speaker said can play. It is not meant to serve functions (cognitive or otherwise) that the speech act content can serve. (2005: 181) 4 There is no consensus on whether ‘at least n’ is the minimal interpretation for expressions with the cardinal n. For instance, Breheny (2008) argues that ‘at least’ interpretations are the result of pragmatic reasoning. 5 Using an eye-monitoring methodology, Bezuidenhout and Morris (2004) find further evidence against ‘minimal first’ models. Breheny et al. (2006) reach the same conclusion by means of on-line tasks. It is unclear, however, whether the evidence gathered supports a version of the ‘minimal too’ thesis – a question that is not specifically addressed in those papers.


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So it is unclear to what extent that experimental research investigates minimal propositions in the sense that interests them. Moreover, it is unclear that research of that kind can investigate the minimal proposition in any other way than as the content of a speech act, given that its experimental conditions cannot help but tap judgments on speech acts, and not on semantic content. On the other hand, as Gibbs (2002) states, ‘literal meaning’ and related notions are hard to define operationally, and it is difficult to disentangle claims for literal meanings of sentences from claims for literal meanings of lexical items. So while more subtle ways to detect minimal propositions experimentally are needed – perhaps ways that rely on free recall rather than on forced choice – it is also reasonable to demand further conceptual clarification about what a minimal proposition amounts to. Therefore, we think it is useful to examine some assumptions of that experimental work, especially the requirements for the testability of a minimal proposition, in an attempt to throw a little more light on the latter notion. 1.3.1

Cancellability and Minimal Propositions

Our worry, then, is how to fix criteria in order to determine what counts as a psychologically realistic minimal proposition, so that one can tell whether it plays any role in the processing of an utterance by the experimental subjects. Those criteria are essential for the aforementioned tests to have any significance. For instance, given the following triad: (1) Brian has three cats (1a) Brian has at least three cats (1b) Brian has exactly three cats why does (1a) count as a minimal proposition for (1), while (1b) counts as something ‘richer’, i.e. an explicature? The rationale seems to be related to the Gricean notion of cancellability (Grice, 1989a, b). In Grice’s view, conversational implicatures are typically cancellable, either explicitly (e.g. when given a putative implicature p of an utterance, it is admissible to add ‘but not p’) or contextually (e.g. finding a context in which the utterance would not carry the implicature). The idea, in a nutshell, would be that cancellable interpretations could not count as minimal propositions. So (1a), and not (1b), is the interpretation that provides the minimal proposition of (1) because given (1) it is possible to cancel (1b) but not (1a). In other words, it is possible to cancel (1b) by saying ‘Brian has three cats but not exactly

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three cats’, while the corresponding ‘Brian has three cats but not at least three cats’ seems odd, if not openly contradictory. If one is going to resort to this general strategy to tell minimal propositions from other interpretations, it seems fair to demand answers for the following two related questions: (1) What is the distinction that cancellability marks? (2) When does one know that a particular proposition is, or is not, cancellable? With respect to the first question, the standard view is that cancellability draws the line between ‘what is said’ and ‘what is conversationally implicated’. However, the fact that there is no consensus on the second question affects the standard view. For instance, take Bach’s oft-discussed example (Bach, 1994) of ‘you are not going to die’ (told by a mother to her son who has a little cut on his finger). The minimal proposition conveyed by the sentence is typically regarded as something akin to ‘you are immortal’, while the contextually appropriate proposition (the ‘impliciture’, in Bach’s terms) is that ‘you are not going to die (from that cut)’. On the one hand, it is possible to cancel the ‘you are immortal’ reading just by adding what has been left implicit in the original scenario, namely ‘from that cut’. On the other hand, it is easy to devise a scenario in which the ‘impliciture’ is cancelled. For instance, suppose that what the mother actually says to her injured son is (making, perhaps, some sort of cruel joke) ‘you are going to die’, and immediately, ‘but not from that cut’. The second utterance cancels the impliciture of the first one. If cases like those were general enough – and we think they are – then cancellability would not offer a sufficiency test for implicatures. Indeed, it might even not be necessary for them: as Weiner (2006) contends, there are implicatures that seem not to be cancellable because any explicit denial of p that one adds to perform a cancellation of p may count as further support for p – for instance, given an ironic utterance, explicit cancellations of the implicated proposition can be typically seen as adding irony, rather than diminishing it, hence strengthening the implicature. The upshot is that cancellability may mark no distinction after all – contrary to the standard view.6

6 One must bear in mind that Grice himself did not formulate the notion of cancellability as the hallmark of conversational implicatures. For instance, he readily acknowledges that ‘one cannot regard the fulfilment of a cancelability test as decisively establishing the presence of a conversational implicature’ (Grice, 1989b: 44). On the other hand, it is also possible to put the cancellability test to other uses, such as telling implicatures from explicatures. According to Capone (2006), the latter are noncancellable because they arise out of what is said, and cancelling them would result in a failure to communicate something specific.


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The disagreement in this respect finds a parallel in Bezuidenhout and Cutting’s note of caution that ‘with respect to any particular case, there is bound to be disagreement amongst researchers as to what the minimal interpretation is’ (p. 435, footnote 6). The sort of vision that is behind their experimental choices for the minimal proposition comes from the allegedly Gricean remark that somebody uttering ‘Jane has three children’ literally says ‘Jane has at least three children, but may have more than three’. But there could be alternative visions to play with. Namely, this notion of literalness goes beyond the semantic content grammatically articulated in the sentence that is the bread and butter of the archetypical minimalist programme (i.e. Cappelen and Lepore). The suggested literal rendition provides elements (‘at least’, ‘may have more than three’) that are not present among the semantic elements of the sentence that are, according to minimalists, the objects of composition. Indeed, ‘to have at least three cats’ is simply one of the many ways in which Brian may have three cats: another is to have exactly three cats, another is to have three albino long-haired Siamese cats and so on. But none of them provides the semantic content of ‘Brian has three cats’. In terms amenable to Cappelen and Lepore’s programme, the best way to articulate that content is as ‘Brian has three cats’, period. This claim seems to have catastrophic consequences for the testability of the minimal proposition in experimental settings such as Bezuidenhout and Cutting’s. The reason is: given that the minimal proposition of (1) is captured by (1) itself, one should include (1), along with (1a) and (1b), as one of the choices for the subjects. At first blush, a move like this may seem absurd: asked which of the interpretations captures (1) best, why on Earth should subjects not choose (1) itself, if given the opportunity? But notice that the idea ceases to be absurd if it turns out that the majority of subjects do not choose (1) as the preferred rendition.7 (This might not be so unlikely if the tests are administered orally, and with a little delay between the target sentence and the multiple choices.) With such an outcome, the psychological reality of the minimal proposition would receive a serious blow. Suppose, alternatively, that most subjects, unsurprisingly, chose (1)

7 As a matter of fact, one of the elements of successive experiments by Bezuidenhout and Cutting (2002) is a test where subjects have to match the target sentence with a paraphrase, one of which is the target sentence itself. But they use it as a procedure to control whether subjects recall properly what they read, rather than as a test on its semantic content.

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as the best interpretation of (1). Would this amount to a corroboration of a minimalist model? We do not think so. The alleged minimal proposition is just a copy of the target sentence. So it is virtually impossible to tell whether the subjects are making a judgment about the sentence’s semantic content or about other, more superficial properties, e.g. whether they were just picking the sentence that most closely resembles the target sentence in its phonological representation.8 Let us follow a revisionist path that, starting with the intuitions that regard non-cancellability as a guide towards what is said, tries to refine and strengthen the criterion for minimal propositions. Consider again the second question we posed: when does one know that a proposition is, or is not, cancellable? Logic may provide assistance here. First, everything that belongs to the logical form of the uttered sentence must be retained in order to make the conveyed proposition non-cancellable. The reason is that by removing elements of the logical form, one would obtain a proposition presumably different from the one originally conveyed, so any attempts at cancellation (i.e. attempts at negating the proposition) would be what we can call ‘pseudocancellations’. These are cases in which the sentence is apparently contradicted but in fact what we have is a reformulation of it – as in Carston’s example ‘she was upset but she wasn’t upset’, where the second ‘upset’ means something different from the first one. Now, we would have a plausible starting point to begin to refine the answer to the question of when a proposition is cancellable, and so to analyse the rationale that underlies decisions about what counts as a minimal proposition. The basic idea is that given a sentence S, the clearest cases of noncancellable propositions are those logically entailed by the proposition expressed by S.9 Thus, we can attempt to replace the vague idea of cancellability by the more precise notion of logical entailment. The minimal proposition has to belong to the class of logically entailed

8

The role of phonology in the minimalist programme seems to be limited to ‘homophonic reports’, i.e. the idea (disputed by some contextualists) that one can always capture what a speaker said by echoing her exact words. Cappelen and Lepore (2006), however, downplay the importance of this test. 9 This idea also seems to underlie the category of ‘semantic entailment’ at the bottom of Atlas’s scale for pragmatic properties of semantic and pragmatic relations (Atlas, 2005: 60). According to Atlas, entailment would share with ‘lexical implicature’ and ‘semantic presupposition’ the property of not being cancellable, but unlike these it would be neither detachable nor calculable.


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propositions.10 Yet this is not enough: unless one wants to endorse Cappelen and Lepore’s claim that the minimal proposition of S is given by S itself, one has to strengthen the relation, for instance, by making it asymmetrical. This can be formulated in the following principle of entailment for minimal propositions: Given a sentence S and a proposition p expressed by an utterance of S, a sentence S* expresses a proposition p* that is minimal with respect to p, only if p* is logically entailed by p, but not vice versa.

So we have a reason why (1a), but not (1b), provides a minimal proposition for (1): on the one hand, (1) entails (1a), which explains the contradictory nature of ‘Brian has three cats but not at least three cats’, and (1a) does not entail (1); on the other, (1) does not entail (1b), which explains why (1b) is cancellable. Now, it is plain to see that the principle of entailment does not provide a sufficient condition for minimal propositions, only a necessary one. There are plenty of propositions that are entailed by (1) but that do not seem to capture its minimal proposition: consider for instance (1c) ‘Brian has something’, and (1d) ‘Somebody has three cats’. So if one wants to say that only (1a) captures the minimal proposition of (1), there must be something else, besides logical entailment, that makes (1a) different from (1c)-(1d). We are going to embark on an investigation of possible attempts to provide this extra element. Let us already divulge our conclusion: we find none of the attempts satisfactory. There is nothing that can be added to the principle of entailment to determine the minimal proposition, and that principle is insufficient by itself to account for it. There is, in our opinion, no principled way to make a distinction that marks a particular type of sentence as providing the minimal proposition of another. The reason will be that there is no such thing as the minimal proposition. This notion is not absolute but relative, and subject to contextual constraints. 1.3.2

Pinning Down the Minimal Proposition: Semantic Content

Let us restate our problem by contrasting it with the contextualist stand on cancellability. We said that contextualism leads to the claim 10 Kissine (2007) also deals with the problems of minimalism to account for logical entailments. In his view, minimalism has the troublesome consequence of licensing inferences that are clearly invalid. For instance, on minimalist grounds ‘John is not tall’ ought to entail ‘John is not tall for an eight-year-old boy’, which licenses an (invalid) inference from ‘if John cannot be part of an NBA team, then he’s not tall’ to ‘if John cannot be part of an NBA team, then he’s not tall for an eight-year-old boy’.

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that there are few – perhaps no – propositions that are not actually cancellable. We are pointing towards the reverse case: given that what is logically entailed is also what is more difficult to cancel, there are too many – perhaps infinite numbers of – propositions that are noncancellable. So if logical entailment has something to do with the search for the minimal proposition, there must be some principled way to determine at which point in that chain of entailed propositions one must stop. To this end, the best suggestion probably comes from the idea of semantic content: the minimal proposition will be the one that is entailed by the sentence and that captures the appropriate semantic content of the lexical elements of the sentence, i.e. semantic content that is more specific than ‘something’, ‘someone’ and the like. Logical entailment and appropriate semantic content seem to impose different constraints when it comes to pinning down the minimal proposition. The principle of entailment points towards the role that logical and syntactical properties play in determining the elements that add up to the minimal proposition and what can be inferred from it. The idea is that the minimal proposition is closer to the logical form of the uttered sentence than any other semantic interpretation. On the other hand, the idea of appropriate semantic content is that distinct semantic values are assigned to those syntactically identified components. The point to stress is that it is always an interpreted logical form that we are dealing with, and that semantic minimalism claims that it is possible to find a unique interpretation that piggybacks exactly on logico-syntactically identified elements. For instance, the interplay between both sorts of constraints – logico-syntactic and semantic – is evident in Borg’s modular semantic theory examined above. To return to our problem, what we need is a principled way to determine that (1a), but not (1b) (or (1c)-(1d), for that matter), captures the appropriate semantic content of (1). For instance, why is at least three part of the semantic value of ‘three’, while exactly three is not? To find an answer, it may be useful to review the notion of semantic content at play, as stated by defenders of semantic minimalism. For Cappelen and Lepore (2005: 143), the semantic content of a sentence S has the following functions: [it is] the content that all utterances of S share. It is the content that all utterances of S express no matter how different their contexts of utterance are. It is also the content that can be grasped and reported by someone who is ignorant about the relevant characteristics of the context in which an utterance of S took place.


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Applying this to our example, the idea would be that, first, all utterances of (1) ‘Brian has three cats’ share the content (1a) that Brian has at least three cats. Second, any competent speaker uttering (1) cannot help but express the content of (1a) no matter the context. And third, any competent interpreter hearing (1) out of context may confidently report (1a), even if she is reluctant to commit to other interpretations, such as (1b), i.e. Brian has exactly three cats. The trouble now is that there are many different propositions expressed by S that can play those three roles. Consider again sentences (1c) and (1d): their respective contents meet the requirement of being shared by all utterances of (1), no matter how different the contexts, and can be grasped and reported by anyone who hears S. Even better, consider (1e) ‘somebody has something’. Its content is also intercontextually shared by all utterances of (1). May we, therefore, suppose that (1e), or something close to it, is the best approximation to the minimal proposition expressed by (1), better than (1) itself? At first glance, this option would be perfectly consistent with two features: (i) The minimal proposition would piggyback, in the closest possible way, on the syntactic structure of the sentence, just as minimalists desire. (ii) The minimal proposition would be what we find at the bottom of the inferential chain that begins with the first interpretation of S and follows with any sentence entailed by such an interpretation; in other words, it would be entailed by all of them while entailing none, being thus the most uncancellable of propositions, just as the cancellability test demands. Of course, we do not think that any of this is what minimalists are looking for, i.e. we do not think that anyone wishes to endorse the claim that (1e) captures the minimal proposition for (1). So one may still strengthen the notion of semantic content of a sentence S by adding that it is the content shared by all and only utterances of S. Let us call this the requirement of exclusivity for semantic content. It is patent that (1e) is shared by all utterances of S, but not only by them, so (1e) does not capture exclusively the semantic content of (1). Yet, is exclusivity an admissible way of strengthening the criterion? Note that exclusivity rules out the possibility that two different sentences S and S* share their semantic content. But surely, we think, one does not want such a strong requirement. It leads to Cappelen and Lepore’s extreme view that the best (the only?) way to articulate S’s semantic content is by means of S itself. We already argued that this claim tends to conflate semantic and phonological considerations, and now we can add that it might jeopardize the semantic enterprise, in that it could threaten the possibility of finding robust semantic commonalities

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between sentences. So if one wants to retain the idea that different sentences may share the same semantic content, one has to be satisfied with the idea that the semantic content of S is simply the content shared by all utterances of S, not exclusively by them. And then the point of the previous paragraph holds: the content of sentences like (1e) may fill the bill. Let us retrace our steps so far. We began by wondering what counts as a minimal proposition so as to make this notion amenable to experimental research into whether it plays a role in people’s utterance processing. We tried a strategy related to cancellability – the principle of entailment – that proved to be insufficient. We showed that nothing seemed to be appropriate as a (testable) candidate for the minimal proposition of S, except S itself. This seemed to raise two problems. One is that it seems to make minimalism trivially verifiable because any account of the comprehension of S holds that S has to be processed some way or another, namely, as a phonological representation. Another is that there are many other sentences that have a contentpreserving role similar to the role of S, namely, those sentences that preserve the bare bones of the semantic structure of S. At this point, one may think that we have lost a crucial element for minimalist semantic content along the way: that it is obtained through composition of the semantic values of the elements of the sentence. Let us call this the compositionality requirement. The idea is that the semantic content of (1) is obtained from composition of the semantic values of ‘Brian’, ‘has’ and so on. Now, one may rightly claim that the semantic content of (1e) is not obtained from these values. But, what are those values? The minimalist answer seems to be that they are fixed values that are kept constant across contexts. So one may immediately think that the value of ‘Brian’ would be Brian, the value of ‘three’ would be three and so on. However, there is no principled reason why the semantic values have to be fixed on those particular values. Note that minimalism is only committed to the claim that ‘Brian’ is fixed to whatever value ‘Brian’ keeps across contexts. To say that ‘Brian’ is fixed to Brian appears as a stronger claim. So one may still regard it as a possibility that ‘Brian’ is fixed to a more non-committal value, namely, the value somebody or perhaps somebody presumably called Brian. If this were the case, and generalizing the strategy, one may defend the view that (1e) ‘Somebody has something’ captures the minimal proposition for (1) better than any other sentence does. We expect that most readers will be reluctant – indeed we are ourselves – to admit that the semantic values of ‘Brian’ and ‘three cats’ in (1) can be captured, respectively, by ‘somebody’ and ‘something’ in


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(1e). So what is our point here? Our point is to force minimalists to admit that their programme demands semantic values that are more specific than those. Let us call this the specificity requirement. One way to meet this requirement – the way of archetypical minimalists like Cappelen and Lepore – is by taking that the semantic values that enter the composition correspond, roughly, to the sort of properties that the words ‘Brian’ and ‘three cats’ denote. But now one may suspect archetypical minimalists of being less minimalist than they think. Let us recall that all the minimalist requires from the semantic theory is that the semantic content of the sentence be a function of the semantic values of its parts. To this end, Cappelen and Lepore contend, one does not need to engage in the metaphysical task of finding what those values are; granted, most of the time we demand something more specific than (1e) as a rendition of (1). We want specific values for its lexical items that help understand what sort of statement about the world (1) is making. But, and this is important, that is precisely what the contextualists have been claiming all along. In other words, the specificity requirement is part and parcel of the contextualist programme. The reason minimalists cannot content themselves with someone as the value for ‘Brian’ in sentences like (1) is the same as the reason why contextualists are dissatisfied with ready as the value for ‘ready’ in sentences like ‘John is ready’: the value is not specific enough and the proposition would convey too little for our purposes. Let us recall now the tension that we remarked on at the end of Section 1.2, when we questioned the stability of the alleged semantic module. Our diagnosis of why one goes astray when one tries to find the criteria for a psychologically realist minimal proposition is that there is a similar tension between two demands on the minimal proposition: (i) Closeness to the syntactic structure: The minimal proposition rides on the logical form. (ii) Specific semantic value: The minimal proposition is not a propositional schema or the like, but a truth-conditional entity. Rather than complementing each other, the two demands pull in different directions: the closer we get to syntactic structure, the less specific the semantic value we can assign. And, conversely, once you begin to assign specific semantic values, you move further from syntax and closer to pragmatics. To put it differently: the balance between demands (i) and (ii) can only be found once context has fixed standards of specificity for the conversational exchange.

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Conclusions: Minimal if or the Relative Reality of Minimal Propositions

We have tried to undermine the idea that the minimal proposition plays a psychological role in the first stages of linguistic processing (the ‘minimal first’ view), as the output of a semantic module, because the evidence for such a module is questionable. We have also tried to undermine the idea that the minimal proposition emerges as one of the propositions expressed by a particular utterance (the ‘minimal too’ view), because there is no principled way to determine which of those propositions counts as the minimal one. As we suggested in Section 1.1, there is a third degree of commitment to the reality of minimal propositions (the ‘minimal if’ view) and this is the one we want to advocate in the closing paragraphs. We think that the discussion in the previous section gives us grounds to argue that the notion of minimal proposition is not an absolute one, as its supporters seem to contend, but a relative one. The idea is that the semantic content that is psychologically real (e.g. grasped by the hearer) can be impoverished in conditions of partial information, lack of context and the like. In those cases, the hearer may still grasp a truth-conditional proposition, yet one that is quite minimal with respect to what the speaker actually intended to say. In fact, this idea is consistent with a modified version of Cappelen and Lepore’s Speech Act Pluralism. This thesis states that ‘no one thing is said . . . by any utterance: rather, indefinitely many propositions are said’ (Cappelen and Lepore, 2005: 199). We want to claim that there are indefinitely many propositions that an utterance may express, including specifically any of those that belong to the chain of propositions entailed by S. If it is granted that none of those propositions counts as the minimal one, then there is no point in trying to determine the minimal proposition of a particular sentence S. But this does not exclude that one of those minimal renditions of S can be entertained by the hearer in the appropriate context. The point is that, in order to elicit the appropriate semantic intuitions from subjects, you also need to contrive special scenarios that draw the attention of the listener to semantic features in the most ‘uncontaminated’ (by the context) possible way. Indeed, this is admittedly the procedure that Cappelen and Lepore follow: Our view . . . is that there is a sharp distinction between communicated content and semantic content. Nonetheless, we use


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communicated content (the content we succeed in communicating to our readers) to ‘get at’ semantic content (semantic context sensitivity in particular). There is of course no other way to proceed. The purpose of the tests is to generate contexts in which semantic content is salient . . . They are ways to get the audience to notice semantic features of sentences uttered. They create contexts in which our attention is drawn to features of the semantic content expressed by the utterances in question. (2005: 113)

Their aim, of course, is to show that the same sentence S in different contexts is able to elicit the same semantic content. But this does not mean that the alleged semantic content is the common element that is present in all contexts in which S is uttered. The only thing it shows is that the content in question is brought to mind if the context is conducive to it. There can be other contexts in which the alleged common semantic content is absent, but a different, perhaps less specific content, is obtained. For instance, in hearing ‘the lynx chased the shrew’, there might be contexts in which the hearer has a deficient idea about what a lynx or a shrew are, yet she is still proficient enough in English to grasp their respective semantic roles, e.g. as agent and patient. This may be enough to recover a general truth-conditional meaning that involves that some creature chased another one. Recall again that, according to Cappelen and Lepore (2005: 143), the semantic content of a sentence S is (a) the content that all utterances of S share, (b) the content that all utterances of S express no matter how different their contexts of utterance are, and (c) the content that can be grasped and reported by someone who is ignorant about the relevant characteristics of the context in which an utterance of S took place. We contend that it is possible to agree with (c) while rejecting (a) and (b). That is, it is possible to accept that, in hearing S without any contextual information, there is some proposition that one may entertain (Martıńez-Manrique and Vicente, 2004); it is also acceptable that this proposition will be, in some sense, a minimal proposition that takes into account only what the sentence itself provides.11 But this does not mean that this proposition is expressed by the speaker, or entertained by the hearer, in every context of utterance. 11 This proposition is reminiscent of Recanati’s ‘external proposition’ (Recanati, 1993: 289), or Perry’s ‘reflexive proposition’ (Perry, 2001).

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In fact, if Cappelen and Lepore broadened the audience to which they address their thought experiments, they might find instances in which the semantic content grasped appears to be an ‘ultraminimal’ proposition not unlike (1e) above. Suppose that the audience for (1) ‘Brian has three cats’ includes people who have no idea who Brian is, or have a vague notion of what cats are. Then it may be possible to characterize their common understanding of (1) as ‘Somebody has something’ or, more plausibly, as ‘Somebody presumably called Brian has a number of things that receive the name of ‘‘cat’’’. To insist that they can ‘grasp and report’ a more specific semantic content of (1) just because they are able to report ‘X said that Brian has three cats’ is to confuse access to the semantic representation of a sentence with access to its phonological representation.12 The impoverished subjects of this example have, indeed, access to some semantic representation, the one their meagre knowledge of Brian and cats – and their rich knowledge of syntax – permits them to have. They are in a situation similar to Alice’s after listening to Jabberwocky: ‘Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas – only I don’t exactly know what they are! However, somebody killed something: that’s clear, at any rate’. We think that in some cases this is as psychologically real as minimal propositions can get.

Acknowledgments This paper is part of research projects HUM2005-03211/FISO, HUM2005-07358 and HUM2005-07539-C02-00 of the Ministerio de Educacioń y Ciencia, and VA077A07 of the Junta de Castilla y Leoń. The authors wish to thank the audience of the Utterance Interpretation and Cognitive Models workshop, especially Mark Jary and Elisabetta Lalumera, as well as two anonymous referees, for their comments. We also wish to thank the editors of this volume for their dedication. Thanks also to Juan Jose´ Acero and Manuel Hernańdez Iglesias. 12 A referee points out that this example may involve a change in language. What the hearer would have ‘is not English, it is ‘‘English*’’, an impoverished version of English that may well have a different semantics from English’. We disagree: if you count this as a change of language then you are individuating languages at the level of idiolects. Our example involves normal English speakers with (different sorts) of gaps in their conceptual repertoire. The point is that in many cases those gaps will not prevent them from retrieving a minimal truth-conditional content based on their general semantic competence.


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References Atlas, J. D. 2005. Logic, Meaning, and Conversation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bach, K. 1994. Semantic slack: What is said and more. In S. L. Tsohatzidis, ed., Foundations of Speech Act Theory: Philosophical and Linguistic Perspectives, pp. 267–291. London: Routledge. Bach, K. 2006. The excluded middle: Semantic minimalism without minimal propositions. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 73:435–442. Bezuidenhout, A. and J. C. Cutting. 2002. Literal meaning, minimal propositions, and pragmatic processing. Journal of Pragmatics 34: 433–456. Bezuidenhout, A. and R. K. Morris. 2004. Implicature, relevance, and default pragmatic inference. In I. Noveck and D. Sperber, eds., Experimental Pragmatics, pp. 257–282. Houndmills: Palgrave. Borg, E. 2004. Minimal Semantics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Borg, E. Forthcoming. Semantics and the nature of psychological evidence. In S. Sawyer, ed., New Waves in Philosophy of Language. Aldershot: Ashgate Press. Breheny, R. 2008. A new look at the semantics and pragmatics of numerically quantified noun phrases. Journal of Semantics 25:93–139. Breheny, R., N. Katsos, and J. Williams. 2006. Are generalised scalar implicatures generated by default? An on-line investigation into the role of context in generating pragmatic inferences. Cognition 100:434–463. Capone, A. 2006. On Grice’s circle (a theory-internal problem in linguistic theories of the Gricean type). Journal of Pragmatics 38:645–669. Cappelen, H. and E. Lepore. 2005. Insensitive Semantics. Oxford: Blackwell. Cappelen, H. and E. Lepore. 2006. Response. Mind and Language 21:50–73. Carston, R. 2002. Thoughts and Utterances. London: Blackwell. Fodor, J. 1983. The Modularity of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gibbs, R. 2002. A new look at literal meaning in understanding what is said and implicated. Journal of Pragmatics 34:457–486. Gibbs, R. and J. Moise. 1997. Pragmatics in understanding what is said. Cognition 62:51–74. Grice, H. P. 1989a. Logic and conversation. In H. P. Grice, ed., Studies in the Way of Words, pp. 22–40. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Originally published in Cole, P. and J. L. Morgan (eds.). 1975. Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Acts, pp. 41–58. New York: Academic Press. Grice, H. P. 1989b. Further notes on logic and conversation. In H. P. Grice, ed., Studies in the Way of Words, pp. 41–57. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Originally published in Cole, P. and J. L. Morgan (eds.). 1975. Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Acts, pp. 113–128. New York: Academic Press.

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Kissine, M. 2007. The fallacy of semantic minimalism. Facta Philosophica 9:23–35. MacKay, G. and A. Shaw. 2004. A comparative study of figurative language in children with autistic spectrum disorders. Child Language Teaching and Therapy 20:13–32. Martıńez-Manrique, F. and A. Vicente. 2004. Overhearing a sentence: Recanati and the cognitive view of language. Pragmatics and Cognition 12:219–251. Nicolle, S. and B. Clark. 1999. Experimental pragmatics and what is said: A response to Gibbs and Moise. Cognition 69:337–354. Noveck, I. and D. Sperber. (eds.). 2004. Experimental Pragmatics. Houndmills: Palgrave. Perry, J. 2001. Reference and Reflexivity. Stanford: CSLI Publications. Recanati, F. 1993. Direct Reference. Oxford: Blackwell. Recanati, F. 2004. Literal Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Recanati, F. 2006. Crazy minimalism. Mind and Language 21:21–30. Robbins, P. 2007. Minimalism and modularity. In G. Preyer and G. Peter, eds., Context Sensitivity and Semantic Minimalism: Essays on Semantics and Pragmatics, pp. 303–319. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sperber, D. 1994. The modularity of thought and the epidemiology of representations. In L. A. Hirschfeld and S. A. Gelman, eds., Mapping the Mind, pp. 39–67. New York: Cambridge University Press. Titone, D., P. S. Holzman, and D. L. Levy. 2002. Idiom processing in schizophrenia: Literal implausibility saves the day for idiom priming. Journal of Abnormal Psychology 111:313–320. de Villiers, J., R. J. Stainton, and P. Szatmari. 2007. Pragmatic abilities in autism spectrum disorder: A case study in philosophy and the empirical. Midwest Studies in Philosophy XXXI:292–317. Weiner, M. 2006. Are all conversational implicatures cancellable? Analysis 66:127–130.


2

What Use Is ‘What Is Said’? MARINA TERKOURAFI

Abstract The advent of experimental pragmatics as an independent field of study has raised several questions regarding the object of a theory of meaning in natural language. The extent to which individual psychological processes are relevant to definitions of meaning is central to these debates, and the notion of ‘what is said’ (WIS) seems to be a prime candidate for scrutiny. Having been assimilated with either logical form, compositional meaning, or with the truth-evaluable proposition expressed by the speaker’s utterance, the theoretical usefulness of the original notion proposed by Grice has been challenged; moreover, evidence that hearers hardly ever attend to it when interpreting speakers’ utterances has called its psychological plausibility into question. However, this need not be a foregone conclusion. To date, investigations of WIS have focused almost exclusively on cases of semantic incompleteness, metaphor and scalar implicatures. A so far under-exploited resource with respect to WIS is the area of indirect speech acts. In this chapter, I discuss two types of evidence – responding to, and recalling indirect speech acts – that suggest the interlocutors’ ability to attend to a minimalist version of WIS in conventionalized indirect speech acts under specific conditions (explicit instruction, increased face-threat). To account for this evidence, an overall theory of linguistic communication must make room for a notion of WIS as the content of the speaker’s locutionary act, which is prior to pragmatic enrichment (hence may not be truth-evaluable) and Utterance Interpretation and Cognitive Models. Philippe De Brabanter and Mikhail Kissine (eds.). Current Research in the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface, Vol. 20. r 2009 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited. All rights reserved.

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28 / MARINA TERKOURAFI not cancellable – what is termed in this chapter, a minimalist conception of WIS. Keywords: saying versus meaning, locutionary act, semantic intention, communicative intention, indirect speech acts, conventionalization.

2.1

Introduction

The notion of ‘what is said’ (henceforth: WIS) by a speaker in producing an utterance u was famously introduced as a term of art in the pragmatics literature by Paul Grice (1989a [1975]: 25) as part of his programme for analysing speaker’s meaning, which led him to the formulation of the notion of implicature. In order to define what is implicated by a speaker in uttering u, Grice needed first to delimit WIS. Since then, a considerable amount of effort has been invested by subsequent theorists in trying to elucidate WIS. And rightly so. For Grice’s explicit discussion of WIS is limited to a couple of paragraphs on pages 25 and 86–87 of Studies in the Way of Words, leaving his fuller understanding of this notion to be reconstructed (or perhaps inferred, with the pertinent risk of error) on the basis of his use of other – no less cryptic – expressions, such as ‘making as if to say’ (1989a: 30). The purpose of this chapter is twofold: first, to trace the evolution of WIS since its original inception to contemporary theorizing. This sketch is not exhaustive1 but merely intended to set the ground for the second, and primary, aim of this chapter, which is to discuss what room, if any, there may be for a notion of WIS in pragmatic theorizing in the 21st century. The advent of experimental pragmatics as an independent field of study in the late 20th century has raised several questions regarding the object of a theory of meaning in natural language. The extent to which individual psychological processes are relevant to definitions of meaning is central to these debates, and the notion of WIS seems to be a prime candidate for scrutiny, having been drastically reformed (e.g. by Recanati, 1989, 2004), or even downright rejected (e.g. by Carston, 1999, 2002). However, this need not be a foregone conclusion. Investigations of WIS in the literature have focused almost exclusively on cases of semantic incompleteness, metaphor and scalar

1 For detailed overviews of the literature on WIS, the reader is referred to Carston (2002, chap. 2) and Recanati (2004, chap. 1).

WHAT USE IS ‘WHAT IS SAID’? / 29 implicatures.2 A so far little exploited resource with respect to WIS is the area of indirect speech acts. Yet, intuitively, indirect speech acts should be pertinent to this debate, once the affinity between Grice’s WIS and Austin’s locutionary act (which may be further broken down into phonetic, phatic and rhetic acts; Austin, 1962: 92–98) is noted.3 In the last part of this chapter, I discuss two types of evidence – responding to, and recalling indirect speech acts – that suggest the interlocutors’ ability to treat indirect speech acts differently when these acts remain distinct at the locutionary level (i.e. in terms of WIS), even though they may be equivalent in terms of their illocutionary and perlocutionary potentials. In contrast to contextualist argumentation, this evidence supports a more minimalist/literalist conception of WIS (Bach, 1994, 2001; Saul, 2002a, b), akin – yet not identical – to Grice’s original notion. But let us take things from the beginning.

2.2

What Grice Said

Grice introduced the notion of WIS in ‘Logic and Conversation’ as follows (1989a: 25): In the sense in which I am using the word say, I intend what someone has said to be closely related to the conventional meaning of the words (the sentence) he has uttered.

Another definition of WIS is found in ‘Utterer’s meaning and intentions’ (Grice, 1989b: 87): ‘‘U (utterer) said that p’’ entails . . . [that] . . . U did something x (1) by which U meant that p 2 For some related experimental studies see Gibbs and Moise (1997), Nicolle and Clark (1999), Gibbs (2002), Noveck and Sperber (2004), Breheny et al. (2006). 3 In recent years, this affinity has been pointed out in a series of publications by Kent Bach. Nevertheless, while building on this affinity, Bach also departs from it. Specifically, both Grice and Austin envisaged WIS and ‘locutionary meaning’ respectively as being propositional (hence truth-evaluable), while a distinguishing feature of Bach’s account of WIS is that the requirement of propositionality is now abandoned (Bach, 2001; see Section 2.2.2). This is made clear, among other things, by these scholars’ respective treatments of lexical items such as ‘but’, ‘therefore’, ‘nevertheless’, etc. On Grice’s (1989a: 25) and Austin’s accounts (at least as the latter is rendered by Strawson; see Strawson, 1973: 57), these items give rise to conventional implicatures which are not part of WIS/locutionary meaning. But on Bach’s account, the full conventional meaning of these items – including those parts of their meaning that Grice and Austin thought impli(cat)ed – is part of WIS (Bach, 1999a).

30 / MARINA TERKOURAFI (2) which is an occurrence of an utterance type S (sentence) such that (3) S means ‘p’ (4) S consists of a sequence of elements (such as words) in a way licensed by a system of rules (syntactical rules) (5) S means ‘p’ in virtue of the particular meanings of the elements of S, their order and their syntactical character.

From a quick reading of these excerpts, it would seem as if WIS were equivalent to compositional or sentence meaning.4 Indeed, this is the view of WIS that Gibbs (2002: 474–475) attributes to Grice. However, this interpretation is easily thwarted by the following example that shows that Grice had more in mind. Discussing an utterance of the ambiguous sentence ‘He is in the grip of a vice’, which may mean that one is either tightly held by some kind of implement, or prey to a bad habit, Grice (1989a: 25) argues that an utterance of this sentence out of context would leave the hearer entertaining both possibilities about what the speaker had said. This is what we might expect if WIS were simply equivalent to sentence meaning, and ‘He is in the grip of a vice’ could be interpreted either analytically (compositionality operating over words), or idiomatically (compositionality operating over lexical entries larger than words). However, Grice continues, ‘for a full determination of what the speaker had said’ (1989a: 25; emphasis added), one would need to know (1) the identities of referring expressions, (2) the time of utterance and (3) which of the two meanings of the ambiguous utterance the speaker had in mind.5 It is this richer notion of WIS that Grice goes on to contrast with what is implicated in the remainder of ‘Logic and Conversation’. It would appear, then, that Gricean WIS must be interpreted in this richer sense, encompassing not only the conventional meanings of 4 Compositional meaning and sentence meaning come apart in the case of sentences containing idioms, which contribute their non-compositional, idiomatic meaning en bloc to sentence meaning. 5 Grice’s discussion of this example as a case of ambiguity shows that there is nothing stopping him from considering the metaphorical meaning of ‘in the grip of a vice’ to be part of WIS, so long as the metaphor is conventional (i.e. an idiom). This is a timely reminder of the priority of conventionality over literality in Grice’s account of WIS, which is consonant with his description of varieties of non-natural meaning (1989b; cf. Saul, 2002a: 349). At the same time, it raises the thorny issue of degree of conventionalization (of metaphors and other tropes) for Grice’s account. Clearly, only an (assumed) difference in degree of conventionalization can explain why Grice can treat the idiomatic reading of ‘He is in the grip of a vice’ as part of WIS, yet feel unable to do the same a mere four pages later for ‘You are the cream in my coffee’, categorizing the latter as a case of the speaker ‘making as if to say’ instead.

WHAT USE IS ‘WHAT IS SAID’? / 31 the words (the sentence) uttered, but also reference assignment, indexical resolution and disambiguation. This interpretation is supported by Grice’s always referring to ‘what someone [B/a man/U (utterer)] said’ (1989a: 25, 24, 30, 31, 87; emphasis added), constantly reminding us that WIS should not be associated with sentences, but with agents’ locutionary acts.6 It is also supported, as Saul (2002a: 351) points out, by the first requirement of the second definition above (1989b: 87), according to which WIS must be meant by the speaker – in other words, WIS must be reflexively intended by her (the speaker must intend the hearer to recognize this). This requirement compels Grice to adopt a rather ingenious – or confusing, as the case may be – solution in cases of metaphor, where, according to Grice, the speaker only ‘makes as if to say’ (1989a: 34). In this way, Grice manages to keep separate those cases where the conventional meaning of the words (the sentence) uttered þ reference assignment þ indexical resolution þ disambiguation is reflexively meant by the speaker (‘speaker said that p’) from those cases where it is not (‘speaker made as if to say that p’). This usage is another consequence of the centrality of reflexive intention to Grice’s account of speaker’s meaning: lacking such an intention, the speaker can only ‘make as if to say’ what she would be saying if such an intention were present. Clearly, Grice considered reference assignment, indexical resolution and disambiguation to be necessary for a ‘full determination of what the speaker had said’ (1989a: 25) because he wanted – indeed: needed, if his account was to dispel the appearance of divergences between the formalist and informalist positions sketched at the beginning of his essay (1989a: 22–24) – WIS to be truth-evaluable. So much follows from the fact that he considers conventional implicatures not to be a part of WIS (1989a: 25). If conventional meaning is, as we just saw, a prime determinant of WIS, the only reason Grice could possibly have had for insisting that conventional implicatures are indeed just that, both conventional and implicated, is that they do not affect

6 The association of WIS with the speaker’s locutionary act and intentions in Grice’s writings is called into question by the following remark (cited in Carston, 2002: 104): ‘[t]he idea of Conversational Implicature, [ . . . ] emphasized the radical importance of distinguishing (to speak loosely) what our words say or imply from what we in uttering them imply’ (original emphasis). However, this remark contains no reference to what we say but only to what our words say, making it even more cryptic about its significance for WIS and hard to reconcile with the rest of Grice’s writings. As such, I merely content myself with noting it here without further comment.

32 / MARINA TERKOURAFI the truth-conditions of the sentence uttered.7 Moreover, this truthevaluable WIS should be meant by the speaker, which means that its truth-conditions should be those of a proposition reflexively intended by the speaker – else, the whole manoeuvre with ‘making as if to say’, which allows Grice to keep WIS tied to the speaker’s intentions, would have been in vain. In short, Grice envisaged WIS as at once: (i) compositional (in a broad sense, which may include contributions by idioms), (ii) propositional (hence truth-evaluable) and (iii) reflexively intended.

2.2.1

Criticisms of Gricean WIS

A major – perhaps even the main – discovery of post-Gricean pragmatics is that WIS understood as encompassing the conventional meanings of the expressions uttered, along with reference assignment, indexical resolution and disambiguation, may fall short in several ways of determining the truth conditions of the proposition expressed by the speaker’s utterance. According to a conservative estimate (Levinson, 2000: 172–186), ellipsis unpacking and narrowing generalities ought to be added alongside reference assignment, indexical resolution and disambiguation to the list of processes that render WIS fully propositional and hence truth-evaluable.8 This type of ‘semantic incompleteness’ (Bach, 2001) or ‘semantic underdeterminacy’ (Carston, 2002) is being addressed in various ways, by positing other conceptual entities that go the extra mile from linguistic meaning to the proposition expressed by the speaker’s utterance. While theorists do not agree on what to call these entities – proposed labels include ‘explicature’ (Sperber and Wilson, 1995[1986]), ‘pragmatically determined aspects of what is said’ (Recanati, 1989), ‘impliciture’ (Bach, 1994) and ‘generalized conversational implicature’ (as this term is used by Levinson, 2000 and elsewhere) – there is widespread agreement that more interpretative work is needed to arrive at the correct truth-conditions for the speaker’s utterance than what Grice had originally envisaged. Moreover, not only these further processes but even the three originally proposed by Grice are driven by much the same pragmatic considerations of intention attribution that drive the 7

For a contrary opinion, see Bach (1999a), and footnote 3 above. Less conservative estimates are proposed within various versions of contextualism (e.g. Recanati, 2004: 83–97). 8

WHAT USE IS ‘WHAT IS SAID’? / 33 derivation of implicatures, and are, according to at least some theorists,9 equally recoverable by the same pragmatic mechanisms, a phenomenon which Levinson (2000: 173–174) has dubbed ‘Grice’s circle’. These arguments undermine the status of Gricean WIS as an independent conceptual entity from two sides. First, contrary to what Grice had originally intended, it can no longer function as a counterpart to what is implicated; instead, this role is now taken up by the proposition expressed by the speaker’s utterance, however we label this. Second, it is no longer distinct from what is implicated in terms of how it is put together, since – at least on some accounts – the tools needed to make WIS truth-evaluable are the same as those used in determining what is implicated. If the above remarks make Gricean WIS appear to be theoretically shaky, it also seems to be psychologically implausible. In a series of experiments involving understanding of semantically incomplete sentences and sentences giving rise to scalar implicatures, Gibbs and Moise (1997) found that experimental subjects consistently reported the pragmatically enriched propositions corresponding to the speaker’s utterance as WIS by the speaker, even though these involved a fair amount of pragmatic enrichment beyond reference assignment, indexical resolution and disambiguation. In a response to Gibbs and Moise, Nicolle and Clark (1999) presented alternative experimental findings showing that, with a bit of tutoring, experimental subjects can recognize a less ‘inflationary’, more semantically oriented notion of WIS. This appeal to experimental investigation of normal interpreters’ intuitions as a source for individuating WIS is revived by Recanati (2004: 15). However, this strategy is treated with scepticism by Bach (2007: 489), who suggests further tests by which subjects may well acquiesce to a more conservative notion of WIS. Grice was perhaps aware of these difficulties in circumscribing his favoured understanding of WIS, and that is why he readily admitted that his appeal to ‘an intuitive understanding of say’ was a ‘problematic assumption’ (1989a: 24–25).

2.2.2

Post-Gricean Reactions to WIS

Responses to the problems with Gricean WIS outlined in the previous section have ranged from downright rejection to reformulation, 9 Bach is a notable exception, sustaining that a syntactically complete sentence may fall short of determining the communicated proposition in two ways – by expressing a minimal proposition, or a propositional radical – that trigger two specific types of enrichment, expansion and completion (Bach, 1994).

34 / MARINA TERKOURAFI which has in turn been either in the direction of enriching WIS with pragmatic information, or in the opposite one, of stripping it down to its bare semantic essentials. From this great variability in responses, one thing is certain: WIS as originally envisaged by Grice is not a viable notion – though, with some fine-tuning, it may become one. Within frameworks that tend to psychologize meaning, two main lines of reaction to WIS have emerged. On the one hand, WIS has been rejected as being ‘redundant in a cognitive processing account of utterance understanding, since it plays no role in the interpretation which is not already played by the independently motivated level of logical form’ (Carston, 1999: 109). This is the reaction of Relevance Theory, in which pragmatic enrichments of the logical form corresponding to the speaker’s utterance generate explicatures, based on which implicatures may or may not be generated. Both explicatures and implicatures are consciously accessible but no other components of meaning are. It would indeed seem that there is little room for WIS in an account that identifies meaning with those parts of it that are consciously accessed.10 On the other hand, Recanati (1989, 1993) has pursued a subtly different contextualist approach. Like Relevance theorists, Recanati prioritizes processing concerns.11 He has thus proposed an Availability principle according to which ‘What is said must be intuitively accessible to the conversational participants’ (2004: 20). To preserve the objectivity of this principle, the following caveat has been added in recent work: ‘(unless something goes wrong and they do not count as ‘‘normal interpreters’’)’ (ibid.). Clearly, a lot of the onus is now shifted to the notion of ‘normal interpreters’ and the conditions under which one may or may not be considered to be one such. In addition to proposing the Availability principle, Recanati

10

One may nevertheless wonder whether some grain of a literal component of meaning akin to WIS is not retained in the notion of the ‘proposition expressed’ appealed to in RT accounts of metaphor and irony (Carston, 2002: 157–160). To the extent that a proposition may be expressed without being ‘explicated’ (communicated), putting together this proposition cannot be guided by considerations of relevance (which apply to acts of ostension) but would need to draw on more, strictly speaking, ‘linguistic’ types of knowledge, akin to those appealed to by Bach in his minimalist conception of WIS (Bach, 2001). While the role of this notion in the RT framework is avowedly limited (Carston, 2002: 160), merely conceding the need for it suggests that disposing of WIS (or some notion of literal meaning akin to WIS) may be easier said than done. 11 Although these theorists have not been directly concerned with experimenting with pragmatic processing, preliminary experimental results would seem to support their intuitions (cf. Noveck and Sperber, 2004).

WHAT USE IS ‘WHAT IS SAID’? / 35 distinguishes between primary and secondary pragmatic processes, the former determining WIS, while the latter taking WIS as input for further inferencing (1993, 2001: 78–79). The result is a pragmatically enriched notion of WIS that is close to the original Gricean notion in terms of propositionality and truth-evaluability, but is unconstrained in terms of the sources of contextual knowledge that may be needed to arrive at these. If Grice’s wish to use WIS as a wedge between semantics and pragmatics were a concern, one should perhaps be not too pleased with this result. But clearly this is not Recanati’s concern. However, for those contemporary theorists who do wish to keep semantics distinct from pragmatics, a notion of WIS that helps achieve that aim has been a primary concern. Prominent among these, Bach (1994, 1999a, b, 2001) has been a constant defender of a semantically oriented WIS, while recently Saul (2002a, b) and Horn (2006) have also devoted some discussion to a more conservative (prior to pragmatic enrichment) notion of WIS. Although their programmes about meaning – whence their interest in WIS – are not identical, these scholars agree on some important points regarding WIS. Glossing over the differences, these points may be summarized as follows: (1) The distinction between WIS and what is implicated is not exhaustive; it ignores other varieties of meaning which may arise in more or less mundane cases. (2) WIS is the content of the speaker’s locutionary act; as such, it cannot encompass elements of meaning that do not correspond to elements of the uttered sentence,12 but it includes more than compositional meaning; specifically, it includes a reference to the speaker’s intention. (3) In virtue of (2) above, the availability to, and/or recovery by, the hearer of a particular piece of information is inconsequential to whether this piece of information is part of WIS.

12 That is, barring elements needed for syntactic well-formedness, as in the case of ellipsis, implicit arguments and empty categories. These are unpronounced elements of the sentence corresponding to the speaker’s utterance and therefore part of WIS under the Syntactic Correlation constraint (Bach’s name for Grice’s condition (5) of the definition of WIS in 1989b: 87 cited above; see Bach, 2001: 17, 41, footnote 1). In other words, WIS must be a well-formed sentence (syntactically) but that does not ipso facto make it a (complete) proposition (semantically).

36 / MARINA TERKOURAFI While the above points may well capture the gist of a renewed (one may call it ‘minimalist’) conception of WIS, some further comments may help elucidate its nature, as well as highlight those aspects that are yet to be agreed upon fully. The nature of varieties of meaning that fall outside of WIS and of what is implicated is one such aspect (point (1) above; cf. Reboul, 2007). Being more interested in propositional/truth-conditional aspects of meaning, Bach introduces the phenomenon of conversational impliciture, which encompasses what is implicit in WIS (Bach, 1994; endorsed by Horn, 2006). Saul’s interests, on the other hand, lie more with aspects of meaning that are implicated, for which she proposes an elaborate taxonomy (Saul, 2002b).13 Their interest in different sides of the semantics/pragmatics border – with Bach elaborating on aspects of the former, and Saul on aspects of the latter – may also relate to another (apparent?) difference between their accounts, namely the precise nature of the speaker’s intention that contributes to the determination of WIS (point (2) above). Bach (2001) allows only a limited role for this in disambiguation and indexical resolution, while he takes all other elements of meaning contributed by the speaker’s intention to fall outside of WIS.14 In this respect, he draws a distinction between three types of intentions: the speaker’s semantic intention is a non reflexive type of intention15 that determines which of the two meanings of an

13 Some of Saul’s (2002b) categories overlap with varieties of meaning that Bach accounts for by drawing a distinction between ‘saying’ and ‘meaning’ (2001: 17–18; see also below). For instance, her category of ‘what the speaker attempts but fails to say’ proposed to deal with malapropisms and poor translations (Saul, 2002b: 236–237) would seem to be identical with Bach’s ‘mean[ing] one thing but unintentionally say[ing] something else’ (Bach, 2001: 17) as in misuses of words and slips of the tongue. In this case, an appeal to Occam’s razor would seem to favour Bach’s analysis, for he is able to account for the same phenomena with fewer conceptual tools, i.e. without having to postulate a different conceptual category for each. 14 In containing a reference to the speaker’s (semantic) intention, WIS is different from sentence meaning tout court. Rather, it is akin to what we may call ‘interpreted logical form’ (Bach, 2001: 41, footnote 1). 15 The suggestion that semantic intentions may not be properly reflexive may be read into the following remark by Bach (p.c.; emphasis added): ‘the general idea is that the speaker’s semantic intention determines what he [sic] takes his words to mean as he is using them. This contrasts with his communicative intention, which determines how he intends his audience to take his act of uttering those words’. This of course should not be taken to mean that the two types of intentions may not be consistent, but rather that, when it comes to semantic intentions, unlike communicative intentions, their recognition is not required for their fulfilment.

WHAT USE IS ‘WHAT IS SAID’? / 37 ambiguous sentence is operative (unless one is dealing with deliberate ambiguity), and operates in narrow context16 relative to which it helps determine the semantic value of context-sensitive expressions; the speaker’s communicative intention, on the other hand, like the speaker’s referential intention which it includes, is properly reflexive, and operates in broad context.17 While Bach’s appeal to semantic intentions in this case may at first appear to be somewhat ad hoc, it is nevertheless justified by the definition of WIS as the content of the speaker’s locutionary act, which makes it part and parcel of WIS that it comes associated with a particular speaker, hearer, place and time of utterance (i.e. with a particular narrow context). Saul, on the other hand, does not draw a similar distinction between different kinds of speakers’ intentions. Rather, she seems to be espousing a view of WIS that is more faithful to the Gricean picture, according to which WIS is ‘in large part a matter of linguistic meaning and speaker’s intentions’ (2002a: 351). As such it is possible that Saul may be allowing into WIS more than what Bach is (but see also Saul, 2002a: 359, footnote 17). Despite these differences, one point of concurrence among all three scholars cited earlier as defending a minimalist conception of WIS is that this does not in any way depend on hearers’ interpretations (see point (3) above). This is an important point for anyone who wishes to maintain a distinction between semantics and pragmatics, since relinquishing it would make WIS by an utterance of a sentence in context variable not only across hearers but also over successive interpretations in time (Horn, 2006: 28; Bach, 2007: 490–491; and 16

According to Bach (1999b: 72; cf. Bach, 2005), ‘[t]here are two sorts of contextual information, one much more restricted in scope and limited in role than the other. Information that plays the limited role of combining with linguistic information to determine content (in the sense of fixing it) is restricted to a short list of variables, such as the identity of the speaker and hearer and the time and place of an utterance. Contextual information in the broad sense is anything that the hearer is to take into account to determine (in the sense of ascertain) the speaker’s communicative intention’. 17 At first blush, Bach’s distinction between semantic and communicative intentions may seem to parallel Sperber and Wilson’s distinction between informative and communicative intentions (1995[1986]: 54–64). After all, in both accounts, only communicative intentions are properly reflexive. However, these two distinctions are not identical in that Sperber and Wilson’s informative intentions may range over any set of assumptions that the speaker intends to make manifest to the audience, while Bach’s semantic intentions can only range over semantic information, i.e. ‘information encoded in what is uttered – these are stable linguistic features of the sentence – together with any extralinguistic information that provides (semantic) values to context-sensitive expressions in what is uttered’ (Bach, 2001: 22).

38 / MARINA TERKOURAFI especially Saul, 2002a, and the examples therein). Insisting that WIS falls squarely on the side of the speaker and, at least on Bach’s account, explicitly lifting the requirement that WIS must be meant (i.e. fall within the speaker’s communicative intention), clearly differentiate WIS from what is implicated, which must be so meant. In this respect, Bach (1994: 272, 2001: 17–18) outlines four possible inter-relationships between ‘saying’ and ‘meaning’, which jointly motivate his endorsement of WIS:18 (1) saying something and meaning something else as well (implicature and indirect speech acts); (2) intentionally saying something and meaning something else instead (nonliterality); (3) unintentionally saying something and meaning something else instead (misuses of words and slips of the tongue); and (4) saying something and not meaning anything at all (translating, reciting, rehearsing). This move helps realign the minimalist conception of WIS outlined above with its Gricean predecessor, at least inasmuch as it helps uphold a distinction between a semantic (hearer-independent) view of WIS and a pragmatic (hearer-oriented) view of what is implicated.19 At the same time, it shields this minimalist conception of WIS against criticisms about its psychological (un)availability to the hearer (e.g. Gibbs and Moise, 1997): such criticisms are simply misguided inasmuch as Grice’s project was never one of accounting for utterance interpretation by actual hearers (Saul, 2002a: 356) but one of offering ‘a rational reconstruction’ of it (Bach, 2001: 488). Objections to the Gricean picture stemming from processing concerns are thus irrelevant. Summing up the neo-Gricean conception of WIS in Bach’s (2001: 18) words, what is said, being closely tied to the (or a) meaning of the uttered sentence, provides (allowing for indexicality and ambiguity) the hearer with the linguistic (semantic) component of his basis for inferring what, if anything, the speaker is communicating.

18

The distinction between the first two categories is pertinent to the aims of this chapter, and I shall return to it in Section 2.3.1. 19 Another recent call for restoring a Gricean notion of WIS by dissociating this from what is implicated – though, unlike Bach, not from what is meant – is Hawley (2002). Hawley proposes three conditions for S’s performance of an act of utterance U to count as S saying that p: ‘1. (Association) p is a proposition associated with U; 2. (Explicitness) S bears an explicit attitude to p; 3. (Prominence) p is as prominent as any other proposition satisfying 1 and 2’ (2002: 987). In requiring that WIS must be (a) propositional (by Association) and (b) consciously available (by Explicitness), Hawley’s conception of WIS is more inflationary than the minimalist one outlined in this section, and closer to Recanati’s ‘overly expansive conception of what is said’ (Bach, 2001: 16).

WHAT USE IS ‘WHAT IS SAID’? / 39 A further definition of WIS may be extrapolated from his recent writings. According to this, WIS may be defined as: a context-independent core of standing linguistic meaning that is provided by knowledge of the language and is available to speaker and hearer alike [in virtue of their knowledge of the language applied to a narrow context rather than in virtue of the speaker’s communicative intention; MT] (Bach, 2007: 490).

Bach lists three important consequences of his conception of WIS (2001: 18–19): (i) WIS need not be a complete proposition; (ii) the speaker’s communicative intention cannot contribute to the determination of WIS;20 (iii) WIS is not explicitly cancellable. The minimalist conception of WIS outlined above is the one I will be assuming in the remainder of this chapter. While not claiming that this conception is fully worked out or correct in all its details, I believe that this conception (or one similar to it) must be assumed if the experimental findings presented below are to be accounted for.

2.3

Experimentally Investigating WIS

The rebuttal of criticisms of the renewed conception of WIS as not psychologically real on the grounds that it was never intended as such in the first place, as explained in the previous section, may well restore its viability as a theoretical notion, but it also raises with some urgency the question whether WIS can or should be experimentally investigated. There are three reasons to be hopeful about the possibility (and, indeed, the legitimacy) of such an undertaking. The first one is that even the strictest adherents to a distinction between competence and performance do not give up on empirical investigations of their subject matter; and while seeking to secure subjects’ grammaticality judgements can never be a foolproof procedure, or one that guarantees direct access to their knowledge of language unadulterated by their knowledge of the world, 20 This means that only the semantic values of ‘impure’ indexicals such as here, now, this and that are specified in WIS (by the speaker’s semantic intention), while fixing their referential content requires a reference to broad context and the speaker’s referential intention (part of the speaker’s communicative intention) which is operative therein. This is consistent with point (i) immediately above.

40 / MARINA TERKOURAFI rather than abandoning it altogether, investigators have turned instead to increasingly sophisticated experimental techniques for both collecting and analysing data as a way of enhancing the accuracy of their results (see, e.g. Schu ¨tze, 1996; Cowart, 1997). There is no reason to think WIS should be any different. Even if WIS is more a matter of (contextindependent) knowledge of language than online processing – or, precisely, in order to discover whether that is so – it should still be amenable to empirical investigation, given appropriate experimental techniques.21 The second reason why we ought to be hopeful about the possibility of experimentally investigating WIS is that its defenders themselves are not excluding this possibility. Saul’s (2002a: 358) discussion of several unusual real-life examples draws ‘directly on intuitions about whether audience interpretation affects WIS’. And although the intuitions are her own, there is no reason why similar examples cannot form the basis for a larger scale investigation of people’s intuitions about WIS. In recent work, Bach has gone even further, proposing specific ways in which subjects’ intuitions about WIS may be tested. Building on the third consequence of his account of WIS cited earlier (namely, that WIS is not explicitly cancellable), Bach proposes to test whether WIS (in Recanati’s expanded sense) is cancellable (in Grice’s sense) – a question to which he obviously expects a positive response (2007: 489). Furthermore, he proposes to compare people’s judgements about WIS in pairs of sentences where one member of the pair would make more explicit WIS by the other member of the pair – again, on the minimalist conception of WIS, people’s responses should be that WIS is different in the two cases (ibid.). Further experimental techniques could investigate WIS in more naturalistic settings. Although not designed with WIS specifically in mind, the experiments discussed later in this chapter fall into this last class. The third reason to be optimistic about the possibility of experimentally investigating WIS is that this has already (inadvertently) been done – leading to some encouraging results. In a series of experiments, Nicolle and Clark (1999) tried to replicate the results of

21 In any case, we should not forget that experimental findings never answer our theoretical questions directly, but only as a result of subsequent interpretation. As such, experimental findings should not be expected to provide us with totally new and hitherto unimagined possibilities, but only to adjudicate between those possibilities that various theoretical frameworks have laid out before us. This last proviso must be kept in mind during any experimental investigation: any experimental design, in virtue of seeking to answer a particular question, will generate answers to that question, i.e. it will inevitably contain a dose of self-fulfilling prophecy.

WHAT USE IS ‘WHAT IS SAID’? / 41 Gibbs and Moise (1997), according to whom subjects failed to be sensitive to a more literalist view of WIS (akin to its neo-Gricean conception), consistently reporting the pragmatically enriched proposition as WIS by the speaker’s utterance instead. While Gibbs and Moise’s findings failed to generalize in the follow-up study, what is interesting for our current purposes is the set-up of Nicolle and Clark’s (1999) third experiment. As part of this, they gave subjects ‘a short tutorial on the distinction between ‘‘what is said’’ and ‘‘what is communicated’’ used as technical terms. The subjects were instructed that what is said is a development of the meaning of the words used, whereas what is communicated may go beyond the meaning of the actual words used in an utterance’ (Nicolle and Clark, 1999: 348). While it is likely that defenders of the minimalist conception of WIS would object to Nicolle and Clark’s definition of WIS as ‘a development of the meaning of the words used’ (emphasis added), which seems to bias interpretation toward the enriched proposition expressed and away from a more literalist conception of WIS, it is nevertheless revealing of the experimental possibilities what was the impact of this short tutorial. Analysing the results of this experiment, Nicolle and Clark found that: people can very easily be made aware of ‘what is said’ as something distinct from what is communicated (that is, implicated), even if they do not normally interpret the term ‘what is said’ in this way. [ . . . ] More specifically, it may be that Gibbs and Moise’s experiments tell us more about how the word say is interpreted than about whether people have reliable intuitions concerning what is said in contrast to what is implicated. (1999: 349)

In a recent series of experiments designed to tease apart a Gricean (truth-conditional) from an enriched (incorporating GCIs) notion of WIS, Larson et al. (2009) developed Nicolle and Clark’s idea of a short tutorial into a full-fledged fictional character, Literal Lucy, from whose perspective subjects were trained to assess whether statements presented as part of short conversations were true or false (Literal Lucy condition). Subjects in a further two conditions were instructed to assess whether the same statements ‘interpreted literally [were] T/F’ (Literal No Lucy condition) or simply whether the statements ‘[were] T/F’ (No Literal No Lucy condition). Larson et al. presented subjects in all three conditions with the same set of stimuli, consisting of: (a) control sentences (statements which were entailed or contradicted by a given FACT, and so true or false on semantic grounds); (b) fillers (statements containing ‘necessary contextual elements’ (indexicals, ellipsis, etc.) which were designed to become false in light of a

42 / MARINA TERKOURAFI given FACT upon such material being contributed pragmatically); and, (c) experimental items (statements containing a wide range of GCI triggers which were false given a FACT if the GCI was incorporated into truth conditions (enriched WIS) and true if not (truth-conditional WIS)). While Larson et al.’s focus was on category c (GCIs), their results from category b (NCEs) are very interesting, and, as they readily admit, also surprising. Specifically, they found that, although sentences containing necessary contextual elements were judged false 86%–92% overall – indicating incorporation of a narrow range of pragmatically contributed material into truth conditions, just as Grice would have predicted – this percentage was lower than the contradiction controls, which were ‘at ceiling (98%–99%)’. The difference between contradictions and NCEs was significant, suggesting that some participants, while making judgments in a literal mode of interpretation, are distinguishing even those contextually-supplied elements of WHAT IS SAID from those that are supplied strictly semantically.

Participants’ ability to distinguish between pragmatic contributions to WIS and purely semantic content is certainly encouraging for the possibility of a minimalist notion of WIS that is the topic of this chapter. Moreover, this ability is heightened in the Literal Lucy condition, suggesting (as will be claimed later) that it can only surface if cooperative conversational principles are suspended (cf. Larson et al., 2009) and that it is precisely the application of such principles that may otherwise obscure its presence. 2.3.1

Locating WIS in Indirect Speech Acts

An utterance such as ‘Can you pass the salt?’ is traditionally viewed as performing two speech acts: a direct or secondary one of asking about the hearer’s ability to pass the salt, and an indirect or primary one of requesting that the hearer pass the salt. The idea that a single utterance may convey more than one illocutionary force in context finds a natural home in Grice’s theory of implicature, so it should come as no surprise that it was couched in those terms early on (Searle, 1975). On the Gricean view of the distinction between WIS and what is implicated, the utterance’s direct/literal meaning would be WIS in uttering it, while its indirect/nonliteral meaning would be what is implicated. Of course, recent scrutiny of the distinction between WIS and what is implicated and, in particular, the recognition that it is not exhaustive (see Section 2.2.2) also raise some important questions

WHAT USE IS ‘WHAT IS SAID’? / 43 regarding this traditional view of indirect speech acts (henceforth ISAs). The possibility of a principled distinction between the literal and nonliteral meanings of an ISA may now seem plausible only in the case of those ISAs that are not conventionalized for specific uses. For instance, an utterance of ‘They may have hired a new chef but he’s still got a few things to learn’ may be used in context to request the salt. In this case, the utterance’s literal meaning would be about a cook who has a few things to learn, while its nonliteral meaning would be about something different, namely passing the salt.22 Things are, however, less clear in the case of conventionalized ISAs, which may be described with reference to Morgan’s (1991 [1978]) ‘conventions of usage’. Morgan distinguished between two types of conventions: ‘conventions of the language’ that are ‘arbitrary, a matter of knowledge of the language’ (1991: 246), and ‘conventions of usage’ that are ‘a matter of culture (manners, religion, law . . . )’ (1991: 247). Moreover, he considered the latter to be a conjunction of three elements – occasion, purpose and means – and, crucially, stated that ‘as the connections between purpose and means become obscured, [ . . . ] the convention of usage is reinterpreted as a convention of the language’ (1991: 247). The fluidity of the boundary between the two types of conventions, and the possibility that, over time, conventions of usage may be reinterpreted as conventions of the language are crucial for distinguishing conventionalization from another related phenomenon, that of ‘standardization’ (Bach and Harnish, 1979; Bach, 1998). The latter refers to the fact that the literal meaning of ISAs may be consistently bypassed in interpretation, described by Bach (1975: 235) as a ‘short-circuit[ing]’ of the inference involved. According to Bach, [a] form of words is standardized for a certain use if this use, though regularized, goes beyond literal meaning and yet can be explained without special conventions.[ . . . ] The inference is compressed by precedent. But were there no such precedent, in which case a more elaborate inference would be required, there would still be enough contextual information available to the hearer for figuring out what is being conveyed. That is why special conventions are not needed to explain these cases. (1998: 713; emphasis added) 22 There remains of course the question whether this literal/direct meaning simply corresponds to a complete proposition (an explicature, or pragmatically enriched WIS, as Carston or Recanati might claim), or is made up of two elements, a minimalist WIS that must be semantically expanded/completed into such a proposition (an impliciture, as Bach might claim). As for the nonliteral/indirect meaning of non-conventionalized ISAs, that would be an implicature on both Bach’s and the RT accounts.

44 / MARINA TERKOURAFI On the other hand, conventionalization, as understood in this chapter, is stronger than this, referring to meaning that, though not fully semanticized inasmuch as conventionalized inferences are still cancellable, and hence not yet a convention of the language, is one step closer to that compared to standardization. Put differently, standardization may be distinguished from conventionalization based on the ‘essentially rational (capable of being worked out) versus conventional (requiring knowledge of special conventions, which must be learnt) character of the inferences involved each time’ respectively (Terkourafi, 2005a: 296 and the references therein).23 Groefsema (1992) has questioned whether the nonliteral meaning of conventionalized ISAs such as ‘Can you pass the salt?’ should be considered an implicature at all, suggesting instead that it is an explicature of the speaker’s utterance. Her suggestion receives support from experimental evidence that people do not regularly access the literal meanings of conventionalized ISAs, and are biased toward their nonliteral meanings even in contexts that call for their literal interpretation (Gibbs, 1979, 1983). On this view, conventionalized ISAs do not express two meanings, but only their so-called ‘indirect’ one, and this corresponds to an explicature of the speaker’s utterance. With speech acts recast as higher-order explicatures in RT (Wilson and Sperber, 1993, Carston, 2002: 119),24 this would make the nonliteral meaning of conventionalized ISAs a higher-order explicature of the utterance.25

23 The historical trajectory of table manners and several ISAs current in the contemporary Western world can be helpful to consider in this respect. Taking such a socio-historical approach, Elias (2000 [1939]) successfully argues that the emergence of increasingly restrained and indirect behaviours from the 16th century onwards owes more to processes of social inclusion/exclusion and hardly anything to hygienic or other ‘rational’ motivations subsequent generations may have come to associate with, and project on, these behaviours post facto (2000: 97–98). 24 A higher-order explicature is ‘a particular kind of explicature [ . . . ] which involves embedding the propositional form of the utterance or one of its constituent propositional forms under a higher-level description such as a speech-act description, a propositional attitude description or some other comment on the embedded proposition’ (Carston, 2002: 377). Higher-order explicatures still count as developments of the logical form of the sentence uttered, in virtue of having as one of their constituents the propositional form (or one of the constituent propositional forms) of the utterance. 25 Conventionalized ISAs may of course perform further acts in context, in addition to the one with which they are associated by convention. For instance, ‘Can you pass the salt?’ may, in addition to conveying a (conventional) request for the salt, imply a (nonconventional) criticism of the cook’s cooking. I believe it is uncontroversial among the approaches discussed in this chapter that these additional meanings would be implicatures generated by the speaker’s utterance in context.

WHAT USE IS ‘WHAT IS SAID’? / 45 The bias toward the nonliteral meaning of conventionalized ISAs raises the question: when a convention of usage is present, is there any room for conventions of the language to make a contribution to meaning? In other words, what, if anything, is said in conventionalized ISAs? This is not a problem for the RT view, which dismisses the notion of WIS on independent grounds. On this view, nothing other than what is communicated by the speaker’s utterance need be said by it.26 However, for anyone wishing to defend a notion of WIS close(r) to its Gricean roots, this question must be reckoned with. According to Bach, ISAs are cases of saying something (and meaning it) and meaning something else in addition; that is, they fall under the first of his four possible permutations of ‘saying’ and ‘meaning’ (Bach, 1994: 272, 2001: 17–18; outlined earlier under Section 2.2.2). Although Bach states that this is the case for speech acts ‘in general’, it seems to me that conventionalized ISAs as defined above stand apart from the rest in this regard, being more properly regarded to be cases of sentence nonliterality, and falling under his second category, that of ‘say[ing] one thing and mean[ing] something else instead’ (ibid.). Prima facie support for this claim comes from non-cooperative responses to conventionalized ISAs such as ‘Can you pass the salt?’ that take the form ‘Yes, I can’ without proceeding to do so. If in performing such conventionalized ISAs the speaker meant what she said (a yes-no question), as well as something else in addition (a request), it would be hard to explain the relative priority between the two meanings, whereby solely addressing the question is sure to give rise to charges of uncooperativeness and a humorous (or irritating, as the case might be) effect, whereas solely addressing the request may give rise to charges of impoliteness or abruptness at most. Moreover, interpreting such responses can involve a garden-pathing feel that suggests that the literal meaning of yes-no question was not something that the speaker meant (i.e. reflexively intended) at all, although this is what she said, for no one could deny the syntactic and semantic appropriateness of the response. A further piece of evidence in support of the claim that conventionalized ISAs constitute cases of sentence nonliterality a` la Bach comes from studies of their diachronic development. Surely, if it 26 WIS in conventionalized ISAs may, however, be a problem for Recanati’s approach, if only on terminological grounds, since pragmatically enriched WIS would now correspond to the nonliteral meaning of a conventionalized ISA, leading to a rather counter-intuitive result regarding the ‘said’ in WIS (e.g. an utterance of ‘Can you pass the salt?’ would be sayingpragmatically enriched ‘I am requesting you to pass the salt’).

46 / MARINA TERKOURAFI were the case that, in uttering an ISA, the speaker always meant both what she said and something else in addition, i.e. if both meanings were activated on a par, it would be hard to explain shifts in meaning (and, concomitantly, shifts in illocutionary force) such as that leading from Early Modern English God be with you (a wish) to Present-day English (good)bye (a leave taking) (Arnovick, 1999). Rather, it seems reasonable to assume that, when an ISA starts going down the path of conventionalization (which not all of them necessarily do), there is a moment at which the convention of usage (nonliteral meaning) wins over the convention of the language (literal meaning) and displaces it to yield a new convention of the language (new literal meaning) instead. This is only possible if the boundaries between the four permutations of ‘saying’ and ‘meaning’ envisaged by Bach are not watertight, such that a meaning that starts life as something that the speaker means ‘in addition’ (Bach’s category no. 1) may become the only meaning meant by her (Bach’s category no. 2). If this suggestion is correct, a natural way of distinguishing between the literal and nonliteral components of conventionalized ISAs follows, whereby their literal meaning is WIS (i.e. not reflexively intended by the speaker), while their nonliteral meaning is an impliciture (i.e. all that is reflexively intended by the speaker). The question that of course arises next is how does this impliciture come about: is it a case of ‘fleshing out’ (expanding the minimal proposition; Bach, 1994: 268), or is it a case of ‘filling in’ (completing a propositional radical; Bach, 1994: 269)?27 It seems to me this may have to be decided on a per case basis, but at least for ‘Can you pass the salt?’ the impliciture would seem to be an expansion triggered by the obviousness of the answer.28 This would bring requests of the Can you VP?-type in line with examples such as ‘I have had breakfast’ (trivially true), or ‘I haven’t eaten’ (trivially false) where, as Bach points out, what is communicated could have been made explicit with the insertion of an appropriate phrase, such as ‘today’ after ‘breakfast’, or ‘dinner today’ after ‘eaten’ (1994: 268). Similarly, in the case of ‘Can you pass the

27

Thanks to Philippe De Brabanter for raising this point. Of course, to the extent that the answer to a Can you VP?-type request is not obvious, we are pushed back again towards Bach’s category no. 1 (saying something (and meaning it) and meaning something else in addition). This is then an opportune reminder that the path from standardization to conventionalization doesn’t go only one way, and the boundary between Bach’s categories 1 and 2 may be crossed in either direction, as Elias’s (2000 [1939]) historical account mentioned in footnote 23 aptly illustrates. 28

WHAT USE IS ‘WHAT IS SAID’? / 47 salt?’ what is communicated could have been made explicit with the insertion of ‘and if so, please pass the salt’ after the question. In the next two sections, I discuss some findings from studies on two aspects of ISAs – how they are responded to, and how they are recalled – and their relevance to the minimalist conception of WIS outlined above. While explicit investigation of WIS in ISAs must await future research, the results of these studies are suggestive about the viability of this minimalist conception of WIS.29

2.3.2

Responding to Indirect Speech Acts

Responses to ISAs in naturalistic settings were investigated in a series of experiments by Clark (1979) and Clark and Schunk (1980). The advantage of focussing on responses to ISAs is that they engender the possibility of two-part responses. For instance, in (1): (1) A: Can you pass the salt? B: Yes ((passes)) the first part of B’s response (‘yes’) addresses the literal meaning of A’s utterance (a yes-no question, Q), while the second part of B’s response (action, which may or may not be accompanied by a verbalization of compliance such as ‘here you are’) addresses its nonliteral meaning (a request, R). In this way, two-part responses make transparent whether, to what extent, and under what circumstances ISAs convey

29 A third aspect that may be usefully studied in this respect is the acquisition of conventionalized ISAs, focusing not on how they are interpreted by children, but on how they come to be produced. Observational evidence suggests that ‘direct teaching of the child about what forms to use in various situations’ is an important source of information here (Snow et al., 1990: 303; cf. Saville-Troike, 1989: 230–242). Children are often explicitly taught a conventionalized ISA in tandem with the appropriate context for its use, as in the example of the father who repeated the phrase ‘Please may I have some ketchup’ at the dinner table three times until his daughter repeated it nearly verbatim (Snow et al., 1990: 295). This insistence on the exact forms to be used – following pragmatic enrichment, alternative forms may have equally well communicated the speaker’s primary illocutionary point – suggests that literal meaning (WIS) is important to the acquisition of conventionalized ISAs. As in the case of responses to ISAs below, attending to the literal meaning of conventionalized ISAs is not strictly speaking required to reach the speaker’s communicative goal (the primary illocutionary point of the ISA). Nevertheless, providing evidence of attending to this meaning (by, e.g. responding to it; Clark and Schunk, 1980: 133) has specific interactional consequences – namely, consequences regarding the speaker’s perceived degree of politeness – and that is why it forms part of parents’ explicit socialization of their children.

48 / MARINA TERKOURAFI both their literal and nonliteral meanings or just their nonliteral one. Moreover, they do so inconspicuously, without asking the subject to make an explicit decision about this, which may introduce further complications regarding the phrasing of experimental instructions (as in the experiments by Gibbs and Moise, 1997 and Nicolle and Clark, 1999, discussed earlier). In Clark (1979), responses to more or less conventionalized ways of performing a request were collected by means of rapid anonymous observation (Labov, 1972), while in Clark and Schunk (1980), the experimenters used questionnaires to investigate subjects’ assessments of the politeness of indirect requests. In both cases, the conventionality of the request, among other things, affected whether and to what extent B’s response contained a first part addressing its literal meaning of question: the more conventionalized the form of the request, the less such a part was included in the response, and vice versa (e.g. Clark, 1979: 446, 451, 456). These findings concur with experimental studies of conventionalized ISAs that found that their literal meanings were, for the most part, ignored (Gibbs, 1979, 1983). While this may not be an unexpected finding given the task-oriented nature of the exchanges investigated by Clark (1979) – responses to service-related requests for information over the phone – the questionnaire findings add an interesting twist. First, these subsequent results show that, while responding to the literal meaning of the speaker’s utterance is in no way required to signal cooperativeness, it nevertheless significantly enhances subjects’ perceptions of politeness (Clark and Schunk, 1980: 133; cf. Munro, 1977, cited in Clark, 1979: 473). Second, an analysis of the form of those less frequent responses that did come in two parts is instructive. What such an analysis shows is that the first part of the response consistently matched the literal meaning of the ISA both in form and in meaning (Clark and Schunk, 1980: 133, 135). For instance, indirect requests beginning with ‘May I?’, ‘Could I?’, ‘Can you?’, ‘Will you?’ were appropriately responded to with the corresponding positive first parts (‘Sure (you may)’, ‘Yes (you can)’, ‘Sure (I can)’, ‘Yes (I will)’, while indirect requests beginning with ‘Would you mind’?, ‘Have you told me’? received in response the appropriate negative first parts respectively (‘Not at all (I wouldn’t)’, ‘No I haven’t’). Respondents’ matching the polarity þ assertion fragment of the first parts of their responses to the direct act performed is prima facie evidence that the form of this act is somehow attended to (cf. Levelt and Kelter, 1982). Nevertheless, Clark and Schunk go further than this, claiming that more than the form, the meaning itself of the direct act is

WHAT USE IS ‘WHAT IS SAID’? / 49 attended to.30 Their claim is based on the distribution of these first parts across responses: respondents included these only when it was appropriate to do so considering the direct meaning of the request. For instance, ‘[a]dding a pleasant Yes, I can in response to Can you tell me? increased politeness more than did adding an insulting No you don’t in response to Do I know’? (1980: 133; italics in the original), making it appropriate to include a first part in responses to the former but not to the latter. Based on this finding, Clark and Schunk go on to argue that, depending on the circumstances, responding to ISAs can involve a multiple-meaning process, where both literal and nonliteral meanings are attended to in parallel, rather than an idiomatic one, where only the nonliteral meaning of the ISA is attended to (1980: 133, 141). Significantly, the impact of circumstances on attending to literal meaning proved to be crucial. Unlike the questionnaire results, the matching of the polarity of the direct act in the response was not replicated by the earlier telephone study, where only one of seven respondents appropriately responded with ‘No’ to a request beginning ‘Would you mind?’, matching the polarity of his answer to that of the request (Clark, 1979: 447–448). Clark’s preferred explanation of this result is that what the other six respondents were reacting to is a pragmatically enriched version of what the speaker had said akin to an impliciture/higher-order explicature31 of her utterance which may be glossed as ‘I ask/request you to’. Clark then appeals to the prevalence of positive polarity indirect requests such as ‘Can you?’, ‘Could you?’, ‘May I?’ that give rise to the same impliciture/higher-order explicature as ‘Would you mind’ to explain the bias toward a positive response in these circumstances. The fact that these different results were obtained by different methodologies suggests that, although the literal meaning of conventionalized ISAs is not routinely accessed during the interpretation of utterances, it may still be accessed under certain circumstances (e.g. increased attention to speech, heightened stakes in the conversation) and as such it should figure in an overall account of how we are capable of understanding them. Clark himself hints at this when he adds that ‘[u]nder more deliberate circumstances, [respondents] might prefer to answer Q instead, as in No and Not at all’ (1979: 448; italics in the original). The questionnaire study would seem to tap into this latter type of ability.

30 Local activation of word meaning would be compatible with Gibbs (2002); nevertheless, the compositional interpretation of literal meaning claimed here by Clark and Schunk is not. 31 These terms of course can only be applied to Clark’s study retroactively.

50 / MARINA TERKOURAFI Overall, the Clark (1979) and Clark and Schunk (1980) studies suggest the presence of a literal component of meaning involved in responding to ISAs. But where would this literal component fall on the continuum from the said to the implicated in their various incarnations sketched earlier (see Section 2.2.2)? Clearly, it cannot be equated with sentence meaning, since various ambiguities may be present in sentence meaning which appear to be resolved in literal meaning.32 For instance, an expression such as ‘Can you VP’? can be ambiguous between a ‘knowledge’ and a ‘(physical) ability’ reading. Take the interrogative sentence in (2): (2) ‘Can you speak French’? This can literally mean either of (2a) or (2b): (2a) ‘Do you know how to speak French (in general)’? (2b) ‘Are you able to speak French (now)’? These two readings are not equivalent, as shown by the possibility of the responses in (3a) and (3b): (3a) ‘Yes, I studied three years of French at school’. (3b) ‘Yes. Comment pourrais-je vous aider’? In order, then, to reply to (2) in the affirmative, the hearer must decide between them, matching (3a) to (2a) and (3b) to (2b) respectively – indeed, crosswise pairing of (2a) to (3b) and (2b) to (3a) could lead to accusations of showing off or uncooperativeness respectively. On this view, the illocutionary force of request is conventionally associated only with the ‘ability’ reading of ‘Can you VP’?: only when read as the question in (2b) can (2) be expanded à la Bach to the impliciture in (4): (4) ‘I am asking whether you are able to speak French now, and, if so, I am requesting that you do so’. ` la RT to the two higher-order explicatures in (5a) and (5b):33 or a (5a) ‘I am asking whether you are able to speak French now’. (5b) ‘I am requesting that you speak French now’. 32

The view of sentence meaning I am espousing here is one that is close to compositional meaning with the proviso set out in footnote 4 above. 33 Qua embeddings of a constituent propositional form of the utterance under two different speech act descriptions, a question and a request, (5a) and (5b) remain distinct, although both constitute higher-order explicatures of the speaker’s utterance in (2).

WHAT USE IS ‘WHAT IS SAID’? / 51 In other words, the impliciture/higher-order explicature of request – (4)/(5b) respectively – is enabled only by one of the two possible literal meanings of (2), both of which are nevertheless possible in terms of sentence meaning. So, literal meaning is different from sentence meaning. But literal meaning is also not the same as the basic-level explicature of the speaker’s utterance. If, taking an RT perspective, the literal meaning in (2b) were said to constitute the basic-level explicature of (2), we would still need to distinguish between (5a) and (5b), both of which would now be higher-order explicatures of (2) (Carston, 2002: 119). However, this would leave us unable to account for the different impact of the two illocutionary forces (Q and R) on interpretation and grammaticalization processes highlighted in the earlier discussion of conventionalization (see Section 2.3.1). On the other hand, if we were to follow Bach’s preferred categorization of ISAs as saying something and meaning it and meaning something else in addition, the utterer of (2) would have to mean (i.e. reflexively intend) both (2b) and (4), but now the additional force of request in (4) would have to be an implicature of her utterance. This is because on Bach’s account an impliciture is generated only when the speaker does not mean what she says but means something that completes or expands on what she says. So if the speaker means what she says (2b), then no impliciture is generated and (4) can only be an implicature of her utterance. However, such a move would obliterate the difference between conventionalized and non-conventionalized ISAs, both of which would now be implicatures of the speaker’s utterance, leaving unaccounted for an empirically significant difference between these two types of speech acts established by various methodologies time and again (e.g. Clark, 1979; Clark and Schunk, 1980; Blum-Kulka, 1987; Holtgraves and Yang, 1990; Holtgraves, 1997a; Marquez-Reiter, 2000; see also the next section). The literal meaning of conventionalized ISAs for which Clark (1979) and Clark and Schunk (1980) provide evidence can thus only be equated with a minimalist notion of WIS. Indeed, the kind of disambiguation and indexical (tense) resolution involved in the choice between the two possible readings of (2) above would seem to be a matter of just the kind of semantic intention that Bach admits as being relevant to WIS (see Section 2.2.2 above, esp. footnote 16). In sum, the full meaning of an utterance of (2) in context is now proposed to be broken down to the following components:

‘Can you speak French’? (sentence meaning)

‘Are you able to speak French’? (WIS, incorporating speaker’s semantic intention, not reflexively meant)

52 / MARINA TERKOURAFI

‘I am asking whether you are able to speak French now, and, if so, I am requesting that you do so’. (impliciture after expansion, incorporating speaker’s communicative intention, a request, reflexively meant)

‘It is rude to continue speaking in English when you know your interlocutors don’t understand English’. (potential implicature, a criticism, reflexively meant. Putative context for this implicature: the speaker thinks that (a) the hearer is able to speak French; (b) none of the other participants speak English; (c) the hearer has been speaking English; and (d) the hearer is aware of all of the above).

Responses to ISAs, then, provide evidence for a minimalist notion of WIS as the content of the speaker’s locutionary act, which is routinely ignored during utterance interpretation for reasons of expediency, yet available to surface to consciousness for politeness and other reasons. This conclusion parallels that of Nicolle and Clark (1999: 349) that people can be made aware of a more austere notion of WIS ‘even if they do not normally interpret the term ‘‘what is said’’ in this way’. 2.3.3

Recalling Indirect Speech Acts

The conclusion that a minimalist notion of WIS can be made available to interpretation, even though it normally is not, is further supported by research on memory for the wording of conventionalized ISAs. Memory for the wording of conventionalized ISAs is important because, if all that is computed is their nonliteral (indirect) meaning, then this should also be the only one available to be recalled later on. Conversely, if their literal meaning (WIS) is also computed in parallel, however unwittingly, this should also be available to recall – though recall ability may vary following individual and contextual factors. While the first hypothesis has received extensive support (see Holtgraves, 2008: 361, and the references therein), the second hypothesis is also attractive, since it allows for observed recomputation of the speaker’s intended meaning based on WIS in case the original attempt at an interpretation fails due to misinterpretation or an attentional lapse (Levelt and Kelter, 1982: 104; cf. Saul, 2002a: 357). In a series of experiments investigating subjects’ ability to recall the wording of ISAs, Holtgraves confirmed that subjects are indeed able to recall the wording of ISAs, although this ability is kept in check by several factors, chief among them the conventionality of the ISA (Holtgraves, 1997a, 2008; Holtgraves and Yang, 1990). Thus, literal

WHAT USE IS ‘WHAT IS SAID’? / 53 meaning was attended to less frequently when the ISA took the form of a conventionalized expression compared with hints (Holtgraves, 1997a). This finding is further supported by evidence that, when a conventionalized ISA is used, an explicit performative is often incorrectly recalled in its place (Holtgraves, 2008).34 Nevertheless, although conventionalization plays a decisive role in suppressing verbatim recall, it by no means does fully obliterates speakers’ abilities in this regard. Indeed, when explicitly instructed to recall the exact wording of ISAs, subjects showed increased evidence of an ability to do so compared with being asked to recall merely the gist of the ISA (Holtgraves, 2008: 365–366). Other factors that seemed to affect memory for the wording of conventionalized ISAs included contextual factors (verbatim recall was better for conventionalized ISAs used in an unexpected context; Holtgraves, 1997a: 109),35 as well as individual ones (subjects less biased toward indirect production/ interpretation performed better in verbatim recall of conventionalized ISAs; Holtgraves, 2008: 368; cf. Holtgraves, 1997b). Attention to speech, contextual and individual factors, then, all play a role in regulating memory for WIS in conventionalized ISAs. Additional factors shown to influence the production and interpretation of ISAs – considerations of face (Holtgraves, 1991; cf. Clark, 1979: 473), status, and culture (Holtgraves and Yang, 1990) – may well interact with these in affecting memory for WIS. Again, the claim is not that WIS is a necessary stage during the interpretation process, or that it is always considered as part of deriving the explicature/impliciture of the speaker’s utterance, the latter being arguably the first component of speaker’s meaning to surface to consciousness; WIS is most frequently bypassed in this process. Nevertheless, the findings of the studies in the last two sections cannot be fully explained unless a notion of WIS akin

34

The finding that conventionalization suppresses access to literal meaning is at first sight in conflict with another finding, namely that verbatim recall was better for conventionalized ISAs compared to hints (Holtgraves, 1997a). The conflict between these two findings is, however, only apparent. Specifically, it is possible that, although literal meaning is present in working memory and therefore available to be responded to, only the enriched, communicated meaning is stored (cf. Levelt and Kelter, 1982). Accurate offline ‘recall’ of the literal meaning of conventionalized ISAs may then well be more akin to successful online reconstruction of the speaker’s production process than to genuine offline recall per se. 35 This finding highlights the importance of defining conventionalization as a relationship holding between utterances and contexts (Terkourafi, 2005b: 213), or, to put it in the terms of Morgan (1991 [1978]), the continuity between ‘conventions of usage’ and ‘conventions of language’.

54 / MARINA TERKOURAFI to its minimalist (pre-enriched) conception is assumed. Assuming such a notion is necessary to account for the handful of cases in which subjects displayed sensitivity to the literal meaning of conventionalized ISAs, either by responding to it, or by accurately recalling it. In addition, the results of the memory studies reviewed in this last section suggest some factors influencing the cognitive availability of WIS that may be usefully manipulated in future experimental studies of WIS.

2.4

Conclusion

Since its introduction in ‘Logic and Conversation’ (Grice, 1989a [1967]) as a counterpart to what is implicated, the notion of WIS has been the object of intense scrutiny. Having been assimilated with either logical form (Carston, 1999), compositional meaning (Gibbs, 2002), or with the truth-evaluable proposition expressed by the speaker’s utterance (pragmatically enriched WIS, Recanati, 2004), the theoretical usefulness of the original notion proposed by Grice has been challenged. Moreover, its psychological plausibility has been called into question by evidence that hearers hardly ever pay attention to it when interpreting speakers’ utterances. However, the crux of the matter, I have argued in the last two sections, lies in the qualification ‘hardly ever’. Studies of how people respond to and recall conventionalized ISAs provide evidence of their ability to attend to a minimalist version of WIS in conventionalized ISAs under specific conditions (e.g. explicit instruction, increased facethreat). To account for this evidence, an overall theory of linguistic communication must make room for a notion of WIS as the content of the speaker’s locutionary act, which is prior to pragmatic enrichment (hence may not be truth-evaluable) and not cancellable – in short, what I have termed a minimalist notion of WIS. Acknowledging such a notion of WIS is necessary to account, not for how we normally understand utterances, but for how we are capable of understanding them. Surely, good psychology must account not only for subjects’ customary processes, but for the entire range of their cognitive abilities. Acknowledgments I would like to thank Kent Bach for numerous clarifications and valuable feedback on several aspects of this chapter, and Tom Holtgraves for generously sharing prepublication drafts of his work. Thanks are also due to the editors of this volume for being highly responsive to questions and requests and for their detailed feedback.

WHAT USE IS ‘WHAT IS SAID’? / 55 Any misrepresentation of these and other authors’ views remains solely my own responsibility.

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56 / MARINA TERKOURAFI Elias, N. 2000 [1939]. The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and psychogenetic investigations, vol. I., Translated by E. Jephcott. Oxford: Blackwell. Second edition. Gibbs, R. 1979. Contextual effects in understanding indirect requests. Discourse Processes 2:1–10. Gibbs, R. 1983. Do people always process the literal meanings of indirect requests?. Journal of Experimental Psychology 9:524–533. Gibbs, R. 2002. A new look at literal meaning in understanding what is said and implicated. Journal of Pragmatics 34:457–486. Gibbs, R. and J. Moise. 1997. Pragmatics in understanding what is said. Cognition 62:51–74. Grice, H. P. 1989a [1975]. Logic and conversation. In Studies in the Way of Words, pp. 22–40. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Grice, H. P. 1989b [1969]. Utterer’s meaning and intentions. In Studies in the Way of Words, pp. 86–116. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Groefsema, M. 1992. ‘Can you pass the salt?’ A short-circuited implicature? Lingua 87:103–135. Hawley, P. 2002. What is said. Journal of Pragmatics 34:969–991. Holtgraves, T. 1991. Interpreting questions and replies: Effects of face-threat, question form, and gender. Social Psychology Quarterly 54:15–24. Holtgraves, T. 1997a. Politeness and memory for the wording of remarks. Memory and Cognition 25:106–116. Holtgraves, T. 1997b. Styles of language use: Individual and cultural variability in conversational indirectness. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 73:624–637. Holtgraves, T. 2008. Conversation, speech acts and memory. Memory and Cognition 36:361–374. Holtgraves, T. and J.-N. Yang. 1990. Politeness as universal: Cross-cultural perceptions of request strategies and inferences based on their use. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 59:719–729. Horn, L. 2006. The border wars: A neo-Gricean perspective. In K. von Heusinger and K. Turner, eds., Where Semantics Meets Pragmatics, pp. 21– 48. Oxford: Elsevier. Labov, W. 1972. Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Larson, M., R. Doran, Y. McNabb, R. Baker, M. Berends, A. Djalali, and G. Ward. 2009. Distinguishing the said from the implicated using a novel experimental paradigm. In U. Sauerland and K. Yatsushiro, eds., Semantics and Pragmatics: From Experiment to Theory, pp. 93–116. Basignstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Levelt, W. and S. Kelter. 1982. Surface form and memory in question answering. Cognitive Psychology 14:78–106.

WHAT USE IS ‘WHAT IS SAID’? / 57 Levinson, S. C. 2000. Presumptive Meanings: The Theory of Generalized Conversational Implicature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Marquez-Reiter, R. 2000. Linguistic Politeness in Britain and Uruguay: A Contrastive Study of Requests and Apologies. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Morgan, J. 1991[1978]. Two types of convention in indirect speech acts. In S. Davis, ed., Pragmatics: A Reader, pp. 242–253. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Munro, A. 1977. Speech Act Understanding in Context. Doctoral Dissertation, University of California at San Diego. Nicolle, S. and B. Clark. 1999. Experimental pragmatics and what is said: A response to Gibbs and Moise. Cognition 69:337–354. Noveck, I. and D. Sperber. (eds.). 2004. Experimental Pragmatics. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Reboul, A. 2007. Does the Gricean distinction between natural and non-natural meaning exhaustively account for all instances of communication? Pragmatics and Cognition 15:253–276. Recanati, F. 1989. The pragmatics of what is said. Mind and Language 4:295–329. Recanati, F. 1993. Direct Reference: From Language to Thought. Oxford: Blackwell. Recanati, F. 2001. What is said. Synthese 128:75–91. Recanati, F. 2004. Literal Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Saul, J. 2002a. What is said and psychological reality: Grice’s project and relevance theorists’ criticisms. Linguistics and Philosophy 25:347–372. Saul, J. 2002b. Speaker meaning, what is said, and what is implicated. Nou ˆs 36:228–248. Saville-Troike, M. 1989. The Ethnography of Communication: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell. Schu ¨tze, C. T. 1996. The Empirical Base of Linguistics: Grammaticality Judgments and Linguistic Methodology. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Searle, J. 1975. Indirect speech acts. In P. Cole and J. Morgan, eds., Syntax and Semantics, vol. 3, pp. 59–82. New York: Academic Press. Snow, C., R. Perlmann, J. Gleason, and N. Hoosshyar. 1990. Developmental perspectives on politeness: Sources of children’s knowledge. Journal of Pragmatics 14:289–305. Sperber, D. and D. Wilson. 1995[1986]. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. 2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell. Strawson, P. 1973. Austin and ‘locutionary meaning’. In I. Berlin, et al. eds., Essays on J.L. Austin, pp. 46–68. Oxford: Clarendon. Terkourafi, M. 2005a. Identity and semantic change: Aspects of T/V usage in Cyprus. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 6:283–306.

58 / MARINA TERKOURAFI Terkourafi, M. 2005b. Pragmatic correlates of frequency of use: The case for a notion of ‘minimal context’. In K. Nikiforidou, S. Marmaridou, and E. Antonopoulou, eds., Reviewing linguistic thought: Converging trends for the 21st century, pp. 209–233. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Wilson, D. and D. Sperber. 1993. Linguistic form and relevance. Lingua 90:1–25.

3

The Contextualist Surprise STEFANO PREDELLI

Abstract This essay discusses the relationships between contextualism and the traditional semantic approach to natural languages. It concludes that the classic contextualist examples are naturally accountable from the traditionalist viewpoint, and that the forms of contextual dependence stressed by the contextualists are semantically unsurprising. The final section explains how the analysis defended here does not involve implicit concessions to the contextualist cause, and does not demand any radical revision of the classic semantic take on natural language. Keywords: context, indexical, semantics, meaning, content. The surprise is half the battle. Many things are half the battle, losing is half the battle. Let’s think about what’s the whole battle. (The Untouchables, 1987)1

The interpretation of the occurrence of an English expression within a communicative exchange depends on the context in which that exchange takes place. This much is an undisputed, and in all its vagueness utterly uninteresting truism. The interpretation of the occurrence of an English expression within a communicative exchange depends in surprising ways on the context in which that exchange takes place. If the dependence in question is surprising in the sense that it 1

From The Columbia World of Quotations, Columbia University Press (1996).

Utterance Interpretation and Cognitive Models. Philippe De Brabanter and Mikhail Kissine (eds.). Current Research in the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface, Vol. 20. r 2009 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited. All rights reserved.

59

60 / STEFANO PREDELLI remains unexplainable from the viewpoint of the traditional approach to language, this claim, far from being an unexciting triviality, would be cause of deep concern for the semantic establishment. The contextualist challenge to the paradigm in natural-language semantics consists in the defence of a claim of the latter sort, that is, in unveiling patterns of contextual dependence that remain allegedly unaccountable within the customary paradigm in natural-language semantics.2 The evaluation of the contextualist challenge thus depends on the analysis of the forms of context-dependence unquestionably recognized within the traditional approach to semantics, and on the extent to which they suffice for the study of the use of language within communicative exchanges. I discuss some of the traditionally acknowledged forms of contextuality in Section 3.1, where I focus on ambiguity, indexicality and contingency. In Section 3.2, I pause on some prototypical examples emerging from contextualist quarters, and I explain how the contextualists’ evidence remains, from the traditionalist viewpoint, eminently unsurprising. Section 3.3 concludes with a closer assessment of the relationships between contextualism and the view put forth in Section 3.2.

3.1

Semantics and Context

Traditional natural-language semantics aims at the systematic assignment of appropriate semantic values to expressions. This project is achieved in two stages: the syntactically simple expressions in the language under study are assigned a suitable semantic profile, presumably reflecting the relevant aspects of their conventional meaning, and the syntactically complex expressions are evaluated on the basis of their syntactic structure, and of the semantic effects achieved by their components. The identification of the appropriate stock of simple expressions within a language, and the choice of a syntactical apparatus able to reflect the semantically relevant effects of structure, are notoriously vexing questions, which fortunately need not be solved, in their general form, at this stage. One particular topic related to these issues, that is, ambiguity, is however worthy of consideration, before confronting other forms of traditionally acknowledged context-dependence. 2 For versions of the contextualist criticism of traditional semantics, see among others Bezuidenhout (1997), Carston (1988), Recanati (2004), Searle (1980), Sperber and Wilson (1995) and Travis (1985, 1996, 1997).

THE CONTEXTUALIST SURPRISE / 61 Natural languages are ambiguous. There are two types of ambiguity: so-called lexical ambiguity and structural ambiguity. As an example of the former, consider the English sentence (1) this is an expensive bill a sentence which may be used as a comment on the cost of a bird’s beak, but also as a remark on a pricey restaurant. As for structural ambiguity, the classic case of (2) visiting relatives can be boring will do: (2) may be uttered in order to remark on the tediousness either of the act of paying a visit to one’s relatives, or of the relatives themselves. Since (i) these sentences, on differing occasions of their use, may be employed so as to achieve intuitively contrasting semantic effects, and since (ii) a semantic theory is a function from its input to semantic outcomes, it follows that no empirically adequate semantic theory, that is, no theory immediately consistent with our intuitions about the truth-conditions on this or that use of those sentences, may rest satisfied with (1) or (2) as its input. What the semantic apparatus must instead focus its attention on are, in the customary jargon, disambiguations of (1) and (2). In the traditional view, disambiguations are (or yield) syntactic constructs, typically of a different form than surface English expressions. So, a certain disambiguation for (1) may look roughly like the artificial item (3) this is an expensive bill1 and an appropriate disambiguation for (2) may consist, for instance, in a tree-like structure appropriately related to the intended parsing for that sentence. Since neither sentences involving numerical subscripts nor labelled trees are identical to the items produced in the normal process of linguistic communication, it follows that a semantic apparatus may be applicable to particular instances of language use only on the basis of (among other things) hypotheses pertaining to how the uttered expressions are appropriately disambiguated, that is, how they may be represented within a format suitable for semantic analysis. It is entirely uncontroversial that semantics, at least in the sense of the term relevant here, is not itself responsible for decisions pertaining to the appropriate disambiguation of a particular item within a linguistic exchange. Consider, for instance, your decision that my utterance of (1) is appropriately interpreted in terms of a disambiguation involving the

62 / STEFANO PREDELLI lexical entry ‘bill1’, that is, a syntactic item eventually mapped to requests of payment, rather than birds. Given that the semantic analysis of my utterance relies from the very beginning on the choice of the appropriate meaning-bearing units, your decision may not rely (solely) on matters encoded within the conventional meaning of this or that English expression, and must thus be grounded to a large extent on socalled pragmatic, or at any rate extra-semantic considerations, such as the fact that we are sitting in a restaurant, and that our conversation never paused on ornithological matters. The initial, pedagogical reason for pausing on examples such as (1) and (2) is thus that instances of ambiguity bring to light uncontroversially contextually sensitive, and, in a sense, unsurprisingly extra-semantic features of the use of language. The sense in which disambiguation is extra-semantic is that it does not depend on matters of meaning, so that no amount of purely linguistic competence may suffice as a justification for my choice of ‘bill1’ within the appropriate syntactic construct. (Of course, the choice may be grounded also on patterns of reasoning which eventually do take into consideration genuinely semantic properties, such as the consideration that, were a certain use of (1) to be disambiguated in terms of beak-related lexical entries, a certain content would be conveyed, which hardly seems plausible within the conversational exchange at the restaurant.) The sense in which disambiguation reflects an important and uncontroversial form of contextuality is that the non-semantic patterns in question are obviously context-dependent, in a sense of context which, at least from the semantic viewpoint, remains up for grabs: the speaker’s intentions, the expectations of her audience, the topic of conversation or for that matter the weather in Sydney at that time may all end up playing a role in this respect. (This much, needless to say, hardly entails that the cognitive, linguistic and psychological mechanisms governing disambiguation inevitably remain outside the scope of any rigorous and promising investigation.) There are good reasons to suppose that semantics may not rest satisfied with mere syntactic items, even on the presupposition of an adequate process of disambiguation. Consider, for instance, the sentence (which I am now assuming for the example’s sake to be suitably disambiguated) (4) I am hungry now. This sentence involves so-called indexical expressions, that is, expressions whose conventional meaning fails to determine an appropriate

THE CONTEXTUALIST SURPRISE / 63 semantic value in isolation. So, for instance, it is part and parcel of the meaning of the English pronoun ‘I’ that it refers to (roughly) the person who is speaking, so that, in the mouth of different speakers, ‘I’ ought to be endowed with contrasting semantic interpretations. It follows that ‘I’ may be assigned a semantic value only with respect to the choice of a speaker, and that, for parallel reasons, ‘now’ may semantically be interpreted only with respect to the choice of a particular time. The collection of the items required for the evaluation of the indexical expressions within the language under study is customarily called a ‘context’. Since forms of contextual dependence other than those highlighted by indexical expressions are of relevance from the viewpoint of this essay, it is convenient to adopt a terminologically more perspicuous locution for this purpose. I settle for ‘index’ in what follows. So, an index appropriate for the interpretation of English must contain, among other parameters, an individual (the agent of the index) and a time, because items of this sort are required by the meaning of, respectively, ‘I’ and ‘now’, and because, consequently, no assignment of semantic value to these expressions may be established, unless it is related in a suitable manner to a given individual or a particular time. Thus, no semantic apparatus interested in the analysis of indexical languages may take into consideration (disambiguated) sentences in isolation, but only sentences paired with an index, that is, sentence-index pairs.3 Communicative exchanges thus need to be represented from the viewpoint of semantics in terms of pairs of this type. Yet, as hinted above, indexes are lists including the sort of parameters required by the meaning of indexical expressions. It follows that the semantically appropriate representation of an utterance is an equally non-trivial, and equally non-semantically governed process in this case, as it was with respect to the choice of an appropriate disambiguated structure. Its non-triviality is partially concealed by the fact that, more often than not, certain obvious regularities constrain the choice of the appropriate parameters, such as, in the case of ‘I’ or ‘now’, respectively, the person who is speaking and the time of speaking. But even in the case of these straightforward indexicals, a choice along these lines may not inevitably be appropriate, as is arguably testified by cases involving recorded messages, historical narratives and the like.4 The point is brought to light with even greater urgency in the case of other indexical 3 See Kaplan (1989), Lewis (1980) and Perry (1997). For a discussion of the relationships between contexts and indexes, see Predelli (2005). 4 On these issues, see Corazza et al. (2002), Predelli (1998, 2005), Romdenh-Romluc (2002), Sidelle (1991) and Vision (1985).

64 / STEFANO PREDELLI expressions, such as the simple demonstratives ‘this’ and ‘that’. In these cases, the choice of the appropriate parameter (the demonstratum) in the index relevant for their interpretation may be identified within a particular communicative occasion only by considering a variety of extra-semantic parameters, such as the speaker’s intentions, or the relative salience of objects within her environment.5 Albeit for very different reasons, then, ambiguity-resolution and index-identification are processes which do eventually matter for the assignment of semantic properties to this or that instance of language use, but which also depend on non-semantically governed regularities, at least in the sense of semantics interested in the systematic relationships between meaning and truth. Even sentence-index pairs will not suffice from a semanticist’s viewpoint. Consider, for instance, the sentence (now assumed to be both disambiguated and, ignoring tense, indexical-free) (5) Laura’s husband is wise. Since one of the prototypical semantic properties one may wish to assign to a sentence is its truth-value, it follows that (5) is not by itself an appropriate item of semantic evaluation: whether (5) is true or false depends not only on its semantic profile, but also on the fact of the matter about who married whom, and about certain individuals’ wisdom. In what follows, I refer to this form of contextual dependency of semantic properties as (semantic) contingency. Given contingency, the semantic evaluation of a sentence needs also to be relativized to a so-called point of evaluation, that is, to an extralinguistic parameter able to yield a definite answer to the question whether, in our example, the individual who married Laura is wise. Thus, what the semantic analysis eventually maps to a truth-value are not lone (disambiguated) sentences, nor even lone sentence-index pairs, but threefold items consisting of a sentence, an index and a point of evaluation. Equivalently, (disambiguated) sentences are assigned a semantic value (a truth-value) with respect to an index and a point of evaluation – that is, sentences are assigned (with respect to a context) intensions, namely functions from points of evaluation to truth-values. Consider a particular instance of language use, say, a sentence in the everyday sense of the term, occurring within a certain conversational exchange. As explained thus far, such an occurrence may be assigned a semantic value (a truth-value) only on the basis of extra-semantic 5

See Recanati (2004) for considerations on this issue.

THE CONTEXTUALIST SURPRISE / 65 choices: what the phenomena of ambiguity, indexicality and semantic contingency bring to light is the need for contextually sensitive, nonsemantically governed decisions, having to do with the choice of a disambiguation, index and point of evaluation appropriate on that occasion. These decisions are moreover not only contextually sensitive and non-semantically governed, but they are so unsurprisingly: that my decision to evaluate your use of (1) as true depends on the identification of the right sense for ‘bill’, of your intended demonstratum, and on the fact of the matter about the cost of our meal, hardly suffices for the contextualists’ subversive pretensions. A few additional considerations on the relationships between ambiguity on the one hand, and indexicality and contingency on the other, are appropriate before I conclude this section, even though their significance with respect to the debate about contextualism will emerge only later in this essay. As pointed out thus far, the resolution of ambiguity, the choice of the parameters for the interpretation of indexical expressions and the selection of the suitable point of evaluation are on a par in being non-meaning-governed, extra-semantic processes. Yet, the relata engendered by these phenomena are recorded in apparently importantly different ways from the semantic viewpoint: index and point figure within the system of semantic evaluation, but disambiguation does not. It is pedagogically appropriate to spend a few words on this imbalance, since some of the resulting theoretical considerations will turn out to be of use in my reply to an objection to the anti-contextualist line I eventually put forth. Why, then, insist that, for instance, indexical expressions occur ‘as they are’, but end up being evaluated in a relativized fashion, without insisting for a parallel treatment for ambiguity? Why, in particular, should we not approach ambiguity on the model provided by parameter-relativization, admit an ambiguous sentence such as (1) as an appropriate semantic input and evaluate sentences with respect to not only an index and a point but also a disambiguation? At least from the point of view of this essay, the only drawback of this strategy is its idle redundancy: nothing within a semantic theory couched in these terms would have to appeal to the disambiguation parameter in order to yield appropriate semantic outcomes, because no semantic property hinges on the relationships between two disambiguations of an ambiguous expression. There presumably are (or at least there may well be) interesting semantic relationships between ‘I’ and ‘now’, and there certainly are interesting logical relations between ‘I’ and ‘the agent’, or between ‘Laura’s husband’ and ‘is a husband’. Moreover, these relationships may be reflected within a systematic

66 / STEFANO PREDELLI apparatus by respecting certain constant aspects of the linguistic meaning of these expressions, while considering their interactions with alternative parameters of the appropriate sort, in these cases, respectively, indexes and points. But there is simply nothing to be gained from the study of the relationships between the alternative uses of ‘bill’, except, in the best of scenarios, for semantically entirely accidental facts about the historical development of English. In slogan form: ambiguity does not have a logic.6

3.2

The Contextualist Dilemma

Where does all of this leave ‘the context’? In the informal sense of the term, ‘context’ is supposed to indicate all those aspects that may eventually make a semantic difference, but which are not encoded within ‘the text’, that is, within those aspects of the language a competent speaker ought to master merely by virtue of her linguistic competence. Three different senses of contextual dependence, and three corresponding ways of accounting for it, have been highlighted in Section 3.1. Firstly, natural languages are ambiguous, and the interpretation of the occurrence of an expression within a given conversational exchange may need to be disambiguated, on the basis of contextual parameters such as the speaker’s intentions or the expectations of her audience. Secondly, natural languages are indexical, and the interpretation of the use of an indexical expression may be established only with respect to the choice of a particular index, a choice once again grounded in contextual features such as who is speaking when, or what she intended to demonstrate. Thirdly, natural languages are semantically contingent (in the sense of the term introduced above), and certain aspects of the interpretation of an utterance may be obtained only on the basis of the identification of the point of evaluation suitably reflecting how things happen to be on that occasion. These, then, are the (or at least some of the) unsurprising ways in which context may determine the interpretation of a particular instance of language use – unsurprising in the sense that, one way or another, traditional semantics is uncontroversially well-equipped to deal with them, given the opportune contributions from extra-semantic 6 I am, of course, focusing on cases of ambiguity in the neighbourhood of ‘accidental homonomy’, as (presumably) in the ‘bill’ example. Instances of polysemy may warrant separate considerations, which are however not immediately relevant for my point in this section.

THE CONTEXTUALIST SURPRISE / 67 quarters. If these were the only way pragmatic considerations mattered for the application of semantic analysis to particular conversational exchanges, we would all have little reason for surprise. According to the contextualists, however, they are not. Suppose that I begin digressing on the inventiveness and dexterity of the human race, alone in being able to devise a variety of vehicles in order to facilitate the transportation of goods and people. In this scenario, my utterance of (6) this is a vehicle while pointing at the pram being pushed on the sidewalk, seems intuitively true. Yet, as that pram proceeds casually beyond a sign reading ‘no vehicles after this point’, I may apparently truly utter the denial of (6), while keeping my attention fixed on the very same demonstratum as before. Clearly, the divergence in our intuitive assessment of the truth-value of my utterances ‘depends on the context’: in the context of my discussion about means of transportation, (6) is apparently true, but in the context relevant for the assessment of violations of traffic regulations, nothing less than a motorized means of transportation of a certain size intuitively qualifies for vehicle-hood. Yet, so contextualists insist, the contextuality at issue here is irreducible to any of the traditionally acknowledged kinds of context-dependence, be that ambiguity, indexicality or contingency. Language does after all depend on context in surprising ways.7 It is plausible to grant the contextualist the implausibility of the hypothesis that what is at issue here is a case of ambiguity, unless one’s aim in labelling (6) ambiguous is merely that of highlighting the possibility of semantically non-equivalent uses of that sentence. The case for structural ambiguity remains highly mysterious, since there appears to be no reason whatsoever for supposing that (6) conceals contrasting syntactic structures, somehow responsible for the alternative semantic outcomes in question. As for lexical ambiguity, it may here suffice to note that the predicament with (6) seems easily reproducible for literal translations of that sentence in other languages, in a way obviously not applicable to clear-cut cases of ambiguity such as (1). Indexicality does not fare much better, at least initially: since it 7 For further discussion of the vehicle example, see Predelli (2007). I am here merely assuming that the intuitions in question ought to be reflected at a genuinely semantic level, and may not be explained in terms of Gricean maneuvers. For this type of anticontextualist reply, see, for instance, Berg (2002), Borg (2004) and Sainsbury (2001).

68 / STEFANO PREDELLI is easy to concoct a multitude of similar examples involving a variety of different expressions, the idea that what (6) shows is that ‘vehicle’ is indexical ought to be extended to an implausibly large number of expressions. The foregoing paragraph swiftly and casually dismissed on the contextualist’s behalf two options many traditionalists may deem to be worthy of closer scrutiny.8 I can afford to remain nonchalant in this respect, because the aim of this essay is that of challenging the contextualist proof of surprising contextuality, and because, when it comes to ambiguity and indexicality, I happen to be on the side of the contextualist’s approach to (6). If I am wrong on these details, of course, I’d be a fortiori right when it comes to the big picture: after all, hardly anyone would be flabbergasted by the sheer notion that ambiguous or indexical expressions may be interpreted only in a contextually dependent manner. Contingency, in the sense introduced above, has received less attention than the previous options, probably because it is at least prima facie an obviously unviable option for the solution of cases such as (6). After all, so the story goes, ‘the way the world is’ remains unchanged as we shift from one conversational scenario to the other – except at best for the obviously irrelevant changes occurring in the time-span between my two utterances of (6). What is being demonstrated in the first scenario is a contraption devised for the transportation of small children, and it remains that sort of entity as we approach the ‘no vehicles allowed’ sign. Regardless of the details in the process of determining the point of evaluation appropriately representing the relevant state of affairs in the first scenario, so this reply concludes, that very same determination ought to be appropriate in the latter. And if anything turns out to be a vehicle in one case (or, more precisely, if anything falls within the extension of ‘is a vehicle’ with respect to the point in question), then it obviously cannot fail to be a vehicle in the other. The foregoing reconstruction of the contextualist reply to appeals to semantic contingency is entirely hypothetical: I know of no contextualist who explicitly addressed the issue. Yet, if any contextualist ever bothered to do so, she would hardly have any other choice than considerations in many respects similar to those I just offered on her behalf. After all, if the point of evaluation appropriate for the establishment of truth-value could vary from one scenario to the other, 8 For sophisticated forms of indexicality (more precisely, for appeals to hidden variables which, when occurring unbound, are interpreted in a contextually dependent ´ (2000) and Szabo ´ (2001). fashion), see Stanley and Szabo

THE CONTEXTUALIST SURPRISE / 69 cases such as (6) would be as unsurprising as the variations in truthvalue for (5) across different possible worlds. And yet, in another sense, the possibility of such variations, even in the face of the pram’s stubborn metaphysical inflexibility, ought to be precisely at the heart of the contextualist viewpoint: if the pram fell outside (or inside) the extension of ‘is a vehicle’ in both cases, hardly any evidence of contextuality, be it surprising or expected, would at all be brought to light. On this latter point, contextualists are indeed unrelentingly vocal, with an enthusiasm ill-matched by the triviality of their observations. For instance, switching from prams to the classic scenario of russet leaves covered with green dye, Charles Travis writes: The English ‘is green’ speaks of a certain way for things to be: green. One might say that it speaks of a certain property: (being) green. If we do say that, we must also say this about that property: what sometimes counts as a thing’s having it sometimes does not. (Travis, 1997: 98)9

In the case of (6): if the intuitions about the contextual variations of this sentence’s truth-value are indeed as variable as the contextualist alleges, it surely must be the case that one and the same contraption, that which pre-theoretically qualifies as a vehicle in one scenario, fails to do so in another. For if this much were not the case, the right reply to the evidence provided by (6) would be in terms of an error theory: if the relevant referent were (or were not) a vehicle on either occasion, reliable judgments of truth-value would not be allowed to vary in the way contextualists allege. Consider again the concluding lines in my reconstruction of a contextualist response to appeals to contingency: if anything counts for determining the point of evaluation appropriate for the attribution of a truth-value to my first utterance of (6), it ought to count in the latter scenario as well. In the light of Travis’s comment, this much should by now sound eminently non-contextualist. If the contextualists (and common sense) are right, something can affect the decision in this respect, notwithstanding the stubbornly immutable state of the pram: what counts as a vehicle, or as red, in one scenario may well not do so in another. What is intuitively aptly classifiable among red objects in one scenario (say, a Japanese maple tree covered in green paint, as assessed 9 Travis’s example is that of an originally russet Japanese maple tree, whose leaves have been painted green. Occurrences of ‘the leaves are green’ are thus apparently true when occurring in a conversation with a photographer, but not as part of a discussion with a botanist.

70 / STEFANO PREDELLI by a botanist) apparently fails the test for redness in another (for instance, that very same shrub when considered as a test-subject for photographic film). What qualifies as a hamburger on some occasion (say, a cube of cement including a hamburger in its core, as assessed by someone looking for evidence of cooked food) intuitively falls short of the requirements for being a hamburger on another (for instance, that very same cube of cement served in a fast-food restaurant).10 And what seems like an apt instance of vehicle-hood in certain contexts, may well fail to count as a vehicle in others. The contextualist may thus not both have his cake and eat it: if context does affect the truth-value of (6) in the way contextualists allege, such a variability falls within one of the unsurprising categories indicated above, contingency. To put it in equivalent terms: if contextualists are right in their considerations about what ‘counts’ as green, as a hamburger or as a vehicle, as I happen to think they rather obviously are, a certain naı¨ve conception of the structure and make-up of points of evaluation ought to go. Points of evaluation may not be understood as mere counterparts of objectively given, ‘inert’ worldly scenarios, because (i) by definition, points provide a univocal reply to the question of the relationships between certain individuals and the extension of certain expressions, and (ii) the intuitively correct replies may well vary, notwithstanding the stubborn invariability of the state in which the world happens to be. Keep your pram as unchanged in any of its physical traits as you may like – as long as intuitions regarding that object’s qualifications as a vehicle vary with one’s interests or ‘point of view’, such a variability ought to be recorded within any semantic apparatus able to give due recognition to intuition-driven verdicts of truth-value. The contextualist evidence pertaining to cases such as (6) turns out to be as unsurprising and unexciting as the discovery that the truth-value of (5) varies with the fact of the matter with respect to who married whom, at least granting the fairly harmless observation that, sometimes, a change in point of view makes as much difference with respect to our intuitions of truth-value as a divorce or, in the case of (6), as the conversion of the pram into a garden ornament.

3.3

Contextualism Regained?

In Section 3.2, I swiftly dismissed appeals to ambiguity or indexicality, and I argued that, even granting the unavailability of strategies of this 10

The hamburger scenario is Searle’s, see Searle (1980).

THE CONTEXTUALIST SURPRISE / 71 sort, the evidence provided by a contextualist is naturally accountable in terms of semantic contingency. I was encouraged in my reply not only by the fact that clear indications in this direction are explicitly put forth by eminent contextualists, but more importantly by the fact that considerations in this vein are essential for the contextualist point to get off the ground in the first place. Indeed, contextualists are the most vociferous defenders of the sort of contextual dependence invoked in my reply to their challenge against the semantic paradigm: what in some contexts qualifies as a vehicle, in other contexts fails to do so. In some sense, then, there is a fundamental point of agreement within my position and some of the contextualists’ considerations. Is this much proof that, far from countering the contextualist challenge, I remained inextricably bogged down in the contextualist quicksand? The contextualist point regarding what counts as what in this or that scenario strikes me as a relatively unexciting triviality, unworthy of a philosophically sounding label. But the issue here is entirely terminological: if recognizing this much contextuality suffices for making one a contextualist, then count me in. What matters, of course, is that this branch of contextualism remains eminently unsurprising, at least as far as semantics goes. There is however an at least superficially different line of response, which also attempts at subsuming my position under the contextualist umbrella. In the view from Section 3.2, the process of evaluation of the use of a sentence in a given scenario considers its syntactic representation (i.e. the result of disambiguation), and relativizes it to an appropriate index and point. But in this view points are not to be understood as mere formal counterparts of ‘ways the world may be’, but as contextually impregnated ‘perspectives’ on the world: where naı¨ve traditionalists may rest satisfied with an appeal to ‘possible worlds’, enlightened semanticists must now take into consideration pairs of worlds and (let us call them) viewpoints. This much, so this reply goes, is not merely an epicycle on the obviously contextually dependent process of point selection – not merely the rather unexciting conclusion that, just as the truth of (5) depends on who married whom, that of (6) depends on what counts as a vehicle for the purpose at hand. What it entails is rather the recognition of a hitherto unrecognized parameter of evaluation, one which penetrates the very fabric of compositional analysis: a new subscript looms on the horizon of semantic analysis in the age of contextualism. Once again, the terminological side of the question remains uninteresting, as does the textual analysis of the examples provided by

72 / STEFANO PREDELLI this or that auctoritas in the field of natural-language semantics (anyone may, of course, rest perfectly satisfied with a naı¨ve conception of points as possible worlds, as long as one may not be forced to confront questions of concrete-encased hamburgers or painted maple trees). But the notion that, by my own admission, contextualism unveils a new parameter of semantic significance, quite simply relies on a rather basic conceptual confusion, one worthy of clarification. A pedagogically useful parallel in this respect is provided by the case of ambiguity, and by its relationships to indexicality and contingency, as discussed towards the end of Section 3.1. Indexicality and contingency, as we have seen, are reflected within the formal apparatus by an explicit relativization of the assignment of semantic value: the choice of the index and point appropriate for the application of semantic analysis to this or that particular instance depends on extra-semantic, contextually governed considerations, but all the alternatives are, metaphorically speaking, already taken into consideration by the machinery of compositional interpretation. Yet, although disambiguation is an equally context-sensitive process, it is not appropriately understood as a parameter on a par with index and point, for the obvious reason that it remains entirely idle for the establishment of any interesting semantic property: the very input of semantic evaluation is an already univocally parsed, lexically unambiguous item. The conceptual distinction between a possible world (in the metaphysical sense of the term) and a viewpoint is, in this sense, as indifferent for semantic purposes as the introduction of a ‘disambiguation’ parameter: at least as far as the contextualist evidence goes, nothing of interest depends on, say, the ability to quantify over viewpoints, or the availability of a privileged, viewpoint-neutral ‘way things happen to be’. One may, of course, allude to points of evaluation in terms of a variety of subscripts, just as one may trivially introduce a subscript for the state of the weather in Sydney. Yet, the typographical attractiveness of small fonts hardly suffices for their semantic significance. The moral is that a compositional system well-equipped for dealing with cases such as (6) need not at all deviate from the wellknown, customary format appropriate for instances such as (5). In either case, of course, the application of the system’s results to this or that use of these sentences depends on unquestionably extra-semantic, and unsurprisingly context-dependent considerations. But that the choice of the point of evaluation appropriate for the assignment of truth-value to an utterance on a given occasion ‘depends on context’ in ways somewhat similar to those appropriate for the disambiguation of

THE CONTEXTUALIST SURPRISE / 73 ambiguous expressions or the interpretation of particular uses of indexicals, is a conclusion that fails to yield any surprising semantic payoff whatsoever.

References Berg, J. 2002. Is semantics still possible? Journal of Pragmatics 34:349–359. Bezuidenhout, A. 1997. Pragmatics, semantic underdetermination and the referential/attributive distinction. Mind 106:375–409. Borg, E. 2004. Minimal Semantics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Carston, R. 1988. Implicature, explicature, and truth-theoretic semantics. In R. Kempson, ed., Mental Representations, pp. 155–181. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Corazza, E., W. Fish, and J. Gorvett. 2002. Who is I? Philosophical Studies 107:1–21. Kaplan, D. 1989. Demonstratives. In J. Amog, J. Perry, and H. K. Wettstein, eds., Themes from Kaplan, pp. 481–563. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ¨ hman, eds., Lewis, D. 1980. Index, context, and content. In S. Kanger and S. O Philosophy and Grammar, pp. 79–100. Dordrecht: Reidel. Perry, J. 1997. Indexicals and demonstratives. In B. Hale and C. Wright, eds., A Companion to the Philosophy of Language, pp. 586–612. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Predelli, S. 1998. I am not here now. Analysis 58:107–115. Predelli, S. 2005. Contexts: Meaning, Truth, and the Use of Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Predelli, S. 2007. The strange case of the missing constituent. In C. Penco, M. Vignolo, and M. Beaney, eds., Explaining the Mental: Naturalist and Non Naturalist Approaches to Mental Acts and Processes, pp. 33–49. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Recanati, F. 2004. Literal Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Romdenh-Romluc, K. 2002. Now the French are invading England. Analysis 62:34–41. Sainsbury, R. M. 2001. Two ways to smoke a cigarette. Ratio 14:386–406. Searle, J. R. 1980. The background of meaning. In J. R. Searle, F. Kiefer, and M. Bierwisch, eds., Speech Act Theory and Pragmatics, pp. 212–232. Dordrecht: Reidel. Sidelle, A. 1991. The answering machine paradox. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 21:525–539. Sperber, D. and D. Wilson. 1995. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. 2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell. Stanley, J. and Z. G. Szabo´. 2000. On quantifier domain restriction. Mind and Language 15:219–261.

74 / STEFANO PREDELLI Szabo´, Z. G. 2001. Adjectives in context. In I. Kenesei and R. M. Harnish, eds., Perspectives on Semantics, Pragmatics, and Discourse, A Festshrift for Ferenc Kiefer, pp. 119–146. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Travis, C. 1985. On what is strictly speaking true. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 15:187–229. Travis, C. 1996. Meaning’s role in truth. Mind 105:451–466. Travis, C. 1997. Pragmatics. In B. Hale and C. Wright, eds., A Companion to the Philosophy of Language, pp. 87–107. Oxford: Blackwell. Vision, G. 1985. I am here now. Analysis 45:198–199.

4

More than Words ELISABETTA LALUMERA

Abstract According to a line of thought favoured by semantic contextualists, a proper account of cases of communication featuring figurative discourse would involve the notion of ad hoc concept, namely, a temporary representation created on the fly out of contextual inputs. Assuming that there is no sharp distinction between literal and figurative discourse, these theorists conclude that concepts in general are ad hoc representations in this sense. This paper proposes an alternative account of figurative discourse, according to which, at least in core cases, the context doesn’t do as much as to create a new concept; rather, it helps us associate an already existing, stable but non-lexicalized concept with a word, which may provide the audience with a cue for retrieving it. The alternative stable-concept view advocated here invokes two levels for the explanation of communication: the level of word meanings and the level of concepts. I will therefore defend the view that concepts are not identical with word meanings. Concepts are more numerous, or – as is often said – they are sliced more finely than word meanings. The two-level stable concept view provides an explanation of cognitive cross-context generalizations, which is not readily available to ad hoc concept views. It also avoids the conclusion that conceptual creativity comes cheap, given the pervasiveness of figurative speech (and a fortiori, given the claim that there is no literal-figurative boundary). Third, it may receive indirect support from recent psychological work on the relationship between linguistic and non-linguistic categorization. Utterance Interpretation and Cognitive Models. Philippe De Brabanter and Mikhail Kissine (eds.). Current Research in the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface, Vol. 20. r 2009 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited. All rights reserved.

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76 / ELISABETTA LALUMERA Keywords: contextualism, ad hoc versus stable concepts, concepts versus word meanings, cross-context generalizations, figurative language.

4.1

Introduction

According to an increasingly popular view, concepts are ad hoc representations of categories. They are created on the fly out of contextually relevant information, and stored in working memory. This view contrasts with the traditional view, according to which concepts are stable representations of general knowledge about categories, accessed and employed in different contexts and through different cognitive encounters with category members. Arguments for the ad hoc nature of concepts come from two different sources, namely philosophy of language (relevance theory) and psychology of categorization (the emerging paradigm of situated cognition). This paper focuses on philosophical arguments only. In some recent philosophical accounts of communication, ad hoc concepts are initially invoked in order to account for a range of phenomena such as the ‘narrowing’ and ‘broadening’ of predicates, metaphor and polysemy, which point to the limits of literal meaning. Then they are promoted to the role of primary constituents of thoughts, often via arguments for the conclusion that there is no sharp distinction between literal and nonliteral discourse. The notion of ad hoc concept appears to be crucial both for theories of cognition and for theories of meaning and communication. Its proper explanatory role and definition are, however, still clouded by unclarity. The general idea behind this paper is that ad hoc concepts may be useful scientific explananda for various cognitive activities, but their postulation as components of thought is not mandatory on purely philosophical and linguistic grounds.1 Accordingly, my first aim here is to argue that the philosophical slippery-slope argument of relevance theorists can be resisted by objecting to its initial step. I will propose an alternative explanation, according to which, at least in some cases of metaphorical utterances, context does not do as much as to create a new concept; rather, it helps us associate a pre-existing but nonlexicalized concept with a word that may provide the audience with a

1 The same conclusion is defended, with different arguments and implications, in Dokic (2006).

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cue for retrieving it, sometimes in virtue of its conventional meaning. In such cases, the concept itself may well be a stable representation, though the concept-word association is ad hoc. If this is so, there is no direct route from linguistic ad hocness to the ad hoc nature of concepts. The alternative stable concept view advocated here invokes two levels for the explanation of communication and cognition: the level of word meanings and the level of concepts. I will therefore defend the view that concepts are not identical with word meanings. Concepts are more numerous, or – as is often said – they are sliced more finely than word meanings. Consequently, it is often the case that a single word can be used to express other concepts than the one it is conventionally associated with. Polysemy and metaphor are two faces of this very same coin. In polysemy, different though related concepts are assigned the same linguistic label by convention. In metaphors, it is sometimes the case that a stable but non-lexicalized concept is given a temporary linguistic label, already conventionally assigned to a different, but somehow contextually related concept. At least in such cases, ad hoc concepts are not needed. The two-level stable concept view advocated here may be defended on the following grounds. First, it offers an explanation of cognitive cross-context generalizations, which is not readily available to ad hoc concept views. Second, it avoids the conclusion that conceptual creativity comes cheap, given the pervasiveness of figurative speech (and a fortiori, given the claim that there is no literal-figurative boundary). Third, it may receive indirect support from recent psychological work on the relationship between linguistic and nonlinguistic categorization. Finally, it is, nevertheless, compatible with the claim that ad hoc concepts do exist and have some role in cognition. In other words, the two-level stable concept view is not in tension with psychological findings about there being occurrent representations of ad hoc categories (Barsalou, 1983, 1999, 2003). The view advocated here, however, is not compatible with the generalization that ad hoc concepts only can be components of thought. The paper is organized as follows. In Sections 4.2 and 4.3 I will draw a map of the possible views on the relationships between concepts, meanings and context. I will use as a test a wide-currency example in the contemporary debate, which involves metaphor, and I will identify and present four alternative positions, namely, two ad hoc concept views (Section 4.2) and two stable concept views (Section 4.3). Then I will describe in more detail one of the four, namely the two-level stable concept view, together with some reasons for favouring it. I will not be

78 / ELISABETTA LALUMERA directly engaged in providing reasons against the other positions – if the two-level stable concept view I propose comes out as the best explanation (at least in some cases), then the other ones are not (at least in those cases). Anyhow, some of the main objections will be mentioned. Section 4.4 defends the two-level stable concept view by providing evidence that concepts are more than words, and Section 4.5 considers some relevant possible objections, and formulates a conclusion.

4.2

Contextualism and Ad Hoc Concepts

The current debate between Contextualists and Semantic Minimalists in the philosophy of language is – roughly – about whether the notion of literal meaning (or semantic content, or what is said) is primary for the individuation of the speaker’s meaning (or speech-act content, or what is communicated) in a given episode of conversation. Minimalists follow Grice and truth-conditional semantics, and say it is. By contrast, Contextualists maintain, within a variegated range of positions, that literal meaning radically underdetermines speaker’s meaning, to the point of being an idle wheel in a theory of communication.2 Rather, according to them, contextual data and non-deductive inferential processes play a key role in the individuation of the speaker’s meaning. Granting the minimally contentious claim that people communicate in order to express their thoughts to others (at least in many interesting cases), a closely related question comes to be the following: Which relationship holds between the linguistic meaning of an utterance, and the thought expressed by that utterance? In a successful episode of communication, by definition, the thought expressed would also be the thought grasped by the speaker’s audience. Given an utterance and a context, how are we to identify the thought this utterance expresses? Which concepts does it contain? The question collapses into the traditional form of the Contextualist-Minimalist debate only if the notion of the thought expressed by an utterance collapses with the notion of speaker’s meaning – and leads to an additional couple of positions otherwise. Two of them postulate ad hoc concepts, the other two don’t. Let me present the whole set of four

2 For a carefully argued Contextualist position see Carston (2002), or Recanati (2004), which also contains an overview of the spectrum of alternatives. Semantic Minimalism is fully explained in Borg (2004), and made famous by Cappelen and Lepore (2005).

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briefly, and explain what ad hoc concepts are meant to be in this dialectic. I will make use of a standard example where there is an intuitive gap to fill between the literal meaning of the sentence uttered, and whatever concerns the speaker’s side – be it the speaker’s meaning, or the thought expressed. The example is the metaphorical sentence Mary is a bulldozer where ‘Mary’ is a woman’s name. Let the communicative context be such that it contains two people, Rita and Lisa, and they are commenting on Mary’s being intent on fulfilling her own objectives, regardless of other people’s feelings and doings. Lisa utters the sentence ‘Mary is a bulldozer’ and Rita agrees (Carston, 2002).3 According to the first ad hoc concept view, an utterance like ‘Mary is a bulldozer’ expresses a thought containing the concept BULLDOZER*, a concept created on the fly and whose extension comprises, let’s say, obstinate and insensitive people. BULLDOZER* is numerically and qualitatively different from the concept BULLDOZER, the artefact concept conventionally associated with the word ‘bulldozer’. On the one hand, it broadens the extension of BULLDOZER, admitting humans within it. On the other hand, it denotes emergent, ‘new’ properties – a human BULLDOZER* is insensitive, while we wouldn’t normally say that a bulldozer (machine) is insensitive. Psychologically speaking, the ad hoc concept is a temporary data structure activated in short-term memory, not a stable representation stored in semantic memory (Barsalou, 1983: 218). What about the meaning of the word ‘bulldozer’ as it figures in the utterance? The ad hoc concept BULLDOZER* also plays the role of speaker’s meaning, as it is the ad hoc meaning of the word ‘bulldozer’. On this view, word meanings are concepts, specifically conceived as word counterparts in a language of thought, where they compose as unstructured atoms (Fodor, 1975, 1998). But concepts are radically context-dependent, they emerge from the completion of an unsaturated entity called ‘schema’ or ‘indicator’, with contextual data. The idea

3 It might be objected that the example sentence contains a dead metaphor, and that ‘bulldozer’ simply means a certain trait of character, almost to the point that a very good dictionary could report it. I might reply that the boundary between dead and live metaphors is really hard to draw. Or I may just bite the bullet here, as my rationale can be rerun with any example of ‘creative’ metaphor. Anyhow, this very example is common currency in the contemporary literature.

80 / ELISABETTA LALUMERA here is that lexical interpretation is not conceived as the (deductive) assignment of an already existing concept to a word (or word-token), but rather it is an inference to the best explanation leading to the postulation of that unique concept that best fits a minimal semantic input, contextual data and some given constraints (Carston, 2002: 363–364).4 Of course, according to this approach, underdetermination and non-deductive inferential processes are meant to affect the complete sentential level as well as the local level. On this view, semantic interpretation as a projection of syntax, a function of the semantic values of the constituents of a sentence and of its syntactic structure, is not even sufficient to determine a truth-evaluable content. That is to say, the sole content here is ad hoc content. Knowledge of language (or the language faculty) contributes a minimal array of syntactic and pre-semantic data, to be completed and enriched in a process of pragmatic interpretation, along with contextual information and according to general cognitive heuristics. The formation of a truthevaluable utterance content and thought requires other cognitive resources than those available to the language faculty, and it involves the so-called central processes. This position is endorsed by relevance theorists, who would include expectations of relevance among the key cognitive heuristics (Sperber and Wilson, 1995; Carston, 2002; Wilson and Carston, 2007). Let me call it the one-level ad hoc concept view, because it postulates ad hoc concepts as components of the thought expressed, and because it allows for a single level of semantic assignment, involving ad hoc concepts, that is ad hoc word meanings. The one-level ad hoc concept view accounts for the intuition that the thought conveyed by an utterance like ‘Mary is a bulldozer’ can be true, or at least can be valued as true from the speaker’s and hearer’s perspective. There is some informative content that speaker and hearer

4 As it features both the ad hoc concept hypothesis and the Language of thought hypothesis (LOT), the view advocated by relevance theorists might be called ‘the Language of ad hoc thought hypothesis’. It is important to notice, however, that the ad hoc concept hypothesis is independent of the LOT theory. Psychologists working within the new paradigm of distributed cognition, who introduced the notion of ad hoc concept, are explicitly against the LOT, and object to computationalism in general. This is also to remark that psychological arguments for ad hoc concepts and linguistic-philosophical arguments are different, and ought to be carefully distinguished.

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can agree with, or disagree with. This is what we assume when we find this dialogue natural: (A) Lisa: Mary is a bulldozer Rita: Yes that’s true. She fired ten employees in order to be promoted vice-president last year And when we find this other dialogue unnatural (maybe ironic): (B) Lisa: Mary is a bulldozer Rita: No she isn’t. She is a woman like both of us, and women are not things The one-level ad hoc concept view also squares with considerations of cognitive economy, at least prima facie. Ad hoc conceptual representations are built up and employed by the cognitive system only insofar as they serve for the specific task of an episode of communication – given the data available in semantic memory, and the data from context, concepts are constructed on the fly, and are preserved as long as it takes for the cognitive task to be completed. There is no unnecessary clutter in semantic memory – we’re saving, so to say, storage cost. Proponents of the theory admit that all the notions involved here stand in need of further clarification. But the rationale behind this position is sufficiently clear. One can envisage a more conservative kind of ad hoc concept view, different from the first one in one central feature. According to the second kind of ad hoc concept view, the word ‘bulldozer’ keeps its conventional, artefact-referring semantic function, while the concept expressed, via contextual enrichment processes, is the ad hoc one, namely BULLDOZER* – it’s a two-level ad hoc concept view. It keeps meaning fixed, while allowing concepts to vary with context. Semantic interpretation as performed by the language module gives literal meaning as an output, while the thought expressed is encoded by the speaker and decoded by the hearer through pragmatic interpretation involving their knowledge of the world (their central processes). Here, two levels of content are at play. As in the previously considered position, here the intuition that there is some true content about which speaker and hearer may agree is safe, as well as the perceived asymmetry between dialogues (A) and (B) above. In the communicative context, a false linguistic meaning (that Mary is a bulldozer) provides the input for a (possibly) true thought

82 / ELISABETTA LALUMERA expressed – the thought containing an ad hoc concept – that attributes to Mary a certain behavioural and personality trait. How is that thought arrived at, given the first-step semantic output? A two-level ad hoc concept view is compatible with – though not required by – a classical Gricean account (Grice, 1989). On such an account, a rational reconstruction of the audience’s process of identification5 of the thought expressed would feature the assumptions that the speaker is cooperative, that she is informed of the audience’s own cooperativeness and knowledge status about relevant issues, and it would also presumably include the statement of the fact that the speaker deliberately violates one of the conversational maxims. Given such assumptions, the thought content that Mary is (roughly) a strongly goal-directed and insensitive kind of person would come out as an implicature. The final, non-traditionally Gricean line would be that the implicated content contains at least one thoroughly contextual component, namely the ad hoc concept BULLDOZER*.6 The main problem with ad hoc concept views has to do with crosscontext generalizations.7 By definition, the concept BULLDOZER* is an occurrent representation, created on the fly for the purposes of Lisa and Rita’s specific episode of communication. It cannot be redeployed in another context – being context-dependent for its very individuation, it cannot survive (so to say) a context-shift. Nevertheless, as soon as we describe Lisa and Rita’s communicative context as C1, we can imagine a second context C2 in which BULLDOZER* is employed again – it is the very context in which I am reporting Lisa and Rita’s conversation to the readers of this paper: C1 Lisa: Mary is a bulldozer Rita: Yes, that’s true. She fired ten employees last year in order to be promoted vice-president 5

I am here assuming that Grice’s account is not meant to be a description of the actual process of metaphor generation and interpretation. It has been argued that it cannot be such a description (see, e.g. Wearing (2006) for a review). This empirical claim is not a direct objection against the theory of implicatures, though it may prompt the need for finding an alternative theory which wears its empirical plausibility on its sleeve. 6 Wearing (2006) argues that metaphors can’t be Gricean implicatures, because they lack a defining feature of implicatures, namely cancellability. If this objection is sound, then the Gricean process is not even a good rational reconstruction of the process of metaphor production and interpretation. As I will make explicit below, however, the details of the process of utterance interpretation are not central to the question of this paper, namely, whether ad hoc concepts are the outputs of such a process. 7 For another objection, regarding the overgeneration of ad hoc concepts in a given context, see Stern (2006).

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C2 Lisa said to Rita that Mary is a bulldozer. Rita agreed and added that Mary fired ten employees last year in order to be promoted vice-president. As for C2, the question ‘what is the thought expressed’? can be raised again. The intuitive answer is that whatever the thought expressed, it would feature the same concept contained in the thought expressed by C1, namely, the concept BULLDOZER*. However, this is not possible for the above-mentioned reason that BULLDOZER* is a temporary data structure in Rita and Lisa’s minds. The thought expressed in C2 would presumably feature a concept BULLDOZER**, but we are not told whether and how it is related to the first BULLDOZER* concept. We are left with no idea of how cross-context generalization can be explained.8 This is particularly important when the context shift is merely temporal, and does not involve different subjects. Take, for example, a context C3 where Lisa herself, after a few days, realizes her behaviour was significantly similar to Mary’s behaviour in some respects, so she writes down in her personal blog ‘I’ve been a bit of a bulldozer today. But finally I got what I was hoping for’. Here, Lisa is apparently using the same concept again – tracking the same kind of behavioural trait in the world, and recognizing it as her own. According to ad hoc concept views, however, she is actually employing a different concept BULLDOZER***, different from the other two we’ve just considered, as contexts are different. Here again – but at the intra-personal level – ad hoc concept theories have difficulty explaining how concepts can be stable enough to support cross-context generalizations. Intra-personal concept stability seems to be a far more relevant property of cognitive systems than inter-personal concept stability, for it makes it possible for a subject to accumulate knowledge on objects and kinds and to project it on newly encountered cases of the same category. Ad hoc concept views owe an account of how this property emerges. In philosophical and linguistic arguments, the problem does not seem to be addressed.

4.3

Stable Concept Views

On stable concept views, concepts are not created on the fly for the purposes of an one-off episode of communication or categorization task. Rather, they are created and preserved by a representational system in 8

See Cappelen and Lepore (2005), chap. 2.

84 / ELISABETTA LALUMERA order to keep track of and represent categories in different contexts, and through different cognitive encounters. We may add that one of their functions is precisely to support inductive projection of knowledge from one context to the other (Millikan, 2000). In order to do that, concepts ought to abstract from peculiarities of different contexts, and generalize over them. So, at least some of our concepts ought to be abstract (enough) and general (enough), rather than context-dependent and temporary. Starting from this general premise, stable concept views may come in two kinds. First, there are one-level stable concept views, which sharply contrast with ad hoc concept views. According to these, the meaning of ‘bulldozer’ and the concept expressed by that word is one and the same representation, the representation of bulldozers. Here, word meanings are stable and context-free thought components. Semantic interpretation yields word meanings, and word meanings are symbols in the language of thought. Here, no world knowledge is involved in the process of interpretation.9 In the example, the thought that Lisa expresses is the false thought that Mary is a bulldozer, as it is conveyed by the utterance saying (falsely) that Mary is a bulldozer (Borg, 2004, following Fodor, 1975, 1998). One-level stable concept views are sometimes explicit in claiming that the primary literal/ conceptual content can be processed further, along with contextual data, so as to express virtually any content whatsoever. Once the literal content is fixed and delivered by the language-plus-concept faculty, indefinitely many optional pragmatic processes of further elaboration and reinterpretation can take place. In appropriate circumstances, for example, the utterance ‘Mary is a bulldozer’ could be used by Lisa to convey to Rita the thought that the project they proposed was approved. Or it could be used to communicate to Rita that Mary left John for Joe the day before her wedding (with the former). As for the question ‘Which thought is expressed by the utterance ‘‘Mary is a bulldozer’’ in a given episode of communication’?, these theorists would consider it to be ill conceived from the start. Either it is the thought that Mary is a bulldozer (the false one), or (via pragmatic processes) one of the indefinitely many thoughts that can be expressed (Cappelen and Lepore, 2005, chap. 13). That is to say, differently from the twolevel ad hoc concept view, on a one-level stable concept view there is no specific true content individuated, neither at the linguistic nor at the 9 A small class of expressions – those identified in Kaplan (1989) – are obviously allowed to vary their denotation as context shifts. Context-sensitivity, however, must always be syntactically marked (in logical form). See Cappelen and Lepore (2005), chap. 1.

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mental level. Thus, on a one-level stable concept view there is no explanation of the perceived asymmetry between (A) and (B) – no reason why the true content in (A) is intuitively felt as more natural than the literal false content in (B). According to the theory, the literal false content grasped by Rita in (B) is primary, while the agreed content in (A) is merely one interpretation out of indefinitely many possible ones. These results (especially the second one) are at odds with speakers’ intuitions about (A) and (B): (A) Lisa: Mary is a bulldozer Rita: Yes that’s true. She fired ten employees in order to be promoted vice-president last year (B) Lisa: Mary is a bulldozer Rita: No she isn’t. She is a woman like both of us, and women are not things This paper defends a kind of stable concept view; more precisely, a two-level stable concept view. Just as in the previous position considered, concepts, in the general case,10 are assumed to be representations in semantic memory, not temporary representations in working memory. On a two-level ad hoc concept view, however, concepts are not identical to word meanings. I’ll defend this claim below. For now I’ll provide an alternative description of the bulldozer example. When Lisa utters ‘Mary is a bulldozer’ and Rita agrees, the thought successfully conveyed is that Mary is a person endowed with a particular personality trait, involving obstinacy, strength, goaldirectedness and insensitivity. Lisa has met many people who possess that personality trait before, and so has Rita. They both possess a mental mark for keeping track of that specific personality trait, as for any other relevant environmental regularity they observe. Let’s call the personality trait ‘C’ and its mental mark ‘the concept of C’. Lisa and Rita’s concepts of C are both concepts of C just because they are mental marks for the same human trait, no matter whether – say – Lisa despises people who are C, while Rita strongly admires them, or whether Lisa thinks C-people live more happily while Rita wouldn’t say that, or whether Lisa is extremely good at detecting C-people even after a very short acquaintance. I am here suggesting a purely functional 10 I add the qualification ‘in the general case’ because I want to make allowances for the possibility of there being ad hoc representations of categories; more on this discussed below.

86 / ELISABETTA LALUMERA characterization of the concept of C, as that unique kind of cognitive tool (presumably a kind of data structure) people use in order to identify and represent the specific trait of personality in question – no matter how rich, or how meagre, it could be in the case of a specific subject as compared to the others, and no matter what the format of mental codification may be. This functional characterization of concepts (merely) presupposes that kinds and properties exist, in some sense independently of our conceptualization of them, and that people tend to share concepts in the minimal sense of being cognitively sensitive to roughly the same kinds and properties (the amount of sharing would of course depend on many factors, including the cultural and geographical background, and the respective age of the subjects). What is peculiar to the concept of C, as far as communication is concerned, is that it is not lexicalized in English, the language of our example. (This looks more like a contingent feature of English than a general cross-linguistic fact, let alone a linguistic universal, but this tentative claim stands in need of adequate evidence). It is, however, an important accident in the fictional context considered, because Lisa wants to convey that very thought, containing that very concept in a quick and effective way to Rita, but she has no conventionally associated word to hand in her mental lexicon. Thus, Lisa employs the means she finds most appropriate for the circumstances, in this case, the artefact-referring English noun ‘bulldozer’. In the picture I am proposing, ‘bulldozer’ refers to an entity in the world, the artefact kind of bulldozers.11 The conditions for category inclusion may be somewhat vague here, as is often the case (is a rusty old bulldozer without the blade still a bulldozer? etc.). Mary, however, would definitely not be a paradigm borderline case – being a woman, she is not a bulldozer in the literal sense. Thus, Lisa utters a sentence expressing the false proposition that Mary is a certain kind of artefact with a large blade in the front part, in order to convey what she thinks is a true thought, that Mary is a person with property C. Lisa thinks that there is some relation between property C and the artefact kind of bulldozers (intuitively, some similarity relation). She also presumes that Rita can grasp the same relation, and therefore that she has the resources to arrive at the intended thought from the literal meaning of the false sentence. The process of interpretation, here, can be Gricean again: Rita knows that Lisa is cooperative, she notices that she said something

11 An ontology of objects, kinds and property is presupposed here, but nothing in the present argument would change with an ontology of objects and sets, or even just objects.

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blatantly false (categorically so), so she tries to make sense of her nonsense by (say) speculating on which possible property of persons is connected with the artefact kind of bulldozers. She finds that property C is the best candidate (though maybe not the only possible one). She concludes that Lisa expressed the thought that Mary has property C, and therefore the concept of C is a component of her thought. This account, undoubtedly, is oversimplified. The question of which possible property of persons is connected with the artefact kind of bulldozers is a very difficult one. The form of inference involved in giving an answer, if any, is probably abduction, which typically involves the subject’s stored knowledge of the world (or at least, of a large experiential domain). If this is so, then an explicit reconstruction of all the inferential premises involved is not feasible, or at least it is empirically very difficult.12 This is a meagre result, but at least one that is generally accepted as such, even by those who explicitly defend an inferential account of metaphor (and non-literal language) interpretation, like relevance theorists (Wilson and Carston, 2007). Moreover, I assumed, for the sake of simplicity, that the route from the semantic meaning of ‘bulldozer’ to the concept of C is inferential, and specifically Gricean, but it may be that associative, Davidsonian approaches would do cognitively as well.13 What is at issue here is not the specific process of metaphor interpretation, but rather what kind of entities its outputs are. Virtually, one and the same explanation of a pragmatic process of metaphor interpretation is compatible with a relevance-theoretic account (where pragmatic interpretation yields ad hoc concepts and ad hoc meanings), with a classical Gricean theory, and even with semantic minimalism (in which concepts as stable entities are the outputs of a purely semantic interpretation process, but where pragmatic processes are responsible for delivering a potentially infinite variety of other contents). In other words, the question of the nature of the pragmatic process is orthogonal to the one I mean to address. This being said, the two-level stable concept view is neither better, nor less well placed than its alternatives on the grounds that it does not include a proper description of the process of interpretation, but only a sketchy one. So which entities are involved in the two-level stable concept view? Words, word meanings conceived as world entities (objects, kinds, properties) and concepts, conceived as data structures that 12 Fodor (2000) thinks that all abductive processes inevitably fall outside the domain of a scientific (meaning ‘computational’) study of mind. 13 See the classical collection on metaphor Ortony (1993). For an update, see Mind and Language, vol. 3, 2006 (the complete journal issue).

88 / ELISABETTA LALUMERA represent world entities, and are conventionally associated with words. According to the two-level stable concept view, it is possible that no new concept is generated in the course of a successful episode of communication involving non-literal language, like the one we have been discussing so far. It may well happen that an old, though nonlexicalized, concept is associated with a word in a non-conventional way. In such cases concepts themselves are stable, not ad hoc, though their association with words is contextual, and done on the fly. This view doesn’t involve ad hoc meanings either, since meanings are conceived as the world entities (if any) that words stand for. It involves, though, ad hoc word-concept associations. Word-concept association is explained as follows. It is usually the case that among the various data a subject stores in her semantic memory about a certain object or property, there is the phonological and graphic representation of the word conventionally used to mean that object or property in the language she speaks. These lexical representations are extremely important in most cognitive activities, because they are easy to remember, reproduce and compute in reasoning and generally in all the cognitive tasks we perform off-line, that is, in the absence of the relevant category samples. Though word-concept association plays a central role in the application of concepts when present, in some cases it may be absent.14 Word-concept association is contingent, and depends both on the speaker’s mastery of her own language, on her epistemic status and on the characteristics of the language itself, specifically on the conventions followed by speakers of that language. In fact, it may happen that in the language of a community, or more frequently in a subject’s idiolect, a concept is not lexicalized. This means that the subject or subjects can discriminate a certain kind of object or property, draw inferences about it, store knowledge about previously encountered instances and apply it to new ones, even though they have no graphic or phonetic representation stored in memory along with knowledge about that kind of object or property. Thus, in this limited sense, concepts are more than words. If concepts are more than words in this sense, it must sometimes be the case that a word is used to express some other concept than the one it is 14 Thus, word-concept association cannot be an essential, i.e. internal property of concepts. The possibility of such a relation, however, may well be essential for concepts – i.e., concepts need not be expressed by words, but they need to be expressible. When concepts are not associated with word representations, they are presumably associated with images (exemplars from previous perceptual encounters, maps or icons). The easiest example is of people we recognize at a glance, without knowing their name.

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conventionally associated with.15 At least some metaphorical utterances can be given an explanation along these lines. If this is so, at least some stable representations can be expressed by metaphorical utterances.

4.4

Concepts are More than Words

What is the claim that concepts are more than words? More precisely, it means that there is no one-to-one mapping between conceptual representations and the lexicon, mainly because only a part of the conceptual repertoire is lexicalized. The ‘mainly’ specification is meant to leave open the possibility that there be words which do not correspond to a concept – conceived as a means of representing and projecting general knowledge about something. For example, words like ‘the’ or ‘by’ do not correspond to a concept thus conceived. Also, a few words are synonyms, that is they are associated with the same concept.16 Leaving the specification aside, the claims can be unpacked in two versions, one for public languages, and one for idiolects: (PL) For every language there are salient objects and kinds in the natural and cultural environment of speakers that are not conventionally associated with one word in that language. (I) For every idiolect there are salient regularities in the natural and social environment of the speaker that he or she does not have a word for. On philosophical grounds, this has already been convincingly argued for in Sperber and Wilson (1998). This is their own intuitive motivation for the claim that concepts are more than words: ‘you look at your friend and recognize the symptoms of a mood for which you have no word, which you might be unable to describe exactly, and whose previous occurrences you only dimly remember; but you know that mood, and you know how it is likely to affect her and you. Similarly, you look at the landscape and the sky, and you recognize the weather, you know how it will feel, but you have no word for it. Or you feel a pain, you recognize it and know what to expect, but have no word for it; and so on. You are capable not just of recognizing these phenomena but also of anticipating them, imagining them, regretting 15

Actually, this is not a matter of logical necessity, since it is not true that a subject ought to express (sooner or later) all the concepts she possesses, nor is it true that she ought to express them with single words, as opposed to phrases. It is, however, empirically plausible. 16 The claim that idiolects contain perfect synonyms is, however, controversial.

90 / ELISABETTA LALUMERA or rejoicing that they are not actual. You can communicate thoughts about them to interlocutors who are capable of recognizing them, if not spontaneously, at least with the help of your communication. Your ability to recognize and think about the mood, the weather, the pain, is evidence that you have a corresponding stable mental file or entry, that is a mental concept’.17 The bulldozer case can be precisely one of these cases. Lisa knows the kind of personality trait, but she does not have a word for it. So, she uses ‘bulldozer’. I have quoted this long passage from Sperber and Wilson in order to show how one and the same insight can be processed further so to arrive at very different conclusions. Evidence for the incomplete mapping claim can be found in experimental psychology, for example in Malt and colleagues’ crosslinguistic studies on categorization (1999, 2003). In a number of experiments, they found that speakers of English, Spanish and Chinese produced highly correlated judgments of similarity about the objects presented (60 common containers, like bottles and cans). The linguistic categories of their respective languages, however, were found to be considerably divergent. For example, subjects of the three languages generally found that an item i was more similar to item j and not to item k, but speakers of one language called i with the same common noun as k, while speakers of another language used one common word for all i, k and j, and speakers of the third language had a word for i only. The example can be read as showing that the prelinguistic (or cross-linguistic) category applied to i and k (the concept of the kind to which i and k belong) is not lexicalized in some of the languages considered. Speakers of English, Spanish and Chinese have concepts that do not correspond exactly to their words. Why is it so? One of the prevailing hypotheses in the crosslinguistic literature is that within some specific experiential domains (e.g. artefacts such as containers for liquids, or emotions), some languages may have more words than others, due to cultural and evolutional factors (Murphy and Medin, 1985). The variable density of the lexicon of different languages in specific domains may also be influenced by the morphology and syntax of the languages considered. For example, Spanish and Italian have an easy way to form nouns for containers, by adding a suffix to the root noun (in Italian, the suffix – era, as in ‘biscotti(i)-era’, biscuit box), so they have many more names for containers than English. But it does not follow that English

17

Sperber and Wilson (1998).

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speakers have fewer concepts of containers than Spaniards and Italians – they just have fewer lexicalized ones. It should be noted that the thesis that concepts are more than word would be false if a strong linguistic determinism were true. By strong linguistic determinism I mean the claim that all categories (and concepts) are a product of language (see Schwanenflugel et al., 1991, for a review). Such a view, however, has not received empirical confirmation recently. The position of the psychologists who favour weak versions of linguistic determinism can still be taken to be compatible with the view I’m defending here. For example, on the developmental side, Yoshida and Smith (2003) note that the English language emphasizes the distinction between objects and substances, while Japanese privileges the distinction between animate and inanimate entities. They add, however, that both Japanese and English would categorize a moving and talking person as animate, and splashing water as a substance, thus using the same concepts of animate and substance in non-borderline cases.18 Thus they claim that language is ‘one force creating ontological distinctions’, but some distinctions are immune to effects of language. Here again, these considerations support the claim that language and concepts do not map one to one, and it is not incompatible with the further thesis that the conceptual system is generally more dense. Further studies in favour of the hypothesis that concepts are more than words were recently conducted by Klein and Murphy (2001, 2002) on polysemy.19 Polysemous words are words with many interrelated meanings, for example ‘paper’, which can be used to refer (at least) to a substance made out of wood, to sheets of that substance, to a written scientific article, to a daily publication and to the institution who publishes it. These meanings are different though somehow related, while meanings of a word like ‘bank’ are not. Klein and Murphy’s categorization task experiments showed, for example, that only 20% of subjects categorized together the different meanings of a polysemous word (Klein and Murphy, 2002). Moreover, it was found that using a

18 Yoshida and Smith think that concepts are contextual entities, but for reasons that differ from the ones considered in this paper. 19 Murphy (2002) maintains that meanings are built out of concepts, whereas I assumed here that word meanings are world entities, and concepts are associated with words. Experimental results about polysemy can be read either as suggesting that there can be many concepts associated with the same word (my reading), or that the same word has many conceptual meanings (Murphy’s reading). See Murphy (1991) for the compatibility of the two approaches.

92 / ELISABETTA LALUMERA word in a specific sense facilitated comprehension for a sentence that used a different word with the same meaning, and inhibited comprehension for a sentence that used that first word with a different meaning (Klein and Murphy, 2001). It is therefore likely that in polysemy subjects associate different concepts (different stable mental data structures) with one and the same word. The alternative – there is one single core concept that all the meanings of the polysemous words derive from – appears to be disconfirmed, because it would neither predict the difference of performance in the comprehension of couples of sentences containing the same meaning of the polysemous word and couples of sentences that do not, nor would it predict the results of the categorization task. In other words, a core concept hypothetically associated with ‘paper’ does not seem to play any role – rather, many concepts stored in semantic memory under the same linguistic label seem to be activated as context shifts. These studies are particularly relevant to the problem discussed here because it is sometimes argued that there is no clear-cut distinction between polysemy and metaphor (Wilson and Carston, 2007). The word ‘bulldozer’, for example, can be used metaphorically to denote a personality trait, but it is not implausible that in some idiolects it is regularly used to denote this personality trait, thus becoming a polysemous word just like ‘paper’. If polysemy involves a one-to-many relation between words and concepts, then it is plausible that metaphor exhibits the same pattern, at least in some cases. Different stable concepts can be associated to the same word, and the relation of association can be constructed either on the fly (metaphor) or permanently (polysemy) by speakers who choose (often consciously and rationally) the best means to fill in a lexical lacuna, and achieve their communicative goals.

4.5

Objections and Concluding Remarks

In the remaining part of the paper, I will consider some objections to the line of argument I have presented. The first one has to do with empirical evidence. It can be objected that the recent psychological literature on categorization is actually accumulating evidence in favour of ad hoc concepts. More precisely, many experiments show that subjects’ performance in typical conceptual tasks are influenced by context. One task is categorization, and specifically feature listing, namely the attribution of properties to an item of a certain category. In a typical experiment run by Barsalou (2003), subjects were asked to remember various objects, or to view pictures of them, and then to

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answer questions as to whether a certain object possessed a certain property. Research found that unoccluded features (either in pictures or in subjects’ reported mental images) were produced more often than occluded ones, even though the latter, and not the former, were typical for the category in question. For example, subjects were more likely to tell that with roots is a property of lawn when they saw (or when they were made to imagine) a rolled-up lawn, than when they just thought about it. As the visual perspective (what is seen of and around the object) can be taken to be part of the context, the experiment can be taken to provide evidence for the claim that context affects conceptapplication. Property verification (‘Do things in category C possess property P’?) and exemplar generation (‘give me an example of category C’) are similarly influenced by context. In general, the presence of background information makes it considerably easier for subjects to perform the required task. Moreover, when asked about their strategies in doing what they were asked to do, subjects strikingly often report that they have scanned through memories of scenes or events, where an exemplar of the category in question was present together with a background and connected items – that is, they appealed to context (Vallee-Tourangeau et al., 1998; Yeh and Barsalou, 2006). Experiments also show that more refined tasks, such as the attribution of functions to an unknown object, are based on background information retrieved from the context. In Wisniewski (1996) subjects were asked to evaluate some artefacts designed to clean up pollution. Introduced to a situation where roadside trash was pertinent, they judged that a good example of (the concept of) pollution cleaner was an artefact with the property of having a large vacuum. On the other hand, when introduced to a situation where an ocean was pertinent, they opted for the object equipped with a large spoon. Thus, context affects people’s representation of the category of a pollution cleaner. That is – the hypothesis goes – context affects people’s concept of a pollution cleaner. Similar results are reported when the context is thoroughly linguistic (a spoken sentence, like ‘The blond hair of the little girl had the lustre of gold’) and the task is lexical (tick a written word that names a property of gold. Subjects chose ‘shining’ rather than ‘malleable’) (reviewed in Yeh and Barsalou, 2006). I think that this evidence can be taken at face value and still be compatible with the main claim of this paper, mainly, that at least some concepts are stable though non lexicalized. Experiments show that many conceptual tasks are influenced by context, namely, that in many cognitive tasks people employ context-modified representations

94 / ELISABETTA LALUMERA of categories.20 However, there may well be other cognitive tasks in which the impact of contextual information is minimal, and where stable concepts are employed. Speculatively speaking, deductive reasoning, counterfactual supposition, cross-context generalization and imagination may not require contextual modifications of stored representations. If experiments showed that all conceptual tasks are influenced by context in the sense that people use context-modified representations of categories, then the stable concept view advocated here would be refuted. But this is not the case. Experiments just show that some (albeit important) uses of concepts are influenced by context. Therefore, a plausible conclusion could be that at least for some cognitive tasks, we employ stable concepts stored in semantic memory, while in some other tasks the impact of context is stronger, and on-line temporary representations are central. A concept of x is a set of stored data that can be accessed and processed either as a whole or partially, and either integrated or not with data from the context. There is no reason, at the moment, for ruling out that these modalities are compatible and coexist within our cognitive system, and that concepts are found on a continuum between minimal and maximal sensitivity to contextual data. Stable concept views in general may also invite an objection that centres on the notion of cognitive economy. Cognitive economy can be characterized as the relationship between costs and benefits of a certain process of management of information within a system. Suppose the information is that contained in my unpublished papers, and suppose that I stored each one of them in the room I was in when I wrote the final line. Then in order to retrieve the papers I may need to travel by plane or by train, and spend a huge amount of effort, time and money. Supposing that information included in my unpublished papers is not dramatically relevant, that would definitively be an uneconomical process of information management. Theories of cognition are sometimes evaluated in terms of cognitive economy. It may be argued, for example – as noted in Section 4.2 – that ad hoc concept views save in storage cost, because if concepts are built on-line, then they are not stored indefinitely in semantic memory. Conversely, stable concept views are committed to high storage costs, because they require concepts to be almost permanent residents of semantic memory (and it is likely that concepts 20 A further possible reply would be to argue that concepts are not identical to representations employed in people’s performance of cognitive tasks. I will not pursue this line here.

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turn out to be highly complex data structures). According to such a line of thought, ad hoc concept views are therefore preferable to stable concept views, because they fare better in terms of cognitive economy. My first reply is as follows. First, there is no definitive evidence for the claim that our cognitive system is built and operates in accordance with strict principles of cognitive economy. As Rescher notes, ‘cost effectiveness – the proper coordination of costs and benefits in the pursuit of our ends – is an indispensable requisite of rationality’ (Rescher, 1989: 12). That is, a rational agent ought to operate so as to maximize cognitive economy. Our cognitive system per se, however, is not a rational agent (an agent who is in control of its own goals and means). Rather, it is a collection of subsystems whose outputs can result in rational behaviour. There is no need that each subsystem is itself rational in order to output something intelligent. Thus – as a theoretical possibility – it may well be that some of our cognitive systems and processes could have been designed and implemented better than they were, as far as cognitive economy is concerned – but that, simply, it didn’t happen. In order to rule out such a possibility of imperfection, one would need to resort to very strong assumptions about either God or evolution. My second reply to the objection takes the cognitive economy ideal for granted. Even assuming cognitive economy as a regulative ideal, it can be said that if ad hoc concept theories save storage cost, they can be a lot more expensive than stable concept views as far as production costs are concerned. On ad hoc concept views, a new concept is created from scattered data in every new cognitive task. However, many relevant features of our environment are highly stable, and we are likely to use and reuse the same information about a certain category through different cognitive encounters. If this is true, then to have such information already organized and stored would be more economical than to repeat the same process of access, retrieval and organization from scattered data every time. Access, retrieval and organization can be more expensive than storage, especially if they are repeated frequently. Even though these considerations stand in need of empirical confirmation, they are no more speculative than the principle of cognitive economy itself. Finally, the stable concept views advocated in this paper can be found wanting as an account of metaphor. I claimed that at least some metaphors are not genuine cases of on-line concept creation, but that they are rather cases of ad hoc word-concept associations motivated by a gap in the lexicon. In short, metaphors are produced because concepts are more than words. Now, as many scholars have pointed out, metaphors come in many different kinds, that may need to be explained by

96 / ELISABETTA LALUMERA different cognitive mechanisms. It is highly plausible that the hypothesis I presented is not sufficient to explain all cases of metaphor. Thus, it is plausible that there are genuinely creative metaphors, in which new concepts are created along with new concept-word associations. Examples can be found in poetry and in the history of science, when genuine creativity is involved (see, e.g. Boden, 1990 for a review). So, it is true that the hypothesis presented here does not qualify as an adequate explanation of metaphor. It is at best a very partial one, and it lacks wide-scope explanatory power. The main aim of the paper, however, was to show that there is no direct route from the explanation of some everyday cases of metaphorical utterances to the psychological claim that concepts are ad hoc structures. A theory of language interpretation need not be the same enterprise as a theory of concepts, because concepts are not just word meanings.

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Klein, D. E. and G. L. Murphy. 2002. Paper has been my ruin: Conceptual relations of polysemous senses. Journal of Memory and Language 47:548–570. Millikan, R. G. 2000. On Clear and Confused Ideas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Malt, B., S. Sloman, M. Shi, and Y. Wang. 1999. Knowing versus naming: Similarity and the linguistic categorization of artefacts. Journal of Memory and Language 40:230–262. Malt, B., S. Sloman, and S. Gennari. 2003. Universality and language specificity in object naming. Journal of Memory and Language 49:20–42. Murphy, G. L. 1991. Meaning and concepts. In P. Schwanenflugel, ed., The Psychology of Word Meaning, pp. 11–35. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Murphy, G. L. 2002. The Big Book of Concepts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Murphy, G. L. and D. L. Medin. 1985. The role of theories in conceptual coherence. Psychological Review 92:289–316. Ortony, A. (ed.). 1993. Metaphor and Thought, 2nd edn., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Recanati, F. 2004. Literal Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rescher, N. 1989. Cognitive Economy: Perspectives in the Theory of Knowledge. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Schwanenflugel, P., B. Blount, and P.-J. Lin. 1991. Cross-cultural aspects of word meaning. In P. Schwanenflugel, ed., The Psychology of Word Meaning, pp. 71–90. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Sperber, D. and D. Wilson. 1995. Relevance: Communication and Cognition, 2nd edn., Oxford: Blackwell. Sperber, D. and D. Wilson. 1998. The mapping between the public and the mental lexicon. In P. Carruthers and J. Boucher, eds., Thought and Language, pp. 184–200. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stern, J. 2006. Metaphor, literal, literalism. Mind and Language 21:243–279. Vallee-Tourangeau, F., S. Anthony, and N. Austin. 1998. Strategies for generating multiple instances of common and ad hoc categories. Memory 6:555–592. Wearing, C. 2006. Metaphor and what is said. Mind and Language 21:310–332. Wilson, D. and R. Carston. 2007. A unitary approach to lexical pragmatics: Relevance, inference and ad hoc concepts. In N. Burton-Roberts, ed., Advances in Pragmatics, pp. 230–260. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Wisniewski, E. J. 1996. Construal and similarity in conceptual combination. Journal of Memory and Language 35:434–453. Yeh, W. and L. W. Barsalou. 2006. The situated nature of concepts. American Journal of Psychology 119:349–384. Yoshida, P. and L. Smith. 2003. Correlations, concepts and cross-linguistic differences. Developmental Science 6:30–34.


5

Predicate Indexicality and Context Dependence PETER BOSCH

Abstract This paper argues that productive language use, specifically cases of apparent variation in word sense, or so-called polysemy, requires a treatment at the denotational level rather than a purely lexicalsemantic solution or a sentence-internal compositional solution. It is argued that the lexical semantics is much less specified than is often assumed and only contains structural constraints over the kind of conceptual entities that can be denoted by the lexical item, but does not contain the conceptual content. Among these constraints, we are proposing a distinction between those that introduce index dependence and others that make the interpretation dependent on argument domains. Only the latter seem to be involved in polysemy. Keywords: index dependence vs. context dependence, lexical meaning, polysemy, denotation.

5.1

The Problem

Modern mainstream linguistics may be characterized as an investigation not of languages, language or language behaviour, but as an investigation of linguistic knowledge.1 This characterization of the 1 I am grateful for the opportunity to present an earlier version of this paper at the conference on Utterance Interpretation and Cognitive Models at the Universite´ Libre de

Utterance Interpretation and Cognitive Models. Philippe De Brabanter and Mikhail Kissine (eds.). Current Research in the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface, Vol. 20. r 2009 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited. All rights reserved.

99

100 / PETER BOSCH subject matter of the discipline is one of the cornerstones of the Chomskyan research programme and has been responsible for much of the success of modern linguistic research. The focus on linguistic knowledge distinguishes this line of work from preceding and also from other current research paradigms. It has led, under the influence of modern logic and the study of formal systems, for the first time in the history of linguistics, to rigorous formal characterizations of some of the structural properties of human language, particularly in the areas of syntax and semantics. The central concept on which both syntax and semantics are built in the linguistic knowledge paradigm is the sentence, both as the basic notion of grammar and – in its guise as proposition or sentence meaning – as the basic notion of formal semantics. Sentences are generated according to syntactic rules from syntactic constituents; and propositions, alias sentence meanings or truth conditions, are built up compositionally from the meanings of their constituents, ultimately the lexical items, of the sentence. This is the core of the generative recipe – attributable in principle already to Gottlob Frege – that provides the principle for an explanation of the fact that arbitrarily many different natural language expressions, phrases and sentences can be produced and understood by any human speaker: All you need is the primitive expressions, i.e. the lexical items, and the rules for their combination. As the purpose of syntactic rules is to determine how constituents, and ultimately sentences, can be built from lexical items, a large part of this knowledge can straightforwardly be accommodated in the syntactic categories of lexical items themselves. In principle, if syntactic categories are made sufficiently complex, they may incorporate all of syntax in the form of syntactic category information and syntax can thus be ‘lexicalized’, i.e. can be made part of the lexical information that becomes available with each lexical item. This path has been taken in quite a number of current approaches to grammar at least to some degree. One would expect that also semantic information could similarly be represented for each word in the lexicon. Putting aside for the moment the question of what such representations may look like and sticking to the basic idea that they must contain all the knowledge that the lexical item contributes to the meaning of the sentence, there is an Bruxelles, 23–24 June, 2006 and for comments and criticism from participants. In addition, I want to thank Graham Katz for very helpful discussions, and Philippe De Brabanter and Mikhail Kissine for many very useful comments on an earlier draft.

PREDICATE INDEXICALITY

AND

CONTEXT DEPENDENCE / 101

obvious difficulty with lexical items that have more than one meaning. This is not a very interesting problem as long as we are concerned with a fairly small number of meanings per word, as in the case of ordinary lexical ambiguity, most typically homonymy. Lexical ambiguity is usually accommodated for by allowing for more lexical entries. This clearly makes sense when there are not only different meanings, but when there is also the intuition that we are dealing with different words that just happen to look or sound the same. A clear indication would be additional morphological or syntactic differences: The expressions to book a flight and a book of fairy tales are reasonably assumed to contain two different lexical items, both pronounced alike and both spelt ‘book’ but not otherwise related in any interesting sense, albeit in some etymological way. When we are concerned with the native speaker’s linguistic knowledge, however, etymology is irrelevant anyhow. Even when there is no difference in terms of morphological or syntactic properties, one would still occasionally assume two different lexical items, e.g. in the case of the two different meanings for the noun caterpillar, designating the animal or the vehicle, even though it may still be transparent to most speakers that one is derived metaphorically from the other. The rule of thumb simply is that one would assume ambiguity and separate lexical entries, i.e. homonymy, whenever there is no obvious rule that would productively derive one meaning from the other – never mind actual historical origins. A speaker of English may learn and use either of the two homonyms without knowing the other, and no one would expect the native speaker to use, or even understand, the form in one sense merely on the basis of already knowing the other. A problem case is when we find uses of lexical items that do not differ much, or do not differ at all, in their syntax and somehow seem obviously related in their meaning, but not to the point of being semantically identical. The English verb to open is a stock-in-trade example2: In phrases like opening a door, opening a letter, opening a bottle or opening a book, the verb open seems to denote different types of actions each time. If in order to open a door you were to do the same thing to the door that you would do to a letter in order to open the letter, you would not only fail to open the door, but your action is also unlikely to be described as even an attempt to open the door.

2 cf. earlier treatments in Bosch (1995, 2007b) that already contain some of the thoughts also defended in this paper.

102 / PETER BOSCH Still, there is a clear intuition that we are looking at a productive mechanism in this case: Knowing one of these uses of open seems like a good start for understanding and using all the others, and there seems no obvious limit to the number of different types of objects that a speaker of English could ‘open’, while the kind of opening operation denoted would still be different each time.3 This is where the problem starts: If, as it may appear, the same word may mean something different every time it combines with other words, how are we to systematically predict the meaning of the resulting phrase for unseen cases, and how are we to compute the meaning or truth conditions of sentences in which these words occur? My argument in this paper is that polysemy has very little to do with lexical semantics and compositionality. Polysemy is neither in the lexicon, nor does it arise from an interaction of different words in a sentence. Instead, I shall argue that polysemy effects come about when lexical information interacts with the denotation that an occurrence of a particular expression has in a particular context. Such interactions yield context-specific denotations for expressions, and it is these denotations that are the input for compositional processes, which eventually will give us something like the ‘meaning’ of an utterance. This model is clearly different from the more generally accepted idea, according to which, first of all, abstract sentence meanings are constructed compositionally and are subsequently adjusted to the context in which the sentence occurs.

5.2

Accounting for Polysemy

In Section 5.2.1 I want to briefly sketch one practically useful but theoretically unsatisfactory approach to polysemy that is commonly taken in lexicography, and in Section 5.2.2 I will give a summary of James Pustejovsky’s Generative Lexicon theory, which is in principle a formal and compositional theory and overcomes essential shortcomings of many other approaches. As the discussion of Pustejovsky’s account will show, I believe that it still falls short of satisfying certain architectural or modularity requirements that are important for a 3 Perhaps one may still want to exclude some uses of open as non-productive or idiomatic, like opening your arms to greet somebody or opening your heart to somebody. I have no specific opinion on this, but even with a reasonable finite number of such idiosyncratic cases that may not be derived productively, there is no doubt that there is still a very large class of uses that are productively related.


AND


proper understanding of polysemy in particular and natural language comprehension more generally. 5.2.1

World Knowledge and the Listing of Senses

How do lexicographers handle polysemy? Looking up the verb to open in the Collins Cobuild English Dictionary (1990 edition) we find, next to – literally – 37 other ‘senses’ for this verb, the entries in (1) and (2), which are fairly representative of the rest. (1) If you open a letter or parcel, you cut or tear the envelope, or remove the wrapping. (2) If you open a book, you move its covers apart to read or write on the pages inside. Somehow this reads like instructions for how to open letters, parcels or books, rather than descriptions of word meanings. But even though this way of explaining word meanings is not the line a theoretical linguist would embrace, it is probably on the right track for practical lexicography, because such lexical entries are clearly useful for the non-native dictionary user: They attempt a classification of different uses of a word, exemplifying each, and thus provide useful albeit indirect hints at the word’s meaning. But why is the Collins approach not attractive for the theoretical linguist? I can see two reasons. One is that no distinction is made between the description of what a word means and the objects or events the word is applied to, in other words, between linguistic knowledge on the one hand and world knowledge or conceptual knowledge on the other. The Collins word senses of open just seem to represent a taxonomy of those events that are all described in English as openings. Now this point may not be seen as critical by all linguists. Some linguists, like many psychologists, believe that word meanings just are concepts. The other reason for being less than happy with the Collins approach is that it just seems to produce lists of different word senses and thus misses generalizations. By merely listing different uses of a word, one does not even get round to asking the question of how these different uses arise and if some or perhaps all of them may be the result of some productive or generative mechanism. Following up the second line of criticism, one may like to view the apparent differences in the sense of open as the result of something like a compositional process: the ‘sense’ that the verb takes on in a particular phrase would differ depending on the type of argument that the verb takes in that phrase, while there is in fact only one lexical sense

104 / PETER BOSCH and just one lexical entry for the verb to open from which these various compositional senses arise. This is, roughly, an approach that James Pustejovsky has been proposing. It has the advantage that it gets away from a mere listing of word senses and can model polysemy phenomena as the result of a productive process. On the other hand, as we shall see, Pustejovsky includes a good deal of conceptual as well as contingent world knowledge into his lexical semantics and would probably not endorse the first of our two critical remarks about the lexicographer’s approach. 5.2.2 5.2.2.1

Polysemy Resulting from Compositional Processes The Generative Lexicon Approach

Pustejovsky (1995: 221) discusses the three sentences in (3) to illustrate the apparent polysemy of the English verb to open. (3) a. Mary opened the letter for her mother. b. The rangers have opened the trail for the summer. c. John opened the door for the guests. The lexical entry, or rather just the semantic part of it, that Pustejovsky (1995: 221) suggests for the English verb to open is given by the feature structure in Diagram 1. Here we find three attributes: the Event Structure (EVENTSTR), the Argument Structure (ARGSTR) and the Qualia Structure (QUALIA) of the verb. EVENTSTR tells us that the verb semantically relates two events, one of which is of the semantic type process, the other of the type state, and that the process must precede the state. ARGSTR open E1 = e1 : process EVENTSTR = E2 = e2 : state RESTR = < ∝ ARG1= 1 ARGSTR =

ARG2 = 2

physobj FORMAL = entity

dc - lcp QUALIA =

FORMAL = open_result(e2 , 2 ) AGENTIVE = open_act(e1,1 , 2 ) DIAGRAM 1.


AND


gives the semantic arguments of the verb, coindexing the first argument with an agent argument, and the second with the result argument in the QUALIA. This second argument is furthermore marked as being of the semantic type physobj and its QUALIA are given, in abbreviated form, by the feature FORMAL, whose value is the semantic type entity. The QUALIA features FORMAL and AGENTIVE are, respectively, used to distinguish the verb’s meaning in a larger domain or for information on the origin or bringing about of an opening. This QUALIA representation is not specific to the verb to open, but is a semantic type. Pustejovsky (1995: 76) calls it the ‘direct causative lexical conceptual paradigm’ (dc-lcp) that represents the QUALIA structure of all direct causative verbs. I could not honestly say I have fully understood these QUALIA, but in the case at hand the information they are supposed to give is that a relation of the type open_result relates ARG2 to the state e2 and a relation of the type open_act relates the process e1 to both ARG1 and ARG2. In plain English, this comes to something like this: Opening something results in a particular state of the thing that is being opened, and the opening is a process that involves an agent and a physical object. The semantics of the verb thus represented is obviously quite neutral with respect to the three senses in (3). ARG1 would, respectively, take on Mary, the rangers or John as its value, and ARG2 would be the letter, the trail or the door; the process, e1, would presumably in all cases be a process of opening; only the state, e2, would differ: the way these sentences are typically read – in any case the way that Pustejovsky wants us to read them – the letter in (a) would not only be open after Mary opened it, but would be available for reading, the trail in (b) would not be open for being read, but would be available to walkers to walk on, and the door in (c) would be open for the guests to walk through. This comes to about the same level of detail as the explanations in the Collins dictionary and one may wonder if this much detail should be part of a semantic interpretation, and if these variants in the interpretation of open would indeed enter the truth conditions of all utterances of the sentences in (3a-c). We will return to this point below. Pustejovsky in any case believes that these differences between the typical or likely interpretations of the sentences in (3) ought to be accounted for in the compositional semantics, and attempts to derive them from an interaction between the lexical semantics of open in Diagram 1 and, for instance, the lexical semantics of the noun letter in Diagram 2 (Pustejovsky, 1995: 222). The noun letter thus behaves semantically as what Pustejovsky calls a ‘dot object’: something that belongs simultaneously to more

106 / PETER BOSCH letter physobj . info - lcp QUALIA =

FORMAL = R(x,y) TELIC = read(e,z,x,y) ... DIAGRAM 2.

open .... dc - lcp QUALIA =

FORMAL = open_result(e2, ◊ TELIC( 2 ) ) AGENTIVE = open_act(e1,1 , 2 )

DIAGRAM 3.

than one semantic type, in the case at hand the semantic type physobj and the semantic type info. The dot object is again a lexical conceptual paradigm, and its TELIC role says that the thing is for reading. Now, in order to see the relation between opening and letter, as it is presumably intended in (3a), we have to look more closely into the arguments of the open_result relation in the lexical entry of open. Diagram 3 gives a more detailed representation of the corresponding parts of the feature structure in Diagram 1. The TELIC quale from the representation of the state that is the result of the opening act is now included under a possibility operator as the second argument of open_result and thus tells us what the purpose of this state is: to make possible the purpose given in the TELIC quale of the second argument of open, i.e. the object opened. This would then, by unification of the feature structures (Pustejovsky speaks in this case of ‘co-composition’), lead to a semantic representation for the phrase ‘open the letter’ as in Diagram 4, which tells us that the point of the letter-opening operation is to make the reading of the letter possible (Pustejovsky, 1995: 223). Assuming a lexical representation for the semantics of door as in Diagram 5 we can then, quite analogously, derive the semantic representation in Diagram 6 for sentence (3c). There is a lot of detail and background missing in this rendering of Pustejovsky’s proposal, but for current purposes at least the outline of the account should be clear enough.


AND


open the_letter E1 = e1 :process EVENTSTR = E2 = e2 :state RESTR = < ∝ ARG1= 1 letter

ARGSTR =

ARG2 = 2

QUALIA =

physobj . info-lcp TELIC = 3 = read(e, z, x, y)

dc - lcp FORMAL = open_result(e2,◊ 3 )

QUALIA =

AGENTIVE = open_act(e1,1 , 2 ) DIAGRAM 4.

door physobj . aperture - lcp QUALIA =

TELIC = walk_through(e,z,y) ... DIAGRAM 5.

open the_door E1 = e1 :process EVENTSTR = E2 = e2 : state RESTR = < ∝ ARG1 = 1 ARGSTR =

door ARG2 = 2

QUALIA =

physobj . aperture - lcp TELIC = 3 = walk_through (e, z, y)

dc - lcp QUALIA =

FORMAL = open_result(e2, ◊ 3 ) AGENTIVE = open_act(e1,1 , 2 ) DIAGRAM 6.

108 / PETER BOSCH 5.2.2.2

Problems with the Generative Lexicon

Pustejovsky does not list different word senses but accounts for polysemy by compositional effects that come about in the interaction of the verb open with its noun arguments. What is the nature of these compositional effects? First of all, it may be surprising, at least from a linguistic point of view, how much world knowledge or, if you like, conceptual knowledge is found in Pustejovsky’s lexical representations. Does it really matter to the understanding of the phrase ‘open a letter’ that letters should have something like an intrinsic purpose of being read? Suppose that it does. What then, if the discourse context gives us explicitly different information? For the postman the purpose of a letter is rather to be delivered, and for the filing clerk perhaps letters must, in the first instance, be sorted and filed. Similarly, not nearly all doors are for walking through; think of cupboard doors, wardrobe doors, etc. But they are still doors. And a carpenter may sometimes have to ‘open a door’, but not as an object of the type physobj.aperture-lcp, but rather as a simple phsysobj, because the lock inside the door needs repair. Walking through the door is not at issue then either. In sum, one may wonder about how much of all this knowledge should be part of lexical knowledge and how much of it is just contingent common sense knowledge that, first of all, is not really linguistic in nature and, second, may change from one discourse context to the other. For instance, one may ask if the plausible inference from (3a), that the purpose of opening the letter is to make it possible that it be read, is in any sense part of the semantics of the sentence, i.e. part of the truth conditions that any declarative utterance of the sentence would have to respect. I find it hard to believe that this should be so. If this inference were part of every proposition that the sentence denotes the sequences in (3au) should yield a contradiction, which they patently do not. (3) au. Mary opened the letter for her mother. The point was just to show her that it was empty. av. Mary opened the letter for her mother. The point was to take out the cheque and then throw it away.4 The knowledge about purposes that is at issue here may well be part of the understanding of particular occurrences of the sentence 4 There is an obvious additional problem here with the polysemy of ‘letter’, which I am trying to ignore because it does not affect our argument.


AND


in particular contexts. But Pustejovsky models it as part of the semantics of the phrase or sentence and as derived by compositional processes. If we want to include this kind of knowledge into the model of the comprehension process – which would certainly make sense – then it should more correctly be treated as defeasible pragmatic knowledge, like Gricean implicatures, rather than as a proper part of the semantics. It should be uncontroversial that world knowledge and conceptual knowledge of all kinds play an essential role in natural language understanding, and certainly also in the case of polysemy. The issue is not whether, but how to take this knowledge into account. Modelling it as part of linguistic knowledge strikes me as simply wrong. Pustejovsky’s compositional processes are strictly sentenceinternal and do not interact with discourse or utterance context. Influence from discourse or utterance context can only be taken into account after the system has delivered a sentence meaning or a semantic value for the sentence. However, by including part of the knowledge that may in fact vary from one discourse or utterance context to the other in the lexical entries, the Generative Lexicon in fact models language comprehension by implicit reference to a default context, and any adjustment to contexts where the defaults do not hold would have to take place after the system has completed operations. This type of architecture for language understanding, which assumes, first, the construction of sentence meanings or propositions, and then, as a further step, an adjustment to contexts, is of course a fairly common position, even though it is rarely made explicit (but cf. e.g. Cutler and Clifton, 1999) and tends to be more of a common background assumption. Also the classic division of labour between semantics and Gricean pragmatics (challenged though in more recent Neo-Gricean thinking) naturally fits in with this architecture, where conversational implicatures can only be derived from propositions; so the propositional result of compositional processes must be completed first, before the pragmatic component can start operating.

5.3 5.3.1

A Denotational Approach to Comprehension Utterances and Sentences

The problems about lexical meaning and polysemy so far discussed have arisen and have been formulated in the context of the compositional semantics of sentences. Sentences are objects of linguistic knowledge, certainly in the sense that native speakers of a language can by and large recognize sentences of their language as such. And

110 / PETER BOSCH possibly, although this is a point where we had better be careful, speakers can also decide – within certain limits – what particular sentences could mean, how to paraphrase them or what other sentences would be semantically compatible. We must be careful here, because sentences are constructs of linguistic theory and these constructs abstract from many factors that influence meaning. Thus, it is only in a derived way that we can say that a sentence is true or false with respect to a particular state of affairs. More correctly, one would have to say that a particular statement made by uttering a sentence on a particular occasion, or, if we want to ignore speech-act aspects, a particular occurrence of a sentence, is true or false with respect to a particular state of affairs. It is also only in a derived way of speaking that we could say that sentences are paraphrases of other sentences. It is not sentences or expressions, but utterances or occurrences of sentences and expressions, that figure in linguistic behaviour and thus carry meaning, and only utterances or occurrences of expressions can refer to other things in the world. Linguistic expressions as such cannot. If we are interested in how linguistic knowledge relates to linguistic behaviour or how linguistic knowledge relates to other parts of cognition, or simply in how somebody in particular understands an expression that is uttered in a particular situation, we are not concerned with expressions but with utterances or occurrences of linguistic expressions. How is all this relevant to questions of apparent variation in lexical denotation, alias polysemy? Polysemy obviously does not show up as long as you look at an isolated word, but it shows up when you compare different occurrences of the word in different contexts. In computational linguistics, or at least in many of its applications, the context of a word is operationalized as a window of a certain number of words that occur to the left and to the right of the target word. And for many purposes of Word Sense Disambiguation, this simple notion of context is quite sufficient. A linguist of course would complain, correctly, that even if this approach to disambiguation works fine, there is no good linguistic reason why it should. There is no linguistic reason why a word should take on a different sense just because of its neighbourhood – pace Firth, who had probably quite different things in mind when he produced his bon mot ‘You shall know a word by the company it keeps’ (Firth, 1957: 11). This complaint loses its force when context is no longer viewed flatly as a bag of words in the target word’s neighbourhood but takes syntactic structure into account. If, instead of mere proximity relations, occurrence within the same phrase or sentence, and structural relations


AND


like argument or modifier status enter the picture, then linguistic selection mechanisms come into play and perhaps one may think of explanations of polysemy in terms of compositional semantic mechanisms. Approaches to polysemy in theoretical computational linguistics, like Pustejovsky’s (1995) or Briscoe and Copestake’s (1999), can be understood along these lines. In these accounts polysemy is explained as resulting from compositional semantic processes. Examples like (4) do not seem to require any information from a context beyond the sentence or the phrase to illustrate what they are intended to illustrate, i.e. that the adjective fast makes a different contribution to the semantics of its phrase, depending on the head of the phrase. (4) a. Fred had a fast run. b. Fred had a fast car. c. Fred had a fast typist. This makes it look as if in the course of the compositional construction of the meanings of phrases or sentences, word meanings were interacting with the meanings of other words, ultimately yielding the ‘meaning of the sentence’ or proposition. 5.3.2

Denotation Matters

But this picture is misleading. It may give a roughly correct account for sentences that approximate the ideal of sentences like ‘Snow is white’ or ‘Ice floats on water’, where no specific reference is involved and discourse dependence is negligible. But sentences that figure in human communication are ordinarily context-dependent in the sense that they make only partially explicit what is being said. Truth conditions for occurrences of sentences in contexts will thus ordinarily have to take discourse as well as non-linguistic contextual information into account. The information that a sentence makes available, i.e. word meanings and syntactic structure, only constrains, but does not determine, truth conditions. And similarly the lexical semantics only constrains the denotation of words. There is indeed good reason to suppose that the contribution that the words in a sentence make to the truth conditions of occurrences of the sentence is not a direct contribution of their lexical semantics, but rather a contribution of the denotation that the words have in the actual utterance context. This notion is supported, for instance, by cases where an adjective combines not with a lexical noun, but with a pronoun or a proper name.

112 / PETER BOSCH Pronouns or proper names do not have lexical entries that could establish a relevant semantic difference. Consider the sequences in (5). (5) a. What did you think about Fred’s last run? Yeah, that was a fast one. b. What did you think about Fred’s last car? Yeah, that was a fast one. c. What did you think about Fred’s last typist? Yeah, that was a fast one. Here we get different truth conditions for each occurrence of the identical second sentence in (a)-(c), but this difference cannot be explained by any interaction between the adjective fast and its head. There just is no difference. Instead we must assume that the effect takes place at the level of denotations: one has a different denotation in each of these cases, brought about via its anaphoric link to the interpretation of the preceding sentence. Similarly, the predication of fast in (6) remains vastly underspecified as long as we lack information about the denotation of Lizzy. As soon as we know that Lizzy is, e.g. a car, a horse or a woman, the truth conditions for an utterance of this sentence are tightened. (6) Lizzy is really fast. The relevant information here is not denotation in the sense of the identification of a referent. Suppose that Lizzy refers to a particular person, your friend Lizzy. Then we still don’t know whether (6) is intended to mean that Lizzy is a fast runner, a fast typist or a fast driver, etc., because neither the lexical representation of the name Lizzy nor the identification of the intended referent or any general knowledge about the referent will help with this decision. Even though we know that Lizzy works as a typist, drives a Beetle and runs Marathons, we still don’t know how to read fast. When (6) occurs in the context of a bicycle race in which Lizzy is taking part, it may rather be intended to say something about her cycling speed. What seems to be playing a role, rather than mere reference, is the conceptual representation of the intended referent for the current occurrence of the expression: Lizzy as a cyclist, as a typist, etc. However, such representations typically do not result from sentences, but require information from discourse as well as preceding and concurrent non-linguistic information. So if the examples in (4) give the impression that the head nouns run, car and typist are decisive for the interpretation of fast, then this


AND


impression is only superficially correct: These nouns and their lexical semantics may give a (usually pretty good) hint at the relevant denotation or conceptual representation of the referent, but they do not determine it. 5.3.3

Indexicality

Before we proceed, we must clarify some terminology and introduce a little more theory about context. A common and conventional view in formal semantics is that context is a set of parameters that, together with other parameters, and independent of sentence meanings, influence the truth of a sentence. This conception, which is close to ideas in Montague (1974) or Lewis (1970), is represented in Diagram 7. Here the semantics is concerned with the fixing of semantic values, perhaps propositions, which are extension-determining functions, i.e. intensions in the sense of Carnap (1947), and which are built compositionally from the grammatical constituents of the sentence. The pragmatics would then determine truth values for propositions, given an index. The index is any packet of various parameters on which the truth of the sentence depends and may include contextual features, but will also include what Lewis called ‘contingency’: the dependence on the world at which the sentence is evaluated. David Kaplan (1978) proposed a somewhat different and currently probably more popular division of labour (cf. Diagram 8) that leaves none of indexicality or context dependence to pragmatics, but only matters that are concerned with speech acts, implicature or appropriateness. Kaplan’s intention was to get some facts about indexical expressions, like I, here, now, right. But there is also the nice side effect that his account yields more intuitive semantic values for

compositional sentence meanings intensions

Propositions :

Index

→

Truth values

semantic values

SEMANTICS

PRAGMATICS DIAGRAM 7.

114 / PETER BOSCH

compositional sentence meanings

semantic values propositions intensions

Characters : Context → Contents

Contents :

Circumstances

→

Truth values

SEMANTICS DIAGRAM 8.

sentences. For instance, the sentence ‘I’m smoking.’ intuitively has the same content, i.e. says the same thing, in my current situation, as the sentence ‘Peter Bosch is smoking at 10:29 p.m. on Saturday, 12 January, 2008’. This common content is modelled by Kaplan as the proposition that both sentences denote relative to my current utterance context. In the Montague-Lewis story, however, a sentence containing indexicals would not determine a proposition in the intuitive sense of ‘what is said’. Here the content of the sentence is constructed purely compositionally, before parameters of the index are taken into account. Our two sentences would thus always have different semantic values, where the value of the first is more variable than the value of the second. The difference between the two accounts must not be overemphasized, since any form of indexicality that can be modelled by one of them can also be modelled by the other. But the Kaplan version gives us, as also Lewis (1981) points out, a more intuitive notion of semantic values. In order to identify the semantic value of a declarative sentence with a proposition or content (in the sense of what is said by the sentence in the utterance situation), semantic values must depend on the relevant features of the utterance context. The content then determines truth values for different circumstances of evaluation, in particular depending on what things are like in the world at which the utterance is to be evaluated. This view is represented in Diagram 8, and here is a short extract from Kaplan (1978: 84) that summarizes it: ‘‘Just as contents (or intensions) can be represented by functions from possible worlds to extensions, so characters can be represented by functions from contexts to contents. The character of ‘I’ would then be represented by the function (or rule, if you prefer) which assigns to each


AND


context that content which is represented by the constant function from possible worlds to the agent of the context. The latter function has been called an ‘individual concept’. Note that the character of ‘I’ is represented by a function from contexts to individual concepts, not from contexts to individuals’’ [emphasis by Kaplan]. The context-dependent expressions that Kaplan focuses on are those that he originally called ‘demonstratives’. He mentioned as examples I, you, here, now, that and the adjectives actual and present (Kaplan, 1978: 81). Later he explained the notion more generally and changed the terminology from ‘demonstrative’ to Peirce’s term ‘indexical’: ‘‘What is common to the words or usages in which I am interested is that the referent is dependent on the context of use and that the meaning of the word provides a rule which determines the referent in terms of certain aspects of the context. The term I now favour for these words is ‘indexical’’’ (Kaplan, 1989: 490). Non-indexical expressions, on the other hand, have a constant character, while ‘‘expressions containing demonstratives will, in general, express different concepts in different contexts. We call the concept expressed in a given context, the Content of the expression in that context’’ (Kaplan, 1978: 91). An important point to note is that contents are not referents or extensions – despite the misleading expression by Kaplan himself – but are concepts, functions or rules that determine referents or extensions in particular circumstances. 5.3.4

Predicate Indexicality

We can now return to our suggestion from Section 5.3.2, i.e. the variation in the adjective interpretation may not be due to the lexical semantics of its nominal head but rather to the denotation of the nominal, which is a concept or property. Having reviewed Kaplan’s notion of context dependence, I now want to propose that the class of indexical expressions is actually considerably more comprehensive than Kaplan suggested. Not only may one think of including such additional expressions as Kaplan (1989: 489) mentioned himself, namely my, you, he, his, she, it, this, that, tomorrow, yesterday and other plausible additions of the same kind, like neighbour, enemy, friend, nearby, right left, on the other side, etc., but perhaps it makes sense to ask if not nearly all lexical expressions are in principle open to indexical behaviour, in the sense that their lexical meaning (character) determines their denotation (content) only relative to the context of their occurrence. The contents of saturated expressions (names) would be individual concepts and also

116 / PETER BOSCH the contents of unsaturated expressions (predicates such as verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, but perhaps also generalized quantifiers) would be concepts. In the simplest cases, like complete VPs, they are truth functions (not sets, but characteristic functions); in other cases, they are more complicated functions of functions, etc. Such a broadening of the notion of indexicality may be seen as posing a problem in the sense that it requires a much broader notion of index. Kaplan could make do with an index of just four parameters: agent, time, position, world, because it is only these context parameters on which the content of his indexicals depends. If, however, every lexical expression is viewed as potentially context-dependent, then the required index would become potentially very large. But possibly this threat is only apparent. As Montague (1974: 98) pointed out (for his notion of an index), ‘It is not necessary to consider [contexts of use] in their full complexity; we may instead confine our attention to those among their features which are relevant for the discourse in question. Thus it will suffice to specify the set of all complexes of relevant aspects of intended possible contexts of use. We may call such complexes indices’. Computing the character function we are thus in each case only concerned with a small number of specific parameters. These, we may assume, are lexically given as part of the character of each lexical item, or of classes of lexical items. In order to compute the contextual denotation of the indexical I, we need the value of the speaker or agent parameter in the current context, and for a gradable relative adjective – to take an example that is probably uncontroversial – the lexical entry would specify parameters for the standard or comparison class (or possibly both), for which we have to find a value in the context. Thus, there is no danger that the suggested broadening of the notion of index would force us into assuming contexts as proper entities in the theory and into having to provide identity criteria for them. There is no need to assume that contexts are completely parameterized, but we may stick to the more convenient view that any two contexts count as the same, in the computation of a character function, as long as they do not differ with respect to the currently relevant index parameters.5 Quite pragmatically, this means that in the computation of the character function of an expression the current context representation

5

cf. Bosch (1982) for a discussion of related problems.


AND


PHON fast CAT

HEAD MOD N :

IND 1 RESTR 2

IND fast , CONT

RESTR

1 RELN

fast

COMP

3

PSOA - ARG

CNX

C - IND

2

COMP 3

DIAGRAM 9.

is inspected only for those index parameters that are the lexically specified parameters of the expression that is being processed.

5.3.4.1

An Example

The denotation of an occurrence of an adjective, like fast, would be a concept, or, more appropriately, a function from concepts to concepts.6 But since fast is a gradable relative adjective, its denotation should make a different contribution to the truth conditions of the occurrence of a sentence, depending on the speed we are comparing with. This relativity is a lexical semantic property of the adjective and hence a property of its character. The comparative speed parameter, having as its value probably a class of entities we are comparing with, must occur in the lexical entry as an implicit variable. For our example fast the character is represented in the lexical entry, as for instance in Diagram 9 (cf. Pollard and Sag, 1994: 55; Mu ¨ller, 2007: 77ff). The information given in that feature structure7 is that fast is a relation between the semantic content of its head (the value of MOD Nu) and the comparison class, which is the value of the COMP feature. The latter is identified with the value of the COMP 6 cf. the discussions in Partee (1995), Kamp (1975) and Siegel (1976). Note, however, that I am here only using the dependence of the interpretation of relative adjectives on context as an uncontroversial example of indexicality. I am trying to ignore all other questions that are controversial in the analysis of relative adjectives. 7 For a predicative use of adjectives, the lexical entry would obviously be different. But this is not our current concern.

118 / PETER BOSCH feature of the context index C-IND (which would, for other indexical expressions, contain such features as SPEAKER, ADDRESSEE, LOCATION – cf. Pollard and Sag, 1994: 332) and which must be recovered from the index. Thus for an occurrence of sentence (7) in a discourse context concerned with a national competition, fast would denote a different relation than for an occurrence in the context of a recreational running event, the difference being due to a difference in the value of the COMP attribute. Similarly for (8) fast would typically denote a different relation in 1981, the time of the first Personal Computer, than in 2008; and also here this is due to the difference in the value of the COMP attribute that is identified with the comparison class that the index, C-IND, makes available. (7) This was a fast run. (8) This is a fast computer. These denotational differences in (7) and (8) are, however, not a matter of any polysemy of the adjective, but – as we have modelled them here – a matter of indexicality. In addition to the variation of the adjective interpretation in each of these sentences, there is also a difference between the adjective denotation in (7) in comparison to (8), which is due to the difference in the head that is modified by the adjective. This is the difference we already discussed in Section 5.3.2. And here we are concerned with polysemous variation in the denotation of the adjective: Fastness of runners and fastness of computers not only are established with respect to different comparison classes, but are different concepts.8 The difference is a difference in their argument domain. This is expressed in the lexical feature structure in Diagram 9 by including the semantic restrictions of the head noun, via coindexing, as an argument of the fast relation. Note, again, that these are restrictions on the denotation of the head and not restrictions on lexical expressions. The difference between (7) and (8) would be just the same if the head of the NP were in both cases the indefinite pronoun one, as long as the concepts denoted by the pronoun are still a run (in a national athletics competition or a recreational context) and a computer (in an occurrence related to 1981 or 2008). 8 Concepts in this sense, which vary contextually, formed the basis of an account for vagueness I proposed in Bosch (1983) and were discussed further as ‘contextual concepts’ in later papers (Bosch, 1995, 2007a).


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The indexicality of fast, i.e. the dependence of its denotation on a comparison class, is obviously not independent of its polysemy or context dependence. We cannot, for instance, interpret an utterance of (8) in the sense that the computer in question is fast compared to a run in a recreational running competition. The comparison class cannot be selected independent of the kind of thing the adjective is applied to. This is not surprising since parameters of the index, such as the comparison class for gradable adjectives, are parameters of the context. The difference to other context parameters is that index parameters are lexically specified and are specified differently for different classes of lexical items. Context dependence comes in, however, via the arguments; for attributive adjectives, via the denotation of the nominal head. 5.3.5

Division of Labour in Language Comprehension

We argued that the comparison class for gradable relative adjectives is a lexically specified index parameter. Evaluating this parameter may still be a tricky task as it involves knowledge about particular contexts. But this is no news. Language comprehension involves many cognitive resources of which linguistic knowledge is only one, and it is probably good policy to not only assume a modular conception of linguistic knowledge itself but also to adhere to a modular conception of language comprehension. So what we should have in a lexical entry, which is strictly part of linguistic knowledge, is only phonological, morphological and syntactic information, plus, as far the semantics is concerned, the character function. The latter provides restrictions on denotations: their semantic type and possibly constraints on their arguments. Let us now return to Pustejovsky’s example that we already discussed. What should a lexical entry for the English verb to open look like? A rough proposal in terms of a feature structure is given in Diagram 10 for transitive open. The semantics is mainly found in the CONT(ent) feature, which specifies a relational concept opening with an event argument (SIT), which remains implicit, and two syntactically realized arguments, AGENT and THEME. This is all the semantics that is required in the lexicon. The remaining tasks of comprehension are the job of the conceptual system. Accordingly we would find in the conceptual representation (or the more abstract regions of the knowledge representation; the distinction does not matter here) a representation for one or more concepts that satisfy the RESTR imposed by the lexicon and that

120 / PETER BOSCH PHON open HEAD verb CAT

SPR

IND i

COMPS

IND j

VAL

MODE

open ,

IND

prop s RELN opening

CONT

RESTR

SIT

s

AGENT

i

THEME

j

DIAGRAM 10.

integrates our concept into the overall knowledge representation by specifying inference relations. In the case at hand, the relevant kind of inference relation is a straightforward entailment, sometimes misleadingly called ‘meaning postulate’: If an agent opens a theme, then we are entitled to assume an action involving this agent, and this action causes an opening of that theme. This entailment can represented as in (9). (9) lx ly ½9e ðopeningðeÞ & themeðe; xÞ & agentðe; yÞÞ ‘ ð9e1 9e2 ðe1 ¼ e & e2 ¼ x & causeðe2 ; e1 Þ & actionðe1 Þ & agentðe1 ; yÞ & openingðe2 Þ & themeðe2 ; xÞÞÞ Elsewhere the conceptual representation will also tell us something about things opening, roughly as in (10), which incidentally would also qualify as the concept denoted to by the intransitive use of the verb to open. (10) lx ½9e ððopeningðeÞ & themeðe; xÞÞ ‘ ðtransitionðeÞ & 9s1 ðpreceding stateðe; s1 Þ &-openðs1 Þ & themeðs1 ; xÞÞ & 9s2 ðresulting stateðe; s2 Þ & openðs2 Þ & themeðs2 ; xÞÞÞÞ

Applying this to the examples in (3), repeated below, we are entitled to infer that Mary’s action causes the letter to be open, the rangers’ action causes the trail to be open, etc. What it ‘means’ to know that a letter, a trail, a door is open, or for that matter a shop or a bottle or an


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exhibition, i.e. what inferences we are entitled to is still another piece of knowledge which surely must be represented somewhere in our conceptual or knowledge representation, but this knowledge is unrelated to linguistic knowledge. And since we are here concerned with semantics, this may well be the point at which to stop. (3) a. Mary opened the letter for her mother. b. The rangers have opened the trail for the summer. c. John opened the door for the guests. There is one important issue that we have not yet touched upon: In what sense are we concerned in the comprehension of (3) with context dependence, as I claimed above? So far we have shown that the variation in inferences permitted by (3a-c) is apparently due to our knowledge of what it means when a letter, a door or a trail is open. We saw that the lexical items letter, door, trail, etc. play no other role than introducing the denotations that they happen to have in a particular occurrence as arguments of the opening relation. Any other linguistic expression that does the same job in a particular utterance context, like pronouns or proper names, will produce the same result for comprehension. Here the current proposal differs from Pustejovsky’s, where the variation in understanding (3a-c) was derived from compositional relations between lexical items in a sentence and where contextual denotations play no role at all. One plausible complaint against the current proposal may be that the denotation for the transitive verb to open that I suggested, i.e. lx ly [(e (opening(e) & theme(e,x) & agent(e,y))], is vastly underspecified and thus could not account, for instance, for classic effects in gapping, such as the apparent incoherence of (11). (11) xHe opened a conference yesterday and she a boutique. Does this not show that the characters or lexical meanings are far more specific than I claimed? No it does not. The relevant difference is one in the denotations, the contents, which are indeed much richer than the character of to open. They are the values of interpreting a verb occurrence in a particular context and take any or all denotational knowledge into account that context and knowledge representation make available, such as knowledge about boutiques and conferences and about opening boutiques or conferences. Once the reader has reached the end of ‘He opened a conference’ in (11), the conceptual representation for the VP would look somewhat like (12). But the concept of conference opening that is here predicated

122 / PETER BOSCH of the agent cannot be the content of the missing verb in the continuation ‘and she a boutique’. What is needed to make (11) coherent would be a super-concept for the theme of open that subsumes both the relevant conference concept and the relevant boutique concept. If, as would be likely in a default context, the conference concept is represented as subsumed by concepts like social event9 or eventually event and the boutique concept is subsumed by a superconcept like retail shop and eventually by either business or location, then no unification would be possible and no suitable restriction for the theme of the verb open would be available. This is what makes (11) look incoherent. (12) lxly [(e (opening(e) & theme(e,x) & conference(x) & agent(e,y))] The discourse context may, however, suggest different conceptualizations. Suppose the context is as in (13). This contextualization would facilitate a conceptualization of both openings as opening events of the kind that the agency manages, and hence would give us a suitable denotation for open with a vastly underspecified theme.10 (13) Mary’s and John’s event management agency is really busy these days. He opened a conference yesterday and she a boutique. As the construction of conceptual representations is strictly a matter of conceptual representation and not of linguistic knowledge, I don’t want to go into it any deeper here. I only want to suggest that this is where systematic relations of conceptual subsumption have their place, as I have just shown in connection with (11) and (13). I believe that this is also the place where some of the conceptual relations belong that Pustejovsky, to my mind mistakenly, puts into his lexical entries. 5.3.6

Indexicality versus Context Dependence

In the case of the adjective fast in Section 5.3.4, we saw that the computation of the context-dependent interpretation was a matter of both indexicality and context dependence, where the index dependence goes via the comparison class and context dependence is computed via 9 I’m here using italics for the names of concepts, as I did in the feature structures. Of course this does not identify concepts with linguistic expressions, which in the text are also represented by italics. The text will always make clear what we are referring to, concepts or linguistic expressions. 10 In previous work (Bosch, 1995), I discussed such contextual denotations for VPs as ‘contextual concepts’.


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the denotation of the nominal head. The latter variation in content I claimed is a case of polysemy. Things are different for the verb to open: There is no contextual index attribute in the lexical entry for this verb, and the link to the context is provided only via the argument expressions of the verb and their denotations, or, as we may say alternatively, via the argument domain for which the contextually relevant opening concept is defined. What is common to both cases is that the context dependence of either fast or open is established via their argument domains. The difference is that for fast, but not for open, there is, in addition, an implicit lexically fixed parameter that accesses the context index. So what we would like to say is that fast behaves in important respects like Kaplan’s indexicals. Also for them the relevant parameter that is interpreted with respect to the context is lexically fixed: I looks for the speaker, now for the current time, nearby looks for the current place, etc. and for fast the indexical parameter looks for a comparison class. This is different for open, which does not lexically provide for index parameters. Finally, let me point out that the difference that we found between fast and open is corroborated by their behaviour in VP anaphora; cf. (14) versus (15) (14) a. Fred just loves speed. His car is really fast and so is his bike. b. Fred and John went back to their homes. Later in the evening Fred went for a drink nearby, and so did John. (15) x Fred opened the door to let the carpenter in and so did the carpenter to replace the lock. (14a) shows that the denotation of fast remains constant as it must under VP anaphora, still containing a variable for the comparison class though that is in each case evaluated with respect to the local argument: cars and bikes. The sentence does not ordinarily mean that the bike is anywhere near as fast as the car. What the bike and the car have in common is that each is fast with respect to its own comparison class. This would be the same for nearby in (14b)11 adjusting its indexical location parameter in the two clauses for Fred’s and John’s location: Fred went to drink near his home and John had a drink near John’s home. The denotation of ‘went for a drink nearby’ is still the 11

The example is due to Graham Katz.

124 / PETER BOSCH same in application to John and to Fred, with a difference merely in the value of the location parameter of the index. The same does not work out for the context dependence of open. Here we are not dealing with indexicality. The lexical entry of open has no contextual index attribute and there is no index dependence in the contextual opening concepts. The context-dependent denotation of open comes about purely on the basis of differences in the domain of the opening concept. Once the argument expression has been evaluated as a door (in the sense in which Fred opens a door to let somebody in, i.e. a door as some kind of a boundary), the contextual concept that stays identical in VP anaphora has been fixed. Since the more plausible reading for the second clause of (15), however, is that the carpenter opened the door in order to get at the inside of the door – and here the door must be conceptualized differently, as some kind of bounded object rather than as a boundary – the sentence becomes incoherent. The variation between the two clauses of (15) is not a variation in the evaluation of an index parameter, but it is due to a difference between the conceptual representations of the arguments.

5.4

Conclusion

We saw in our discussion of the Generative Lexicon approach that the different contributions that different occurrences of the verb to open make to the truth conditions or to comprehension can probably not be accounted for in terms of compositional relations between constituents. I argued that the apparent variation in word sense is in fact the result of processes at the denotational level, i.e. conceptual rather than linguistic processes. Still, if we want to know what the contribution of linguistic knowledge to these processes is, we must find out how linguistic and conceptual processes interface. Part of the solution I am proposing is a broadening of David Kaplan’s notion of indexicality by allowing, in principle, for all lexical expressions to encode part of their meaning as a dependence on an index parameter. Indexicality is a lexical property of expressions and thus a genuine part of linguistic knowledge. Indexical expressions thus carry their index parameter with them in all their denotations. Fast means in all contexts: ‘fast with respect to some comparison class’. Different values for the index parameter between two different occurrences do not lead to anything like different ‘senses’ or polysemy. We saw, however, that indexicality can only do part of the job of relating expressions to contexts. The other part is a form of context


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dependence that hinges upon the argument domains of the concepts denoted in particular occurrences and on the conceptual representation of arguments. This part, despite its consequences for genuine linguistic processes and despite its interactions with indexicality, seems to be the business of conceptual representation. And this is also where the roots of polysemy are: In context dependence in the narrow sense that is not indexicality and that is not reflected in any form in lexical entries.

References Bosch, P. 1982. The role of propositions in natural language semantics. In W. Leinfellner, E. Kraemer, and J. Schank, eds., Proceedings of the 6th International Wittgenstein Symposium, pp. 282–285. Wien: Hoelder, Pichler Tempsky. Bosch, P. 1983. Vagueness is context dependence. A solution to the Sorites Paradox. In T. T. Ballmer and M. Pinkal, eds., Approaching Vagueness, pp. 189–210. Amsterdam: North-Holland. Bosch, P. 1995. Meanings and contextual concepts. In M. Bierwisch and P. Bosch, eds., Semantic and Conceptual Knowledge: Papers from a Joint Workshop of the Max Planck Arbeitsgruppe ‘Strukturelle Grammatik’ and the IBM Institute for Logic and Linguistics, 21–23 April 1994, pp. 79–99. Tu ¨bingen, Berlin: Arbeitspapiere des Sonderforschungsbereichs 340, Bd. 71, Universita¨t Tu ¨bingen. Bosch, P. 2007a. Lexical and contextual concepts. Paper delivered at the 8th Szklarska Poreba Workshop on Lexical Concepts, 25 February 2007. Szklarska Poreba, Poland. Bosch, P. 2007b. Productivity, polysemy, and predicate identity. In B. ten Cate and H. Zeevat, eds., Language, Logic and Computation: Proceedings of the Sixth International Tbilisi Symposium, 2005, pp. 58–71. Briscoe, T. and A. Copestake. 1999. Lexical rules in constraint-based grammar. Computational Linguistics 25:487–526. Carnap, R. 1947. Meaning and Necessity. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Cutler, A. and C. C. Clifton, Jr. 1999. Comprehending spoken language: A blueprint of the listener. In C. M. Brown and P. Hagoort, eds., The Neurocognition of Language, pp. 123–166. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Firth, J. R. 1957. A synopsis of linguistic theory 1930–55. In Studies in Linguistic Analysis, pp. 1–32. Oxford: The Philological Society. Kamp, J. A. W. 1975. Two theories about adjectives. In E. L. Keenan, ed., Formal Semantics for Natural languages, pp. 123–155. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kaplan, D. 1978. On the logic of demonstratives. Journal of Philosophical Logic 8:81–98.

126 / PETER BOSCH Kaplan, D. 1989. Demonstratives. In J. Amog, J. Perry, and H. K. Wettstein, eds., Themes from Kaplan, pp. 481–563. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lewis, D. 1970. General semantics. Synthese 22:18–67. ¨ hman, eds., Lewis, D. 1981. Index, context, and content. In S. Kanger and S. O Philosophy and Grammar. Dordrecht: Reidel. Montague, R. 1974. Pragmatics. In R. H. Thomason, ed., Formal Philosophy: Selected papers of Richard Montague, pp. 95–118. New Haven: Yale University Press. Mu ¨ller, S. 2007. Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar. Tu ¨bingen: Stauffenburg. Partee, B. H. 1995. Lexical semantics and compositionality. In L. R. Gleitman and M. Liberman, eds., An Invitation to Cognitive Science, 2nd edn., vol. 1, pp. 311–360. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Pollard, C. and I. Sag. 1994. Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pustejovsky, J. 1995. The Generative Lexicon. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Siegel, M. 1976. Capturing the Russian adjective. In B. H. Partee, ed., Montague Grammar, pp. 292–309. New York: Academic Press.

6

Semantics with Clusters of Properties GALIT W. SASSOON

Abstract In model-theoretic semantics, we represent the core of predicate meaning by intension. Another notion, clusters of characteristic properties (‘‘dimensions’’), serving as conceptual guidelines that help us identify the denotation in each context of use, has intrigued scholars from a variety of disciplines for years. Typical examples are the prototype and exemplar theories, which are prevalent in the study of concepts in cognitive psychology. Model-theoretic theories often appeal to clusters of properties/features/criteria/propositions etc. However, there is no systematic account of the role of clusters. Stipulations are made in each case separately regarding the presence of clusters and/or their various effects. I propose a detailed formal model, which incorporates two kinds of clusters into our denotational representation of predicate meaning. For example, the interpretation of the predicate chair includes in each context in this model a set of individuals (chairs), necessary properties (like piece of furniture) and typical characteristics of chairs (like: has a back, four legs, etc.). I illustrate the use of this model in semantics with one case study: contextual restrictions in universal generalizations with every, any, and generic a. I propose that these quantifying expressions access the cluster of their first argument and use it in different systematic ways (determined by their semantics) to construct their domain. In virtue of this feature, the present proposal captures the similarities, as well as the precise differences between the interpretations of statements with every, any, and generic a (with a given predicate as their first argument). Utterance Interpretation and Cognitive Models. Philippe De Brabanter and Mikhail Kissine (eds.). Current Research in the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface, Vol. 20. r 2009 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited. All rights reserved.

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128 / GALIT W. SASSOON Keywords: clusters, dimensions, domain restrictions, generics, partial information, typicality.

6.1 6.1.1

Introduction Some Classical Cluster Theories and Experimental Evidence

Cluster theories of concepts are characterized by the view that the cognitive representations of concepts (and the interpretation of words labeling these concepts), include a set of characteristics, which are themselves concepts or concept labels. The cluster provides conceptual guidelines that help to identify instances of the concept. Cluster theories are found in the work of philosophers like Wittgenstein (1953) and Searle (1958); conceptualist semanticists like Fodor and Katz (1963), Katz and Postal (1964: 12–29), and Jackendoff (1972); psycholinguists like Keil (1979) and Markman (1989) and cognitive psychologists like Rosch (1978), among many others (see for instance Smith, 1988; Reed, 1988; Murphy, 2002; and references therein). In formal semantics, such theories are systematically found in the work of Bartsch (1984, 1986, 1998). The effects of clusters are extensively investigated in cognitive psychology, and empirical evidence from a variety of psychological experiments has been collected. The most basic motivation for cluster theories is the fact that people tend to define or describe the content of a predicate (say, bird) by a list of other predicates, which are often called features or dimensions. The dimensions rarely stand for necessary conditions for membership under the predicate; rather, the properties they denote affect the typicality of entities with respect to the predicate. For instance, the following characteristics are regarded as dimensions of birds: fly, build nests, sing, have feathers, perch on trees, small, eat insects, etc. The extent to which an entity exemplifies the typicality properties correlates with (Rosch, 1978; Reed, 1988; Murphy, 2002): (i) Judgments concerning whether it is regarded as a more or less typical bird, in comparison with other entities (robin, seagull, chicken, penguin, etc.) (ii) Speed of categorization of the entity (when presented as a novel stimulus) (iii) Retrieval from memory (in recall of memorized lists of instances of a concept, people tend to reorder them by typicality), and

SEMANTICS

WITH

CLUSTERS

OF

PROPERTIES / 129

(iv) Memory encoding (e.g., typical instances first seen often look familiar). In addition, typicality clusters play an important role in certain stages of language acquisition. For example, typical instances are acquired earlier than atypical instances. Children link the former to the category label when they still fail to do so with the latter (Anglin, 1977; Markman, 1989). Some neurobiological evidence displaying the importance of characteristic dimensions has been collected as well. For instance, items with different characterizing properties are stored in different brain areas. Predicates that denote artifacts are usually characterized by the use of the entities they denote (e.g., an important characteristic of chairs is the fact that they are used for sitting). In accordance, studies have established that semantic information about these predicates is stored near brain areas responsible for motor control and action planning. Predicates that denote animate beings are characterized by the sensory (usually visual) properties of the entities they denote; in accordance, studies have established that semantic information about these predicates is stored in the areas in which the relevant sense is implemented (see a review in Bookheimer, 2002). Traditionally, psychological studies have focused mainly on fixed (though culture- or language-dependent) typicality dimensions. Later on, research has extended also to ad hoc or context-dependent typicality clusters (Barsalou, 1983; Roth and Shoben, 1983; Wisniewski and Medin, 1994), highlighting the role of context in the selection of dimensions and in judging their importance. The rest of Section 6.1 of this paper discusses classical objections to cluster theories. I show that clusters can and should be represented as part of the interpretation of predicates, along with denotations. The use of clusters in the interpretation of predicates is demonstrated with one case study, restrictions on domains of quantification. In Section 6.2, I present a formal model with clusters of dimensions. In Section 6.3, I discuss the different ways in which the quantifying expressions every, any, and the generic indefinite determiner a use the clusters in order to restrict their domain, or widen it. I attempt to show that an analysis of domain restrictions which makes use of clusters in the interpretation of predicates is more elegant and more accurate than accounts which do not make use of this mechanism. In Section 6.4, I argue that clusters often only serve to order domain members by relevance in the context. I present formal constraints on clusters of ordering dimensions, and I discuss their consequences with examples of statements with the given quantifying expressions.

130 / GALIT W. SASSOON 6.1.2

The Intensional Approach: Classical Objections to Cluster Theories

Formal semanticists often admit (cf. Carlson and Pelletier, 1995; Cohen, 1999) that characterizing properties are part of our world knowledge and that they play a role in the interpretation of statements like (1): (1) a. Birds fly. b. Frenchmen eat horsemeat. Often, model-theoretic semantics directly appeals to clusters of properties/features/criteria/propositions, etc. Examples include: Lewis (1970) (features restricting modal bases); Lewis (1970), Venneman and Bartsch (1972), Kamp (1975) (ordering criteria and standards of precision, in the analysis of gradable predicates and comparatives); Kadmon and Landman (1993) (contextual restrictions on conditionals, quantifiers and generics); Bartsch (1986, 1998) (cluster properties of adjectives and nouns in an analysis of polysemy and metaphor); Bartsch (1984), Landman (1989) (sets of properties in the analysis of with respect to phrases, and in the analysis of groups); Lasersohn (1999) (pragmatically ignorable features of words when used in loose speech, and when modified by certain adverbs); Searle (1958) (characterizing properties associated with proper names in identity sentences), and many others. However, cluster theories have been seriously criticized by semanticists (cf. Lewis, 1970; Kripke, 1972; Putnam, 1975; Cohen, 1999; Carlson and Pelletier, 1995; Chierchia and McConnell-Ginet, 2000). Formal semantic theories model the interpretation of predicates with intensions, rather than clusters. The intension of a predicate is a function from a tuple of indices (which may include, e.g., a time point t, a world w, a situation s, an event e, a context c, etc.) to the set of instances of the predicate in this tuple of indices (the extension or denotation in the given time point, world, etc.; cf. Montague, 1974).1 The intensional theory of predicate meaning came into being partially as a reaction against cluster theories of meaning, for good historical reasons. The arguments for intensions (rather than clusters) as the core of meaning focus mainly on compositionality, aboutness, and various wrong predictions of cluster theories. First, cluster theories fail to be compositional (Osherson and Smith, 1981; Kamp and Partee, 1995; Fodor, 1998). Only a 1 For simplicity, in this paper I omit all the indices except for either a world index w or a context index c.

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compositional theory can generate the meanings of the infinitely many complex expressions possible in a language, using a finite set of rules. Early cluster theories typically did not address the question of constructing meanings of complex predicates (say, male nurse, red or white, pets which are birds, pets which are not birds, etc.) based on the meanings of the parts (constructing, for instance, the cluster of red or white from the separated clusters of red and white, and the meaning of or). Yet, much recent research is dedicated to compositionality (see, e.g., Hampton’s, 1997 review), exemplifying partial connections between the clusters of (concepts labeled by) complex predicates and the clusters of (concepts labeled by) their constituents. I will not directly discuss the issue of the compositionality of clusters in this paper, though certain predictions regarding compositionality of clusters and its limits follow from the theory I present. I discuss these in detail in Sassoon (2007), where I argue in favor of the view that clusters are based on several non-compositional, yet productive strategies.2 Second, cluster theories fail to capture aboutness (Lewis, 1970; Chierchia and McConnell-Ginet, 2000). Aboutness concerns the relation between linguistic representations (like sentences and their constituents) and non-linguistic entities (the world, as a non-linguistic conceptual structure). The observation is that it is a core part of the native speaker’s capacity to classify objects or situations by means of linguistic items. All human beings are capable of distinguishing situations in which it rains from situations in which it does not rain. Only competent speakers of French can associate the latter with the linguistic item il ne pleut pas, that is part of their semantic competence. This classificatory competence is exactly what the notion of intension models. Every expression is associated with the set of objects it applies to in each context. Cluster theories of meaning only associate predicates like bird with sets of other predicates (dimensions), but those are linguistic items, symbols themselves. This translation only pushes the need for a semantic interpretation one level up to the level of clusters (Lewis, 1970). In other words, cluster theories fail to represent the contribution of cluster properties (and, in particular, typicality dimensions) to truth conditions (Cohen, 1999: 11).3

2

Kamp and Partee (1995) advocate at length the importance of compositionality. Their implementation of prototype theory in a model-theoretic framework does not use cluster properties; they eventually admit, however, that clusters might do a better job. 3 Many advocates of cluster theories in cognitive psychology reject truth-conditional semantics altogether (cf. Murphy, 2002).

132 / GALIT W. SASSOON Third, Kripke (1972), Putnam (1975), and many others following them have demonstrated very convincingly that cluster theories give rise to wrong predictions, mostly with regard to the semantics of predicates that stand for natural kinds, like whale. At some point in time, whales were thought to be fish. Presumably, at that time, the cluster of concepts associated with whale included the concept fish. The discovery that whales were mammals changed the cluster (fish being replaced by mammal) but not the denotation: the word whale still refers to the same objects (the absolute set of whales, à la Kripke-Putnam). No one thinks that other creatures that are fish are the actual whales. That is, the word is more strongly connected with its denotation, not with a cluster of properties. Moreover, it is incorrect to assume that prior to the discovery, the sentence whales are fish was regarded as a definitional tautology, and following the discovery, a meaning change has turned it into a contradiction. Its falsehood is and was an empirical matter. For the same reasons, whales are mammals is not regarded as a tautology today, but rather as an empirical matter. Conversely, on an intensional theory, if the replacement of older criteria for whalehood by new ones changes the meaning of whale at all, this change is very limited (it could be that with the new knowledge, the denotation of whale in dubious contexts changes). 6.1.3

My Proposal

I shall argue that both the failure to represent aboutness and the wrong predictions of cluster theories can be eliminated, provided that clusters are implemented within an intensional theory. The model I present in the following sections explains how cluster properties relate systematically to the ontology presupposed by semantic interpretations. Thus, the problem of aboutness is solved: we have denotations, as usual. In addition, I shall argue that cluster properties of predicates like whale (e.g., living in the ocean or mammal), ought to be represented as context-dependent characteristics of whale. In certain contexts they are taken to be presupposed by whale, while in others they may not be so taken. In a framework like this, it does not follow that whales are mammals is a tautology, or that whales are fish is a contradiction. Since cluster properties are not regarded as entailments of the predicate they characterize, the classical Kripke-Putnam arguments against them are no longer valid. Moreover, I propose that we need clusters in our denotational theory. A basic motivation for a model with clusters of properties in the

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semantics of predicates (along with denotations) is that it permits a more adequate representation of people’s knowledge of predicate meanings and the way they acquire it, and of the variety of empirical evidence mentioned in Section 6.1.1 (typicality ordering of entities, categorization-speed, memory, language acquisition, etc.). In addition, it allows for a systematic account of a variety of semantic phenomena in which clusters play a crucial role. While model-theoretic semantics often appeals to clusters (cf. Section 6.1.2), there is no systematic account of the role of clusters. Effects of clusters (entailed properties, contextually restricted meanings, typicality orderings, etc.) are usually dealt with by stipulating restrictions separately for each phenomenon: fixed and contextual restrictions on intensions, quantifiers, conditionals, etc., case by case. This is ad hoc as it is not a part of the representation of the Fregean sense, and it is not economical. Clusters as part of predicate interpretation, being accessible to grammatical operations, would save a lot of these stipulations. As this paper demonstrates this claim by focusing on one case study, contextual restrictions on domains of quantifying expressions, the following section briefly reviews some of the assumptions in the analysis of contextual restrictions. 6.1.4

Contextual Restrictions on Quantifying Expressions

Domains of quantification are contextually restricted. Consider, e.g., the quantifying expression everything in example (2). (2) I lived near the Seine, near Boulevard St. Germain and Rue St. Michel, near the market and the Pantheon, near everything.4 The domain of the universal quantifier denoted by everything clearly does not include every possible object, only sites in Paris, or maybe even only famous or adored sites. Consider also the example in (3), which the secretary in the linguistics department at Tel Aviv University posted on the bulletin board. (3) No notice (of any kind) may be posted on the notice board. Notices that the secretary herself posts are clearly irrelevant here. Other kinds of notices might be irrelevant too – lists of grades, notices regarding classroom changes, etc. 4 This and the other naturally occurring examples in the rest of this paper are taken from the daily Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, 04.01.2002 (except when mentioned otherwise).

134 / GALIT W. SASSOON Conventionally, contextual restrictions on quantifying expressions are represented by a context variable (say, Xc), whose value is a set of relevant individuals (for details see von Fintel, 1994). The truth conditions of a statement with a quantifying expression, like (4), are represented in (5):5 (4) A duck lays whitish eggs. (5) ’w: [[A duck lays whitish eggs]]w ¼ 1 iff ’dA([[duck]]w-Xc): dA[[lays whitish eggs]]w (where Xc is a set of relevant individuals). (5) says that every individual which is a duck and is in the set of the relevant individuals, is in the denotation of lays whitish eggs. Kadmon and Landman (1989, 1993) offer a different representation of contextual restrictions, specific for generics: a set of restricting properties. They argue that a context variable (e.g., Xþ duck in (6)) accompanies generics (it is part of the semantics of generic determiners). Its value is a set of properties that determine what is relevant. For example, the truth conditions of (4) are given in (6): (6) ’w: [[A duck lays whitish eggs]]w ¼ 1 iff ’dA[[duck]]w such that d þ has the properties in Xþ duck : dA[[lays whitish eggs]]w (where Xduck is a set of properties that determine what is relevant: water bird, of the family Anatidae, with webbed feet and flattened beaks, female, etc.). (6) says that every individual that is a duck and that has the properties in Xþ duck , is in the denotation of lays whitish eggs. The value of the context variable is assigned by the context at large and by the predicates involved in the sentence (e.g., duck and laying whitish eggs). It may include properties like water bird, of the family Anatidae, with webbed feet and flattened beaks, etc., which usually characterize ducks.6 But it may also include properties like female. When we speak of ducks’

5

There is a controversy as to the position of context variables in the syntactic structure of quantified statements, and as to whether they are part of the syntactic ´’s, 2000 syntactic approaches structure at all (cf. von Fintel’s, 1994 and Stanley and Szabo vs. Jacobson’s, 1999 variable free approach). In this paper, I do not take a stand in this controversy. I focus on the semantic contribution of different expressions in quantified statements to their truth conditions (and I leave open the question of whether this contribution has a syntactic reflex or not). 6 Note that the context variable incorporates the constraint that the relevant individuals be ducks. The formulation, then, is a bit superfluous.

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reproduction habits, being a female is a necessary condition for relevance, because if male ducks were relevant, the statement would be judged false, and it is not.7 The important observation of Kadmon and Landman is that the domain of generic determiners (as determined by the context variable) is typically vague. This happens because the value of the context variable is not fully determined. They formally represent this by means of two sets – restrictions (e.g., members of Xþ duck ) and non-restrictions (members of the set of non-restrictions, which is represented as, e.g., X duck ). The latter may include the properties denoted by, e.g., small, or has an ink stain on its forehead, which (in most contexts) are considered unnecessary for duckhood. If a property is not specified in any of these sets, the domain of the generic quantifier is vague. For example, until the property denoted by healthy is specified as either necessary (a restriction) or not (a non-restriction), we cannot say whether sick entities are relevant ducks (are practically regarded as ducks in the context) or not.8 We also find sets of restricting properties in theories of conditionals (Kratzer, 1979, 1986; Kadmon and Landman, 1993). For example, the truth conditions of (7a) and (8a) are given in (7b) and (8b), respectively: (7) a. If John subscribes to a newspaper, he gets well informed. b. ’w: [[7a]]w ¼ 1 iff ’eAEVENT, such that [[John subscribes to a newspaper in e]]w ¼ 1 and e has the properties in Xþ John subscribes to a newspaper : [[he gets well informed in e]]w ¼ 1.

7

It is the predicate laying whitish eggs (or the fact that the discussion is about reproduction habits) that makes female a relevant property. Hearers are usually willing to grant that the preconditions for reproduction are satisfied, leaving open only the question under discussion (e.g., whether the eggs are whitish or not). So hearers grant that the presuppositions of the predicate in the nuclear scope (in predicate position) of a generic sentence are satisfied (in the given example, they constrain the domain to healthy adult females; cf. Partee, 1989), though the property denoted by the predicate itself (e.g., laying whitish eggs) is not regarded as constraining the domain, and so generic sentences do not end up true too easily. 8 Kadmon and Landman’s analysis of free choice any crucially depends on this cluster of properties: any widens the domain by the elimination of restricting properties. The elimination of restricting properties corresponds to more demanding truth conditions. For example, speakers may judge the statement Any duck lays whitish eggs as false, precisely because not any duck is a female (but note also that the eliminated dimension may vary across contexts; for further discussion see Section 6.3.1 below).

136 / GALIT W. SASSOON (8) a. If there is sugar in the tea, the tea tastes good. b. ’w: [[8a]]w ¼ 1 iff ’eAEVENT, such that [[There is sugar in the tea in e]]w ¼ 1 and e has the properties in Xþ There is sugar in the tea : [[the tea tastes good in e]]w ¼ 1. The conditional in (7a) is restricted via Xþ John subscribes to a newspaper to be only about subscriptions to a newspaper that John can read. (8a) is restricted to eventualities in which, e.g., there is no oil in the tea. This is crucial, for instance, to account for the fact that, intuitively, (8a) fails to entail (9): (9) If there is sugar and oil in the tea, the tea tastes good. In the rest of this paper, I discuss problems with the theories just presented, and I offer my own positive view. More precisely, I argue that the analysis improves if context-dependent clusters are represented as part of the interpretation of predicates. As such, they automatically restrict denotations, as well as quantification domains. In Section 6.2, I focus on the role of the predicate in restricting quantification domains. In Section 6.3, I discuss the role of the quantifying expression.

6.2 6.2.1

Clusters in Predicate Interpretation The Role of the Predicate in the Analysis of Domain Restrictions

One problem is that the presence of the restriction in, e.g., generic statements like (4), is an ad hoc stipulation. The restricting properties are stipulated separately for each quantifying expression: every, some, necessarily, if-then, etc., despite the fact that they often come from one and the same source. Intuitively, their main source is not the quantifying expression itself, but the predicates in the sentence. It is our world knowledge and contextual information about predicates that affect the domain of quantifying expressions in their context of utterance. Before the occurrence of a predicate, the addressee has no idea what the contextual restrictions should be. A quantifying expression triggers special awareness of context restrictions, but the nature of the restrictions depends just as much – or even more – on the predicates in the sentence. This claim is directly supported by the fact that predicate denotations are often interpreted restrictively even in the absence of a quantifying expression. Consider, e.g., utterances of negated predicates like not a bird or non-birds in a context of a visit to the zoo. Speakers and hearers hardly ever interpret these predicates as referring to the garbage cans or to the cages or fences; nor do they interpret them as

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referring to visitors in the zoo, though all these constitute members of the denotation of not a bird and non-birds. We tend to restrict the denotations of these predicates to animals (and often to those that resemble birds). It is for the same reason that sentences such as prime numbers are not birds/non-birds are so odd. Given the default restriction of not birds to animals, their truth is trivial, and so asserting them fails to reach the required level of informativeness. Furthermore, hearers do not normally assume that sentences like Tweety is a bird are about ostriches, or that sentences like You may take a piece of fruit are about olives. Atypical birds and atypical pieces of fruit are, by default, taken to be irrelevant, even though in, say, scientific discussions, they are considered as instances of the given predicates. By default, we use special means when we tend to refer to atypical instances (for a discussion see Cruse, 1977). This fact shows that predicate denotations may be contextually restricted, even in the absence of a quantifying expression.9 To represent this fact, the interpretation of predicates ought to be associated with a set of restricting properties. I therefore propose that stipulating an additional set of restrictions in the semantics of quantifying expressions is superfluous. The cluster in the interpretation of predicates can do the job which is usually thought to be done by the context variable accompanying quantifiers. In other words, the operations denoted by quantifying expressions can access the clusters of predicates that form their arguments, and use them to either restrict their domain, or widen it (as discussed in Section 6.3). We usually only have partial information about predicate interpretation, namely about the contextual denotations of predicates, and their clusters (sets of restrictions). Representing this fact is important if we are to give an adequate account of predicate interpretation. We will also see in Section 6.3 that it is crucial for capturing differences between various quantifying expressions. I therefore dedicate the rest of Section 6.2 to a discussion of formal representations of partial information, and the way clusters may be added to them. 6.2.2

Formal Representations of Contexts of Partial Information

The standard intensional semantics is a model of total information. For each individual and each property in each index (or index tuple), such a model determines whether the individual instantiates the property or 9 See Carston (2002) and references therein for plenty of other examples of contextdependent restrictions on the interpretation of predicates.

138 / GALIT W. SASSOON not. There is no third possibility, i.e., there is no gap containing individuals that are inherently borderline for a certain property or that one does not know if they have that property or not due to a lack of some crucial information. In such a case also all the relations between all the predicates, or between the properties they denote in a certain index, are completely specified. To put it differently, the clusters of predicates are complete. Every predicate P has, in any index, say a world w, a denotation [[P]]w, and it is determined for each other predicate Q whether its denotation, [[Q]]w, is a superset of [[P]]w, intersects with [[P]]w, etc. There is no space for vagueness. This contrasts sharply with the more common situation, in which the speaker is not completely familiar with the total clusters and denotations, even if we assume that they exist. It is also the case that as discourse unfolds, speakers may extend the information they have by accepting more statements asserted during the conversation as true. Models of total information cannot represent these dynamic stages of information expansion. For example, in many contexts involving birds, one may not know about each individual if it is a bird or not (one may hesitate about bats, penguins, flying dinosaurs, toy birds, etc.), exactly which animals are adult, or healthy, etc. One may know whether a bird hunts mice, and not know whether only adult or healthy birds do so or all of them do (whether, when talking about birds’ eating habits, the discourse actually refers only to some typical subset of all birds), etc. In order to deal with this basic fact, dynamic discourse change models and vagueness models have been developed. Following Stalnaker (1978), let us call the linguistic and world knowledge of a given community of speakers an actual context. Stalnaker shows that many aspects of partial information can be modeled in a classical theory by representing contexts of partial information c as sets of possible worlds, Wc (the worlds consistent with the information in c).10 However, it has been argued in the context of epistemic modality (Veltman, 1984, 1996) and in the context of 10 For example, the truth of a statement like Tweety is a bird is considered common knowledge in a given context c iff it holds true in every world w in Wc; the falsity of a statement is considered common knowledge in c iff it is false (Tweety is not a bird) in every world w in Wc. The truth-value of a statement is unknown or undetermined in c iff Wc includes both a world in which it is true (Tweety is a bird) and a world in which it is false (Tweety is not a bird). Generally, for any statement j:

a. [[j]]c ¼ 1 iff ’wAWc, [[j]] w ¼ 1 b. [[j]]c ¼ 0 iff ’wAWc, [[j]]w ¼ 0 c. Otherwise, [[j]]c is unknown (undetermined)

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cs cu ck cb cp co cr cy

FIGURE 1 The contexts’ structure in a vagueness model MC, with a set of partial contexts C.

vagueness (van Fraassen, 1969; Fine, 1975; Kamp, 1975; Landman, 1991) that partiality enters into the truth conditions in that predicates are assigned interpretation directly relative to information states (contexts) c, rather than relative to worlds w, and the basic logic of predicates is three valued. This means that we do not associate with a predicate in a context c just a denotation, the set of individuals to which the predicate applies ([[P]]w), but a triple consisting of a positive denotation, ½½Pþ c , the set of individuals in c that are positively known to fall under P, a negative denotation, ½½P c , the set of the individuals in c that are positively known not to fall under P, and a gap, ½½P?c , the remaining individuals.11 Figure 1 demonstrates how a vagueness model, MC, for a domain D and a set C of partial contexts, represents (monotonic) information growth (Sassoon, 2001). As formally stated in (10a), MC contains a zero context, c0, in which all the denotations are empty. From c0 on, each intermediate context c1 is monotonically extended (c1rc2) by contexts c2 in which more entities are added to the positive and negative denotations of the predicates (10b), up to the point that all the denotations are complete (10c-d).12 11

In such a theory, intensions are more fine-grained: Intension is the function that maps every context c and predicate P into the denotation triple of P in c (Landman, 1991). The triple always represents knowledge about the real world, so when we write, say, ½½Pþ c , the world index is omitted. The temporal index and other indices are omitted only for the sake of simplicity. 12 r is a partial order on C (a meet semi lattice). This relation of information extension between contexts (c1rc2) represents monotonic information growth, not temporal precedence between actual discourse stages. Perhaps sometimes discourse participants start out assuming that whale contextually refers to all whales, only to gradually find out that only, say, healthy female adult ones are relevant. These participants ‘‘jump,’’ so to speak, non-monotonically, from one context, c1, to another, c3, where the latter is neither an extension of the former (it is not the case that c1rc3), nor extended by it (it is not the case that c3rc1).

140 / GALIT W. SASSOON (10) Let CONCEPTn be the set of predicates of arity n. a. In the zero-information context, c0AC, all the denotations are empty: ’nAN ’PACONCEPTn: ½½Pþ c0 ¼ ½½Pc0 ¼ + b. The information in context c1 is monotonically extended by that in c2 (c1rc2) iff: ’nAN, ’PACONCEPTn: ½½Pþ c1 ; ½½P ½½P ½½Pþ c2 c1 c2 c. A context c is total (cAT) iff the denotations are completely known (there are no gaps): ’nAN, ’PACONCEPTn: ½½Pþ c [ n ½½P ¼ D c d. Any context cAC is extended by a non-empty set of total contexts, TcDT. e. Contexts are consistent (no d is P and not P): ½½Pþc \ ½½Pc ¼ + What is the intuitive idea underlying the proposed knowledge structure? First, any intermediate context c1 in MC represents a possible ‘‘real’’ context (say, the knowledge shared by the participants in a certain discourse). Second, the contexts extended by (leading to) c1 represent the way in which this knowledge has been gradually accumulated, and the contexts extending c1 represent the possible ways in which this knowledge may be gradually completed. The rest of the structure includes counterfactual contexts (sets of facts about alternative realities).13 But for any predicate P, ½½Pþ c1 and ½½Pc1 do not exhaust our knowledge about P’s denotations in c1. For example, if it is directly given in c1 that Sam (who is known to be 1.90 m tall) is tall þ (½½Samþ c1 2 ½½tallc1 ), then in c1 we infer that Dan (who is known to be 1.95 m tall) ‘‘must be tall.’’ In every total context c2 extending c1, þ þ Dan will end up in ½½tallþ c2 (8c2 2 Tc1 : ½½Danc2 2 ½½tallc2 ). Let us call the set of things whose membership status is known either directly or by inference, the super denotations, ½½tallc1 and ½½:tallc1 :14 f.

Super denotations: ½½Pc1 ¼ \f½½Pþ c2 jc2 2 Tc1 g; \f½½P c2 jc2 2 Tc1 g

½½:Pc1 ¼

13 Our information is never total. So a context of total information represents what an agent may potentially consider to be known rather than what an agent has actually ever considered to be known. 14 Dan is tall by epistemic necessity. I am following Veltman (1984) in analyzing epistemic necessity as truth in every total extension of c1 (super truth in c1; van Fraassen, 1969). However, Veltman (1984) and van Fraassen (1969) represent epistemic necessity at the level of truth conditions of statements, while I represent epistemic necessity at the level of the denotations.

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In the following section, I show how membership clusters can be added to this formal model. 6.2.3

A Formal Representation of Contexts of Partial Information with Clusters

My proposal is that the basic interpretation of a predicate P in a context c, includes both directly given partial extensions: h½½Pþ c ; ½½Pc i (as in standard vagueness models) and partial sets of characteristic properties, as follows (cf. Kadmon and Landman, 1993): a positive membership cluster, MSþ ðP;cÞ , the set of membership dimensions, i.e., predicates such that, in c, membership in their denotation is positively known to be necessary for membership in P’s denotation (in c and its extensions, all Ps fall under them) and a negative membership cluster, MS ðP;cÞ , the set of non-membership dimensions, i.e., predicates such that, in c, membership in their denotation is positively known not to be necessary for membership in P’s denotation. The remaining predicates form the membership-cluster gap, MS?ðP;cÞ . In c, it is not yet known whether they are necessary for P-hood or not. Furthermore, I propose that dimension-sets can be incorporated into semantic knowledge-structures, by treating them on a par with denotations (Sassoon, 2001, 2007). From the zero context on (where all denotations and clusters are empty; cf. (11a)), each context c1 is monotonically extended by contexts c2 in which more entities and dimensions (predicates) are added to the predicate denotations and dimension-sets (11b), up to the point that they are all complete (11c-d).15 (11) a. In the zero-context, c0AC, all the denotations and dimensionsets are empty: 8n 2 N; 8P 2 CONCEPTn :

½½Pþ c0 ¼ ½½Pc0 ¼ + MSþ ðP;c0 Þ ¼ MSðP;c0 Þ ¼ +

15 I assume that for any n, the set of predicates CONCEPTn is closed under the linguistic operations (i.e., it includes complex predicates such as red apple, birds which are pets, non-smokers, etc.). For simplicity, in this paper I do not deal with the interpretation of variables, but for a dimension model with variable assignments (where the clusters of predicates such as his cars; similarity to her, etc. are appropriately represented) see Sassoon (2007).

142 / GALIT W. SASSOON b. A context c1 is monotonically extended by a context c2 (c1rc2) iff: 8n 2 N; 8P 2 CONCEPTn :

þ ½½Pþ c1 ½½Pc2 ;

½½P c1 ½½Pc2

þ MSþ ðP;c1 Þ MSðP;c2 Þ ; MS ðP;c1 Þ MSðP;c2 Þ

c. In a total context cAT, all the denotations and dimension-sets are complete: 8n 2 N; 8P 2 CONCEPTn :

n ½½Pþ c [ ½½Pc ¼ D n MSþ ðP;cÞ [ MSðP;cÞ ¼ CONCEPT

d. Any context cAC is extended by a non-empty set of total contexts, TcDT e. Contexts c are consistent: No d is P and not P: ½½Pþ c \ ½½Pc ¼ +. No Q does and does not restrict P: þ MSðP;cÞ \ MS ðP;cÞ ¼ + In such a model, the dimension-set of a given predicate may vary across total contexts, and may be partially unknown in partial contexts. Thus, different possible uses of a concept (or a dimension), as well as different stages of its learning, are represented. The constraint on membership clusters in (12) postulates the requirements on cluster properties in every total context tAT (from now on I use the letter t for total contexts). Because of monotonicity (cf. (11b)), the facts in every partial context c are necessarily consistent with these constraints, as explained below. (12) The constraint on membership clusters: ’tAT (the set of contexts of total information), ’nAN, þ þ ’PACONCEPTn: ½½Pþ t ¼ \f½½Qt jQ 2 MSðP;tÞ g It follows that the positive denotation of P consists of (all and only) the individuals that satisfy every membership dimension. In addition, it follows that the negative denotation of P, which is the complement of the positive denotation (cf. (11c) and (11e)), consists of (all and only) the individuals that do not satisfy some membership

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dimension. So a membership dimension is known to be necessary for P-hood. Moreover, P-entities need not satisfy P’s non-membership dimensions. They are only required to satisfy MSþ dimensions. So non-membership dimensions are known to be non-necessary for P-hood. This is important: only violation of necessary dimensions determines non-P-hood. It means that exceptions to generalizations on P cannot be regarded as irrelevant (non-Ps) on the basis that they violate some nonmembership property (cf. Section 6.3.1 below). Now, because of monotonicity, the facts in every context c in our structure are necessarily consistent with constraint (12). For example, consider a partial context c, in which MSþ ðduck;cÞ consists of the consists of the dimension small dimension bird; and MS ðduck;cÞ ¼ fbirdg & MS ¼ fsmallgÞ. If c were total, being a bird ðMSþ ðduck;cÞ ðduck;cÞ would be a necessary and sufficient condition for duckhood. But since c is partial, being a bird is just necessary (and there are additional potentially necessary conditions for membership). We now know (in c and its extensions) that only birds may be ducks, but not just small ones (small is a non-membership dimension, which means that ducks may be either small or not). It may, accidentally, be the case that only small birds exist (and thus all ducks are small). But this would be an arbitrary empirical fact: it is not required by the contextual semantic definition of duck in c. This model captures the fact that directly given denotations in partial contexts like c, ½½Pþ c and ½½Pc (the sets of entities that are directly learnt to be denotation members or non-members, respectively) are extendable on the basis of the clusters. It is a fact that we may know that objects are ducks, or tables or so on, even if they were never directly given to us as such: The indirectly extended denotation of P in c (the positive super denotation), [[P]]c (as opposed to the directly given denotation, ½½Pþ c ), is the set of individuals whose P-hood can be inferred, i.e., the set of individuals that are P in every possible way of extending the information in c to totality (cf. (10f)). For instance, in the above given context c, every individual that differs from directly given ducks only along non-necessary dimensions (e.g., small) must be regarded as a duck too. There cannot be a total extension t of c (crt) with properties that such an individual violates specified as necessary for ducks. If known ducks already violate a property it cannot be regarded as necessary. The negative denotation is extendable in the same way, e.g., every non-bird in c is in [[:P]]c (i.e., in the negative super denotation), even if it was not directly given as such (i.e., it is not in ½½P c ). Only individuals that can be

144 / GALIT W. SASSOON either P or not-P, because they violate some unspecified (potentially necessary) property, remain in the (indirectly reduced) gap. 6.2.4

Intermediate Conclusions

We now have a complete formal model with clusters, along with denotations, in the interpretation of predicates. Let us go over the main points regarding the use of such a model in natural language semantics. Consider, e.g., the predicate whale. The context-dependent membership cluster added to our model ought to directly represent the fact that there is no absolute set of whales that is always a priori referred to by a contextual use of this predicate. Sentences with the predicate whale, like those in (13), are interpreted in relation to the information given in a certain context and to certain contextual presuppositions, i.e., in relation to a contextually restricted set of relevant whales, and what is known about them. Contextual information determines whether the relevant objects in each and every contextual use are all the whales that have ever existed, the set of whales that are alive now (the year 2008), the whales that were alive in the last decade or will be alive in the next 50 years, the set of whales in a certain sea, nature reserve, or zoo, males or females, etc. (13) a. Whales are gray. b. We feed the whales in the morning. c. Every whale chooses a territory. d. A whale suckles her offspring. So a property like living in the ocean, mammal, or female, which may be a part of our world knowledge and background knowledge in a given context, is now represented as a part of our linguistic knowledge (the linguistic interpretation of the predicate whale). Stipulating both an extension and a cluster of characteristic properties is not redundant in contexts of partial information (i.e., contexts in which some individuals are still in the denotation gap, and/ or some predicates are still in the cluster gap). On the one hand, the information in the cluster is not given by the information in the denotation. The individuals in the denotation of whale may have many known properties, but one can not deduce from this whether they are required or not of all the denotation members. For example, even if all the known whales are healthy, it is not clear whether the dimension healthy is required or not of every potential member of whale. On the other hand, the information in the cluster does not give the information that the denotation gives. In some context one may know that the

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relevant whales ought to be, say, nocturnal, adult, males, but the question whether an arbitrary nocturnal adult male whale is relevant in that context, may still be open (if for instance it is not healthy). Therefore, in a context of partial information one may know some property to be necessary for whalehood without knowing a single whale, or one may know that some individuals are in the denotation of the predicate without knowing all the predicate’s positive and negative membership cluster’s members (the membership dimensions and nonmembership dimensions). Hence, postulating clusters of characteristic properties as part of the basic interpretation of a predicate P (in addition to the denotation), allows for a better representation of the actual content of the partial information a discourse participant may have regarding that predicate. As Section 6.1.2 shows, in previous approaches the absence of clusters was compensated by adding contextual criteria for, say, whalehood, to models externally, by lists of stipulations. The same criteria are stipulated again and again when linguistic items that make use of them are analyzed (quantifiers, any, conditionals, etc.). So the cluster’s content is indeed represented in these theories, but not in an economical way. By contrast, in the present proposal clusters are stipulated only as part of the interpretation of predicates. In Section 6.3, I propose that the operations denoted by quantifying expressions can access these clusters and use them in various systematic ways to construct their domains.

6.3

The Role of Quantifying Expressions

6.3.1

Every, any, and the Generic Indefinite a

A predicate in the position of the first argument of a quantifying expression, then, plays a crucial role in the construction of a domain of quantification, as it contributes sets of relevant individuals and criteria for relevance in the context. But though crucial, its role is not sufficient. When an English speaker wants to express a universal generalization, she/he must choose one of several possible quantifying expressions: every, all, any, generic a, bare plurals, each, always, conditionals, etc. The choice of some of these expressions and not others can be, and often is, meaningful. Different determiners with a universal force have varying import in terms of the domain they presuppose. For instance, every is often regarded as ‘‘non-vague,’’ in contrast to the vagueness of the generic indefinite a (Kadmon and Landman, 1993; Carlson and Pelletier, 1995; Lasersohn, 1999). Intuitively, the

146 / GALIT W. SASSOON singular generic indefinite a (as well as a bare plural) is used when the speaker wants to allow the existence of certain exceptions, whereas every is used when the speaker is committed to the idea that there are no exceptions at all (i.e., every is a marker of a precise quantification). (14) a. An owl hunts mice (6¼ every owl hunts mice) b. A poodle gives live birth (6¼ every poodle gives live birth) (Carlson, 1977) c. A (xevery, xany) duck has colorful feathers and lays whitish eggs (Kadmon and Landman, 1993) d. I don’t think that a photographer who has no culture sees things the same way a cultured photographer does. A cultured photographer is more sensitive to things and therefore he sees more. e. Birds fly (6¼ every bird flies) The determiners in (14) are not associated with precise (totally known) domains. Therefore, exceptions are tolerated, because it is always possible to regard the exceptions as irrelevant (not in the domain). Those generalizations only mean: generally, typically, normally . . . In addition, they are law-like. (14a), for instance, would usually be taken to entail that if, for instance, you or I were owls, we would hunt mice. These counterfactual entailments are usually represented by quantification over possible alternatives of reality w (worlds, situations, etc.). The expressions in (15) are assumed to have precise meanings: (15) a. Every student who had ever read anything about phrenology attended the lectures (Ladusaw, 1979). b. The townspeople are awake (Lasersohn, 1999).16 c. ‘‘There are two types of photographers,’’ he says, ‘‘those who photograph only what they can sell, and those who photograph everything. I photograph everything. All kinds of nonsensical things that I know I will never use, but I just can’t help myself.’’ d. He joined the ‘‘Hagana’’ . . . Everything was terribly secret . . .

16 Lasersohn makes a distinction between statements with a definite determiner like (15b) and statements with every like (15a) in terms of how much pragmatic slack is tolerated. In both cases, however, exceptions make the statement strictly speaking false, and in that, both differ from the statements in (14).

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e. Take television for example. There is no sparkle of happiness, everything is bad. f. Materna Premium contains all* the essential ingredients in mother’s milk necessary for proper development. You just have to add a hug . . . (*Permitted for use). The generalizations in (15) have a stricter interpretation: if there are exceptions, these generalizations are strictly false (like the every versions of (14a-e)). Since the advertisers of (15f) do not want to be accused of lying, they explicitly mention the exceptions (in *). Note that we can sometimes express such generalizations in the presence of exceptions, but this is considered to be loose speech. In these cases we still know that they are, strictly speaking, false, unlike the generalizations in (14) which may be potentially true even in the presence of exceptions. We use false generalizations when they are close enough to the truth, or violate it only in pragmatically ignorable ways (Lasersohn, 1999). It is likely that (15c)-(15e) are false, but the intention of the speaker is precisely to make a very strong statement, so every is the preferred quantifier. Any is more complex, as its use combines both strictness and tolerance to exceptions (Kadmon and Landman, 1989, 1993): (16) You say that a healthy owl hunts mice? Any owl hunts mice (6¼ an/every owl hunts mice). (16) is different from the generalizations in (15) and similar to the generalizations in (14) in being interpreted such that only ‘‘normal’’ owls are strictly required to hunt mice. Each owl may be regarded as a legitimate exception on some basis. The domain is vague. In addition, like the generalizations in (14), (16) has counterfactual entailments. However, (16) is similar to the generalizations in (15) in one respect: An exception cannot be ignored on the basis that it is not healthy. No exceptions are allowed along the dimension healthy/sick. Any receives here a free-choice interpretation: whichever owl you choose – healthy or sick – will hunt mice. Kadmon and Landman (1989, 1993) argue that the function of any is to create widening of the domain by elimination of a restriction: one property (healthy) that is initially regarded as necessary for membership in the domain is specified as non-necessary. As a result, the generalization strengthens: it applies to sick members too. Kadmon and Landman also argue that the distribution of any is limited to contexts in which widening along a dimension strengthens the statement. Consider, for instance, the

148 / GALIT W. SASSOON following examples: (17) a. I am not reading any book b. *I am reading any book. In (17a), every relevant book ought to be in the set of things that I do not read, and so widening the set of relevant books strengthens the requirements: more books have to satisfy the generalization. Because strengthening occurs, any is licensed. In (17b) only one relevant book is required to be in the set of things that I read, so widening the set of relevant books weakens the requirements: more books may satisfy the generalization. Since there is no strengthening, any is not licensed. This theory predicts many of the cases in which any is or is not licensed. A possible conclusion from the above observations is that every requires the domain to be precise, whereas generic indefinites require it to be vague. More precisely, every requires the domain to be precise in every respect (the speaker should have full information: every property should be either known to be necessary or known to be non-necessary for membership in the domain, so that the set of individuals that ought to satisfy the generalization would be totally determined), whereas any requires the domain to be non-vague only in one respect (some specific, contextually marked property, e.g., healthy in (16), should be specified as non-necessary, meaning that violation of that property is not a basis for the exclusion of objects from the domain; if such objects are exceptions to the generalization, they falsify it, unless there is another property which forms a legitimate basis for their exclusion from the domain). But, is a (or any) indeed used in contexts where the denotation of the first argument is more partial (i.e., for fewer entities, we can positively say whether they are denotation members or not) than in those where every is used? I do not think so. They may occur in the very same contexts. The point is that contexts are rarely total (i.e., denotations are rarely precise). There are infinitely many properties (potential restrictions), whose status as necessary or unnecessary is not known. The effort of specifying the status of each of them as either necessary or not, one by one, is never worthwhile. It is precisely because of the vagueness in predicates’ contextual interpretation that we may construct the domain in several possible ways, and we need several linguistic items in order to mark the option that we choose. I propose that every, any, and generic a may operate upon the same cluster of restrictions of the same predicate in the same context. However, they treat the unspecified dimensions and entities in different ways. I propose that these expressions denote operations upon the dimension-cluster of their first argument. They shift contexts, systematically,

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rendering the cluster – and hence the denotation – more or less partial, and through this they weaken or strengthen the universal statements. On this analysis, restrictions are stipulated just once: in the predicate interpretation, and not with every quantifier’s contextual occurrence. The rest is determined by the semantics of the quantifying expression. In addition to being economical, this illuminates the relations between the meanings of different quantifying expressions, given a specific context. For instance, consider the following examples: (18) a. Apparently, if you believe that any aspect of an organism has a function, you absolutely must believe that every aspect of an organism has a function (Pinker, 1997). b. Every match I strike lights. Not any match, of course, a wet one doesn’t (Kadmon and Landman, 1993). In both (18a) and (18b), any (which is supposed to modify a predicate with a vague denotation and cluster), and every (which is supposed to modify a predicate with a non-vague denotation and cluster), operate on the same predicate in the same context. The Adaptationists’ view, which Pinker (1997) introduces and rejects using the phrase in (18a), is as follows: if one is committed to the idea that any aspect of an organism has a function, regardless whether it is, say, a physiological or a behavioral aspect (but with possible exceptions on some other basis), then one must also be committed to the idea that every aspect of an organism has a function, i.e., without exceptions on any basis at all: physiological, behavioral, complex, not complex, . . . With any, the properties physiological or behavioral are treated as non-restrictions. With every, everything that was not initially treated as clearly necessary in the context, is treated as nonnecessary (non-restriction). No further restrictions can be presupposed and be the basis for disregarding exceptions, if these exist. According to Pinker, the Adaptationists disregard important distinctions like complex or not complex, while according to Pinker only complex aspects have functions. The same kind of switch in interpretation happens in (18b), but this time it is the other way around: it is any that yields a stronger statement. With every, no ‘‘new’’ property can be treated as necessary for membership in [[match]]c. Only properties that were clearly treated as necessary for membership in [[match]]c in the first place are so regarded, and dry is naturally one of those necessary conditions for relevance in c. However, with any the properties wet and dry are treated as non-restrictions. The domain is widened along dry to include wet

150 / GALIT W. SASSOON matches too. Because of this, the generalization any match I strike lights becomes false. To sum up, the analysis proposed predicts that every, any, and generic a can appear in the very same contexts, but the use of every is always stronger (i.e., induces wider domains) than the use of a and any along every dimension, except for the dimension that any eliminates. So on the present proposal all quantifying expressions access one and the same cluster of restrictions (the one in the context-dependent interpretation of their first argument). In virtue of this feature, the present proposal captures the similarities, as well as the precise differences between the interpretations of noun phrases with different quantifying expressions (per a given predicate as their first argument). Therefore, it is not only more economic, but also more adequate than previous theories in which sets of restrictions are stipulated case by case and the similarities and differences between the cases are not captured. In the next section, I demonstrate in detail the workings of the analysis of every, any, and a as operations upon clusters. 6.3.2

Universal Generalizations with Operations Upon Clusters

The examples in (19) contain predicates and quantifying expressions with a universal force. Let us examine their contribution to the truth conditions. (19) a. Every duck lays eggs b. A duck lays eggs c. Any duck lays eggs Naturally, the quantifying expressions contribute a universal quantifier, e.g., the statement a duck lays eggs in its generic reading is interpreted as equivalent to the statement ’(duck,lays eggs). I follow Veltman (1984) and Landman (1991) in assuming that (20a-c) represents the truth conditions of the universal statement ’(duck,lays eggs) (regardless of whether ’ is a translation of every, any, or a). (20) a. [[’(duck,lays eggs)]]c ¼ 1 iff ’dA(D[[:duck]]c): dA[[lays eggs]]c b. [[’(duck,lays eggs)]]c ¼ 0 iff (dA [[duck]]c: dA[[:lays eggs]]c c. [[’(duck,lays eggs)]]c ¼ Unknown Otherwise

As stated in (20a), the given universal statement is known to be true in a partial context c iff every potential duck (e.g., everything that is not yet specified as a non-duck in c, i.e., not in [[:duck]]c, but rather is either in [[duck]]c or in the denotation gap of duck) lays eggs (is specified

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in [[lays eggs]]c). In (20b), we see that the given universal statement is (known to be) false in a context c iff some known duck (a member of [[duck]]c) does not lay eggs (is specified in [[:lays eggs]]c). In (20c) we see that if neither the truth condition nor the falsity condition is satisfied (for instance, if the sets [[duck]]c, [[:duck]]c, [[lays eggs]]c, and [[:lays eggs]]c are still empty), the truth value of the universal statement is unknown in c. Regarding the predicates, the special feature of the present analysis is that, in any context c, the sets [[duck]]c, [[:duck]]c, [[lays eggs]]c, and [[:lays eggs]]c are already restricted to those instances that are known to be relevant in the context. In addition, these sets are þ not the directly given denotations ([½duckþ c ; ½½duckc ; ½½lays eggsc ; and ½½lays eggsc , respectively), but rather the super denotations (cf. (10f)), which are indirectly extended on the basis of the clusters þ (the sets of entities that belong to ½½duckþ t ; ½½duckt ; ½½lays eggst ; and ½½lays eggst , respectively, in every total extension t of c). The information in c cannot consistently extend with these entities added to a different set, i.e., these entities must be regarded as ducks, non-ducks, egg-layers, and non-egg-layers, respectively. An additional important non-standard feature of the present analysis is that the use of a certain determiner shifts the interpretation from the context of evaluation c to another context: (21) a. [[19a]]c ¼ 1 b. [[19b]]c ¼ 1 c. [[19c]]c ¼ 1

iff iff iff

[[’(duck,lays eggs)]]every(duck,c) ¼ 1 [[’(duck,lays eggs)]]a(duck,c) ¼ 1 [[’(duck,lays eggs)]]any(duck,c,Q) ¼ 1

In (21a), every is used, so we move from c to a context called every(duck,c). In (21b), with the generic indefinite, we move to a context a(duck,c). In (21c), any moves us to the context any(duck,c,Q). Q is the dimension which any eliminates. In the following sections, I discuss each quantifying expression in more detail. For simplicity, throughout the discussion I assume that, unless mentioned otherwise, in the context of evaluation c the predicate bird is necessary for duckhood (it is a membership dimension of duck), and small is non-necessary (it is a non-membership dimension of duck). All the other predicates are in the denotation gap. Formally: (22) MSþ ðduck;cÞ ¼ fbirdg MSðduck;cÞ ¼ fsmallg

Some dimensions, for instance female, are unspecified in the duck clusters. That means that female is still potentially necessary of ducks in this context. Thus, duckhood of male birds is undetermined: If they

152 / GALIT W. SASSOON do not lay eggs the falsity condition (dA[[duck]]c: dA[[:lays eggs]]c is not satisfied, as these males are not known to be contextually relevant ducks (they are not members of [[duck]]c). Nor is the truth condition satisfied in c, ’dA(D[[:duck]]c): dA[[lays eggs]]c, because male birds do not lay eggs, and they are not necessarily known to be contextually irrelevant ducks (they are not members of [[:duck]]c). 6.3.2.1

The Use of Every

Let us look at the context every(duck,c) ( ¼ ce). It is identical to c, except that all unspecified predicates are treated as non-necessary (non-membership dimensions) in ce: all the predicates that can be generated in the language and are not in the positive cluster are added to the negative cluster. The negative cluster becomes the complement set of the positive ones: 1 þ (23) a. MS ðduck;ceÞ ¼ ðCONCEPT MSðduck;ceÞ Þ b. [[’(duck,lays eggs)]]ce ¼ 1 iff: ’dA(D[[:duck]]ce): dA[[lays eggs]]ce c. [[’(duck,lays eggs)]]ce ¼ 0 iff (dA [[duck]]ce: dA[[:lays eggs]]ce

Recall that no predicate except for bird is specified in the clusters of duck in c. In ce, however, all these unspecified predicates (e.g., female, male, big, small, grown up, not grown up, etc.) are specified in the negative clusters. The consequence of this is that all and only the birds satisfy all the necessary dimensions (as the unique membership dimension in c is bird), and so all of them, whether male or female, big or small, etc., get classified as ducks (based on (12)). We cannot add more requirements in the context every(duck,ce). If some birds do not lay eggs, e.g., male birds, the falsity condition, (dA [[duck]]ce: dA[[:lays eggs]]ce, is satisfied, and hence the statement every duck lays eggs is false in c (cf. (23a,c)). No exception is tolerated. That is why this every statement is intuitively judged false. Consider example (24), taken from the Kinneret Covenant (Ha’aretz, Friday 4.1.02): (24) Every citizen is a free person. A relevant citizen in the context of the Kinneret Covenant is a citizen of Israel, not a citizen of the world, of the United States, and so on. (24) may also be true for such citizens, or false for everyone, but that is irrelevant. The Kinneret Covenant is specifically about Israelis. So every quantifies over a contextually relevant set (and for this reason, speakers sometimes judge examples like (24) to be true). Yet, if a property was not regarded as a necessary dimension of citizen in the

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context (like the properties: female, male, Jewish, Muslim, old, young, and so on), it clearly cannot be regarded as such after the use of every. The use of every implies that we refer to the largest denotation possible in the context. In (15f), repeated below as (25), only nutritional ingredients are relevant. Thus, a hug is not a relevant ingredient. (25) Materna Premium contains all* the essential ingredients in mother’s milk necessary for proper development. You just have to add a hug . . . (*Permitted for use). However, all the edible ingredients existing in mother’s milk indeed are relevant, and if some of those constitute exceptions to the generalization they must be mentioned. Again, we see that the expected interpretation is such that the set of relevant essential ingredients is the largest possible, relative to the existing contextual restrictions. Next, I argue exactly the opposite for context a(duck,c). 6.3.2.2

The Use of the Indefinite Determiner

What happens in context a(duck,c) ( ¼ ca)? One possible hypothesis is that the context a(duck,c) is simply identical to context c, which is usually partial, and thus the clusters and denotations of duck are vague. This possibility makes sense, but let me suggest a stronger, more controversial hypothesis, and demonstrate its advantages. The strong hypothesis is that context a(duck,c) is identical to c, except that even predicates that in c are already specified as nonnecessary dimensions (e.g., small) are treated as unspecified (i.e., potentially necessary) of duck in ca, and the same holds true of any predicate (given that the interpretation of every predicate influences the interpretation of duck, since every predicate is a potential dimension of duck). Context a(duck,c) is identical to c in every respect except that it is changed minimally so as to allow every property to be possibly necessary for duckhood, and more generally, to allow every property to be possibly necessary for P-hood, for every predicate (actual or potential duck dimension) P, i.e., the negative clusters of predicates are emptied, as stated in (26a), and in addition, even if the directly given denotation of duck in c, ½½duckþ c , is not empty, the directly given denotation of duck in a(duck,c), ½½duckþ aðduck;cÞ , is empty (for otherwise, undesirably, many predicates would not be potentially necessary of instances of the given predicate, e.g., female, male, adult, not-adult, etc., because some entities violating them would already be

154 / GALIT W. SASSOON considered positive denotation members). The same hold true of every predicate, as stated in (26b). (26) For all predicates P: a. MS ðP;caÞ ¼ + b. ½½Pþ ca ¼ +; ½½Pca ¼ +

In fact, intuitively, it is impossible to define the domain of the generic statement by pointing, without rendering the interpretation of the statement episodic. Even if an entity is directly given as a duck for previous purposes in the discourse, it is not necessarily relevant to a generic statement on ducks. It may well form an exception and be regarded as irrelevant for some reason or another (say, because its age is too young). Before we proceed to examine the resulting truth conditions, recall that genericity is often represented by an implicit generic quantifier, Gen, which quantifies over alternatives of reality (Carlson and Pelletier, 1995). The hard task is to determine the modal base relative to which a generic statement is interpreted, and the individuals that are relevant in each alternative of reality in the modal base. On the present analysis, the idea would be that a generic generalization ought to hold true only in those alternatives of reality that obey the linguistic definitions in c, i.e., the constraints on predicate denotations imposed by the positive cluster’s dimensions in c (MSþ ðP;cÞ of any predicate P). The positive clusters express the contextual content of the word, e.g. the relevant presuppositions in the intended meaning of duck in c. Intuitively, the generic statement a duck lays eggs is about the states of affairs in every alternative of reality in which the predicate duck refers to female water birds of the family Anatidae which are healthy, of the right age range, and so on. In addition, the generic statement is about the states of affairs in every alternative of reality in which the predicates female, water bird, healthy, etc., have the intended meanings (in the above defined sense) that they have in c, etc. The arbitrary facts, i.e., which individuals are members in these sets, may vary from one alternative to the other (and that is the source of the counterfactual entailments), but some inherent facts (the contextual conceptual content of the interpretation of duck, i.e., the positive cluster) ought to remain constant. This is hard to express unless clusters are explicitly represented. How can we formalize these intuitions? First note that total contexts t in T in our information structure correspond to alternatives of reality, so quantification can range over alternative total contexts

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(instead of possible worlds as in, for instance, Carlson and Pelletier, 1995). Second, we are only interested in total contexts in which the positive clusters of predicates, MSþ ðP;cÞ , are identical to the positive clusters in c, for all predicates P. Thus, we can express the contribution of Gen to the truth conditions of (19b) in the following way: (27) [[Gen a duck lays eggs]]c ¼ 1 iff: þ ’tAT, such that ’P, MSþ ðP;tÞ ¼ MSðP;cÞ : [[’(duck,lays eggs)]]a(duck,t) ¼1 The truth conditions in (27) state that every possible duck lays eggs in every extension in which being a duck presupposes whatever it presupposes in c (e.g., being a female, a water bird, etc.), and female presupposes whatever it presupposes in c, and so on. These are the desired truth conditions in that the facts may vary to the extent that the relevant conceptual and linguistic content (represented by the clusters in the interpretation of predicates) in the context of evaluation allows. However, it turns out that the present proposal has the advantage that similar truth conditions can be derived without stipulating an implicit determiner Gen as a constituent of the statement. Let us see how. According to our analysis, the truth conditions should be those stated in (28)-(29). iff (28) a. [[a duck lays eggs]]c ¼ 1 iff b. [[a duck lays eggs]]c ¼ 0 c. [[a duck lays eggs]]c ¼ Unknown

[[’(duck,lays eggs)]]ca ¼ 1 [[’(duck,lays eggs)]]ca ¼ 0 Otherwise

’dA(D[[:duck]]ca): dA[[lays eggs]]ca b. [[’(duck,lays eggs)]]ca ¼ 0 iff (dA [[duck]]ca: dA[[:lays eggs]]ca c. [[’(duck,lays eggs)]]ca ¼ Unknown Otherwise

(29) a. [[’(duck,lays eggs)]]ca ¼ 1

iff:

The context a(duck,t) is identical to t in every respect except that it is changed minimally, so as to allow every property to be possibly necessary or typical for P-hood (the directly given denotations and the negative clusters are empty). The generic statement is true iff (cf. (29a)) every possible duck lays eggs in every extension in which being a duck presupposes whatever it presupposes in c (i.e., being a female, a water bird, etc.), and female presupposes whatever it presupposes in c, and so on. However, the sets ½½duckþ ca , ½½duckca , þ ½½lays eggsca , and ½½lays eggsca are empty, as stated in (26b). As a

156 / GALIT W. SASSOON result, neither the truth condition nor the falsity conditions of ’(duck,lays eggs) are satisfied in ca, i.e., the truth value of statements of the form a P is Q can never be directly determined in ca. Following van Fraassen (1969), Kamp (1975), Veltman (1984), Landman (1991), and many others since, we can assume that in such a situation speakers attempting to determine the truth value of the statement may resort to epistemic necessity, i.e., to truth (or falsity) in every total extension of the context of evaluation. In the given example, speakers may indirectly determine that the statement ’(duck,lays eggs) is true in ca iff the information in ca can only extend in such a way that it ends up true (i.e., iff it is true in every total extension t of ca). Similarly, speakers may indirectly determine that the statement ’(duck,lays eggs) is false in ca iff the information in ca can only extend in such a way that it ends up false (i.e., iff it is false in every total extension t of ca). This verification process is called the supervaluation technique (van Fraassen, 1969). The resulting truth conditions are, then, the following. (30) [[A duck lays eggs]]c ¼ 1

iff: ’tAT, tZa(duck,c): [[’(duck,lays eggs)]]t ¼ 1 iff: ’tAT, tZa(duck,c): ’dA(D [[:duck]]t): dA[[lays eggs]]t

The statement a duck lays eggs is true in c iff the statement ’(duck,lays eggs) is necessarily true (‘‘super-true’’) in ca, i.e., iff the information in ca cannot consistently extend in such a way that the statement ’(duck,lays eggs) would be found false. Thus, the effect that is usually thought to be contributed by Gen (quantification on the relevant total states) is already achieved. The truth conditions require that every possible duck lay eggs, in every extension in which being a duck presupposes being a female, water bird, etc. In this analysis, the positive cluster of duck in the relevant total extensions includes all the dimensions included in the positive cluster of duck in c, and maybe additional dimensions. Similarly, female, water bird, etc. presuppose what they presuppose in c, and so on. Since predicate denotations are empty in a(duck,c), every denotation that satisfies the positive membership constraints of duck is in fact the denotation of this predicate in some total context of a(duck,c). So we get the desired truth conditions. Many exceptions are tolerated (e.g., male birds, sick birds, etc.), and at the same time, in any extension in which you or I do satisfy every membership dimension (we are ducks, healthy, female, etc.), we are strictly required to lay eggs.

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Furthermore, predicates that in c are specified as non-membership dimensions (e.g., small 2 MS ðduck;cÞ ), are in the cluster-gap of duck ), which means that they are considered in ca (smalleMS ðduck;caÞ potentially necessary for duckhood in ca, i.e., they may get classified as membership dimensions of duck in some extensions of ca. Now, in all these extensions, some birds are not small, some are too small, and so on. In ca, all these facts form a potential basis for considering these birds irrelevant (because in ca these predicates may turn out to be necessary for duckhood). In extensions t in which they do, these birds are members of [[:duck]]t. So, basically, in these extensions, even if these birds do not lay eggs, these exceptions can be tolerated (e.g., too small or too big birds). In fact, a generic statement a P is Q may be interpreted relative to a context of evaluation which is more specified than a(P,c). An addressee, trying to determine the truth of a generic statement, may accommodate his or her information in such a way that the truth of the generic statement will be examined only in a subset of the total contexts described above. Being a cooperative addressee, he or she will try to accommodate the information in a way that will make the generic statement true. Therefore, this addressee may ‘‘jump’’ from ca, where many dimensions are yet unspecified, to a richer context, where predicates like not too small and not too big are membership dimensions of duck.17 Yet, not every accommodation is possible. Intuitively, statements like a duck lays eggs are true, while statements like a cow lays eggs are false. Why? We do not treat the predicates cow and duck as contradictory (we know that relevant cows or ducks may exist). In total contexts in which the denotation of cow is not empty, the statement a cow lays eggs is false. Given that dimensions like mammal and gives live birth are probably specified in MSþ ðcow;cÞ in most literal contexts, adding lays eggs to the positive clusters of cow is inconsistent (it makes the predicate cow contradictory). However, adding it to the positive clusters of duck is perfectly consistent. This fact relates to a more general idea that often appears in the literature about generic statements, namely that the property lays eggs has to be ‘‘inherent’’ to ducks. In my theory, a property can be considered as ‘‘inherent,’’ or very probable, based on the given cluster (for further discussion of possible vs. impossible accommodations see Section 6.4). 17 In fact, I believe that predicates like female and healthy are initially regarded as unspecified (and this renders every duck lays eggs false), and in the context of utterance of a duck lays eggs they are added to the positive cluster by accommodation.

158 / GALIT W. SASSOON Greenberg (2002, 2007) argues that pragmatics may specify some non-restrictions, i.e., properties that do not form a basis for regarding an exception as irrelevant (MS dimensions, in the present terminology). However, these non-restrictions are highly context-dependent, and easily cancellable. For instance, consider example (31). (31) a. Dogs bark b. A dog barks. It is quite likely that genetic problems in leg function are not a basis for regarding exceptions (things that do not bark) as irrelevant dogs in contexts of utterance of (31). But, of course, one could easily imagine the possibility that genetic problems in leg function might somehow be related to genetic problems in the vocal chords. In such a context, genetic problems in leg function would in fact form a basis for regarding a dog that does not bark as irrelevant. Hence, we want the semantics of generic indefinites to allow exceptions on every basis (i.e., to treat everything that is not specified in the positive membership cluster as a potential membership dimension), so that it will indeed follow that implications regarding certain things being non-restrictions are cancelable.18 Even in definitional contexts like (32a) we do not have to assume that the semantics determines that every predicate except for never married is unnecessary of bachelors, i.e., that all bachelors are relevant: (32) a. A bachelor is unmarried/Bachelors are unmarried. b. Bachelors are happy. All bachelors are only potentially relevant. (32a) would be regarded as true even if all bachelors were relevant, simply because we all have the predicate never married specified in MSþ ðbachelor;cÞ in every normal (literal) context (and this entails that all bachelors are unmarried). But discourse can extend by asserting and accepting as true (32b), which seems to show that the participants do presuppose more restrictions. Bachelors that, say, are dying, are irrelevant. On the proposed analysis, we do not have to assume that they were initially regarded as relevant, and that discourse advances in a non-monotonic way such that they are removed from the denotation afterwards. It is no wonder, under the strong hypothesis, that a generic reading shows up with indefinites, and not with every. A generalization 18 In fact, pedants can always argue against generic statements, by refusing to accommodate restrictions.

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like a duck lays eggs is likely to hold true in every alternative of reality, only if exceptions are ignored. We know that in some easily imaginable alternatives there are sick exceptions, in others exceptions whose age is too young to lay eggs, etc. (such exceptions do exist in actual contexts of evaluation c, and therefore, in ce). When every is used, none of these properties forms a basis for ignoring exceptions, and, hence, the statement is false. Since universal quantification over alternatives is implicit, it simply does not appear when it necessarily induces false statements. I terminate the discussion of the generic indefinite with two additional short arguments. First, the data in (33) demonstrates that the adverb almost is infelicitous with the indefinite article. This is directly accounted for because almost, as a means of weakening universal statements, is superfluous when every exception, along every dimension, is already allowed (for more details see Kadmon and Landman, 1993). (33) a. b. c. (34) a. b.

Almost every owl hunts mice Almost any owl hunts mice. * Almost an owl hunts mice. everyone, everywhere, anybody, anything . . . * a one, *a where, *a body . . .

Second, the data in (34) demonstrates the fact that the use of unrestricted predicates like one, body, thing, and so on, is not felicitous with the indefinite article. These predicates have almost every property specified in their negative clusters. As such, naturally, they do not combine well with the indefinite, which eliminates every property from this set. In statement (35), the indefinite is felicitous with the unrestricted predicate thing, only because it receives a free-choice interpretation, like free choice any, which assumes that some properties are specified in the negative clusters (as demonstrated in the following section). (35) I didn’t see a thing To summarize, I have proposed an account of both episodic and generic universal statements (statements with every vs. statements with a), which, by minimal means, captures the intolerance of every to exceptions, and both the law-like nature of the generic indefinite and its tolerance to exceptions. To the best of my knowledge, in no previous theory are both of these features of generics captured by one and the same mechanism. On my proposal, predicates (as first arguments of

160 / GALIT W. SASSOON quantifiers) help us construct the domain by supplying partial sets of relevant entities and criteria for relevance. A choice of one of several possible expressions, like every, any, or the generic indefinite, helps to determine the status of the unspecified criteria and entities. I delay the discussion of the use of any to Section 6.4, where I discuss one more problematic feature of previous analyses. This feature relates to the nature of the restrictions in these theories. I argue that some restrictions do not function as membership dimensions (as constraining membership in the domain, as assumed in previous theories; cf. Section 6.1.4), but as ordering the domain by typicality (ordering dimensions). Again, I describe a new proposal, improved in this regard. The use of both membership and ordering dimensions is exemplified by the use of any.

6.4 6.4.1

Clusters of Ordering Dimensions The Role of Typicality Ordering Dimensions

Most theories of contextual domain restrictions relate to a set of properties that restrict the set of objects quantified over. However, an additional common kind of properties, typicality dimensions, plays a crucially different role in contexts: They order the members of the domain (or denotation) by relative relevance in the context, rather than merely excluding irrelevant members. For example, even if being healthy, or grown up, is not necessary for duckhood in the context of a discourse on the reproduction behavior of ducks, healthy grown up birds may well be more relevant than sick or immature (very young and very old) birds. In such a case, the properties healthy and grown up are contextually typical of ducks: they raise ducks’ relevance in the context. We have seen in Section 6.1.1 that speakers associate with (the concepts labeled by) predicates a set of typicality dimensions. I propose that this set too, which I call the ordering cluster, should be represented as part of the (contextual) interpretation of predicates, along with the denotation and the membership cluster. While the members of the membership cluster serve to merely restrict the denotation to its relevant subset, the members of the ordering cluster serve to order instances (and especially denotation members) by typicality – and hence relevance – in the context. In the following paragraphs, I demonstrate the significance of the ordering dimensions in the analysis of two types of quantifying expressions, any and generic indefinites.

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Beforehand note that, following Kadmon and Landman (1993) and much research in cognitive psychology (cf. Wisniewski and Medin, 1994; Murphy, 2002), I take it that, like the membership cluster, also the ordering cluster of predicates P is usually only partially specified. It should, therefore, be represented by two sets – a positive ordering cluster (a set of ordering dimensions), OSþ ðP;cÞ , and a negative ordering cluster (a set of non-ordering dimensions, i.e., predicates that do not affect the typicality of entities), OS ðP;cÞ . If a property is not specified in either of these sets, it is unknown in the context whether it affects the ordering of instances by typicality (and through that their relative relevance) or not. For example, while four legs and a back are usually taken to be typical of chairs, and soft is usually taken not to be typical of chairs, in many contexts we may be uncertain as to the status of the properties denoted by predicates such as wooden or brown (i.e., whether wooden chairs are more typical than other chairs or not, and whether the more brown a chair is the more typical it is or not). Kadmon and Landman (1993) argue that any is similar to the generic indefinite in being vague. However, any widens the domain, by the elimination of some specific contextually determined restriction (which is treated as a non-restriction), and hence the statement is strengthened. Any occurs only when widening induces strengthening. For instance, according to Kadmon and Landman, in (16) repeated below as (36), any eliminates the restriction healthy, which was initially regarded as necessary for owlhood.19 The property healthy is specified as non-necessary for owlhood. (36) You say that a healthy owl hunts mice? Any owl hunts mice In terms of the present proposal, then, generic any contributes a universal quantifier, and shifts the interpretation to a context any(owl,c,healthy) ( ¼ cany), which is identical to the context a(owl,c) (so we capture the law-like nature of any statements), except that the eliminated dimension, healthy, its negation, not healthy, and all the predicates that entail them (e.g., not sick and sick, respectively) are specified as negative membership dimensions of owl: (37) MS ðowl;cany Þ ¼ fhealthy; not healthy; sick; not sick . . .g 19 Regarding this example, one could also claim that the use of any only helps to clarify the (previously unspecified) status of healthy (to imply that indeed it is a non-restriction). See further discussion of this effect of any below.

162 / GALIT W. SASSOON As a result, the domain widens: the property denoted by hunts mice should apply to both sick and healthy entities, so this generalization is stronger than the generalization an owl hunts mice. More facts need to be the case for it to hold true. However, widening will not do when the domain is predetermined, and, thus, cannot be widened, as in the examples in (38): (38) a. b. c. d. e. f.

Just hand me any (one) of those ten bottles You didn’t take a picture of any of your ducks I’m sure you’d like any of the videos in my store Any of the videos in my store will please you I can easily recite any (one) of exactly 15 poems I can easily recite any (one) of only 15 poems

In (38a), the domain includes ten items; in (38b), with polarity sensitive any, the domain is predetermined by an ownership relation, which is explicitly expressed by the term your ducks, and the same is true of (38c-d) with free choice any. We refer here to very specific finite sets of objects, so widening cannot work. In (38e-f) we see that any can even occur with a phrase modified by exactly and only.20 Furthermore, widening cannot exhaust the contribution of any to the meaning of statements. In particular, sometimes any eliminates ordering, rather than creating widening. Consider, for instance, the following examples: (39) A: Do you have some socks to lend me? B: Yes, do you prefer socks like those you usually wear? (say: warmer socks) A: No, any socks (you have) will do (40) Do you have some socks to lend me? Any socks would help (dry/ wet) A sock that is drier, or appropriate to the weather, or fashionable, or clean, and so on, is a more relevant sock to lend. Such properties order socks on a scale of relevance. Any here may simply eliminate this ordering. The natural interpretation of any in these statements is: forget about the usual preferences for more typical socks; all socks are 20 One could assign examples (38e-f) a different syntactic structure, arguing that any does not really combine with only and exactly. However, I do not see any justification for assigning (38a-d) and (38e-f) different structures, while below I do show that any the determiner can contribute semantically to the interpretation of all these examples. I therefore refrain from making any such syntactic stipulation.

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equally good for me at the moment. Hence, I propose that any may also treat some dimension as non-ordering (i.e., when we check in a context c1 whether the statement any socks would help is true we move to a new context c2, in which some dimensions, e.g., dry and wet, are members of OS ðsocks;c2 Þ or of OSðsocks to lend;c2 Þ , and we check whether indeed all the relevant socks would help). Similarly, in for instance, a context of utterance of Any duck lays whitish eggs, any may eliminate healthy from OSþ ðduck;c1 Þ and specify it in OSðduck;c2 Þ . What is the effect of such elimination? Usually, more typical items are more highly expected to satisfy generalizations or requests. When sickness does not reduce typicality, sick exceptions are more typical, and hence more serious exceptions than when sickness does reduce typicality. For example, if some sick duck does not lay eggs it cannot be regarded as less relevant (and hence be ignored ‘‘pragmatically’’), on the basis of being sick. All other things being equal, healthy and sick entities get classified as equally typical (and, therefore, equally relevant for generalizations about ducks). So any in this use homogenizes the domain (eliminates ordering along some dimension), rather than widens it.21 Additional evidence in favor of this analysis is the following. On this analysis any is predominantly a dimension eliminator, so that homogenizing rather than widening may occur. When homogenizing occurs ordering is removed by any. If this in fact occurs, we should expect that reintroducing the ordering would be incoherent. This prediction is borne out, as illustrated by the following contrast. On the one hand, in (41b)-(43b), we see that with any the speaker cannot assume ordering along the dimension that is being eliminated. On the other hand, in (41a)-(43a), with the indefinite determiner, we see that the speaker can assume ordering almost along every dimension. (41) a. I rarely watch movies. Especially (not) long ones (Ordering along long: O) b. I rarely watch any movies. # Especially (not) long ones. (Ordering along long: #) (42) a. Could you take a picture of one of those ducks? Try to pick a healthy one. (Ordering along healthy: O) 21 In the formal representation of my theory in Section 6.4.3, I briefly show how the elimination of an ordering dimension strengthens the statement (for a detailed discussion see Sassoon, 2001).

164 / GALIT W. SASSOON b. Could you take a picture of any (one) of those ducks? x Try to pick a healthy one. (Ordering along healthy: #) (43) a. Could you hand me one of those bottles? Try to make it a small one. (Ordering along small: O) b. Could you hand me any (one) of those bottles? x Try to make it a small one. (Ordering along small: x) Yet another effect may occur when any eliminates unspecified dimensions. In such a case the elimination induced by any just clarifies what the domain is. For instance, in the context of an utterance of (44), it is reasonable to assume that the properties large and small were not specified in the clusters of bottle. The use of any implies, as always, that these properties ought to be regarded as non-restrictions (specified in the set of non-membership dimensions and/or in the set of non-ordering dimensions of bottle): (44) A: Hand me a bottle. B: A large one or a small one? A: Just hand me any (one) of those ten bottles. In conclusion, elimination of dimensions, rather than widening, is any’s basic function in all its occurrences. The effects of dimension elimination include widening, homogenizing, and clarifying, depending on whether the eliminated dimension was initially treated as necessary for membership in the denotation of the predicate forming the first argument of any, typical of the entities falling under this predicate, or unspecified in its clusters, respectively. Additional evidence for the linguistic relevance of clusters of ordering dimensions comes from generic statements, where ordering dimensions affect truth-value judgments. Consider, e.g., the following examples. (45) a. The Frenchmen eat horsemeat. b. Bees are sexually sterile. According to common speakers’ intuitions, statements like (45a) are true and statements like (45b) are false (Cohen, 1999). Statement (45a) is regarded as true because eating horsemeat can be taken to be typical of Frenchmen. If we ignore atypical entities (i.e., if we regard them as contextually irrelevant Frenchmen), (45a) would be true. The statement may be judged true even if very few perfectly typical entities

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(i.e., entities that eat horsemeat) exist. It is only crucial that these entities are taken to be more typical than identical individuals that do not eat horsemeat. Conversely, statement (45b) is regarded as false because only workers are sexually sterile, and being a worker is not taken as a property that raises the typicality of bees. At least out of the blue, workers and non-workers are taken to be equally typical. In sum, in this section I have given several illustrations of the role of clusters of ordering dimensions (stereotypes) in semantic analysis. Section 6.4.2 attempts to provide a formal model with membership and ordering clusters, in which quantifying expressions denote operations that can access these clusters and use them in order to widen, restrict, order, or homogenize their domain. 6.4.2

The Dimension Model

It is easy to see how ordering clusters can be added to the formal model presented in Section 6.2 (cf. (11) vs. (46)). (46) Let CONCEPTn be the set of predicates of arity n. a. In the zero-context, c0AC, all the denotations and dimensionsets are empty: 8n 2 N; 8P 2 CONCEPTn : ½½Pþ c0 ¼ ½½Pc0 ¼ + þ MSþ ðP;c0 Þ ¼ MSðP;c0 Þ ¼ OSðP;c0 Þ

¼ OS ðP;c0 Þ ¼ + b. A context c1 is monotonically extended by contexts c2 (c1rc2) iff: þ 8n 2 N;8P 2 CONCEPTn : ½½Pþ c1 ½½Pc2 ; ½½Pc1 ½½Pc2 : þ MSþ ðP;c1 Þ MSðP;c2 Þ ; MSðP;c1 Þ MSðP;c2 Þ þ OSþ ðP;c1 Þ OSðP;c2 Þ ; OSðP;c1Þ OSðP;c2 Þ

c. In a total context cAT, all the denotations and dimension-sets are complete: n 8n 2 N; 8P 2 CONCEPTn : ½½Pþ c [ ½½Pc ¼ D þ MSþ ðP;cÞ [ MSðP;cÞ ¼ OSðP;cÞ [ OSðP;cÞ

¼ CONCEPTn d. Any context cAC is extended by a non-empty set of total contexts, TcDT.

166 / GALIT W. SASSOON e. Contexts c are consistent: ½½Pþ c \ ½½Pc ¼ + þ MSþ ðP;cÞ \ MSðP;cÞ ¼ OSðP;cÞ \ OSðP;cÞ ¼ +

f. Super denotations: ½½Pc1 ¼ \f½½Pþ c2 jc2 2 Tc1 g ½½:Pc1 ¼ \f½½P c2 jc2 2 Tc1 g The non-trivial part, addressed next, regards the formulation of a constraint on ordering clusters that will appropriately represent the requirements on ordering dimensions in every total context. 6.4.2.1

Typicality Orderings

When asked to describe the content of a word, say chair, people may point at some examples of chairs, and from all available chairs, they are likely to start pointing at relatively typical chairs, and only then point at worse examples. Alternatively, they may utter a list of characteristics of chairs, including predicates that stand for necessary conditions for membership in the contextual extension like piece of furniture, and, mostly, predicates that denote properties that affect typicality like has a back, four legs, is used as a seat, etc. These predicates denote properties that good examples exemplify better than less typical examples of chairs. Children in acquisition, and adults while disambiguating or acquiring predicate meaning in specific contextual uses, are exposed both to instances that fall (or do not fall) under a predicate, to the order in which examples are given (i.e., good examples first), and to characteristic (or non-characteristic) properties, which are exemplified best by the early acquired examples (Anglin, 1977). I therefore propose that the ordering dimensions and the ordering of entities by typicality mutually constrain one another, in just the same way that the membership dimensions and the denotation mutually constrain one another (cf. constraint (12) on membership clusters, repeated below in (47)). (47) The constraint on membership clusters: ’tAT (the set of contexts of total information), ’nAN, ’PACONCEPTn: þ þ ½½Pþ t ¼ \f½½Qt jQ 2 MSðP;tÞ g

A Membership dimension is known to be necessary for P-hood.

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Non-membership dimensions are known to be non-necessary for P-hood. In order to represent orderings of entities by typicality, I use (add to the language) two-place formal relations, ZP, for any predicate P. For example, the relation ‘‘Zduck’’ may correspond to various natural language expressions: at least as relevant a duck, at least as typical (of a) duck, at least as good an example of a duck, at least as similar to a duck, etc. These ordering relations play a role in contexts, by telling us which entities are more relevant to generalizations or requests about ducks.22 The interpretation of a two-place relation in a context c, say, ½½chair þ c , consists of a set of pairs of individuals /d1,d2S, such that d1 is at least as good an example of chair as d2. The negative denotation, ½½chair c , consists of pairs in which this is not the case, i.e., those pairs ? in which d2 is a better example (¼ ½½ochair þ c ). The gap ½½chair c contains pairs of individuals about which we do not yet know if they belong to the negative set or to the positive one.23 (48) The ordering constraint: ’d2,d1AD, ’c2AT: hd1 ; d2 i4 2 ½½ Pþ c2 , i.e., d1 is at least as (good an example of a) P as d2 in a total context c2 iff: In any context c1 under c2, if d2 is P, so is d1, and if d1 is :P, so is d2 (’c1rc2: (d2e[[P]]c1 or d1A[[P]]c1) and (d1e[[:P]]c1 or d2A[[:P]]c1)). The ordering constraint states that for any total context c2, and two entities d1 and d2, d1 is at least as (good an example of a) P as d2 in c2 (hd1 ; d2 i 2 ½½ Pþ c2 ) iff in all the partial contexts leading to c2, it is either the case that d1 is added to P’s positive super denotation before Different translations of rP differ in truth conditions. For instance, d1 may be more of a kibbutz member but less typical of a kibbutz member than d2 (if, say, d2 has left the kibbutz but still looks and behaves like a kibbutz member). Yet, perhaps we need not pose different definitional constraints on more P, more typical P, and more relevant P. The difference between these three comparative phrases seems to be pragmatic in nature: It is generally assumed that the comparative more P makes use of a semantic ordering dimension in the meaning of P (Kamp, 1975; Bartsch, 1984, 1986). In contrast, more typical (of a) P makes use of different, or additional, ordering properties, namely, criteria from world knowledge, not just semantically fixed criteria. Finally, relevant P makes use also of completely ad hoc criteria. I leave this issue for future research. 23 I assume that all entities, even non-chairs, can be ordered by similarity to chairs. It is easy to see that some pieces of furniture resemble chairs more than others (compare, e.g., a bench, a table, and a lamp), though as we move further away toward dissimilar items intuitions about ordering become blurred or flattened (rendering, say, a banana and an ice cream equally dissimilar to chairs). 22

168 / GALIT W. SASSOON d2 (in a context in which d2 is not yet in it), or the case that d2 is added to P’s negative super denotation before d1 (in a context in which d1 is not yet in it). For instance, d1 is more of a chair than d2 in a total context c2 iff in every context c1 leading to c2: First, if d2 is already considered a chair, then d1 must be a chair (so it is potentially more typical of a chair). Second, if d1 is already considered a non-chair, then d2 must also be a non-chair (given d2’s lower typicality). As desired, a possibly different ordering relation may be associated with a predicate in each context. This much contextdependency is required in representing typicality and relevance.24 It follows from the ordering constraint that equally typical (and hence equally relevant) entities d1 and d2 are always taken to be, e.g. chairs (or non-chairs) together (in all contexts c under c2: þ (d1 2 ½½Pþ c iff d2 2 ½½Pc ) and (d2 2 ½½Pc iff d1 2 ½½Pc )). In contrast, d1 is more typical (and hence relevant) than d2 ([[>duck]]c) only if the relation is not symmetrical: it is only the case that d1 is at least as typical as d2, but not vice versa. It also follows that d1 is classified as a duck before, or without d2 being so classified, or d2 is classified as a nonduck before, or without d1 being so classified.25 The ordering constraint assumes that because of the partial nature of information, we can associate an ordering relation with every predicate. Why do we need this at all? Suppose that only d1 is a directly given duck in a context c (it is the only member in ½½duckþ c , the positive denotation). Therefore, we must regard d1 as the best example of a duck in c, as our knowledge prevents certainty in the duckhood of any object other than this example: any such object may violate necessary conditions. Thus, we see that even so-called ‘‘sharp’’ predicates are ordered by the order in which they get classified as denotation members as information extends.

24

The tradition relating gradability to vagueness originates in theories of comparatives such as Kamp (1975), but my theory has the advantage that a comparative relation may be partial. In Kamp and similar theories, the ordering relation is total. It is defined for a whole information structure. In my theory, it is defined for branches in the structure, so a relation relative to a predicate P between two individuals is context-dependent, and it is unknown if information doesn’t have to extend to just one particular relation in every branch. 25 þ þ þ þ þ Formally, ½½¼ Pþ c2 ¼ ð½½ Pc2 \ ½½ Pc2 Þ and ½½4Pc2 ¼ ð½½ Pc2 ½½ Pc2 Þ. and Thus, d1 is more of a chair than d2 in c2 iff hd1 ; d2 i 2 ½½ chairþ c2 hd2 ; d1 ie½½ chairþ c2 , i.e., iff in any context leading to c2, if d2 is a chair, so is d1, and if d1 is a non-chair (a member of the negative denotation), so is d2, but not vice versa: In some context leading to c2, either d1 (but not d2) is (already known to be) a chair, or d2 (but not d1) is (already known to be) a non-chair.

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Typicality Ordering Clusters

What is the effect of the ordering criteria on the ordering relation (and of the ordering relation on the ordering criteria)? Consider, e.g., the predicate bird. Psychological studies of prototype and exemplar theories have established that the degree of typicality of an entity equals the weighted-mean of its degrees in the typicality ordering dimensions of bird, feathered, small, flies, nests, eats insects, etc. A direct representation of this weighted-mean constraint involves the use of degree functions and the representation of partial knowledge about degrees (see Sassoon, 2007). This is beyond the scope of this paper. Instead, in (49), I directly postulate two consequences of the weighted-mean constraint that are directly relevant to the purpose of this paper. (49) The constraints on ordering dimensions: An ordering dimension Q of P (unlike a non-ordering dimension) helps order individuals relative to P: ’d1,d2AD, ’tAT, ’nAN, ’PACONCEPTn: a. If for all P’s ordering dimensions Q, d1 is at least as (good an example of a) Q as d2, than d1 is at least as (good an example of a) P as d2: þ If 8Q 2 OSþ then hd1 ; d2 i 2 ½½ Pþ ðP;tÞ ; hd1 ; d2 i 2 ½½ Qt ; t b. If, in addition, for some of P’s ordering dimensions Q, d1 is a better (example of a) Q, then d1 is a better (example of a) P: þ þ þ If 8Q 2 OSþ ðP;tÞ ;hd1 ;d2 i 2 ½½ Qt ;9Q 2 OSðP;tÞ ;hd1 ;d2 i 2 ½½4Qt ; þ then hd1 ;d2 i 2 ½½4Pt

The main point is that we can order individuals with respect to P, with respect to ordering dimensions Q of P, with respect to ordering dimensions T of Q, etc., i.e., some pairs are directly learnt to fall under ZP, some pairs are directly learnt to fall under ZQ, under ZT, etc. In addition, based on our knowledge that T is a dimension of Q, and Q is a dimension of P, we are sometimes able to indirectly infer that some other pairs stand, or do not stand, in these ordering relations. Constraint (49a) indicates that for every two entities d1,d2: if d1 is at least as typical (and hence relevant) as d2, relative to every potential ordering dimension of P, then d1 is necessarily at least as typical (and hence relevant) as d2 relative to P. Constraint (49b) states that if d1 is also actually better along some ordering dimension of P, then d1 is

170 / GALIT W. SASSOON necessarily more typical (we regard it as more relevant) than d2 relative to P. For instance, suppose that the dimensions healthy and grown up (or mature) order ducks. If one duck is more grown up than another duck (which is good), but it is also less healthy (which is not good), then we cannot automatically determine which duck is more relevant. Only if one duck is healthier, more grown up, and so on (no inverse relations relative to different ordering dimensions), do we necessarily see it as more typical and hence more relevant in the context. This is a ceteris paribus correlation: all other things being equal, if a duck is, say, healthier – it is more relevant. And if two ducks are equally typical (relevant) relative to all potential ordering dimensions (they are equally healthy, of the same age, etc.), then they are necessarily equally typical (relevant) ducks. The constraints in (49) do not specify how to determine the relations between individuals in inverse relations relative to different ordering properties (for instance, the relation between d1 and d2 if d1 is, say, more grown up but less healthy). We may assume that age is more important (and this assumption would make d1 a better example of a duck), or the opposite (which would make d1 a worse example). It does follow from (49) that non-ordering dimensions (members of OS ðP;cÞ ) cannot influence the status of individuals relative to P in c. They do not help to order entities relative to P. It also follows that if we do not know the ordering dimensions, we may not know the ordering relations. In addition, it follows that the individual which ranks best in all the potential ordering dimensions will be regarded as the best example (the prototype). And conversely, the first directly given duck, d1, which by the ordering constraint is the best duck, ought to rank best relative to all the ordering dimensions (otherwise, (49) is violated, as some individual which is better relative to the ordering dimensions is not a better duck).26 One may learn at a later stage that one’s language community regards another object d2, identical to d1 except that it is healthier, as a duck. Since one knows healthy to be an ordering dimension, d2 must be a better example of a duck than d1. In such a case one has to accommodate one’s previous assumptions: one has to move non-monotonically in the information structure, to a state c,

26 For a review of empirical evidence supporting this prediction see Sassoon (2007), chap. 8.

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in which both d2 and d1 are ducks, but d2 is the better (best) duck-example.27 Denotations are further extendable on the basis of the ordering cluster: if one learns that some individuals are not as good as directly given ducks only along non-ordering requirements, one will regard them too as ducks. This is because constraint (49) states that if two individuals are equally relevant relative to every potential ordering property, then they are necessarily equally relevant ducks, and constraint (48) states that all equally relevant ducks must get classified as ducks together. 6.4.3

Universal Generalizations with Operations upon Ordering Clusters

I propose that, e.g., the contexts every(duck,c), a(duck,c), and any(duck,c,healthy) are such that the ordering clusters in them are changed in just the same way as the membership clusters are according to the proposals in Section 6.3. The use of the indefinite determiner triggers a shift to a context a(duck,c) ( ¼ ca), which is identical to c, except that for every predicate, even non-necessary dimensions become unspecified (i.e., potentially necessary), and even non-typical dimensions become unspecified (i.e., potentially typical). Hence, the negative clusters are emptied: (50) a. For every predicate P: MS ðduck;caÞ ¼ +;

OS ðduck;caÞ ¼ +.

b. [[A duck lays eggs]]c ¼ 1 iff: ’tAT, tZa(duck,c): [[’(duck,lays eggs)]]t ¼ 1 iff: ’tAT, tZa(duck,c): ’dA(D [[:duck]]t): dA[[lays eggs]]t As a result, in addition to the consequences discussed in Section 6.3, we also capture the fact that in generic contexts almost every predicate can be added to the set of dimensions that serve as criteria for ordering the instances by relevance in the context. This means that different instances in the domain may have a notably different status in

27 In fact, experiments show that newly encountered entities which are good in the dimensions are often felt to be familiar (though they are not). On the current proposal this happens because, in these circumstances accommodation occurs, whereby these entities are specified as known denotation members in earlier (more partial) contexts than other known entities, which are less good in the dimensions (for further discussion see Sassoon, 2007).

172 / GALIT W. SASSOON terms of their degree of relevance in the context, i.e., the degree to which they may be ignored, in case they form exceptions to the generalization.28 We said that a cooperative addressee tries to accommodate her information in a way that will make a generic statement a P is Q true. But not every accommodation is possible. This addressee would try to imagine an extension of a(c,P) such that all the relevant Ps are Qs in all its total extensions. As desired, the analysis presented here predicts that this is possible (i.e., one can imagine that all relevant Ps are Qs) only if Q may be taken to be typical of P. Why? If Q is typical of P, then the following facts follow from the constraints on the typicality ordering and on the ordering dimensions (48)-(49): (i) If some non-Q entity is regarded as P in a context, then entities that are equal to it in all other respects except that they are Qs are definitely regarded as Ps in the given context. (ii) If some Q entity is regarded as non-P in a context, then entities that are equal to it in all other respects except that they are non-Qs are definitely regarded as non-Ps in the given context. In such states of affairs, a cooperative addressee can easily accommodate the interpretation of P by moving to an extension in which only the most typical entities are regarded as relevant. Given this accommodation, the generalization Q applies. If Q is not typical of P, this becomes impossible to do, since in every context extending or extended by the context of evaluation, Q and non-Q entities, similar in all other respects, are in or out of the denotation of P together. This captures the fact that statements like The Frenchmen eat horsemeat 28 The use of every triggers a shift to the context every(duck,c) ( ¼ ce), which is identical to c, except that all the predicates that can be generated in the language and are not in the positive clusters of duck are added to the negative clusters. They get classified as nonnecessary (non-membership dimensions) and non-typical (non-ordering dimensions): 1 þ It MS-ðduck;ceÞ ¼ ðCONCEPT1 MSþ ðduck;ceÞ Þ and OSðduck;ceÞ ¼ ðCONCEPT OSðduck;ceÞ Þ. follows that in every statements, the ordering of instances in the domain of the universal quantifier is relatively flat – all the instances are more or less equally relevant. For this reason, every does not leave much pragmatic slack. Pragmatic looseness is tolerance to generalizations which are violated solely by atypical instances, whose relevance is small (where tolerance means that they are regarded as true enough despite being strictly speaking false). Most of the instances in the domain in every statements are equally relevant, and they are all highly relevant (because virtually all properties do not form a basis for considering instances that violate them to be less relevant). Thus, nothing can be regarded as a tolerable exception.

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are true and statements like Bees are sexually sterile are false (Cohen, 1999).29 With regard to the use of any, recall that Kadmon and Landman (1993) argue that any widens the domain, by the elimination of some specific contextually determined restriction (which becomes a nonrestriction), and hence the statement is strengthened. However, we have seen that widening cannot exhaust the contribution of any to the meaning of statements. For instance, sometimes any eliminates ordering, rather than creating widening, as illustrated by examples such as (51). (51) Do you have some socks to lend me? Any socks would help. (dry/ wet) The natural interpretation of any in these statements is: forget about the usual preferences for more typical socks; all socks are equally good for me at the moment. Hence, in my analysis, any may also treat some dimension as non-ordering, e.g., in (51) any eliminates dry from OSþ ðsock to lend;cÞ and specifies it in OSðsock to lend; anyðsock to lend;c;dryÞÞ . What is the effect of such elimination? Usually, more typical items are more highly expected to satisfy generalizations or requests. If sickness does not reduce typicality, it does not reduce the relevance of sick exceptions in the context. They become (more typical, and hence) more serious exceptions. For example, if some sick duck does not lay eggs it cannot be regarded as less relevant than healthy ducks (which are otherwise similar), and hence it cannot be ignored ‘‘pragmatically,’’ on the basis of being sick. Formally, if sick and healthy ducks are regarded as equally relevant ducks, then (it follows from the ordering constraint that) they get classified as ducks together (on the same partial extension). In other words, healthy ones do not get classified as ducks first. The duck denotation in any(duck,c,healthy) homogenizes (rather than widens) along healthy. In Sassoon (2001), I give detailed illustrations of the way homogenizing induces strengthening. In general, widening occurs, but only in some context extending or extended by the

29 This is why certain researchers (as described in Cohen, 1999) argue that a true generic sentence corresponds to a cultural convention, i.e., a stereotype. However, the truth of a generalization of the form A P is Q can be due to empirical reasons. Sometimes Q is not a dimension of P (though it could have been), but it so happens that only Qs can satisfy all the properties in the positive membership cluster (i.e., all the relevant Ps happen to be Qs).

174 / GALIT W. SASSOON context of evaluation, not necessarily in the context of evaluation itself.30

6.5

Conclusions

Let us take up again the main points of my argument. First, in the dimension model, where clusters are part of predicate interpretation, the interpretation function already does the work of domain selection. There is no need to further restrict denotations to their contextually relevant subsets (by, say, intersecting them with other entity sets, e.g., with the values the assignment function assigns to context variables, g(Xc); cf. von Fintel, 1994 and Stanley and Szabo´, 2000).31 In the present analysis, the value [[P]]c is the contextually 30

Strengthening is defined in Kadmon and Landman (1993) (see detailed explanations therein) as follows: A statement with any (Sany) is stronger than without any (S) iff: For every model M and context c: a. If [[Sany]]c,M ¼ 1 then [[S]]c,M ¼ 1 and b. If [[S]]c,M ¼ 0 then [[Sany]]c,M ¼ 0 But not vice versa: For some model M and context c: c. [[S]]c,M ¼ 1 and [[Sany]]c,M ¼ 0. How does homogenizing induce strengthening? Assume that the property healthy orders ducks in c (i.e., healthy 2 OSþ ðduck;cÞ ). That means that healthy entities are better ducks than similar sick ones. Thus, in some context c* extending or extended by c sick entities are not yet ducks but similar healthy ones are already ducks, and that is crucial. For example, assume that d1 and d2 are equal in all other respects except that only d1 is healthy and lays eggs. Thus, d1 is a better example of duck in c. In some context c* 2 extending or extended by c, d1 is already in ½½duckþ c , but d2 is still in the gap ½½duckc . In . The statement some extension t* of c* d2 and similar ducks are specified in ½½duck t without any is true in t ð8de½½:duckt : d 2 ½½lays eggst is the case even if some sick entity like d2 does not lay eggs; this entity is not relevant). But any cancels this ordering along healthy, by triggering a shift to the context of evaluation anyðduck;t ;healthyÞ in which healthy does not order ducks. Sick and healthy entities are equally good ducks. Both d1 and d2 are ducks. Since d2 does not lay eggs (9d 2 ½½duckanyðduck;t ;healthyÞ : d 2 ½½:lays eggsanyðduck;t ;healthyÞ ) the statement any ducks lays eggs is false in t*. We have a context t* in which: [½St ;M ¼ 1 and ½½Sany t ;M ¼ 0, and not vice versa (for every c, if [[Sany]] ¼ 1 in c, then sick and healthy ducks lay eggs. Hence: necessarily: [[S]]c ¼ 1 too). Thus Sany is actually stronger. Widening occurred in contexts t* and c* (the latter are extending or extended by the context of evaluation). It does not have to occur in the context of evaluation itself, as assumed by Kadmon and Landman (1993). 31 Note that while assignment functions usually represent pointing (the fact that the reference of unbound pronouns is typically given by pointing), the content of clusters of dimensions is often part of our world knowledge, it is usually more stable, and it is often not directly given, but inferred (e.g., if we get to know someone, who in a couple of meetings is always late, we tend to infer that this person is typically late).

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relevant set of individuals, those that the predicate P is used to refer to in the context. This design reflects the intuition that the source of the contextual restriction lies in conceptual characteristics that are associated with the predicate, and that affect its interpretation also in the absence of a quantifying expression (cf. Section 6.2). Second, psychological research shows that most of the characteristics of predicates do not denote necessary conditions for membership. Rather, they denote properties that raise the typicality of entities and hence their relevance to generalizations about instances of the given predicate. We have proposed formal constraints that define the role of ordering dimensions in a formal semantic model, and we have exemplified their contribution to the truth conditions and truth judgments of generic statements (cf. Section 6.4). This has rarely been done before. Third, in the dimension model, all quantifying expressions access one and the same cluster of restrictions (the one in the contextdependent interpretation of their first argument). In virtue of this feature, the present proposal captures the similarities, as well as the precise differences between the interpretations of noun phrases with different quantifying expressions (per a given predicate as their first argument). In particular, I have shown that my proposal elegantly captures the characteristics of statements with every versus generic statements. It also captures both the law-like nature of the generic indefinite and its tolerance to exceptions by minimal means, without stipulating an empty determiner Gen to trigger quantification over alternatives (cf. Section 6.3). Therefore, we have given compelling arguments to the effect that clusters have to be represented as part of the interpretation of predicates. This ‘‘intension plus cluster’’ approach is needed and fruitful in that the resulting analysis is more economic and more adequate than previous theories in which sets of restrictions are stipulated case by case and the similarities and differences between the cases are not captured.

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176 / GALIT W. SASSOON Bartsch, R. 1986. Context dependent interpretations of lexical items. In J. Groenendijk, D. de Jongh and M. Stokhof, eds., Foundations of Pragmatics and Lexical Semantics, GRASS 7, pp. 1–26. Dordrecht: Foris. Bartsch, R. 1998. Dynamic Conceptual Semantics. Stanford: CSLI publications. Bookheimer, S. 2002. Functional MRI of language: New approaches to understanding the cortical organization of semantic processing. Annual Review of Neuroscience 25:88–151. Carlson, G. 1977. Reference to Kinds in English, Doctoral dissertation. Amherst: University of Massachusetts. Carlson, G. and F. J. Pelletier. (eds.). 1995. The Generic Book. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Carston, R. 2002. Metaphor, Ad Hoc Concepts and Word Meaning – More Questions than Answers. UCL Working Papers in Linguistics, vol. 14, pp. 83–105. Chierchia, G. and S. McConnell-Ginet. 2000. Meaning and Grammar: An Introduction to Semantics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Cohen, A. 1999. Think Generic! Stanford: CSLI publications. Cruse, D. A. 1977. The pragmatics of lexical specificity. Journal of Linguistics 13:153–164. Fine, K. 1975. Truth, vagueness and logics. Synthese 30:265–300. Fodor, J. 1998. Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fodor, J. and J. Katz. 1963. The structure of a semantic theory. Language 39:170–210. Greenberg, Y. 2002. Two types of quantificational modalized genericity and the interpretation of bare plural and indefinite singular NPs. In B. Jackson, ed., Proceedings from SALT XII, pp. 104–123. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, CLC Publications. Greenberg, Y. 2007. Exceptions to generics: Where vagueness, context dependence and modality interact. Journal of Semantics 24:131–167. Hampton, J. 1997. Conceptual combination. In K. Lamberts and D. Shanks, eds., Knowledge, Concepts and Categories, pp. 135–162. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Jackendoff, R. 1972. Semantic Interpretation in Generative Grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Jacobson, P. 1999. Towards a variable free semantics. Linguistics and Philosophy 22:117–184. Kadmon, N. and F. Landman. 1989. Polarity sensitive any and free choice any. In M. Stokhof and L. Torenvliet, eds., Proceedings of the Seventh Amsterdam Colloquium, pp. 227–251. Amsterdam: ITLI publication, University of Amsterdam.

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Kadmon, N. and F. Landman. 1993. Any. Linguistics and Philosophy 16:353–422. Kamp, H. 1975. Two theories about adjectives. In E. L. Keenan, ed., Formal Semantics of Natural Language, pp. 123–155. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kamp, H. and B. Partee. 1995. Prototype theory and compositionality. Cognition 57:129–191. Katz, J. and P. M. Postal. 1964. An Integrated Theory of Linguistic Description. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Keil, F. 1979. Semantic and Conceptual Development: An Ontological Perspective. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kratzer, A. 1979. Conditional necessity and possibility. In R. Bauerle, U. Egli, and A. von Stechow, eds., Semantics from Different Points of View, pp. 117–147. New York: Springer. Kratzer, A. 1986. Conditionals. In A. M. Farley, P. T. Farley, and K. E. McCullough, eds., Papers from the Parasession on Pragmatics and Grammatical Theory, pp. 1–15. Chicago, IL: Chicago Linguistic Society, University of Chicago. Kripke, S. 1972. Naming and necessity. In G. Harman and D. Davidson, eds., Semantics of Natural Language, pp. 253–355. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Ladusaw, W. A. 1979. Polarity Sensitivity as Inherent Scope Relations. Doctoral dissertation, University of Texas. Landman, F. 1989. Groups II. Linguistics and Philosophy 12:723–744. Landman, F. 1991. Structures for Semantics. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Lasersohn, P. 1999. Pragmatic halos. Language 75:522–551. Lewis, D. K. 1970. General semantics. Synthese 22:18–67. Markman, M. E. 1989. Categorization and Naming in Children: Problems of Induction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Montague, R. 1974. Formal Philosophy: Selected Papers of Richard Montague, Edited and with an Introduction by Richmond H. Thomason. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Murphy, G. 2002. The Big Book of Concepts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Osherson, D. N. and E. E. Smith. 1981. On the adequacy of prototype theory as a theory of concepts. Cognition 11:237–262. Partee, B. 1989. Binding implicit variables in quantified contexts. In C. Wiltshire, et al., eds., Papers from the 25th Regional Meeting, pp. 342–365. Chicago, IL: Chicago Linguistic Society. Pinker, S. 1997. How the Mind Works. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Putnam, H. 1975. The meaning of ‘meaning’. In K. Gunderson, ed., Language, Mind and Knowledge, pp. 131–193. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Reed, S. K. 1988. Cognition: Theory and Applications, 2nd edn., Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole.

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7

Discourse Evocation: Its Cognitive Foundations and Its Role in Speech and Texts MARC DOMINICY

Abstract Sperber’s theory of cognitive evocation aims at accounting both for the processing of olfactory stimuli and for the symbolic interpretation of reflective beliefs. Yet, any proper analysis of smell processing is incompatible with the deferential theory Sperber adopts when dealing with reflective belief contents. Moreover, not all reflective beliefs can be characterized in deferential terms. In a non-deferential framework, a belief is reflective iff its propositional content includes an unanalyzed concept, i.e., a concept that does not define any proper sub-field of a cognitively accessible field. Unanalyzed concepts are quite similar to the unanalyzed percepts one has to posit when analyzing smell processing, and share a basic feature with them: when emerging or being recalled, they trigger the formation or recollection of autobiographical engrams stored in the episodic memory. In line with Boyer’s theory of traditional truth, one can assume that cognitive evocation always leads to a causal hypothesis where the content processed appears as meaning naturally some propositional content, in that it is caused by the corresponding fact. This causalist approach provides wellmotivated foundations for a general model of concept formation and for an adequate characterization of discourse evocation viewed Utterance Interpretation and Cognitive Models. Philippe De Brabanter and Mikhail Kissine (eds.). Current Research in the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface, Vol. 20. r 2009 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited. All rights reserved.

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180 / MARC DOMINICY as an opportunistic strategy that relies on the awareness human beings may entertain of cognitive evocation. Keywords: evocation, olfaction, reflective beliefs, deferential, concept formation.

7.1

Introduction

One of the major insights of Dan Sperber’s work on evocation is the hypothesis that the symbolic interpretation of utterances radically differs from their ordinary pragmatic processing (see Sperber, 1974, 1975a, b, 1979a, b, 1985, 1996, 1997).1 In most circumstances, pragmatic processing quickly reaches a final state that may be assumed to fit in with the informative intention of the speaker/writer; it generally does not give rise to deep discrepancies between hearers/readers, nor to dramatic revisions or further elaborations (see Sperber and Wilson, 1995). By contrast, no final state can be assigned, except by some authoritarian fiat, to symbolic interpretation: the speaker’s/writer’s informative intention remains so indeterminate that hearers/readers frequently disagree on the precise meaning of the utterance under consideration, and are prone to indulge in constant revisions or elaborations. In principle, pragmatic processing is )non-literalist*: if the conversational interaction proceeds smoothly, the surface detail of the utterances does not matter very much, and no accurate memories of it subsist after a very short time; speech reports, paraphrases, translations, summaries, elucidations . . . testify to the liberties speakers may take with respect to the syllables, words, and phrasing that were really produced. The opposite holds for symbolic interpretation: any admissible gloss should stick to the original formulation, the most minute features of which can turn out to be relevant to the interpretive process.2 1

The results presented below are part of the research work carried out within the ARC Project 06/11-342 Culturally modified organisms: )What it means to be human* in the age of culture, funded by the Ministe`re de la Communaute´ franc- aise – Direction geńe´rale de l’Enseignement non obligatoire et de la Recherche Scientifique (Belgium). The enormous intellectual debt I owe to Christine Michaux and Sylvie Delvenne will appear on every page that follows. 2 New Criticists wanted to eliminate any indeterminacy from the symbolic interpretation of poetry while combining literalism with a radical skepticism about informative intentions. For them (Brooks, 1947; Wimsatt and Beardsley, 1954), )the intentional fallacy* and )the heresy of paraphrase* were the two sides of the same coin: once you feel entitled to attribute to some speaker/writer the intention to make believe (or, at least, to represent linguistically) some propositional content, you find it acceptable to express this content by producing an approximate report, a paraphrase, a translation, a

DISCOURSE EVOCATION / 181 In order to capture the specificity of symbolic interpretation, Sperber used the case example of smells. He claimed that his general theory of evocation could apply both to the processing of olfactory stimuli and to what he eventually chose to call )reflective beliefs*.3 I will try to show here that this approach runs against a basic objection, in that any proper analysis of smell processing proves to be incompatible with the )deferential* theory Sperber adopted when dealing with reflective belief contents. It will also appear that not all reflective beliefs can be characterized in deferential terms and that, in certain cases at least, this failure to meet the requirements of a deferential theory, far from being accidental, crucially determines the cognitive salience and the social significance of the belief content(s) at hand. Interestingly enough, Sperber’s own work has paved the way for a non-deferential approach to reflective beliefs. In such a framework, a belief is reflective if, and only if, its propositional content includes an )unanalyzed* concept, i.e., a concept that does not define any proper )sub-field* of a cognitively accessible )field*. Since unanalyzed concepts turn out to be quite similar to the )unanalyzed* percepts one has to posit in order to

summary, an elucidation, . . . of the original utterance; and conversely. But )[t]he poem communicates so much and communicates it so richly and with such delicate qualifications that the thing communicated is mauled and distorted if we attempt to convey it by any vehicle less subtle than that of the poem itself* (Brooks, 1947: 72–73). For instance, Browning’s So wore night cannot be aptly paraphrased as ‘‘Thus night passed’’ because )the word wore does not mean literally ‘‘that the night passed,’’ it means literally ‘‘that the night wore’’ – whatever wore may mean* (Brooks, 1947: 200–201). In this conception, poetry requires an interpretive stance which, in fact, rules out any interpretation (see Graff, 1979, 1980; Dominicy, 2006). As pointed out by Davidson (2001: 13, 66), when an interpreter says what an utterance means, (s)he is making an empirical (i.e., non-tautological) claim; even if the homophonic/homographic paraphrase or translation were always the best way for the speaker/writer to say what his/her utterance means (which I personally doubt, pace Davidson), the same would surely not hold for the interpreter, unless (s)he gave up all the principles that should guide him/her in understanding the speech productions of other persons. It follows that the literalism of symbolic interpretation – which is some sort of interpretation, after all – cannot consist in remaining within the boundaries of homophonic/homographic reproduction. 3 Sperber’s approach to )beliefs* (i.e., belief contents) is )dualistic* (see Recanati, 1997: 93), in that ordinary ()intuitive*) belief contents (such as the content of my belief that Obama will be elected president) contrast with )quoted, defective* (Sperber, 1974: 113, 1975a: 404), )semi-propositional, representational* (Sperber, 1985: 49–60), or )reflective* (Sperber, 1996: 70–74, 85–97, 146–150, 1997: 77–80) belief contents (such as the content of my belief that God is everywhere). Sperber’s terminological variations stem not only from the fact that he does not explicitly distinguish between )belief* taken as a propositional attitude and )belief* taken as a propositional content, but also from the internal inconsistencies of his theory; more on this below.

182 / MARC DOMINICY account for smell processing, it comes as no surprise that the reflective belief contents that resist the deferentialist reduction share a basic feature with olfactory contents: when emerging or being recalled, they trigger the formation or recollection of autobiographical )engrams* stored in episodic memory.4 This essential link to episodic memory explains why the reliance on )experts* does not necessarily imply any kind of deference (Boyer, 1990). Sperber (1974) convincingly argued that any processing of an olfactory stimulus assimilates the percept at hand to a cause or an effect. In Boyer’s (1990) theory of )traditional truth*, the symbolic interpretation of the )enigmatic* utterances produced by traditional truth-tellers make such utterances (and the corresponding beliefs) causally result from what these utterances (and the corresponding belief contents) mean. I will assume here that evocation always leads to a causal hypothesis where the content processed appears as )meaning naturally* (in short, )meaningN*) some propositional content P, in that it is caused by the fact that P (Grice, 1957). This causalist approach will allow me to propose a model of concept formation that leaves room not only for those unanalyzed concepts that escape any deferential reduction, but also for the progressive emergence of different types of concepts from a basic perceptual level. The appearance and diffusion, in Nazi concentration camps, of the concept (or rather )concepts*) MUSELMANN (Delvenne et al., 2005) will serve as an illustrative test case for this model.5 Finally, I will claim that a distinction should be made between )cognitive evocation* and )discourse evocation*. To put it in a nutshell, discursive evocation can be conceived of as an )opportunistic* strategy that relies on the (more or less acute) awareness human beings may have of cognitive evocation. I have argued elsewhere that the )epideictic* rhetoric of praise and blame can be analyzed in the same terms (see Dominicy, 1995, 1996, 2001, 2002a, 2008a). Even since Aristotle, decision theories waver between a deliberative (intellectualist, democratic) conception, according to which ethical choice proceeds from a previous reasoning that provides it with a justification, and a spontaneist (emotivist, aristocratic) conception, according to which it proceeds from an intrinsic preference devoid of any external 4

On the difference between )semantic memory* and )episodic memory*, see Tulving (1972, 1983). Given that Tulving’s (1972: 386) )semantic* memory contains pure referential knowledge, I prefer to call it )semantic-encyclopedic* (see below). On the notion of an )engram*, see Tulving (1983: 159–161). 5 In the following, concepts will be written in small capitals.

DISCOURSE EVOCATION / 183 justification. These conflicting views presumably originate in our (more or less acute) awareness of those mental and neural mechanisms that lead us to act. According to Damasio (1994), emotions drastically restrict the number of our possible actions, and therefore allow us to deliberate on our decisions and choices in an efficacious way. Libet (1999) claims that the volitional process is initiated before free will comes to control (and possibly veto) the performance of the voluntary act. In sum, action can be seen as an Intentional move that depends on pre-existing non-Intentional processes or states (see Proust, 2001, 2005).6 This dependency accounts for our inability to reduce ethical choice to the simple product of rational deliberation; but the fact that we are able to veto an act that is about to be performed, and that we frequently have to justify our behavior, explains why a purely spontaneist approach proves cognitively insufficient and socially inadequate. Deliberative rhetoric and epideictic rhetoric differ in their affinity with one conception of action or the other: while deliberative rhetoric emphasizes the role of justification and previous reasoning, epideictic rhetoric disconnects the acts under consideration from any external factor that would be likely to explain or vindicate them. If a similar conclusion holds for discursive evocation, this will mean that the speaker/writer will use it to trigger certain effects in the mind of the hearer/hearer by way of interpretive regularities that will obtain in the same way as happens when cognitive evocation is at work. In other words, the foundations of discursive evocation can be found in the central properties of cognitive evocation; but this naturalistic account should be mitigated, in that the causal relation between cognitive and discursive evocation remains indirect, with the (accurate or inaccurate) awareness of cognitive evocation as an intermediate step.

7.2

Cognitive Evocation in Smell Processing

It is well known that olfaction exhibits striking cognitive peculiarities (Michaux and Dominicy, 2006). Since smells cannot be remembered independently of an associated stimulus (e.g., the rose as associated with its fragrance), they fail to provide us with direct remembrances (Sperber, 1974: 128–129); yet, olfactory memory proves remarkably efficacious when the retrieved information gives rise to recognition effects (recall the famous )Proust Phenomenon*). The fact that odors 6 The use of )Intentional* and its derivatives with upper case )I* goes back to Searle (1983).

184 / MARC DOMINICY can spontaneously cue autobiographical memories that are vivid, affectively toned, and very old, has often been interpreted as meaning that the traces of olfactory experiences are stored, as (components of) engrams, in episodic memory; this would explain why the human olfactory system is able to make fine-grained distinctions between very close olfactory stimuli (David, 1997). In addition, all investigations bearing on the denomination of smells end up with the same conclusion: languages do not possess what could be called )a descriptive terminology of smells*. The terms and expressions that designate smells just about always refer to them through either their effect (a sweet, acrid, . . . smell) or their cause (the smell of a rose, of cut grass, . . . ). According to Sperber (1974: 127–128), the human mind does not categorize smells: they are not subsumed under one generic category, nor stored in memory under specific conceptual labels, but rather linked to different encyclopedic categories that correspond either to the subjects’ responses to them or to the objects that can be thought to have olfactory properties. For Sperber (1974: 129–133), the lack of a semantic field for smells and the impossibility of accessing directly the memory of smells give rise to the evocative power of olfactory experiences. In order to account for the interpretation of an olfactory stimulus, Sperber postulates a processing that involves the following steps: (I) The olfactory stimulus occurs; the conceptual attention of the interpreter focuses on this particular smell. (II) )Focal propositions* describe this new information in working memory, giving it the form under which it is submitted to the interpreter’s attention. (III) The interpreter attempts to make sense of the new information by trying to have it integrated within the information already existing in passive memory. (IV) Operation (III) fails. The interpreter’s conceptual attention does not succeed in representing the smell under an )analyzed* description; as a consequence, no additional encyclopedic entries have been activated in working memory. (V) The interpreter does not have any direct access to passive memory data that would )describe* the information. So (s)he builds up a new representation; but this time, (s)he does not form a representation of the stimulus, but rather a representation of the )defective* ()unanalyzed*) representation (see Step (IV)) of the stimulus. The )unanalyzed* output of the conceptual apparatus

DISCOURSE EVOCATION / 185 falls under the scope of )quotes*, and this )quoted* material undergoes symbolic processing. In other words, the interpreter’s conceptual attention focuses on the )defective* representation. (VI) Since the )unanalyzed* ()defective*) representation is the input to the symbolic processing, the interpreter builds up )auxiliary propositions* that relate it to the encyclopedic component of passive memory. This )evocative* process retrieves information that allows a reevaluation and satisfactory analysis of the )quoted* material. In short, )evocation* provides a second way of accessing memory that comes into play whenever the ordinary mode of accessing memory (i.e., )invocation*, French )convocation*) fails. In order to evaluate this model properly, we need an elementary analysis of perception. Relying on previous work (Delvenne et al., 2005: 23–31; Michaux and Dominicy, 2006; Dominicy, 2007a), I will adopt the basic tenets of causal Intentionalism, viz. (i) the distinction between the perceived (external) )objet* and the (internal) )content* of the corresponding perceptual experience; (ii) the asymmetric implication between perceptions and perceptual experiences;7 (iii) the constraint that stipulates that the perception of some object take places iff the corresponding perceptual experience is satisfied, i.e., iff the object causes this perceptual experience (see, e.g., Grice, 1961; Anscombe, 1965; Searle, 1983; Pacherie, 2000). In addition, I will assume that an )aspectualization* process derives the perceptual content from the perceived object (see Clementz, 2000): (1) PERC(Objet) PERCEXP(Content) (2) B[PERCEXP(Content)4:(PERC(Objet))] (3) Existence condition for a perceptual experience PERCEXP(Content) B[((Objet)(ASP(Object,Content) 4 Object causes PERCEXP(Content))] (4) Satisfaction condition for a perceptual experience PERC(Object) PERCEXP(Content) is satisfied

[ASP(Object,Content)4Object causes PERCEXP(Content)] 7 The assumption that perceptions and perceptual experiences are related this way follows from a more general rejection of the so-called )disjunctive* theory of perceptual reports (as defended by Hinton, 1967; Snowdon, 1981; Putnam, 1999; Martin, 2004). NonIntentional theories of perception can (and, in my view, must) leave room for a comparable asymmetry (Spivey and Geng, 2001).

186 / MARC DOMINICY In this framework, perception involves a stimulus (belonging to some )proper domain*) and an aspectualization process that depends on the sensory apparatus of the perceiver and many other factors,8 and that provides the mind with a perceptual content the focal element of which (the )percept*) falls under (is categorized as an instance of) some concept: (5)

↵

Examples: (6)

↵ (7)

↵ As pointed out by Michaux (1998a: 227–232; see also Delvenne et al., 2005: 82–93), Sperber did not explicitly distinguish between the olfactory stimulus and the )percept* – a term he used in an incidental way only (Sperber, 1974: 152). As a result, he tended to confuse the (proper or actual) )domain* of a perceptual module with the )field* to which the output (and the percept) may belong: compare Sperber (1974: 128) with Sperber (1996: 123–146). One can reasonably claim that no )field* is available for directly classifying olfactory percepts; but within the modular perspective taken by Sperber in his recent work, there should exist an olfactory domain – which means that the percept included in the content produced by the aspectualization of an olfactory stimulus necessarily falls under (is categorized as an instance of) the concept SMELL, and that the human mind surely categorizes smells (pace Sperber, 1974: 127–128).9 Keeping this distinction in mind, it appears that some of Sperber’s assertions (1974: 129–133) are confusing: they seem to suggest that, during stimulus analysis, a problem arises that triggers the coming into play of the symbolic apparatus. This would imply that the 8 For a striking example of the way we can act on this encapsulated process by modifying its initial conditions, see Chisholm (1990). 9 Notice that this conceptual categorization of percepts does not involve any propositionality (Delvenne et al., 2005: 24–29; Dominicy, 2006, 2007a).

DISCOURSE EVOCATION / 187 aspectualization of an olfactory stimulus may fail so that it blocks the formation of a percept. But the evocation process cannot interfere with, or substitute for, the modular stimulus processing. At the aspectualization level, smells have nothing peculiar. Their singularity only emerges when the interpreter tries to check whether the percept can be classified within a pre-existing conceptual field of the semantic-encyclopedic memory, i.e., can fall under (be categorized as an instance of) a subconcept of such a field. In sum, the difference between an )analyzed* (e.g., visual) percept and an )unanalyzed* olfactory percept can be captured with the help of the following general definitions:10 (8) Percept p is analyzed in the field /C, cnS iff: (a) C ¼ {c1, . . . , cm}, mW1, and cneC; (b) for any cj (1rjrm), [cj.cn] is a semantic rule; (c) for any cj, ck (1rjrm, 1rkrm) such that j6¼k, [cj.:ck] is a semantic rule; (d) there is a cj (1rjrm) such that p ↵ cj; thus p ↵ cn. (9) Percept p is unanalyzed iff there does not exist any (cognitively accessible) field /C, cnS such that p is analyzed in /C, cnS. For the analyzed (visual) percept, we get for example: (10) Percept p is analyzed in the field /C, COLORS: (a) C ¼ {YELLOW, RED, BLUE}; (b) [YELLOW.COLOR] is a semantic rule, etc.; (c) [YELLOW.:RED] is a semantic rule, etc.; (d) p ↵ YELLOW; thus p ↵ COLOR. while the unanalyzed olfactory percept provides us with the following instantiation of the scheme in (9): (11) There does not exist any (cognitively accessible) field /C, SMELLS such that p is analyzed in /C, SMELLS. At this stage, Sperber’s hypothesis seems to boil down to the idea that, in the case of smells, the percept never assimilates to a preexisting concept. First, he argues that the symbolic apparatus is 10 The )semantic rules* mentioned in definition (8) belong to the )logical entries* of concepts in Sperber and Wilson (1995: 89–93); I have shown elsewhere that, contrary to what is claimed by Sperber and Wilson, they cannot be viewed as deductive )elimination rules* (Dominicy, 1991).

188 / MARC DOMINICY activated whenever the interpreter is unable to find, in his/her encyclopedia, a concept that would assimilate to the percept (s)he is trying to make sense of. Second, he underlines the inability humans show of directly retrieving the memory of a particular smell. Does that mean that no concept, except the domain-concept SMELL itself, can be associated with such-and-such a smell in memory? As shown by Michaux (1998a: 232–237), this position would run against an insuperable objection: if our memory did not contain (except for SMELL) any concept associated, in some way or another, with a given olfactory experience, we should not be able to recognize very different smells, sometimes years after having first perceived them, nor be able to compare them in conceptual terms. We thus have to assume that the engrams of (or involving) olfactory experiences are stored in episodic memory under a partial semantic-encyclopedic encoding that relies on some kind of conceptual association. However, the retrieval of these engrams requires an episodic recollection, which indicates that no pre-existing conceptual representation is associated with them. For such a conceptual representation to emerge, the mind should form what can be called a )free radical* (Tulving, 1983: 10, 109–118) or a )quasi-concept* (Michaux, 1998a: 154–165, 1998b; Delvenne et al., 2005: 34–40, 65–66). A )free radical* or )quasi-concept* (in the following, I will use the second expression) is a piece of information that results from the encoding in semanticencyclopedic terms of at least two perceptual, proprioceptive or emotive experiences that can be retrieved from episodic memory. It differs from a mere engram in that, in principle, its retrieval does not require episodic recollection; this autonomy is due to the fact that it encodes some similarity between (at least) two different experiences of the same subject. At the semantic-encyclopedic level, a quasi-concept appears as a )poor* and defective representation (because it is generally unshared and does not define any proper sub-field); at the episodic level, it allows the mind to vividly recollect autobiographical contents while entertaining a pre-existing conceptual representation of them. To take a concrete example, the aspectual features of an olfactory percept p1 will recall an olfactory percept p2 included in an engram that encodes in episodic memory an event where something was burning (this encoding obviously involves some components of the semanticencyclopedic memory). Notice – and this is crucial for my argument – that we can perceive a smell of burning even if nothing is burning in the current environment. Relying on this evidence, I will claim that, given an unanalyzed percept p1 of that kind, the evocative process will

DISCOURSE EVOCATION / 189 explore the semantic-encyclopedic memory so as to form the following hypothesis: (12)

THE ASPECTUAL FEATURES OF P1 COULD MEANN THE FACT) THAT SOMETHING IS BURNING.

(COULD

BE CAUSED BY

Notice that we can think or speak of a smell of burning even if we strongly believe that nothing is (or even could physically be) burning in the current environment. Obviously, the evocation effect will be all the more powerful, symbolically, as: (i) the COULD modality receives its maximal interpretation ()could meanN but does not really meanN*) and (ii) the event(s) encoded in episodic memory is/are salient. This happens, for instance, when Auschwitz survivors perceive, in normal everyday circumstances, a smell whose aspectual features could meanN that corpses of gassed prisoners are being cremated and when they simultaneously experience a recollection of some particular episode of selection and cremation in the concentration camp.11 On the basis of hypothesis (12), the similarity between the current percept p1 and the recalled percept p2 (as stored in episodic memory) is partially encoded in semantic-encyclopedic terms. Once the quasiconcept of a smell of burning is formed, it can be retrieved, in principle, without triggering any episodic recollection; but its purely semanticencyclopedic content remains )poor* and defective. If, when reading a novel, I understand that some character is having the visual experience of a red car, the existence of the sub-concept RED within the field defined 11

Although smell processing may assimilate the olfactory percept to a cause or an effect (as indicated by linguistic evidence), evocation forces the second option. This is independently confirmed by the following data. Such collocations as a beautiful color and a good color clearly differ from a semantic viewpoint, and the former occurs much more frequently than the latter. By contrast, a beautiful smell and a good smell are not so easily discriminable if taken in isolation, and the former occurs much less frequently than the latter. Kant’s theory of judgment can help us here (Dominicy, 1994: 122–123). Contrary to good, beautiful qualifies the percept at hand )objectively*, by ruling out the possibility that this qualification might stem from the effects the percept produced on us. From the essentialist import of the concept BEAUTIFUL it follows that the complex concepts it belongs to will be )analyzed*, i.e., will define a proper conceptual sub-field. Color concepts being )analyzed*, BEAUTIFUL COLOR does not raise any problem. But the same conclusion does not hold for BEAUTIFUL SMELL. The noun phrase a beautiful smell mostly appears in utterances dealing with fragrances and scents, i.e., in contexts where one could assume proper sub-fields to exist, at least for perfume specialists or particularly sensitive persons; yet, even there, the causal link to the object(s) the smell emanates from is almost systematically mentioned. In other contexts, evocation works freely; see e.g. this example from an Internet chat: QUESTION: Do you recall that new toy smell from childhood? ANSWER: Baby dolls have a beautiful smell, where good could not substitute for beautiful.

190 / MARC DOMINICY by COLOR allows me to get an idea, through mental imagery and without any episodic recollection, of the shade of color this character sees; if I understand that (s)he is having the olfactory experience of a smell of burning, no such access is available to me.

7.3

Sperber on Reflective Beliefs

According to Sperber (1974, 1979a, b, 1985, 1996, 1997), an ordinary ()intuitive*) belief content can be conceived of as a propositional content stored in the )belief box* of the mind: (13) CICERO’S

PROSE IS FULL OF SYNECDOCHES

while a reflective belief content (like, e.g., the content of the belief that Cicero’s prose is full of synecdoches, as entertained by someone who has no idea of what synecdoches can be, except that they are figures of speech) should be described by means of one of the following three formats: (14) (a) ‘‘CICERO’S PROSE IS FULL OF SYNECDOCHES’’ IS TRUE (metarepresentational format with S-quotes) (b) ‘‘CICERO’S PROSE IS FULL OF SYNECDOCHES’’ (non-focusing S-quotational format) (c) CICERO’S PROSE IS FULL OF ‘‘SYNECDOCHES’’ (focusing S-quotational format) Sperber (1974: 111–119, 1985: 54–60, 1996: 85–92, 146–150, 1997) clearly favors the metarepresentational format (14a); so let us begin with it. It is crucial to his approach that the belief box can contain (14a) without containing (13). This requires us to make a clear distinction between Squotes ‘‘’’ (from )Sperber*) and ordinary T-quotes ) * (from )Tarski*) since T-quotes always allow disquotation (i.e., (13) follows from (15)): (15) )CICERO’S PROSE IS FULL OF SYNECDOCHES* IS tional format with T-quotes)

TRUE

(metarepresenta-

Sperber (1974: 111) illustrates his position by means of the following example. Suppose A shows to B a sealed envelope while claiming that it contains a sheet of paper on which the linguistic expression of some propositional content P is written. Suppose A claims to B that this propositional content is true. Since B cannot identify P (though (s)he can provide a linguistic description of it: the proposition written on . . . ), (s)he can entertain the belief that P is true without believing P, and even without being able to believe P. If my ignorance of rhetoric is such

DISCOURSE EVOCATION / 191 that I have no idea of what synecdoches can be, this ignorance will play the same role as Sperber’s sealed envelope. Now, it is possible to capture this intuition by using the non-focusing S-quotational format instead of the metarepresentational format: (16) (a) (M )PC*-PC-proposition)M (b) (M1 ‘‘PC’’-(M2 PC-proposition)M2)M1 (17) (a) (M )CICERO’S

PROSE IS FULL OF SYNECDOCHES*-CICERO’S PROSE

IS FULL OF SYNECDOCHES-proposition)M

(b) (M1 ‘‘CICERO’S

PROSE IS FULL OF SYNECDOCHES’’-(M2 PROSE IS FULL OF SYNECDOCHES-proposition)M2)M1

CICERO’S

When T-quotes are used, the expression consisting of the left and right T-quotes and the embedded expression (the embedded propositional content) refers to this expression (this propositional content) which, in turn, refers to a proposition (e.g., a set of possible worlds).12 This referential chain holds from the viewpoint (the perspective) of a unique mind M. When S-quotes are used (which will happen in the synecdoche example), the expression consisting of the left and right S-quotes and the embedded expression (the embedded propositional content) does not refer to this expression (this propositional content), but to the referential link between the propositional content and the proposition. The first referential link holds from the viewpoint (in the perspective) of mind M1 that entertains the reflective belief that Cicero’s prose is full of synecdoches; the second (embedded) referential link holds from the viewpoint (in the perspective) of mind M2. Such a )deferential* interpretation of Sperber’s theory of reflective beliefs has been put forth by Recanati (1997).13 Using his terminology, we can say that, in (17b), M1 )quasi-believes* that Cicero’s prose is full of synecdoches; furthermore (to paraphrase Recanati, 1997: 97), if to believe that p is to have in one’s belief box a representation P the meaning of which is p, then the person who quasibelieves that p believes that p. Notice that M1 may entertain the reflective belief (14b) even if M2 does not entertain the corresponding intuitive belief. Indeed, it is not required, for M1 to reflectively believe (to quasi-believe) that p, that there exists a mind M2 that intuitively believes (and thus does not quasi-believe) that p, but only that there 12 Notice that propositional contents and propositions are designated by roman upper case and italic lower case schematic letters, respectively. 13 Recanati formulates this theory in a Kaplanian framework, so that he does not use the word )content* to refer to conceptual representations.

192 / MARC DOMINICY exists a mind M2 that can access p from P. In our example, M1 may quasi-believe that Cicero’s prose is full of synecdoches even if no mind intuitively believes that Cicero’s prose is full of synecdoches; but there should exist a mind M2 that knows what kind of figure of speech a synecdoche is. This peculiar case can be described with the help of the focusing S-quotational format (where )C* stands for )concept* and a )virtual class* is conceived of as a set of extensions that may vary across possible worlds): (18) (a) (M )C*-C-virtual class)M (b) (M1 ‘‘C’’-(M2 C- virtual class)M2)M1 (19) (a) (M )SYNECDOCHE*-SYNECDOCHE-virtual class)M (b) (M1 ‘‘SYNECDOCHE’’-(M2 SYNECDOCHE-virtual class)M2)M1 (c) CICERO’S PROSE IS FULL OF ‘‘SYNECDOCHES’’ (focusing S-quotational format) Deference appears as a natural solution in the classical )elm* case (Putnam, 1975: 215–271), where a mind ignorant of what elms really are entertains reflective beliefs about elms under the assumption that some experts can assign an intuitive content to his/her beliefs. For this epistemological (rather than semantic) )division of labor* to prove rational, the experts one relies on should be assumed to possess a competence in the relevant field that allows them to produce wellgrounded statements on such matters (Sperber, 1974: 111–119, 1985: 54–60, 1996: 85–92; Searle, 1983: 200–202; Boyer, 1990: 99; Fodor, 1994: 33–39). Yet, Recanati himself mentions the case of the Lacanian tenet, dogma, opinion, idea, . . . that the unconscious is structured like a language. He says that, in )Lacanian cases*, no user has the cognitive resources for determining the (Kaplanian) content of the term to which the deferential operator applies; hence, no (Kaplanian) content is available in such contexts. It follows that a mind that entertains the (Sperberian) reflective belief that the unconscious is structured like a language, does not quasi-believe that the unconscious is structured like a language. I fully agree with this conclusion, but I wonder, then, how to deal with such situations. Obviously, there is a way out which would consist in claiming that, in Lacanian cases, the person who reflectively believes P thinks or acts )as if* there were at least one mind endowed with the cognitive resources necessary for entertaining the corresponding intuitive belief; this would be a case of )pretending*, a fictive quasi-belief. But take now the example of the Jesuit father Dominique Bouhours who was (or claimed to be) an )expert* on style in 17th-century France. His central tenet, dogma, opinion, idea, . . . was that good style should

DISCOURSE EVOCATION / 193 exhibit what he called )je ne sais quoi*, but also that nobody (including himself) could provide any definition, description, characterization, . . . of this )je ne sais quoi*.14 In sum, Father Bouhours’s )expertise* in the stylistic )je ne sais quoi* had less to do with the competence of elm (or synecdoche) specialists than with the social position of traditional truthtellers. As emphasized by Boyer (1990), traditional truth-telling (e.g., divination) does not require any substantial knowledge that would be inaccessible to unauthorized speakers; and the production or evaluation of truth-telling utterances crucially depends on the literal similarity of the current occurrence with previous occurrences, as stored in the episodic memory of the speaker and the audience. As a truth-teller, Bouhours could only provide his audience with repeated ostensions of the )je ne sais quoi* (or of the lack of it). Such an )occasion-bound* activity (Boyer, 1990: 43) does not involve any )know that* nor does it allow any )democratic* learning. We are left, at best, with a )know how* linked to an )aristocratic* familiarity with a certain )form of life*. This familiarity is frequently assumed to follow from some initiation; but actual initiation processes turn out to bear on trivial or irrelevant contents only (Boyer, 1990: 95–97). In such non-deferential cases, the reliability of the )expert* does not stem from his/her (alleged) ability to derive statements from particular premises and general principles, so that (s)he is not personally committed to the truth of the reflective beliefs (s)he entertains and therefore expresses for a given audience. Yet, Boyer (1990: 61–68) convincingly argues that, when denying any full-fledged intentionality to traditional truth-tellers, people are not automatically led to the hypothesis that )hidden* entities entertain the corresponding intuitive beliefs – which would amount to assuming some kind of )magical* deference. For him, the truth-telling character of an utterance U follows, in such cases, from the causal link that relates U, and the inclusion of the corresponding reflective content P in the truth-teller’s belief box, to what U and P meanN, i.e., to what causally produced U and the inclusion of P in the truth-teller’s belief box (Boyer, 1990: 72–78, 88–90). Consider, e.g., the case of a diviner who predicts the fall of the Roman empire by pointing to the peculiar way some birds fly (Boyer, 1990: 74). In a context where people are 14 )Il est bien plus aise´ de le sentir que de le connaıˆtre. Ce ne serait plus un je ne sais quoi, si l’on savait ce que c’est; sa nature est d’eˆtre incompre´hensible, et inexplicable.* [It is far easier to feel (the je-ne-sais-quoi) than to know it. It would not be a je-ne-sais-quoi anymore if one knew what it is; its nature consists in being incomprehensible, and unexplainable.] (Bouhours, quoted in Defize, 1988: 53–54).

194 / MARC DOMINICY interested in the destiny of the Roman empire, the truth-teller’s utterance U that deals with the flight of the birds is devoid of any pragmatic relevance, since no intuitive knowledge links one topic to the other. But if U, and the inclusion of the corresponding reflective content P in the truth-teller’s belief box, are (assumed by an interpreter to be) caused by the fact that the Roman empire will fall, then U and P meanN (for this interpreter) that the Roman empire will fall. In divination cases, the truth-teller may provide his/her audience with the necessary causal link or leave it implicit; but in both situations, the utterance U (which deals, in our example, with the flight of birds) is )enigmatic*, in that its lack of pragmatic relevance does not prevent it from )meaning* something that cannot be discovered through a problem-solving approach, but only by guessing the answer. Quite interestingly, we can apply the same analysis to Father Bouhours’s utterances on the stylistic )je ne sais quoi*. When commenting the writings of Jansenist authors, Bouhours systematically pointed out a lack of )je ne sais quoi*, without explicitly relating this (alleged) artistic failure to the theological views expressed (see Defize, 1988). But it was quite clear to everyone that such a succession of pragmatically irrelevant utterances (with strikingly similar surface forms) involved a doctrinal criticism. In fact, each such utterance U of Bouhours was assumed (by his readers) to be caused by the fact that the writing under examination was due to a Jansenist author; and each time Bouhours was assumed to include the corresponding reflective content P in his belief box, this inclusion was assumed to be caused by the fact that the writing under examination was due to a Jansenist author; consequently, U and P were assumed to meanN that the writing under examination was due to a Jansenist author. This strategy proved effective in that, on the one hand, Bouhours could pretend not to entertain any meaning intention bearing on theological matters and, on the other hand, never had to commit himself personally to the truth of his reflective beliefs about (the presence or lack of) the stylistic )je ne sais quoi*.

7.4 )Unanalyzed* Concepts and Evocation The focusing S-quotational format allows us to reduce the reflectiveness of a belief content to the fact that it contains at least one )unanalyzed* concept (Sperber, 1985: 49–60, 1996: 146–150, 1997).15 The notion of an 15 Notice that )unanalyzed* concepts can be complex, and thus co-extensive with propositional contents (Dominicy, 1999: 115–116).

DISCOURSE EVOCATION / 195 unanalyzed concept proves very similar to that of an unanalyzed percept (see above). First, we have to provide a definition of what it amounts to for a concept to be analyzed in a given field: (20) Concept ci is analyzed in the field /C, cnS iff: (a) C ¼ {c1, . . . , cm}, mW1, 1rirm, and cneC; (b) for any cj (1rjrm), [cj.cn] is a semantic rule; (c) there is a concept ckeC such that: (i) [ci.ck] is a semantic rule; (ii) there is no cj (1rjrm, i6¼j) such that [cj.ck] is a semantic rule. Then, we can define the general notion of an unanalyzed concept as follows: (21) Concept ci is unanalyzed iff there does not exist any (cognitively accessible) field /C, cnS such that ci is analyzed in /C, cnS. For instance, the concept SYNECDOCHE is unanalyzed if the only (cognitively accessible) field available for it is that of the figures of speech, and: (22)

is unanalyzed in the field /C, FIGURE-OF-SPEECHS where: (a) C ¼ {SYNECDOCHE, METAPHOR, METONYMY}; (b) [SYNECDOCHE.FIGURE-OF-SPEECH] is a semantic rule, etc.; (c) there is no concept ceC such that: (i) [SYNECDOCHE.c] is a semantic rule; (ii) [METAPHOR.c] is a not a semantic rule, [METONYMY.c] is not a semantic rule. SYNECDOCHE

Clearly, only those unanalyzed concepts that prove analyzed for certain expert minds can be dealt with in deferential terms. In the cases where deference does not work or even cannot work, as happens with Father Bouhours’s JE-NE-SAIS-QUOI, the evocative processing of the reflective belief content (hence of the unanalyzed concept) is, again, quite comparable to the evocative processing of olfactory percepts. Suppose Bouhours produces, in front of some audience, the utterance Arnauld’s prose lacks )je ne sais quoi* and that he subsequently produces the utterance Pascal’s prose lacks )je ne sais quoi* in front of the same audience. Due, in particular, to the surface similarity of the two utterances, the second one will be likely to recall the engram that encodes the first one in the hearers’ episodic memory. If, in turn, this similarity is partially encoded in semantic-encyclopedic terms, the

196 / MARC DOMINICY quasi-concept of an author whose prose lacks )je ne sais quoi* is formed. While it can be retrieved, in principle, without triggering any episodic recollection, its purely semantic-encyclopedic content remains )poor* and defective. But, in the actual story, the striking coincidence that both Arnauld and Pascal belonged to the Jansenist party, and the fact that Bouhours continuously produced utterances on the same template, paved the way for an evocative processing of those reflective belief contents of his that included the unanalyzed concept JE-NE-SAISQUOI: (23)

ARNAULD’S (PASCAL’S, . . . )

THE FACT THAT

PROSE LACKS

‘‘JE-NE-SAISARNAULD

QUOI’’ COULD MEANN (COULD BE CAUSED BY THE FACT) THAT (PASCAL, . . . ) IS A JANSENIST WRITER

When discussing the evocative processing of smells, I have claimed that the evocation effect will be all the more powerful, symbolically, as the COULD modality receives its maximal interpretation ()could meanN but does not really meanN*) and the event(s) encoded in episodic memory is/are salient. This may seem not to hold for the various hypotheses schematized under (23). Yet, traditional truthtelling proves compatible with such situations. For instance, diviners whose activity consists in identifying people who bring bad luck frequently turn out to bring bad luck themselves, which shows that no intuitive evidence can be invoked to counter a suspicion of this kind. Similarly, Bouhours could concede that non-Jansenist prose (including his own) sometimes lacks )je-ne-sais-quoi* without weakening his implicit thesis of a Jansenist plot against the catholic doctrine. Though this stylistic failure did not meanN that an author (like himself) intuitively known not to be a Jansenist actually was a Jansenist, it still could meanN that the author in question was a Jansenist, which ensured that a general suspicion of Jansenism might spread within the whole social group. In the same way as one can (non-pathologically) feel a smell of burning while knowing that nothing is actually burning, one can )sense a touch of Jansenism* while knowing that no Jansenist content or attitude actually occurs. Totalitarian propaganda of the past century systematically made use of this perverse corollary of symbolic interpretation. To take another, far less dramatic example, suppose that the reflective belief content (19c) is interpreted symbolically, which entails that evocation will produce a hypothesis of the following form: (24)

THE FACT THAT MEANN

(COULD

CICERO’S

PROSE IS FULL OF

BE CAUSED BY THE FACT) THAT

‘‘SYNECDOCHES’’ P

COULD

DISCOURSE EVOCATION / 197 The identity of the propositional content P cannot be determined in general terms, in that it depends on the autobiography and belief network of each interpreter (or on shared autobiographies and networks within a group of interpreters). Suppose, e.g., that the mind M also entertains a reflective belief with content (25a); on the basis of a trivial network of beliefs about the relationships between the moral personality of an author and its writings, M can form the hypothesis in (25b): (25) (a) ‘‘SYNECDOCHES’’ HAVE MORE ENERGY THAN ‘‘METAPHORS’’ (b) THE FACT THAT CICERO’S PROSE IS FULL OF ‘‘SYNECDOCHES’’ COULD MEANN (COULD BE CAUSED BY THE FACT) THAT CICERO WAS A STRONG MAN

Again, it is possible for someone to believe (25b) while knowing on intuitive grounds that Cicero was no strong man.

7.5

Evocation and the Typology of Concepts

In a previous research report jointly written with Sylvie Delvenne and Christine Michaux (Delvenne et al., 2005), I have tried to show that any empirically valid typology of concepts should include the genealogical model summarized in Table 1. TABLE 1

A model of concept formation

198 / MARC DOMINICY An )occurrence-gathering* concept (of an individual or a type) is characterized by the fact that it does not allow prototypicality evaluations, unless they concern different occurrences of the same individual or different occurrences of the script with respect to which the type at hand is a role. Suppose I successively point at two different photographs of Donald Davidson and I say, first, that )this* is a prototypical Donald Davidson (that )this* is prototypically Donald Davidson) and, second, that )this* is not a prototypical Donald Davidson (that )this* is not prototypically Donald Davidson): what I mean is that the first snap provides the image of a prototypical occurrence of Donald Davidson and that the second one does not. Similarly, I cannot say that )this* is (not) a prototypical passerby without evaluating the prototypicality of the perceived event (e.g., the street scene) that contains the person in question as a focal element: nobody is a typical passerby when giving a lecture or sleeping in bed. Obviously, I can say of John that he is a prototypical umpire, but then I use another, individual-gathering, concept UMPIRE. Conversely, there exists at least one occurrence-gathering concept LINGUIST; indeed, specialists of literary studies frequently tell anecdotes where a linguist, whoever (s)he may be, plays a precise role with respect to a rather rigid script: the linguist advocates a detailed study of the text under examination but eventually proves unable to say anything interesting about it. I have already accounted for the evocative (Level I) derivation of quasi-concepts from percepts. In addition, the emergence of the concept (or rather )concepts*) MUSELMANN in Nazi concentration camps suggests that, in some cases at least, an individual-gathering concept will derive (by virtue of Level III evocation) from an occurrencegathering concept which, in turn, derives (by virtue of Level II evocation) from a quasi-concept. The German word Muselmann originally was Auschwitz slang for people near death from acute starvation who were doomed to selection for the gas chamber and subsequent cremation.16 We do not know when this use of Muselmann first appeared; the only thing we can say is that this happened before September 1942 (Delvenne et al., 2005: 41–42, 115–119). Very plausibly, the linguistic innovator was an SS guard, which does not mean that the term was intended to be offensive. When Holocaust survivors (reluctantly) try to describe to other people what it meant to be a Muselmann, they resort to a metonymic

16 I will use the German word Muselmann while keeping the English inflection for the plural.

DISCOURSE EVOCATION / 199 strategy where the entity in question is initially categorized as an )it*, a )thing* or a )being* (Delvenne et al., 2005: 72–73). This indicates that any person who faced a Muselmann for the first time had to process an unanalyzed percept: (26)

↵ A lot of evidence (Delvenne et al., 2005: 119–132) supports the hypothesis that the innovative use of Muselmann was triggered by the perceptual prototype of the (Islamic) Muslim, which was familiar to most persons through popular culture (paintings, drawings, picture movies, etc.). Indeed, witnesses frequently allude to some aspectual features of this perceptual prototype: physical state (extreme thinness, neglected beard, . . . ), bodily attitudes (the prisoners look like praying Muslims, they move their heads mechanically, . . . ), clothing (rags), activities (begging, . . . ), etc. An independent confirmation comes from the fact that there existed, in Buchenwald slang, a derived expression Mu ¨de Scheich (literally, )tired/weary sheik*), which is a derisory elaboration based on the popular folklore of the twenties and thirties (Delvenne et al., 2005: 45, 131). This suggests that the emergence of the quasi-concept MUSELMANN can be accounted for as follows. The aspectual features of the visual percept in (26) – let us call it )p1* – recall a visual percept p2 included in an engram that encodes in episodic memory an event where, presumably, the current perceiver was confronted (with a representation of) the perceptual prototype of a Muslim; obviously, one can perceive a )Muslim-like* entity (a Muselmann) even if (one knows that) no Muslim is present in the current environment: (27)

THE ASPECTUAL FEATURES OF P1 COULD MEANN (COULD BE CAUSED BY THE FACT) THAT THE VISIBLE ENTITY IS A MUSLIM

(Level I evocation) Once the quasi-concept MUSELMANN is formed, it is potentially independent of episodic recollection, but it remains conceptually )poor* and defective: it is either unshared or shared by a quite limited number of persons, and does not belong to any cognitively accessible field. As a consequence, any belief content that includes this (unanalyzed) quasiconcept will be reflective, so that cognitive evocation may produce an occurrence-gathering concept by operating at Level II. Suppose, for instance, that some mind M has the reflective belief content THIS ‘‘MUSELMANN’’ IS BEGGING FOR FOOD, where the quasi-concept MUSELMANN

200 / MARC DOMINICY is unanalyzed. On the basis of the epistemic stereotype of the (Islamic) Muslim, i.e., a certain set of belief contents stored in the semanticencyclopedic memory (Dominicy, 1999: 117–118; Delvenne et al., 2005: 132–136), M can form the hypothesis in (28): (28)

THE FACT THAT THIS

‘‘MUSELMANN’’

IS BEGGING FOR FOOD COULD

MEANN (COULD BE CAUSED BY THE FACT) THAT

MUSLIMS TYPICALLY BEG MUSLIM, (S)HE

FOR FOOD (I.E. THAT, WHENEVER YOU ARE FACED WITH A WILL BEG FOR FOOD)

(Level II evocation) This will lead to the emergence of an occurrence-gathering concept MUSELMANN. In reality, a detailed study of the data provided by Holocaust testimonies and narratives (Delvenne et al., 2005: 76–80) shows that the attested occurrence-gathering concept MUSELMANN included both certain symbolic components (such as the one I have just mentioned) and a crucial intuitive component (i.e., a conceptual feature related to an analyzed concept), viz. the fact that a Muselmann was doomed to be selected for the gas chamber and subsequent cremation. It follows that, when trying to define the notion of a Muselmann, survivors always mention selection and gassing (cremation), generally combined with some aspectual or behavioral feature(s). Most witnesses do not have any individual-gathering concept of a Muselmann, for the simple reason that, in their view, Muselmanns were not individuals (not persons) anymore. If we neglect the emotive and ethical implications of such an attitude, we can compare this situation with what happens with Donald Davidson, waiters, umpires, John Doe, or cinnamon smells. Each time we are confronted with Donald Davidson, a waiter, an umpire, John Doe, or a cinnamon smell, we directly identify the individual Donald Davidson we have an occurrence-gathering concept of, the type or role (of a waiter, an umpire, or John Doe) we have an occurrence-gathering concept of, or the cinnamon smell we have a quasi-concept of (see Michaux, 1998a: 154–165, 232–237, 1998b); this occurrence of the individual, the typerole, or the smell differs from other occurrences of him(her)/it, but we still have to do with the same individual, the same role-type, the same smell we identify in all cases. As remarkably emphasized by Primo Levi (1987: 91–92), this is precisely what happened with Muselmanns: they were no individuals anymore, they bore no proper name anymore, because each of them reduced to an occurrence of the same role. Witnesses (see Delvenne et al., 2005: 46–47) repeatedly refer to them by

DISCOURSE EVOCATION / 201 means of the word silhouette (sometimes adding without a name), which clearly expresses an occurrence-gathering concept: we cannot say that something is (not) a prototypical silhouette, unless we (quite implausibly) evaluate the prototypicality of the perceived event that includes the occurrence at hand as a focal element. For most Holocaust prisoners or survivors, the occurrencegathering concept MUSELMANN remained unanalyzed. First, they systematically refrained from classifying Muselmanns within any cognitively accessible field: to put it crudely, for them Muselmanns formed no sub-class of human beings (Delvenne et al., 2005: 76). Some of them even attributed to Muselmann an etymology that clearly indicates that they conceived of Muselmanns as hybrids (Delvenne et al., 2005: 118–119): the German word was (wrongly) assumed to derive from a compound Muschel þ Mann, i.e., )shell(fish)þman*. Hybrids do not belong to any taxonomy; and the fact that the related concepts do not define proper sub-fields explains the strong evocative potential of these concepts (Sperber, 1975b; Dominicy, 1999: 119–123; Delvenne et al., 2005: 107). Second, the selection-gassing-cremation script that included MUSELMANN as the occurrence-gathering concept of a role could not function as an analyzed conceptual structure (as happens, for instance, with the concept of a waiter or an umpire and the related scripts): if a mind had deep problems in coping with the concept of the Muselmann role, these could not be solved by any access to the concept of the selection-gassing-cremation script. Yet, the reflective belief contents that included the unanalyzed occurrence-gathering concept MUSELMANN sometimes gave rise to an individual-gathering concept. The (Level III) evocation at work in this case amounted to positing an )essence*, viz. some kind of )Muselmannhood* (Delvenne et al., 2005: 136–144). Except for secondary elaborations (by physicians, psychoanalysts, historians, philosophers, . . . ) that are not found in testimonies or narratives, this process again relied on the epistemic stereotype of the (Islamic) Muslim: (29)

THE FACT THAT THE

‘‘MUSELMANNS’’ LET THEMSELVES BE SELECTED FOR

THE GAS CHAMBER COULD MEANN (COULD BE CAUSED BY THE FACT) THAT

MUSLIMS

ADHERE TO A FATALISTIC CREED

(Level III evocation) Such an attribution of a transferred fatalistic )essence* to the Muselmanns raised a lot of ethical and emotional problems, in that it could lead both to a blame of the victims and to a blurring of the moral responsibility of the Nazis (see Delvenne et al., 2005: 113–114, 141).

202 / MARC DOMINICY This is one of the main reasons why Primo Levi (1987: 716) attempted to (consciously) build up an alternative individual-gathering concept by representing the Muselmanns as what he called )integral witnesses*. To take another example, imagine that (thanks to Level I evocation) I have the quasi-concept of the smell I perceive whenever I visit my grandmother at her house. If I entertain the intuitive belief that my grandmother is a very sad person, I can form the following hypothesis by virtue of Level II evocation: (30)

GRANDMA’S HOUSE SMELLS THIS WAY COULD MEANN (COULD BE CAUSED BY THE FACT) THAT GRANDMA IS A VERY SAD PERSON (Level II evocation) THE FACT THAT

This paves the way for the emergence of an occurrence-gathering concept which, though remaining strongly linked to episodic contents and recollection, could be shared by a larger number of people: after all, I am surely not unique in having associated the quasi-concept of the smell of someone’s house with the sadness of that person. Contrary to quasi-concepts, many occurrence-gathering concepts represent a role included in a script, in which case they are tightly related to conceptual representations of complex events; this accounts, e.g., for the cognitive salience of proverbs (Michaux, 1998a, 1999; Michaux and Dominicy, 2001; Delvenne et al., 2005: 66–70). It follows that, like quasi-concepts, they may be modified by any new episode, which may supplement them with (a) new feature(s); consequently, there is no clear-cut distinction, for such concepts, between the encyclopedic component (or )entry*) and the purely semantic component (or )(logical) entry*). By contrast, individual-gathering concepts tend not to be modified by new episodes, so that their encapsulated semantic component (or )(logical) entry*) clearly differs from their encyclopedic component (or )entry*). In short, occurrence-gathering concepts (and quasi-concepts) emerge and evolve in an )a posteriori* way, while individual-gathering concepts function as if they pre-existed )a priori* (see Michaux, 1998a: 150–154, 1998b; Delvenne et al., 2005: 34–40, 50–51, 109–114).

7.6

Discourse Evocation as an )Opportunistic* Strategy

I have described cognitive evocation as a process that makes sense of an unanalyzed percept or of an unanalyzed conceptual representation by relying on an assignation of natural meaning where the signified content is causally related to the input at hand. Everyone of us will become aware, in one circumstance or another, of this mechanism.

DISCOURSE EVOCATION / 203 As an )opportunistic* strategy, discourse evocation aims at producing similar effects: the input the interpreter will have to process symbolically is an unanalyzed conceptual representation that the speaker/writer intentionally expresses as such by means of a linguistic stimulus (Dominicy, 1990, 1992, 1994, 2007b). To make things concrete, let us compare the following three utterances in context: (31) [CONTEXT: John was in charge of securing a levee during a river flood] John fought against a river (32) [CONTEXT: John valiantly faced a group of hooligans] John did not back away from a group of hooligans (33) [CONTEXT: John valiantly faced a group of hooligans] John fought against a river In (31) and (32), the pragmatic processing of the utterance will run smoothly, in that the context ensures easy access to the optimally relevant interpretation. By contrast, the utterance in (33) will appear either as literally nonsensical (e.g., if the interpreter assumes the speaker/writer to be irrational, to be linguistically incompetent, to have made a slip of the tongue/pen, etc.) or as providing a reflective belief content where the concept FOUGHT AGAINST A RIVER remains unanalyzed: (34) JOHN ‘‘FOUGHT

AGAINST A RIVER’’

Suppose, now, that the interpreter is familiar, in some way, with the Homeric song (Book XXI of the Iliad) that recounts Achilles’ fight against the Scamander river. This will allow him/her to form the following hypothesis: (35)

JOHN ‘‘FOUGHT AGAINST A RIVER’’ COULD MEANN (COULD BE CAUSED BY THE FACT) THAT ACHILLES FOUGHT AGAINST SCAMANDER THE FACT THAT

In both (31) and (32), the speaker/writer obviously sticks to a )descriptive* strategy: (s)he attempts (and, in fact, will manage) to provide the interpreter with an )occasional* representation of some entities and events. )Descriptive* speech allows us to get a rather precise idea of the agents and places involved, to interpret the events narrated in terms of reasons to believe or to act, causes and effects, aims and failures, temporal ordering, etc. If subjected to a )descriptive* interpretation (i.e., to pragmatic processing), the utterance in (33) will sound incorrect

204 / MARC DOMINICY or enigmatic; but the second diagnosis can be used by an interpreter who knows of Achilles’ fight against Scamander as a starting point for building up, through evocative processing, a )non-occasional* representation of John’s behavior. In the case at hand, the utterance in (33) can trigger, in the interpreter’s mind, the episodic recollection of an event (e.g., a Greek lesson) that included some utterance about Achilles and Scamander. If the similarity between the two utterance contexts is partially encoded in semantic-encyclopedic terms, the interpreter will acquire a quasi-concept. But given the fame of Achilles’ deeds (at least among some groups of interpreters), the utterance in (33) can ultimately lead to the formation of the occurrence-gathering concept of a role included in the conceptual representation of a script, Achilles and John thereby reducing to different occurrences of the same type. Such a genealogical assumption allows us to reconstruct Aristotle’s theory of )mimesis* in cognitive terms (see Dominicy, 1990, 1992, 1994, 1995, 1996, 2002a; Michaux and Dominicy, 2001); it also accounts for the emergence of idioms like cross the Rubicon. )Evocative* speech, when processed symbolically, triggers in the interpreter’s mind a salient recognition effect, leaving the confused impression that the event at hand was, in some way, already encoded in passive memory. Hypothesis (35) proves compatible with the fictional status of Homer’s narrative if the COULD modality, when given its maximal reading ()could meanN but does not really meanN*), scopes over the second occurrence of the factive operator (THE FACT) THAT. But, as shown by the Rubicon example I have just mentioned, evocation will work the same way when no fiction is involved; furthermore, nothing constrains any hearer/reader of Homer’s Iliad to process it as the product of a pure fictional )pretense* (Searle, 1975). It follows that hypotheses like (35) will look extremely weird to anyone who is committed to an extensional nomological view of causation coupled with a rejection of semantic holism. In order to come to grips with this problem,17 we should compare (35) with the divination belief content I briefly commented on when discussing Boyer’s views on traditional truth-telling: (36)

THE FACT THAT

‘‘THE

BIRDS ARE FLYING IN THIS SPECIFIC WAY’’ COULD

MEANN (COULD BE CAUSED BY THE FACT) THAT THE

ROMAN EMPIRE WILL

FALL

Boyer (1990: 74) writes that )[t]he flight of the birds can allow one to predict the demise of the empire because the state of affairs (whatever 17

For a first, quite unsatisfactory, discussion, see Dominicy (2007b).

DISCOURSE EVOCATION / 205 it is) that has made the birds fly this specific way is the one that will make the empire fall*. Obviously, the expression (THE FACT) THAT THE ROMAN EMPIRE WILL FALL in (36) does not refer to the event consisting in the demise of the empire; otherwise, any mind entertaining (36) would be committed to accepting retroactive causation. In reality, (36) only entails: (i) that it is both true that the birds are flying in this specific way and the Roman empire will fall; (ii) that the event consisting in this specific flight could (non-maximal reading) be caused by some event prior to it. In a holistic semantics, once it is true that the Roman empire will fall, any event of the world is such that the Roman empire will fall (see Dominicy, 2005b). Consequently, the expression (THE FACT) THAT THE ROMAN EMPIRE WILL FALL can refer to any event of the world and, in the absence of any nomological framework, any event prior to the event consisting in the flight of the birds is likely to cause this flight. It thus appears that Boyer’s statement may be given two radically different readings. Either )the state of affairs [ . . . ] that has made the birds fly this specific way [and] that will make the empire fall* remains inscrutable at the epistemological level only (this inscrutability being alluded to by the phrase )whatever it is*), in which case the mind that includes (36) in its belief box may envisage that some nomological restriction applies to the set of the possible (causally efficacious) referents of (THE FACT) THAT THE ROMAN EMPIRE WILL FALL; or this state of affairs is semantically inscrutable, in which case the mind that includes (36) in its belief box does not envisage that any nomological constraint might bear on the set of the possible (causally efficacious) referents of (THE FACT) THAT THE ROMAN EMPIRE WILL FALL. Boyer’s assumption that the )expertise* of truth-tellers does not involve any ability to derive conclusions from particular premises and general principles rules out the first reading as a superfluous rationalization in traditional contexts. The same holds for discourse evocation. Suppose we interpret hypothesis (35) so that the mind that believes this content also has to assume that some peculiar event has caused John to fight valiantly. Such an interpretation does not require the mind in question to believe, in addition, that some nomological framework relates John’s valiance to its cause. In short, we have to do with a causalist thought that does not bother to look for causes. It is sufficient that the world allow something (semantically inscrutable) to act as a cause; but for the world to be so, it is necessary that it be (actually or fictionally) true that Achilles fought against Scamander. If my analysis of discourse evocation is on the right track, this strategy exhibits two main features that distinguish it from ordinary )description*.

206 / MARC DOMINICY Description aims at providing the interpreter with semantic truth (i.e., actual or fictional truth) by making him/her form an occasional representation that generally does not subsist as such in his/her passive memory. By contrast, discourse evocation relies on a pre-established semantic truth in order to provide the interpreter with a )representational truth*, i.e., with a non-occasional representation that proves likely to subsist as such in his/her passive memory. For instance, the utterance in (33) could not be used, in isolation, to provide the interpreter with the information that John valiantly faced a group of hooligans; but once this information has already been acquired through contextual evidence, John fought against a river can trigger the evocative processing that )causally* relates John’s behavior to Achilles’ deeds. In such a case, evocation does not add anything in terms of semantic truth; but it adds a lot in terms of representational truth, in that it drastically modifies the vision the interpreter may have of the event at hand (Dominicy, 2005a, 2007b, 2008b). In some real texts, e.g., in narrative poetry, a very complex intertwining of description and evocation ensures that the hearer/reader can access both semantic and representational truth (see Dominicy, 2002b). In a (post-)Gricean intentionalist approach, descriptive utterances convey non-natural meaning. By contrast, the meaning symbolically assigned to evocative utterances is assumed to be natural (i.e., grounded on a causal relation). In the same way as traditional truth-tellers do not personally commit themselves to the truth of the reflective beliefs they entertain and therefore express for a given audience, the authors of evocative texts (notably poets) frequently claim that something inspired them, i.e., causally produced their utterances and the inclusion of the corresponding reflective beliefs in their belief box; obviously, no descriptive novelist could adopt the same posture. This may seem contradictory with the fact that discourse evocation is an intentional strategy; but, in this case, the meta-communicative intention of the speaker/writer does not bear on the meaning to be assigned, it bears on the way this meaning assignation should take place.

References Anscombe, G. E. M. 1965. The intentionality of sensation: A grammatical feature. In R. J. Butler, ed., Analytical Philosophy, Second series, pp. 158–180. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Boyer, P. 1990. Tradition as Truth and Communication: A Cognitive Description of Traditional Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

DISCOURSE EVOCATION / 207 Brooks, C. 1947. The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. Chisholm, R. 1990. Act, content and the duck-rabbit. In R. Haller and J. Brandl, eds., Wittgenstein – Eine Neubewertung/Towards a Re-Evaluation II, pp. 63–73. Vienna: Ho ¨lder-Pichler/Tempsky. Clementz, F. 2000. La notion d’aspect perceptif. In P. Livet, ed., De la ` l’Action: Contenus perceptifs et perception de l’action, Perception a pp. 17–57. Paris: Vrin. Damasio, A. R. 1994. Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: Putnam. David, S. 1997. Repre´sentations sensorielles et marques de la personne: Contrastes entre olfaction et audition. In D. Dubois, ed., Cate´gorisation et Cognition: De la perception au discours, pp. 211–242. Paris: Kime´. Davidson, D. 2001. Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Defize, T. 1988. Comment confondre les janseńistes? Des Lettres provinciales de Pascal a` la critique grammaticale du pe`re Bouhours. Histoire ´ piste´mologie Langage 10(I):43–58. E Delvenne, S., C. Michaux, and M. Dominicy. 2005. Cate´goriser l’impensable: La figure du ‘‘musulman’’ dans les te´moignages de rescape´s des camps nazis. In Oralite´s 2. Brussels: Universite´ libre de Bruxelles, Unite´ de Recherches ‘‘Sources audiovisuelles en histoire contemporaine’’. Dominicy, M. 1990. Prole´gome`nes a` une theórie geńe´rale de l’e´vocation. In ´ vocation, pp. 9–37. Leuven: M. Vanhelleputte, ed., Se´mantique Textuelle et E Peeters. Dominicy, M. 1991. Review of D. Sperber and D. Wilson (1989), La Pertinence: ´ ditions de Minuit [French translatCommunication et Cognition. Paris, E ion of the first ed. of Sperber and Wilson (1995)]. Le Franc- ais Moderne 59:85–91. Dominicy, M. 1992. Pour une theórie de l’eńonciation poe´tique. In W. De Mulder, ´ nonciation et Parti Pris, pp. 129–141. Amsterdam: Rodopi. et al. eds., E Dominicy, M. 1994. Du ‘style’ en poe´sie. In G. Molinie´ and P. Cahne´, eds., Qu’est-ce que le Style?, pp. 115–137. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Dominicy, M. 1995. Rhe´torique et cognition: Vers une theórie du genre épidictique. Logique et Analyse 150/151/152:159–177. Dominicy, M. 1996. Le genre épidictique: Une argumentation sans questionnement?. In C. Hoogaert, ed., Argumentation et Questionnement, pp. 1–12. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Dominicy, M. 1999. Les ste´reótypes et la contagion des ideés. Langue Franc- aise 123:105–124. Dominicy, M. 2001. L’e´pidictique et la theórie de la dećision. In M. Dominicy and M. Fre´de´ric, eds., La Mise en Sce`ne des Valeurs: La rhe´torique de l’e´loge et du bla ˆme, pp. 49–77. Lausanne: Delachaux et Niestle´.

208 / MARC DOMINICY Dominicy, M. 2002a. Les )topoı¨* du genre épidictique: Du mode`le au crite`re, et vice-versa. Zeitschrift fu ¨r franzo ¨sische Sprache und Literatur 32:49–65. ´ vocation directe et évocation indirecte: Comment narrer Dominicy, M. 2002b. E en poe´sie?. Degre´s 111:c1–c25. Dominicy, M. 2005a. Langage, interpre´tation, theórie: Fondements d’une épiste´mologie moniste et faillibiliste. In J.-M. Adam and U. Heidmann, eds., Sciences du Texte et Analyse de Discours: Enjeux d’une interdisciplinarite´, pp. 231–258. Gene`ve: Slatkine. Dominicy, M. 2005b. Conscience et reálite´ physique: Sur une the`se de David Chalmers. In F. Beets and M.-A. Gavray, eds., Logique et Ontologie: Perspectives diachroniques et synchroniques. Liber amicorum in honorem ´ ditions de l’Universite´ de Lie`ge. Huberti Hubiani, pp. 133–147. Lie`ge: E Dominicy, M. 2006. Non-Propositionality in Poetry. Paper delivered at the Workshop on the Pragmatics of Poetic Communication, University of London Institute in Paris, December 1–2, 2006. Dominicy, M. 2007a. Se´mantique et philosophie de l’esprit: Les rapports de perception visuelle. In F. Neveu and S. Pe´tillon, eds., Sciences du Langage et Sciences de l’Homme, pp. 65–82. Limoges: Lambert-Lucas. Dominicy, M. 2007b. L’e´vocation discursive: Fondements et proce´de´s d’une strate´gie ‘opportuniste’. Semen 24:145–165. Dominicy, M. 2008a. Epideictic rhetoric and the representation of human decision and choice. In K. Korta and J. Garmendia, eds., Meaning, Intentions, and Argumentation, pp. 179–207. Stanford: CSLI Publications. Dominicy, M. 2008b. Les mode`les de la phrase litte´raire: Sur les pas de Michael Riffaterre. In R. Bourkhis, ed., La Phrase Litte´raire, pp. 19–33. Louvain-laNeuve: Academia-Bruylant. Fodor, J. A. 1994. The Elm and the Expert: Mentalese and its Semantics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Graff, G. 1979. Literature Against Itself: Literary Ideas in Modern Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Graff, G. 1980. Poetic Statement and Critical Dogma. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Grice, H. P. 1957. Meaning. The Philosophical Review 66:377–388. Grice, H. P. 1961. The causal theory of perception. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplement 35:121–152. Hinton, J. M. 1967. Visual experiences. Mind 76:217–227. Levi, P. 1987. Opere, vol. I. Turin: Einaudi. Libet, B. 1999. Do we have free will? Journal of Consciousness Studies 6:47–57. Martin, M. G. F. 2004. The limits of self-awareness. Philosophical Studies 120:37–89. Michaux, C. 1998a. Le Proverbe: Vers une theórie de la parole évocative. Doctoral dissertation, Universite´ libre de Bruxelles, Brussels.

DISCOURSE EVOCATION / 209 Michaux, C. 1998b. Deńominations et repre´sentations conceptuelles. In J. L. Cifuentes Honrubia, ed., Estudios de Lingu ı Cognitiva, vol. II, ¨´stica pp. 755–766. Alicante: Universidad de Alicante. Michaux, C. 1999. Proverbes et structures ste´reótypeés. Langue Franc- aise 123:85–104. Michaux, C. and M. Dominicy. 2001. Le jeu rećiproque du cognitif et de l’e´motif dans le genre épidictique. In M. Dominicy and M. Fre´de´ric, eds., La Mise en Sce`ne des Valeurs: La rhe´torique de l’e´loge et du bla ˆme, pp. 135–165. Lausanne: Delachaux et Niestle´. Michaux, C. and M. Dominicy. 2006. Evocation and the organization of memory. Paper delivered at the Workshop on The Pragmatics of Poetic Communication, University of London Institute in Paris, December 1–2, 2006. Pacherie, E. 2000. Les diffe´rents niveaux de contenu perceptif. In P. Livet, ed., ` l’Action: Contenus perceptifs et perception de l’action, De la Perception a pp. 59–82. Paris: Vrin. Proust, J. 2001. A plea for mental acts. Synthese 129:105–128. Proust, J. 2005. La Nature de la Volonte´. Paris: Gallimard. Putnam, H. 1975. Mind, Language and Reality: Philosophical Papers II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Putnam, H. 1999. The Threefold Cord. Mind, Body, and World. New York: Columbia University Press. Recanati, F. 1997. Can we believe what we do not understand? Mind and Language 12:84–100. Searle, J. R. 1975. The logical status of fictional discourse. New Literary History 6:319–332. Searle, J. R. 1983. Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Snowdon, P. F. 1981. Perception, vision, and causation. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 81:175–192. Sperber, D. 1974. Le Symbolisme en Geńe´ral. Paris: Hermann. English translation: Rethinking Symbolism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. Sperber, D. 1975a. Rudiments de rhe´torique cognitive. Poe´tique 23:389–415. Sperber, D. 1975b. Pourquoi les animaux parfaits, les hybrides et les monstres sont-ils bons a` penser symboliquement? L’Homme 15:5–34. Sperber, D. 1979a. La penseé symbolique est-elle pre´-rationnelle?. In M. Izard and P. Smith, eds., La Fonction Symbolique: Essais d’anthropologie, pp. 17–42. Paris: Gallimard. Sperber, D. 1979b. Remarques sur l’absence de contribution positive des anthropologues au proble`me de l’inneíte´. In: M. Piattelli-Palmarini, ed., Theóries du Langage. Theóries de l’Apprentissage, pp. 361–365. Paris: ´ ditions du Seuil. E

210 / MARC DOMINICY Sperber, D. 1985. On Anthropological Knowledge: Three Essays. Cambridge/ ´ ditions de la Maison des Sciences de Paris: Cambridge University Press/E l’Homme. French version: Le Savoir des Anthropologues: Trois Essais. Paris: Hermann, 1982. Sperber, D. 1996. Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach. Oxford: Blackwell. French version: La Contagion des Ideés: Theórie naturaliste de la culture. Paris: Odile Jacob, 1996. Sperber, D. 1997. Intuitive and reflective beliefs. Mind and Language 12:67–83. Sperber, D. and D. Wilson. 1995. Relevance: Communication and Cognition, 2nd edn., Oxford: Blackwell. Spivey, M. J. and J. J. Geng. 2001. Oculomotor mechanisms activated by imagery and memory: Eye movements to absent objects. Psychological Research 65:235–241. Tulving, E. 1972. Episodic and semantic memory. In E. Tulving and W. Donaldson, eds., Organization of Memory, pp. 381–403. New York: Academic Press. Tulving, E. 1983. Elements of Episodic Memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wimsatt, W. K. Jr. and M. R. Beardsley. 1954. The intentional fallacy. In The Verbal Icon, pp. 3–18. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press.

8

Children’s Enrichments of Conjunctive Sentences in Context IRA NOVECK, CORALIE CHEVALLIER, FLORELLE CHEVAUX, JULIEN MUSOLINO AND LEWIS BOTT

Abstract An utterance conjoining two propositions with and often conveys more information than the sum of its parts. Consider how a truthtable analysis would show that Mary got pregnant and got married is equivalent to Mary got pregnant and got married; in conversation, the order of the two conjuncts matters much more. We present three experiments that investigate both the development and on-line processing of pragmatic enrichments linked to and by presenting story-vignettes, each concerning a short series of events, to 10-year-olds and adults. Critical were two types of a comprehension question: One that conjoined two events in their order of appearance and one that inverted the two events. Results show that (a) children are generally more likely than adults to respond affirmatively to inverted-order questions; (b) as events are made more salient in the story, children’s pragmatic enrichments in response to the test-questions increase; and (c) inverted-order questions are linked with extra reading time for both children and adults, but not necessarily for the same reason. These data are taken to show that and sentences are initially processed among children in a minimal fashion and that developmental effects reflect how pragmatic enrichments as well as metalinguistic analyses require further effort in processing these sentences. Utterance Interpretation and Cognitive Models. Philippe De Brabanter and Mikhail Kissine (eds.). Current Research in the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface, Vol. 20. r 2009 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited. All rights reserved.

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Keywords: conjunctions, pragmatic enrichment, experimental pragmatics, development, metalinguistic evaluation.

8.1

Introduction

Consider an ordinary conjunctive sentence, as in (1a) below, and the same sentence with its conjuncts reversed, as in (1b): (1) a. Mary got married and got pregnant. b. Mary got pregnant and got married. Whereas the first sentence expresses a relatively standard series of events, the second can raise eyebrows in places where the order in (1a) is traditionally observed. The implicit enrichment of both utterances, which is linked to the way the conjunction and is interpreted in each utterance (e.g., from and to and then or to and thus) make the two sentences seem rather different. This comparison highlights the contribution pragmatics makes to sentence meaning. Without such enrichments (based on the semantics of the sentences), the two utterances are equivalent. In fact, logically speaking, the two are (P&Q ¼ Q&P). Investigations into other pragmatic enrichments lead to the prediction that children are less inclined than adults to pragmatically enrich such conjunctive utterances. This expectation is based mostly on recent work with scalars (Chierchia et al., 2001; Noveck, 2001; Papafragou and Musolino, 2003; Pouscoulous et al., 2007; for a review, see Noveck and Reboul, 2008): Whereas children as old as 10 are likely to accept the minimal lexical meanings of terms such as Some (which can be glossed as Some and possibly all) in experimental tasks, adults are more likely to go further by enriching the sentence pragmatically (e.g., by making Some imply Not All). For example, Pouscoulous et al. (2007) show that 9-year-olds are significantly more likely than adults to respond affirmatively to statements such as Some turtles are in the boxes (when in fact all of the turtles in the scenario are in boxes) because adults are arguably more likely to generate Not all turtles are in the boxes (which justifies a false response).1 Similarly, after displaying each of three horses jumping over a log, Papafragou and Musolino (2003) reported that 88% of 5-year-olds accept the statement Some of the horses jumped over the log whereas nearly all adults reject it. 1 In a similar vein, Noveck and Posada (2003) showed that adults who answer negatively to such statements take longer than those who answer affirmatively (see also Bott and Noveck, 2004).

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An investigation into the pragmatic enrichment of and makes for an ideal complement to the studies on scalars and for two reasons. First, if one can find evidence showing that this sort of enrichment develops with age, it would show that the robust findings concerning scalars are just one example of linguistic-pragmatic development. This is important because some argue that scalar development occurs at the level of semantics and is practically a grammatical phenomenon (Chierchia et al., 2001). Evidence of general pragmatic development would strongly suggest that scalars are representative of a more general extralinguistic phenomenon. Second, there are findings from the literature that cast doubt on the detectability of such a development. Early work on the more specific conjunctions before and after leave the impression that young children do not even fully integrate conjunctions in sentence processing. Clark (1971) reported that 3- to 5-year-old children are sensitive to the ‘‘order of mention’’ of conjuncts to the extent that, despite hearing a sentence like B after A (e.g., The boy kicked the rock after he patted the dog), 45% of 5-year-old children act out kicking (the first mentioned event) and then patting (the second mentioned event), even though the word after ought to indicate that the second mentioned event occurred first. It is as if nearly half of the 5-year-olds ignore the uttered conjunction and interpret the sentence based on the order in which the two events were mentioned. If it is the case that order of mention is paramount for young children then we should expect children to readily reject a sentence as false when it presents two events in an order that is opposite to what was just read or heard. In fact, initial experimental indications are that enrichments of sentences containing and do indeed produce a developmental effect akin to scalars. An exploratory study (Noveck and Chevaux, 2002) presented 7-year-olds, 10-year-olds, and adults with booklets that included a small set of four very short stories (among fillers), each followed by a conjunctive comprehension question. For two of the comprehension questions, the order of its two conjuncts respected the sequence of events in the story and for the other two the conjuncts were inverted. For example, one story described a girl, Julie, who had answered a phone call in the second sentence and accepted an invitation to a birthday party in the fifth. Participants were then required to respond Yes or No to one of two kinds of follow-up questions: (2) a. Julie answered the phone and accepted an invitation? b. Julie accepted an invitation and answered the phone?

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Agreeing with the utterance of (2b) indicates that the participant accepted the minimal meaning of the conjunctive sentence (that the two conjuncts are true). Rejecting (2b) would indicate that the sentence was enriched, making the order of the two conjuncts relevant. Whereas the rates of agreement to (2a) were high and accurate for all participants, the authors found that 85% of 7-year olds, 63% of 10-yearolds, and 29% of the adults respond affirmatively to (2b). The adults’ rates of affirmation both were lower than those produced by the children and defied chance predictions. The children were evidently less fussy than adults about the sequence of the conjuncts. That 10-yearolds respond affirmatively to questions like (2b) after having read (and while still having available) the story is impressive; it indicates that they do not readily enrich and sentences like the one in (2b). This effect has since been replicated (Mira Ariel, personal communication). Competing linguistic-pragmatic accounts, which have driven the discussion on scalars, would also disagree about the way the pragmatic enrichment of and occurs. On the one hand, there are those who assume that specific pragmatic enrichments occur automatically or by default with the arrival of the critical spoken word, in this case and. For example, Levinson (1983, 2000) argues that interlocutors initially ‘‘buttress’’ the conjunction by privileging the sequential interpretation of and (see (3b) below). Other interpretations become available once the buttress becomes incompatible with the context (see Levinson, 2000: 122–127). Although this default mechanism for and is hypothesized to work in a way that is equivalent for the process in generating scalars (where, e.g., Not all is generated by default with the onset of the word Some), this buttress is considered to be representative of a different class of implicatures.2 On the other hand, there are those who assume that listeners start off with the minimal, linguistically encoded meaning before pragmatically enriching it. Such Contextualist accounts are best represented by proponents of Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1995). For example, Carston (1996, 2002) argues that the encoded meaning of and is akin to a minimal, truth-functional meaning and that context helps enrich it in any one of several ways. For example, consider four andenrichments described by Carston (2002): (3) a. Contrast: It’s autumn in the U.S. and it’s spring in Chile. b. Sequential: She took the scalpel and made the incision. 2 Scalars are considered classic examples of Q-implicatures (which refer to Grice’s Quantity maxim) while conjunctions are exemplary of I-implicatures (which refer to informativeness).


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c. Containment: We spent the day in town and went to Macy’s. d. Causal: She shot him in the head and he died instantly. This approach does not privilege sequential interpretations and it supposes that a sentence could be perfectly meaningful without an enrichment to start with. Furthermore, this approach does not make a principled distinction between scalar inferences and pragmatic enrichments of and because both are examples of a listener’s best efforts to make a speaker’s utterance yield more cognitive effects. One can better appreciate the two accounts by taking the utterance in (2b), considering it an arbitrary utterance (4), and comparing the linguistically encoded meaning (5a) and the meaning inferred by way of enrichment (5b): (4) Julie accepted an invitation (A) and answered the phone (B). (5) a. Julie did A and B in some order (logical interpretation). b. Julie first did A and then did B (pragmatic interpretation). Note that (5a) is less informative than (5b) because the former is compatible with any one of two possible treatments of and in (4). That is, Julie did A and B in some order can be true with two representations (one where A comes first and another where B comes first). The interpretation represented by (5b) reduces the range of meanings of and (and is true only when A comes first). According to Relevance Theory, a listener starts with the interpretation that corresponds with the meaning of the words, like in (4); if a minimal reading (5a) is satisfactory to the listener, he will adopt it. However, if the listener aims to make (4) more relevant, e.g., more informative, he can enrich its meaning, e.g., by adopting (5b). Given that (5b) arrives by way of further processing (enrichment), there is a cost involved (i.e., cognitive effort). This amounts to deeper processing but at a (perhaps small) cost. Right now, the two approaches can account for the pragmaticdevelopmental effect generally and for the finding regarding and in our exploratory study more specifically. From the Default Inference perspective, it could be claimed that defaults, such as the one that results in buttressing, become automatic with development and that the developmental-pragmatic effect reflects such maturation. A Contextualist account would suggest that children and adults use the same comprehension mechanisms but that greater cognitive resources are available for adults, which in turn allows them to process the critical term (in this case, and) more deeply. Although the work from Noveck and Chevaux (2002) is revealing, the experiments go only a short distance in describing effects of

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pragmatic enrichment among children. The present work aims to expand on our prior findings while refining the paradigm and addressing the theoretical debate. Refinements are fivefold. First, we present a follow-up to Noveck and Chevaux (2002) that includes cases of before and after in order to determine the extent to which conjunctions are recognized at all in these tasks (Experiment 1).3 Second, a version of the study with and is presented as part of a computer-driven story-reading task in which one line is presented at a time in a self-paced manner, in order to get a more natural reaction to the comprehension question. The aim is to extract revealing response times (Experiments 2 and 3). Third, unlike in the prior work (which potentially prompted causal as well as sequential enrichments), the comprehension questions here are designed to produce enrichments that can only be sequential in nature. Fourth, we add stories (providing us with six stories in Experiment 1 and nine in Experiments 2 and 3). Finally, we introduce a third conjunctive comprehension condition that is aimed to allow for an unequivocal false response. A question that ought to prompt a negative response allows us to eliminate the possibility that children favor affirmative responses.

8.2

Experiment 1

In the first experiment, we expand on the Noveck and Chevaux task in three ways. First, we provide two conditions (and vs. before/after). Second, we add a condition where No is the only correct response. With a minor change in the story, one can arrive at this third type of question. For example, if in the story above Julie were to decline the invitation, the answer to the question in (2a) would now be clearly negative. Third, we add two stories, so that participants read six instead of four. 8.2.1 8.2.1.1

Method Participants

Fifty-one 10-year-olds and 57 undergraduates participated. All participants were native French speakers. The participants’ mean ages (range) were 10;9 (10;2–11;11) and 18;6 (17;6–20;0). The participants were recruited from middle class regions in Lyon and the Universite´ de Lyon II. 3 Noveck and Chevaux (2002) also showed that while 74% of 7-year-olds incorrectly respond affirmatively to inverted-order questions that employ and then explicitly as a conjunction, as in Julie accepted an invitation and then answered the phone?, adults and 10-year-olds answered affirmatively at very low rates (8% and 0%, respectively). The present study isolates 10-year-old children because they demonstrated adult-like competence on such control questions.

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Materials

Booklets were prepared that included 14 stories, 6 of which were relevant to the present study. The remaining eight stories formed part of another study concerning children’s answers to Yes/No questions (including when the question was formed as a negative). Each story was made up of five lines and had its own page and there was a follow-up question after each story that appeared at the bottom of the page along with the choice of responses Yes and No. The participants were required to circle the appropriate choice. Thus, the stories remained in view as the participants answered each question. For example, consider the (translated) story in (6): (6)

Guillaume finishes eating dinner at his friend’s home. Since it is not late, he decides to walk home. On the way, he hears a noise in a bush. He heads to the bush and, in the branches, discovers a cat. Guillaume takes the cat into his arms and caresses its head.

For the questions containing and, the follow-up came in one of three varieties: Either it presented events from the story in their proper order (e.g., 7a), in an inverted order (7b), or with a false second conjunct. The question for this third type was identical to the one that tested for the properly ordered conjunctive question (e.g., 7a’s); however, an inconsistency was created by making a minimal modification to the original story linked with the question (e.g., we changed cat to bird in the story above): (7) a. Guillaume ate dinner at a friend’s and took a cat into his arms? b. Guillaume took a cat into his arms and ate dinner at a friend’s? We refer to these three types of question as A&B, B&A, and A&I (with A being the first event in the story, B being the second, and I standing for inconsistent). We took pains to (a) make each comprehension question equivalent in length and to (b) choose an ‘‘A’’ event from an early portion of the story and ‘‘B’’ event from the end of the story. To create the before/after condition, and was systematically replaced by before or after (in French, avant or apre`s). With respect to the story above, the answer to the comprehension question that contained before in (8a) would be correct while (8b) would not be. (8) a. Guillaume ate dinner at a friend’s before he took a cat into his arms? b. Guillaume took a cat into his arms before he ate dinner at a friend’s?

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The same can be done with after: Now, however, (9a) is wrong and (9b) is correct. (9) a. Guillaume ate dinner at a friend’s after he took a cat into his arms? b. Guillaume took a cat into his arms after he ate dinner at a friend’s? For the sake of completeness, we replaced and with before and after in the A&I condition as well, but the correct answer under these conditions becomes difficult to discern. For example, in the case of (8a) the test question can appear ambiguous because the semantics of before is partly satisfied (Guillaume did eat dinner at a friend’s before doing something else). Thus, we were not certain that (children and adult) participants would say false consistently. Given that this was a secondary control (to be compared to the A&I problems, which were controls for the B&A sentences), and included for the sake of completeness, we did not focus on these results. Nevertheless, we track these results even if they make only a limited contribution to the present study. 8.2.1.3

Design

With the exception of a single practice story, all three types of and question were prepared for each story. Booklets were prepared that rotated questions with respect to each story. In the case of the A&I question, the story was changed minimally as we described earlier. In this way, each participant had a unique set of materials. Given that there were three sorts of test questions with and and six sorts of before and after questions (see Table 1), the stories were distributed differently according to condition. In the and condition, stories were paired and then linked either to A&B, B&A, or A&I questions and across three kinds of booklets. For example, in one booklet, Stories 1 and 4 were presented with the test question A&B, Stories 2 and 5 were presented as B&A, and Stories 3 and 6 were linked with the test question A&I. Another booklet could have Stories 1 and 4 presented with the test question form B&A and in a third booklet these stories could be linked with the test question form A&I. This way all stories appeared with the three question forms. Given the multiple ways one can arrive at story-question pairings for the before/after condition (in principle, each of six stories can be paired with six types of questions), we constrained the booklet preparation in the following way. Any individual story was linked with one of three questions (e.g., the Guillaume Story was linked with a B after A question, a B before


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TABLE 1 The construction of Experiment 1 entailed having three sorts of questions with and and six sorts with before/after Conjunction

Anticipated answer

and A and B B and A A and I

Yes Yes/Noa No

before/after A before B B before A A before I A after B B after A I after A

Yes No No No Yes No

Notes: A and B refers to two events that occurred in a story and in that (A then B) order. A sentence stating Guillaume had dinner at a friend’s before he took a cat into his arms is true when the two events occurred in that order in the story. a Indicates that this is the critical item for this study, where a Yes response is consistent with logic and No indicates a pragmatic response. I refers to an event inconsistent with the story. A sentence stating Guillaume had dinner at a friend’s and took a cat into his arms is false when the story never mentioned a cat (but rather a bird) for this condition.

A question, and an A before I question), but ultimately three stories were linked with each type of question (and all six types of questions were represented). Three booklets were prepared each having the same set of experimental story-question pairs. That is, each of three booklets had a collection of six stories, each having one sort of question. 8.2.1.4

Procedure

Booklets were prepared that included 14 stories, 6 of which were relevant to the present study. The remaining eight stories were filler items. Each story was made up of five lines presented on a single (half) page that included a follow-up question just below the story along with the response options Yes or No. The participants were required to circle one of the two choices. Thus, the stories remained in view as the participants answered each question. 8.2.2

Results and Discussion

First, we review participants’ performance with the unequivocal control sentences before turning to participants’ performance with the

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B&A sentences. This is followed by a presentation of performance on the remaining control sentences in the before/after condition. Following Clark (1971), we carried out analyses using both participants (represented with the index 1) and stimulus items (represented with the index 2) as random effects. As can be seen in Table 2, adults respond at ceiling for the two unequivocal and sentences (A&B and A&I) and for the four unequivocal before/after sentences (A before B, B after A, B before A, A after B). The children’s performance also reveal strong competence, with rates of correct responses to all unequivocal sentences being above chance levels, with the exception of the A after B sentence, which prompted 69% to give a correct response (No). Nevertheless, the adults’ performance is consistently stronger than the children’s with respect to the four unequivocal before/after sentences (t1(48) ¼ 3.55, po0.001, t2(5) ¼ 2.01, po0.10) and the two unequivocal and sentences (t1(57) ¼ 2.32 po0.05, t2(5) ¼ 2.57, po0.05). Importantly, whenever the second event was mentioned first (B after A which is true and B before A which is false), children’s and adults’ performance was optimal, indicating that the participants were well aware of the test question’s ‘‘order of mention.’’ TABLE 2 Percentage of correct responses to questions in Experiment 1 concerning the presence of two events (A and B) in a story conjoined by either and or before/after Correct response and A and B B and A A and I

Yes Yesa No

before/after A before B A after B A before I B after A B before A I after A

Yes No No Yes No No

10-year-olds (%) (N ¼ 27)

Adults (%) (N ¼ 32)

96 73 85

97 53 95

N ¼ 24

N ¼ 25

83 69 42 94 92 21

100 100 40 100 96 60

Note: A refers to the event that occurred first with respect to another event B. I refers to an event that is inconsistent with the story. a Indicates that this is the critical item for this study, where a Yes response is consistent with logic.


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Given the generally high rates of correct performance (and one where adults’ rates of correct performance are consistently higher than the children’s), it is striking that rates of agreement (Yes) to the B&A sentences are significantly higher among the children (73%) than they are among the adults (53%). Given our a priori prediction concerning the direction of this effect, we conducted a one-tailed test and found that the results largely confirm what was found in Noveck and Chevaux (2002). Children are significantly more likely than adults (marginally in an analysis by participant) to accept B&A sentences as adequate interpretations of the events in the stories: t1(46) ¼ 1.48, p ¼ 0.08; t2(5) ¼ 3.67, po0.01. As we pointed out earlier, the responses to the before and after sentences that contain a false conjunct can potentially prompt children and adults to respond affirmatively. This turned out to be the case. For example, one story describes a character named Beatrice who goes scuba diving. The two conjuncts in the test question for the more standard versions (those that do not introduce a false conjunct) are jumped off the boat and observed colorful fish. In order to set up the false test question for the A&I conditions (as well as A before I and I after A), the story about Beatrice mentions colorful plants instead of colorful fish. It is reasonable for participants to figure that Beatrice, who is scuba diving after all, is likely to see fish and thus answer affirmatively to Beatrice jumped off the boat before observing fish [Beátrice a saute´ du bateau avant d’observer des poissons?]. In fact, this story encouraged 88% of the adults and all of the children to answer affirmatively to this test question even though the story never mentioned fish (and even though the story remained visible while responding to the question). Interestingly, however, only 25% of adults and 33% of children answer this question affirmatively when the connective is and (i.e., most responded No when the test question was conjoined by and, as in Beatrice jumped off the boat and observed fish). These data indicate that the choice of conjunction has a strong effect on the way a question is evaluated. A neutral and encourages the participants to read the conjuncts carefully in order to see that it is true, while the conjunctions before and after appear to bias participants to accept the statement as true when a conjunct corresponds with one of the true events. Although this effect is in itself interesting (and it does not appear to be a developmental one), it is not central to our aims and we will not discuss it further. To summarize, Experiment 1 demonstrates that children are highly sensitive to the order in which the two conjuncts are mentioned. When a test question mentions the latter (of two true events) first and the two events are conjoined by after, both children and adults accept these as

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true; when a test-question mentions the latter (of two true events) first and they are conjoined by before, nearly all reject these as false. Nevertheless, 10-year-olds have a strong tendency to reply affirmatively to B&A questions and more so than adults. Ten-year-olds’ affirmative responses to B&A test questions can safely be taken to show that the children are less likely to enrich these sentences than their older cohorts.

8.3

Experiment 2

This experiment aims to capture on-line processing of sentences containing the conjunction and. In order to achieve this goal, three more five-line-long stories are developed to be part of a self-paced task for 10-year-olds and adults. The experiment includes nine stories (plus one example), without filler items, so as not to overburden the children. (A self-paced reading task is manifestly more difficult for children than a standard paper-based paragraph-question task.) As in Experiment 1, each story is followed by a comprehension question that mentions two conjoined events. All conjunctions are presented as and. There are three conditions (A&B, B&A, and A&I). Participants are required to answer Yes or No to each question. Unlike Experiment 1, lines of text are presented and disappear after having been read. Our focus rests on responses to questions whose events are inverted; a negative evaluation to a B&A question would be an indication of a pragmatic enrichment while a positive evaluation would be an indication that and was treated with a minimal meaning. Participants are not told in advance that their response times are recorded. 8.3.1 8.3.1.1

Method Participants

Twenty-nine 10-year-olds and 22 adults participated. All participants were native French speakers. The participants’ mean ages (range) were 10;8 (10;2–11;1) and 18;6 (17;3–20;3). The children were recruited from schools or after-school programs in middle class regions around Lyon. The adults were recruited from the Universite´ de Lyon II. 8.3.1.2

Materials

Ten stories were prepared. One served as a practice problem. As in Experiment 1, each story was made up of five lines and concerned one person and a series of events. As indicated above, the follow-up


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question used the conjunction and and came in one of three varieties, which we refer to as A&B, B&A, and A&I, as in Experiment 1. 8.3.1.3

Design

With the exception of the practice story, all three types of question were prepared for each story. The MATLAB program that ran the study was designed to (a) randomly generate one type of question per story while (b) assuring that each type of question was linked to three trials of A&B, B&A, and A&I conditions over the course of the experiment. In this way, each participant had a unique set of materials. 8.3.1.4

Procedure

The instructions informed participants that the experiment concerned text comprehension and that it included about 10 stories. The instructions also explained how each story would be presented lineby-line, how the story could be advanced by pressing the space bar, and that the stories should be read naturally. The instructions explained that there would be a question following each story and that the participant should – throughout the task – keep one finger from each hand on the Yes and No keys (which were indicated on the e or p keys of an AZERTY keyboard). The program then presented one example. Each left-justified line of text was presented in the middle of the screen. The start of each story was signaled by Story (x): To continue press the space bar. The end of the story and the arrival of the question were signaled by To make the question appear, please hit the space bar. The question was presented in a shade of white that was slightly lighter than the previous lines. The assignment of the right and left hands for Yes responses was counterbalanced across the experiment. The program to run the experiment was written in MATLAB using the Psychophysics Toolbox (Brainard, 1997; Pelli, 1997).

8.4


The response proportions were analyzed principally with t-tests among the participants. The reaction-time data, which included only justifiable responses that were sufficiently numerous (this excludes incorrect responses to A&B and A&I questions and adults’ affirmative responses to B&A questions), were analyzed using ANOVAs or t-tests to which a log transform was applied. As before, we carried out analyses using both participants and stimulus items as random effects. The

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participant analysis involved summing over all stories but distinguished between the three types of questions. The item analysis separated the nine stories, summed over all participants, and distinguished between the three kinds of questions. By convention, we refer to F-values obtained with participants as the random factor as F1 (or t1), and F-values obtained with items as the random factor as F2 (or t2). All p-values assume a two-tailed test unless otherwise stated. We removed five participants (three children and two adults) whose responses indicated a failure to fully appreciate the task. Four of these participants responded by hitting the same key in response to all nine of the questions and the remaining participant hit the same key to eight. Responses to questions were considered outliers if they were beyond the mean response time73SD for each population. This amounted to the loss of two data points among adults and one among children. These outliers were removed from both choice proportions and reaction time data and amount to less than 1% of the data. Table 3 illustrates the proportion of affirmative responses as a function of question-type. For the A&B sentences, 77% of the adults’ responses and 75% of children’s are affirmative, indicating little difference between the children and adults. Similarly, the A&I

TABLE 3 Mean latencies of (and percentage of) justifiable responses to the three types of conjunctive questions in Experiment 2 Group

Question A&B

B&A

A&I

Justifiable responses

Children, N ¼ 26 Adults, N ¼ 20

Yes

Yes

No

No

9,754 (77%) 5,259 (75%)

9,465 (44%) 7,710a (18%a)

11,769 (56%) 6,400 (82%)

9,004 (89%) 4,990 (93%)

Notes: A and B refer to the order in which the events occurred in the story, where A occurred in an early part of the story and B in a later portion (I refers to an event inconsistent with the B type of event). a We include this cell for completeness sake, but it does not provide a reliable measure of response times because there were relatively few such responses (see text and especially footnote 5).


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questions yielded low rates of affirmative responses – 7% and 11% for adults and children, respectively. However, there is a large difference between the two populations for the B&A question to which 18% of the adults’ responses and 46% of the children’s are affirmative. These observations were verified using an ANOVA with proportion affirmative as the dependent variable, Question-type as a withinsubject factor and age as a between-subject factor. The ANOVA revealed a significant interaction for question-type and age, F1(2,90) ¼ 4.67, po0.05, F2(2,32) ¼ 3.78, po0.01. Further t-tests revealed that this interaction was due to the B&A question. Whereas the B&A question among the children prompted significantly fewer affirmative responses than A&B questions, t1(25) ¼ 4.89, po0.0001; t2 (8) ¼ 3.95, po0.005 and significantly more affirmative responses than the A&I question, t1(25) ¼ 4.56, po0.0001; t2 (8) ¼ 4.78, po0.002, the B&A question among the adults prompted lower rates of affirmative responses than the A&B question, t1(19) ¼ 6.32, po0.0001; t2 (8) ¼ 8.91, po0.0001 and rates of affirmative responses that were similar to the A&I question, t1(19) ¼ 1.56, pW0.05; t2 (8) ¼ 1.99, pW0.05. This analysis shows that adults are enriching and in the B&A questions to a greater extent than children, consistent with Noveck and Chevaux (2002) and Experiment 1 above. The participants’ mean response times can also be found in Table 3. We compared children and adults using an ANOVA with reaction times to the three questions as a repeated measure.4 There was (not surprisingly) a developmental effect, F1(1,40) ¼ 49.14, po0.0001, F2(1,14) ¼ 158.74, po0.0001 and an effect for question type, F1(2,80) ¼ 12.92, po0.0001, F2(1,14) ¼ 3.96, po0.05. The interaction was not significant, F1(2,80) ¼ 0.135, pW0.8, F2(2,28) ¼ 0.08, pW0.9. A series of t-tests (with significance levels appropriately reduced to 0.017 for each set) showed that the question type that prompted the longest response time was the negative response to the B&A question.5 For adults, the main effect for question type is due to the difference in response times between the negative response to the B&A question and the other two (for the difference between A&I vs. negative response to

4

As indicated earlier, we used only the negative response latencies to the B&A question because there were only 11 affirmative responses in total among adults (3 of which were outliers that disproportionately increase the mean response times for this group). 5 For within-subject analyses that follow, we use only participants or stories that fill both cells (i.e., there are occasionally empty cells for B&A questions). This explains why the degrees of freedom vary in the t-tests.

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B&A: t1(19) ¼ 3.48, po0.01, t2(7) ¼ 1.54, p ¼ 0.16; and for the difference between A&B vs. the negative response to B&A, t1(18) ¼ 2.63, p ¼ 0.017, t2(7) ¼ 1.00, pW0.30). Similarly, for children, the latency effect was due primarily to the different speeds in responding to A&I and negatively to B&A questions, t1(23) ¼ 4.33, po0.005, t2(8) ¼ 4.33, po0.005 and (when based on stories) to the different speeds in responding to A&B and negatively to B&A, t1(23) ¼ 1.57, p ¼ 0.13. t2(8) ¼ 3.31, po0.017. These findings indicate that negative responses to B&A questions were more time-consuming to arrive at than responses to the other questions, both for children and adults. A more fine-grained analysis was conducted for the children in which the latencies of the four justifiable responses were compared in a one-way ANOVA. Again we found a main effect for speed of justifiable response, F1(3,51) ¼ 4.45, po0.01, F2(3,21) ¼ 4.52, po0.05, and conducted follow-up t-tests (with significance levels reduced to 0.008). As before, the main effect is due to the difference between the latency of the negative responses to B&A and to A&I. Children’s speed of affirmative responses to the B&A question are thus comparable to the control questions. Finally, we investigated response times to children’s split response to the B&A question and, given prior findings and our a priori hypothesis, we used a one-tailed test. We found the expected difference, showing that children’s negatives responses to B&A questions prompt significantly slower responses than positive ones (at least when stories are a random factor), t1(17) ¼ 1.53, p ¼ 0.07, one tailed, t2(7) ¼ 2.24, po0.05, one-tailed. 8.4.1

Discussion

This on-line task presents two main confirming findings. First, we find the same pragmatic developmental effect reported in Experiment 1 with respect to children assenting to B&A questions at higher rates than adults. Second, for both age groups, the mean latency of No responses to B&A questions is significantly longer than those of correct responses among the control questions. This indicates that answering the B&A question requires extra effort. Meanwhile, the children’s affirmative response times to B&A questions are comparable to those for the controls and faster than negative responses to this question. These findings indicate that the linguistically encoded meaning of and is fundamental because those children who respond affirmatively to B&A questions cannot be said to be canceling a default inference, but to be applying and without enrichments from the start. This depiction of


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the response time data is consistent with Contextualist accounts of pragmatic enrichment among adults (e.g., Bott and Noveck, 2004). It is difficult to argue that the slow, negative responses to B&A questions are due simply to a bias linked to No responses because the A&I questions also prompt No responses and are not exceptionally slow. It is also hard to attribute the developmental pattern to learning because the children’s fast affirmative/slow negative response-time patterns to B&A questions here resonate with those found with adults in scalar studies (Noveck and Posada, 2003; Bott and Noveck, 2004; Breheny et al., 2006). One thing that remained imperfect on this task was the rate of correct responses to the controls, and especially the responses to the A&B questions. We note that even if we used a strict criterion (e.g., to include those participants who got at most a single control item wrong), and thereby reduced the number of children to 16 and the number of adults to 17, the child-adult pragmatic effect for the B&A question remains (44% of affirmative responses among children vs. 20% for adults) and the percentage of correct responses for the control problem A&B remains in the low 80%s. We found this last figure less than ideal and aimed to re-administer the task while improving the quality of our items.

8.5

Experiment 3

Experiment 2 confirmed that children are less likely to enrich conjunctive statements than adults when the experiment uses an online task. Moreover, children reveal a slower pragmatic response with respect to their semantic response. Nevertheless, the control problem (the A&B) condition provided rates of correct responses that were relatively low for children and adults (75% and 77%, respectively) when the text was presented one line at a time. (Note that in Experiment 1, performance on control tasks was satisfactory and arguably because the entire text was available). We thus did an inventory on the stories and identified those whose results indicated that they were problematic. We improved these and conducted a new experiment that was identical in design to the last one. As we describe in Section 8.5.1, it appeared that the weak stories needed to make events more salient. For example, in the Guillaume story’s question (Guillaume had dinner at a friend’s house and caressed a cat on the head), the reference to dinner in the vignette is made almost in passing even though it is the opening line. We also noticed that higher rates of correct responses to A&B questions followed stories in which the events appeared prominent.

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ET AL.

Method Participants

Nineteen 10-year-olds and 26 adults participated. All participants were native French speakers. The participants’ mean ages (range) were 10;1 (9;6–10;6) and 19;9 (18;7–21;5). The children were recruited from an elementary school in Romans. The adults were recruited from the Universite´ de Lyon II. 8.5.1.2

Materials, Design, and Procedure

The design of Experiment 3 was identical to that of Experiment 2. We made only minor editorial changes with the goal of making the events (to be described in the test question) more salient. For example, the story about Guillaume described in (6) referred to his having dinner at a friend’s house in passing before going home and finding a cat (or bird). We thus changed the story so that the dinner (event A) is eliminated but mention of his bicycle (the new event A) is clear. The story now reads as: (6u)

Guillaume is on his way home from a friend’s on a bicycle. He puts his bicycle down in the garden and makes his way to the door. On the way, he hears a noise in a bush. He heads to the bush and, in the branches, discovers a cat. Guillaume takes the cat into his arms and caresses its head.

This led to a clearer comprehension question, referring now to an A event that concerns a more salient bicycle: (10) a. Guillaume put down his bicycle and took a cat into his arms? A&B b. Guillaume took a cat into his arms and put down his bicycle? B&A As in Experiment 2, we were very careful to make sure that question length was similar across items (range is from 15 to 18 syllables in French). 8.5.2


Performance on the control questions was much improved compared to Experiment 2. Children scored M ¼ 0.91 (SD ¼ 0.24) and M ¼ 0.90 (SD ¼ 0.19) proportion correct on the A&B and A&I questions respectively, while adults were even more accurate, M ¼ 0.93 (SD ¼ 0.17) and M ¼ 0.96 (SD ¼ 0.14). Nonetheless, five children and


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two adults failed to exceed the inclusion criterion of providing more than four correct responses out of six control items and were removed from further analysis. As shown in Table 4, the correct performance to the control questions among the included children was M ¼ 0.89 (SD ¼ 0.16) and M ¼ 0.94 (SD ¼ 0.13) to A&B and A&I, respectively, and M ¼ 0.95 (SD ¼ 0.13) and M ¼ 0.99 (SD ¼ 0.07) for the adults. We now turn to the experimental questions, B&A. Recall that in Experiment 1, a high proportion of children (73%) accepted the reversed events as being an accurate description of the story and in Experiment 2 fewer did (44%). Interestingly, in Experiment 3 the trend was extended, i.e., children were even less likely to accept the B&A description, M ¼ 0.28 (SD ¼ 0.31). This proportion was significantly lower than chance (in the participant analysis), t1(17) ¼ 3.06, p ¼ 0.007, t2(8) ¼ 1.84, p ¼ 0.10. In contrast, the proportion of affirmative responses among the adults was higher than in previous experiments so that the adults were now equivocal, M ¼ 0.44 (SD ¼ 0.40). There was no significant difference between the two groups on the experimental questions however, t1(36) ¼ 1.65, p ¼ 0.11, t2(16) ¼ 1.27, p ¼ 0.22. The responses by the adult participants imply that they were equivocal. This is confirmed by longer reaction times to both affirmative and negative responses compared to the appropriate control questions. The affirmative responses to B&A were slower than the affirmative (correct) responses to A&B, M ¼ 6.61 versus M ¼ 5.17, t1(16) ¼ 2.25, p ¼ 0.039, t2(8) ¼ 2.19, p ¼ 0.060, and negative responses to B&A were slower than negative (correct) responses to A&I, M ¼ 6.63 versus M ¼ 4.87, t1(18) ¼ 4.35, p ¼ 0.020, t2(8) ¼ 2.38,

TABLE 4 Mean latencies (and percentage) of justifiable responses to the three types of conjunctive questions in Experiment 3 Group

Question A&B

B&A

A&I

Justifiable responses

Children, N ¼ 19 Adults, N ¼ 26

Yes

Yes

No

No

8,445 (89%) 5,173 (95%)

10,172 (28%) 6,635 (44%)

8,937 (72%) 6,113 (56%)

8,114 (94%) 4,860 (99%)

Note: See above tables for an explanation of A, B, and I.

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p ¼ 0.045. Analysis of the children’s response times proved inconclusive because we failed to observe significant effects between responses to the experimental questions and the control questions, nor were there any significant interactions when comparing adults to children. In summary, we did not observe the same developmental trend in Experiment 3 as we did in our prior experiments. Instead, we failed to observe significant differences between adults and children responding to the B&A statements and the majority of children’s responses were to reject the B&A statements rather than to accept them. Nevertheless, we can draw an important conclusion from these results – the effects observed previously are sensitive to the exact form of the experimental items. The crucial difference between this experiment and the previous ones is that the story-items were clarified in an attempt to improve responses to the control questions. As we achieved our goal to improve the clarity of the stories as well as the questions (responses to the control questions were more accurate than in Experiment 2), this methodological improvement prompted so many children to enrich the B&A question that it eliminated the developmental effect found within the two prior experiments and in Noveck and Chevaux (2002). Thus, we can conclude that children’s ability to detect pragmatic anomalies depends on how easy it is for them to identify the relevant events in the discourse. When these are made easily available, as in this experiment, enrichment is more likely. We discuss the implications of these findings in more detail below.

8.6

General Discussion

This study was designed to investigate pragmatic enrichment of the conjunction and in utterance processing with a focus on children. Overall, it shows that pragmatic enrichment is a general phenomenon that covers more than just scalars. We summarize our main findings here and show how they fit with the rest of the developmental literature on pragmatic enrichment. One main result concerns literate 10-year-olds who are more apt to seek out pragmatic enrichments as the task becomes clearer. Starting with Noveck and Chevaux (2002) and continuing through each of the three experiments reported here, one can see how 10-year-olds – while responding to roughly equivalent test questions – tend to enrich more as the expectations of the task as well as the stories themselves become clearer. Experiment 1’s paper and pencil task, which presented stories (and filler items) that were eventually shown to be less than optimal,


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yielded few responses indicating conjunction enrichments (27%). Experiment 2, which removed the fillers that were present in the first experiment and focused uniquely on nine stories that had the same sort of test question each time, increased rates of responses indicating pragmatic enrichment (to 47%). When we improved the stories themselves while maintaining the same experimental paradigm in Experiment 3, children were more likely to enrich the and question; i.e., ‘‘pragmatic’’ responses increased further to 72%. Thus, 10-year-olds are more likely to make pragmatic enrichments as the context of the task and the stories themselves become sharper and less burdened by distractions. This shows that a pragmatic enrichment depends to a great extent on the delivery of the utterance in context. Merely stating two events in their inverse order and connecting them with and is not enough to encourage pragmatic enrichment. This developmental result resonates with the findings from Pouscoulous et al. (2007), who showed how extraneous processing demands may negatively affect the computation of scalar implicatures, especially in young children. The first experiment in Pouscoulous et al. showed that 91% of 9-year-olds accept the linguistic meaning of some (i.e., 9% enrich) when the task uses the (relatively difficult) French quantifier certains, arbitrary materials, and plenty of distractor items. Experiment 2 of that paper revealed that with a set of minor changes (a nonverbal action task that uses the more frequent quelques and includes no unnecessary distractors), children as young as 4 years of age can be encouraged to derive enrichments at very high rates (over 80% of 7-year-olds enrich). The results of the three experiments in the present paper show that adults are generally less likely to accept the minimal, linguistically encoded meaning of and. When one considers the data from Noveck and Chevaux (2002) and the first two experiments here, one sees that adults pragmatically enrich consistently more than children. Whereas children in Experiment 1 were likely to respond affirmatively to the B&A question, adults’ responses reveal equivocality. When the task was presented as part of an on-line study in Experiment 2 and both the children and adults became more ‘‘pragmatic,’’ the adults were more likely to respond negatively to the B&A question than the children. This demonstrates that the developmental-pragmatic effect, reported mostly for scalars, is robust (Noveck, 2001; Papafragou and Musolino, 2003; Pouscoulous et al., 2007). However, the final experiment revealed a surprising effect: Once the paradigm was clarified by having well-constructed stories (along with the continued absence of distractors), the children were mostly

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‘‘pragmatic’’ (and more than in the previous experiments). Adults – who had generally enriched the conjunctive utterances in Experiment 2 – became equivocal (as in Experiment 1). That is, the stories allowed for improved processing for adults and led them to detect that two answers to the B&A question were possible, making the process of answering this question a metalinguistic one.6 As the reversedness of the B&A questions become more salient, the adults (and to a lesser extent the children), not only pragmatically enrich the meaning of and but also become aware of both readings. Although this is the first time we have come across this unenriched to enriched to metalinguistic effect, it is possible that it has already been witnessed in the developmental literature. Using the Some elephants have trunks material used by Noveck (2001, Experiment 3), Feeney et al. (2004) have reported an anomalous finding showing how both children and adults respond true to these underinformative sentences at about a 65% rate, indicating that the adults are less pragmatic than usual and that children are slightly less logical than usual (Noveck showed that children as old as 10 accept these underinformative statements as true at rates of upwards of 80% while adults respond at rates that are at chance levels). We hypothesize that, due to the authors’ instructions (which are reproduced below7), participants in their task (and specifically the adults) were encouraged to take a metalinguistic stance and notice that the underinformative items can lead to two justifiable responses: There are sixteen statements on this sheet. You have to decide whether the statement is true or false. I will read each one out individually and I want you to answer true or false. I will then mark your answer down. If you don’t understand a particular word please ask.

By twice stressing that the experimenter was seeking a logical (True/False) analysis, the study might well have encouraged a metalinguistic stance (especially among the adults) that would also ultimately favor adults’ providing logical responses. We suspect that the children’s responses could also be affected by presenting what could appear as a logical task, but not necessarily for the same reasons as the adults. In contrast, Noveck (2001) carried out a double blind study wherein participants were simply asked to spontaneously indicate 6

This may account for the adults’ equivocal responses in Experiment 1 as well. The authors wish to thank Aidan Feeney, who was kind enough to send these instructions to the first author. 7


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whether they agree or disagree with the provided statements (see also Guasti et al., 2005). In conclusion, our experiments show that the developmentalpragmatic effect, which has focused mostly on so-called scalar terms, is robust because our main result shows that children are generally less likely than adults to produce enrichments of and as they answer what we call B&A questions. More specifically, this work ultimately shows how a conjunctive sentence can be read in three ways, each one more complex than the previous one. At its most basic, a sentence containing and simply connects two propositions. Enrichments that provide an implied temporal order can render a conjunctive sentence more informative, but this does not come for free. Finally, participants (especially more mature ones) can become aware of both interpretations when the order of conjuncts in a question is reversed as long as the task is made clear and is easy to process. This three-step process could well be exemplary of utterance processing generally.

References Bott, L. and I. Noveck. 2004. Some utterances are underinformative: The onset and time course of scalar inferences. Journal of Memory and Language 51:437–457. Brainard, D. H. 1997. The psychophysics toolbox. Spatial Vision 10:433–436. Breheny, R., N. Katsos, and J. Williams. 2006. Are generalized scalar implicatures generated by default? An on-line investigation into the role of context in generating pragmatic inferences. Cognition 3:434–463. Carston, R. 1996. Enrichment and loosening: Complementary processes in deriving the proposition expressed? UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 8:205–232. Carston, R. 2002. Thoughts and Utterances. Oxford: Blackwell. Chierchia, G., S. Crain, M. Guasti, A. Gualmini, and L. Meroni. 2001. The acquisition of disjunction: Evidence for a grammatical view of scalar implicature. In A. H. J. Do, ed., BUCLD Proceedings, pp. 157–168. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press. Clark, E. 1971. On the acquisition of the meaning of before and after. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 10:266–275. Feeney, F., S. Scrafton, A. Duckworth, and S. J. Handley. 2004. The story of some: Everyday pragmatic inference by children and adults. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology 58:121–132. Guasti, M. T., G. Chierchia, S. Crain, F. Foppolo, A. Gualmini, and L. Mernoni. 2005. Why children and adults sometimes (but not always) compute implicatures. Language and Cognitive Processes 20:667–696.

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Levinson, S. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levinson, S. 2000. Presumptive Meanings: The Theory of Generalized Conversational Implicature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Noveck, I. 2001. When children are more logical than adults: Experimental investigations of scalar implicature. Cognition 78:165–188. Noveck, I. and F. Chevaux. 2002. The pragmatic development of and. In B. Skarabella, ed., BUCLD Proceedings, pp. 453–463. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press. Noveck, I. and A. Posada. 2003. Characterizing the time course of an implicature: An evoked potentials study. Brain and Language 85:203–210. Noveck, I. and A. Reboul. 2008. Experimental pragmatics: A Gricean turn in the study of language. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 12(11):425–431. Papafragou, A. and J. Musolino. 2003. Scalar implicatures: Experiments at the semantics-pragmatics interface. Cognition 86:253–282. Pelli, D. G. 1997. The VideoToolbox software for visual psychophysics: Transforming numbers into movies. Spatial Vision 10:437–442. Pouscoulous, N., I. Noveck, G. Politzer, and A. Bastide. 2007. A developmental investigation of processing costs in implicature production. Language Acquisition 14:347–375. Sperber, D. and D. Wilson. 1995. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell.

9

Relevance, Assertion and Possible Worlds: A Cognitive Approach to the Spanish Subjunctive MARK JARY

Abstract This paper puts forward an analysis of the indicative/subjunctive contrast in Spanish, according to which the difference between the two moods is explained in terms of the former, but not the latter, being apt for the presentation of propositions as premises to be used in the derivation of implicatures. In terms of the theoretical framework employed – Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory – this amounts to the claim that the indicative is characterised by the ability to present a proposition as relevant in its own right. This proposal is shown to account for the presence of the subjunctive in a wide range of linguistic environments and to explain its sensitivity to information-structure concerns, thereby shedding light on both its truth-conditional and non-truthconditional contribution to utterance interpretation. Keywords: Spanish, mood, indicative, subjunctive, relevance theory, formal semantics, possible worlds, Stalnaker, assertion.

9.1

Introduction

The alternation between indicative and subjunctive moods in Spanish (and in the other Romance languages) has long been a subject of Utterance Interpretation and Cognitive Models. Philippe De Brabanter and Mikhail Kissine (eds.). Current Research in the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface, Vol. 20. r 2009 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited. All rights reserved.

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236 / MARK JARY interest for semantics and pragmatics. One reason for this is that the sort of analyses of the meaning of the subjunctive that one finds in traditional grammars (i.e. it is related to information assessed as doubtful by the speaker, or used to describe an unrealised state of affairs) is undermined by its use in factive environments. For example, ‘el hecho de que’ (‘the fact that’) often takes the subjunctive, as do factive predicates such as ‘alegrarse de que’ (‘to be happy that’) and ‘lamentar que’ (‘to regret that’). One response to these data has been to suggest that the indicative is marked for asserted information, the subjunctive for non-asserted information (Terrell and Hooper, 1974; Hooper, 1975; Terrell, 1976). This approach then seeks to explain the presence of the subjunctive in factive environments in terms of presupposition. While such an analysis has intuitive appeal, we will see that it is unable to account for the use of the choice of mood in causative constructions, such as ‘conseguir que’ (‘manage to’). The propositions expressed by these clauses have, on Terrell and Hooper’s account, all the hallmarks of asserted information and hence the clauses should be indicative. However, these predicates unfailingly select the subjunctive. Another approach to the problem posed by the indicative/ subjunctive contrast has been to seek explanations in formal semantic models. These accounts have proved insightful, but, as we will see, they find it difficult to deal with the full range of data in a straightforward manner. The precise nature of the problems varies, but among the issues that will be highlighted is a difficulty in dealing with factive constructions that take the subjunctive. What I aim to show in this paper is that the insights of both of these approaches can be maintained, and their problems avoided, by adopting a cognitive perspective on utterance interpretation. According to the view I will present, the difference between the indicative and the subjunctive is best explained in terms of how the proposition expressed by the clause in question contributes to the inferential process of utterance interpretation: as a premise in its own right or by making a less direct contribution.1 I proceed as follows: in Section 9.2, I briefly survey the data; in Section 9.3, I outline in more detail the assertion/non-assertion approach to the indicative/subjunctive contrast; in Section 9.4, I present a relevance-theory-based account of the contrast and apply this 1 In English, this approach to the indicative has already been employed to uncover new patterns in the data relating to infinitive and indicative complement selection after ‘believe’; see Jary (2008).

A COGNITIVE APPROACH

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SPANISH SUBJUNCTIVE / 237

to the data; I then relate this to alternative accounts in Section 9.5, before concluding in Section 9.6.

9.2

The Data

Mood choice in Spanish is sensitive to both linguistic and discourse considerations. In this section, I describe these factors, dealing first with verb complement selection. 9.2.1

Epistemic Verbs

Under this broad heading, I include verbs relating both to belief and to knowledge. In the affirmative, these verbs always take indicative complements: (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)

Creo que Juan viene ‘I believe that Juan is coming-IND’ Silvia cree que Juan viene ‘Silvia believes that Juan is coming-IND’ Se´ que Juan viene ‘I know that Juan is coming-IND’ Silvia sabe que Juan viene ‘Silvia knows that Juan is coming-IND’ Me he enterado de que Juan viene ‘I found out that Juan is coming-IND’ Silvia se ha enterado de que Juan viene ‘Silvia found out that Juan is coming-IND’

Negating these verbs, though, affects complement choice in a way that interacts interestingly both with person and with whether the verb relates to belief or knowledge. Let’s take third-person cases first: (7) (8) (9)

Silvia no cree que Juan viene/venga ‘Silvia doesn’t think that Juan is coming-IND/SUBJ’ Silvia no sabe que Juan viene/venga ‘Silvia doesn’t know that Juan is coming-IND/SUBJ’ Silvia no se ha enterado de que Juan viene/venga ‘Silvia hasn’t found out that Juan is coming-IND/SUBJ’

Examples (7)-(9) show that both indicative and subjunctive clauses are possible in these environments. The difference between the two relates to speaker attitude: indicative clauses show speaker

238 / MARK JARY acceptance of the proposition expressed by the complement clause, while this acceptance is not indicated by the subjunctive cases. So, (7) with an indicative complement indicates that while Silvia does not believe that Juan is coming, the speaker does (de Bustos and Aliaga, 1996: 29–31; Quer, 2001: 91). With a negative complement, however, the speaker gives no indication that he accepts the embedded proposition. When the verb relates to knowledge or knowledge acquisition, as in (8) and (9), the choice of an indicative complement not only indicates that the speaker accepts the embedded proposition, but also that its truth is not at issue. In other words, the indicative in these cases marks the proposition expressed as presupposed. The subjunctive versions of (8) and (9), however, do not presuppose the truth of the proposition expressed by the complement clause. This might seem odd to speakers of English, but a little consideration should show that even in English knowledge-related predicates do not necessarily presuppose the proposition expressed by the complement clause. For example, in (10) it is not presupposed that the addressee has won the lottery. (10) You look pleased. Have you just found out that you’ve won the lottery? (10) illustrates the point that English knowledge-related predicates, in negative and interrogative sentences, though compatible with the truth of the proposition expressed by the complement, do not entail it. In Spanish the facts are different: an indicative complement entails the proposition expressed, a subjunctive does not.2 A speaker cannot deny that she knows or believes that P and simultaneously acknowledge the truth of P. Consequently, if the matrix verb is first-person, the fact that an indicative complement to a mentalstate verb indicates speaker acceptance of the proposition expressed by that complement should rule out the indicative when the main verb is negated. And indeed, this is the case: as (11) and (12) show, when the matrix clause is in the present, indicative complements are ungrammatical in first-person cases, the only exception being instances of echoic use, in which the proposition expressed by the complement clause is as ‘a quasi-literal mention of the words by the speaker or as an immediate answer to a previous assertion’ (Aliaga and de Bustos, 2002: 141). When the matrix clause is in the past, though, the indicative is 2 This is a well-established feature of Spanish (Rivero, 1971; Terrell and Hooper, 1974; Terrell, 1976; Guitart, 1991; Mejıás-Bikandi, 1994, 1995).


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acceptable, for the speaker can reasonably indicate that she accepts that the proposition expressed by that clause while also denying that she found out about this at some point in the past. (13) illustrates this point. (11) No creo que Juan *viene/venga ‘I don’t believe that Juan is coming-*IND/SUBJ’ (12) No se´ que Juan *viene/venga ‘I don’t know that Juan is coming-*IND/SUBJ’ (13) No me entere´ de que Juan venıá/viniera ‘I didn’t find out that Juan was coming-IND/SUBJ’ 9.2.2

Verbs of Desire and Associated Speech-Act Verbs

These obligatorily take a subjunctive complement: (14) Quiero que te vayas ‘I want you to go-SUBJ’ (15) Silvia quiere que Juan se vaya ‘Silvia wants Juan to go-SUBJ’ (16) Silvia manda a Juan que se vaya ‘Silvia orders Juan to go-SUBJ’ 9.2.3

Verbs Reporting Reactions to a State of Affairs

In this group, I include verbs that describe emotional reactions to, and judgments made concerning, a state of affairs. Examples are: (17) Me gusta que me traten bien ‘I like it that people treat-SUBJ me well’ (18) Siento que no hayas aprobado ‘I’m sorry that you have-SUBJ not passed’ (19) Silvia se alegra de que Juan este´ aquı´ ‘Silvia is happy that Juan is-SUBJ here’ (20) Es raro que Juan este´ aquı´ ‘It’s strange that Juan is-SUBJ here’ (21) No es justo que Juan este´ aquı´ ‘It’s not fair that Juan is-SUBJ here’ These verbs are often discussed under the heading of ‘factiveemotives’, as it was generally held that the sentences in which they serve as the main verb entail the proposition expressed by the subordinate clause. However, it has been pointed out by Quer (1998) that this is not always the case. For example, (17) does not entail that

240 / MARK JARY the speaker has been treated well on any particular occasion, just that she likes to be treated in this way, in general. What is crucial for a factive reading, Quer points out, is an episodic interpretation. Thus, if we force such a reading by transposing (17) to the past, with a perfective main-verb form, the proposition expressed by the complement clause is indeed entailed: (22) Me gusto´ que me tratasen bien ‘I liked it that they treated-SUBJ me well’ These verbs tend to take the subjunctive, regardless of a polarity, though we will see in Section 9.4.7 that certain discourse and syntactic considerations can license the indicative. 9.2.4

Causative Predicates

I include under this heading clear causatives such as ‘evitar’ (‘avoid’) and ‘conseguir’ (‘manage to’) and verbs of helping and letting such as ‘ayudar’ (‘help’) and ‘dejar’ (‘allow’, ‘let’). The examples are from Quer (1998: 46–50): (23) Evito´ que los estudiantes le engan ãran ‘He stopped the students deceiving-SUBJ him’ (24) Consiguio´ que todos sus alumnos aprobasen ‘He managed to ensure that all of his pupils passed-SUBJ’ (25) La acreditacioń ayudo´ a que cada profesional conociera mejor su labor ‘The accreditation helped each professional to understand-SUBJ his/her job better’ (26) Dejo´ que los alumnos saliesen antes ‘She let the pupils go-SUBJ out early’ These verbs obligatorily take a subjunctive complement. 9.2.5

Communication Verbs

Many verbs relating to communication can take either an indicative or a subjunctive complement, the interpretation differing in each case. If an indicative complement is present, then the interpretation is one on which the speaker is reporting or describing an assertive speech act. A subjunctive complement, by contrast, relates to a directive act. Moreover, a subjunctive can coerce a directive reading even when the verb relates to a mental act, such as ‘decidir’ (‘decide’). This


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phenomenon is discussed in some detail by Ahern and Leonetti (2004), from where the following examples are taken: (27) a. Dice que pones mucha sal ‘S/he says that you put-IND a lot of salt in’ b. Dice que pongas mucha sal ‘S/he tells you to put-SUBJ a lot of salt in’ (28) a. He pensado que pones mucha sal ‘I thought you put-IND a lot of salt in’ b. He pensado que pongas mucha sal ‘I’ve decided that you should put-SUBJ a lot of salt in’ As Ahern and Leonetti point out, this phenomenon occurs across an entire group of verbs, such as ‘gritar’ (‘shout’), ‘escribir’ (‘write’), ‘repitir’ (‘write’), ‘indicar’ (‘indicate’) and ‘advirtir’ (‘notify’). Lexical ambiguity is ruled out by the observation that verbs such as these may take coordinated complements of opposing moods, as (29) (Ahern and Leonetti’s (11)) shows. Consequently, any account of Spanish mood alternation needs to be able to explain its effects in this type of case. (29) Avisa que viene el tren a su hora y que vaya el taxi a recogerle ‘S/he says that the train is coming-IND on time and for the taxi to go-SUBJ and collect him/her’ 9.2.6

Restrictive Relative Clauses

The most robust observation that has been made about mood selection in relative clauses is that subjunctive relatives are generally licensed by a range of intensional linguistic contexts, and that the proposition expressed by the subjunctive relative falls under the scope of that operator. Examples of the intensional contexts in which subjunctives are found include predicates of desire such as ‘querer’ (‘want’), negation, future tense, interrogatives, conditionals and imperatives. These are illustrated by (30)-(35), which are adapted from Quer (1998: 105–106): (30) Quiero mandarle regalos que le hagan feliz ‘I want to send him/her gifts that make-SUBJ him/her happy’ (31) No le envıó regalos que le hagan triste ‘I don’t send him/her gifts that make-SUBJ him/her sad’ (32) Le mandare´ regalos que le sorprendan ‘I’ll send him/her gifts that will surprise-SUBJ him/her’ (33) ¿Le mandas regalos que le entretengan? ‘Do you send him/her gifts that entertain-SUBJ him/her?’

242 / MARK JARY (34) Si le mandas regalos que le hagan feliz ‘If you send him/her gifts that make-SUBJ him/her happy’ (35) Mańdale regalos que le hagan feliz ‘Send him/her gifts that make-SUBJ him happy’ In the absence of an intensional context, a subjunctive restrictive relative clause is ungrammatical. This is not to say, though, that such contexts necessarily select a subjunctive relative: indicatives are also possible: (36) Quiero casarme con un ‘I want to marry a boy (37) Quiero casarme con un ‘I want to marry a boy

chico que tiene ojos azules who has-IND blue eyes’ chico que tenga ojos azules who has-SUBJ blue eyes’

As will be seen in Section 9.4.10, mood choice here relates to the existence of the referent of the NP modified by the relative clause.

9.2.7

Discourse Factors

Information-structure considerations also play a role in the choice of mood in Spanish. For example, Krakusin and Ceden õ (1992) show that mood selection after ‘el hecho de que’ (‘the fact that’) depends on whether the clause comes early or late in the sentence, suggesting that the choice is determined by whether the proposition expressed by the subjunctive clause is new or old information, the former being expressed by the indicative. (38) and (39) are examples from the Google corpus. (38) El hecho de que un cigarrillo sea denominado como bajo en brea o nicotina no significa que el cigarrillo contenga menos nicotina3 ‘The fact that a cigarette is-SUBJ described as low in tar or nicotine does not mean that the cigarette contains less nicotine’ (39) En Microsoft, nunca perdemos de vista el hecho de que nuestro éxito depende del suyo4 ‘At Microsoft, we never lose sight of the fact that our success depends-IND on yours’ 3

Example taken from website of Centers for Control and Prevention, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on 16 December 2002 (http://www.cdc.gov/spanish/ tabaco/nodejaque.htm). 4 Example taken from Microsoft Website on 16 December 2002 (http:// www.microsoft.com/colombia/isv/downs/guia_rapida.doc). Link no longer active.


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Further examples of mood alternation motivated by similar concerns are provided by Lunn (1989a, b, 1992). She points in particular to the habit of journalists of using the past subjunctive ‘ra’ form in relative clauses where the information is assumed to be known to a readership. The clearest cases are when information given in a headline is repeated in the text of an article. Consider the following, which Lunn (1989b: 252) cites from the magazine Hola (26 October 1985): (40) a. Headline: La bandera que beso´ es la que, en su dıá, tambień beso´ el Rey don Juna Carlos, y bordo su tatarabuela la Reina dona Maria Cristina ‘The flag that he kissed is the one that one day King Juan Carlos also kissed-IND and his great-grandmother Queen Marıá Cristina embroidered-IND’ b. Text: Y, al final beso´ la bandera roja y gualda que hace treinta an õs besara su padre el Rey y que un dıá bordara su tatarabula la Reina don ã Marıá Cristina ‘And, at the end, he kissed the red and gold flag that his father the King kissed-SUBJ thirty years ago, and that his greatgrandmother Queen Marıá Cristina once embroidered-SUBJ’ This is a clear example of already available information being marked as such by the use of the subjunctive, but Lunn also points out that the information thus marked need not be present in the co-text: it is often enough that the writer assumes it to be known to her readers for her to opt for the subjunctive.

9.3

The Assertive/Non-Assertive Approach

One very influential account of mood alternation in Spanish is that of Terrell and Hooper (Terrell and Hooper, 1974; Hooper, 1975; Terrell, 1976). According to this account, mood selection is motivated by an association between the indicative mood and assertion. The appeal of this claim is that assertion is closely related to the phenomena associated with mood choice in Spanish: truth commitment and discourse prominence. We have seen that the use of the indicative in the complements of mental-state verbs is associated with commitment to the truth of the proposition expressed being either undertaken by the speaker or attributed to the subject of the main clause; and we have also seen how levels of discourse prominence can be indicated by mood choice, the subjunctive being associated with backgrounded or

244 / MARK JARY ‘old’ information. Moreover, there is syntactic evidence for Terrell and Hooper’s analysis in that predicates that they class as assertive, and which can therefore take the indicative, tend to allow what they call ‘complement proposing’, the effect of this being to foreground the proposition expressed by the indicative clause, giving it ‘main-point status’. Thus, (1) and (2) can be expressed as (41) and (42):5 (41) Juan viene, creo ‘Juan is coming-IND, I think’ (42) Juan viene, cree Silvia ‘Juan is coming-IND, Silvia thinks’ The fact that the subjunctive is associated with propositions that are presented as unrealised (as when they are expressed by the complements of directive speech-act verbs) also lends support to the assertivity thesis. However, the assertivity account is not without problems, one of these being its predictions concerning presupposition. Presupposition is generally contrasted with assertion, some even arguing that certain phenomena that are traditionally called presuppositional should be relabelled ‘non-assertions’ (Abbott, 2000). The assertivity thesis therefore predicts that presupposed propositions should be expressed by a subjunctive clause. Hooper and Terrell find some support for this in that the so-called ‘factive-emotives’ often presuppose the proposition expressed by their complements. As we have seen, though, knowledge and knowledge-acquisition predicates can also either presuppose or not the proposition expressed by the complement clause. But in these cases, presupposition is indicated not by the subjunctive, but by the indicative. We have, then, a putative form of non-assertion being associated with the subjunctive in some linguistic environments (the ‘factive-emotives’) and the indicative in others (knowledge and acquisition-of-knowledge verbs) (cf. Guitart, 1991). Terrell’s (1976) response to this observation is to point out that these verbs do allow, in the positive form, complement proposing. Thus, (5) and (6) can be re-expressed as (43) and (44): (43) Juan viene, me he enterado ‘Juan is coming-IND, I have found out’ (44) Juan viene, se ha enterado Silvia ‘Juan is coming-IND, Silvia has found out’ 5

In this observation, Terrell and Hooper build on an earlier insight by Bolinger (1968).


TO THE


At this point, though, we must ask what the term ‘assertive’ is intended to describe: a set of predicates that allow complement proposing, or a semantic feature underlying that ability? If the former is the case, then the term ‘assertive’ might as well be dropped, for cases such as (43) and (44) show that predicates which demonstrate a semantic characteristic generally associated with non-assertion allow this transformation. If the latter is the case, then we are entitled to request a definition of assertion. The most explicit we find is the following: We use the term ASSERTION loosely to mean a proposition expressed in a declarative sentence. More, specifically, the speaker claims the proposition which he has announced to be true to the best of his knowledge. An assertion is a claim to truth which, on at least one reading, may be taken to be the semantically dominant proposition in the discourse context. [ . . . ] Assertions may also be indirect; that is, we may report the assertions of others and describe the way in which the assertion was reported to us. (Terrell, 1976: 224)

This characterisation of assertion makes false predictions about the correct mood choice for the complements of causative predicates such as (26). In such cases, the speaker is committed to the truth of the proposition that the pupils went out early, yet this is not presupposed: the negation of (26) does not have this entailment. Moreover, it could be argued that the speaker’s main point was that the students had left early, making this the ‘semantically dominant proposition in the discourse context’.6 (26) Dejo´ que los alumnos saliesen antes ‘She let the pupils go-SUBJ out early’ It is not enough simply to say that the speaker of (26) does not assert the proposition expressed by the subjunctive clause unless one can say in what sense she does not assert it, and Terrell and Hooper’s account does not suggest any grounds on which it could be argued that the proposition expressed by the subjunctive clause is not, on their terms, asserted. Thus while their account has significant intuitive appeal, the pre-theoretic notion of assertion that they employ is not up to the job of explaining what elements of meaning determine mood 6 That causatives can present the proposition expressed by the complement as the main point can be shown by the use of ‘conseguir’ (‘manage to’): an utterance such as ‘Conseguimos que se fueran’ (‘We managed to get them to leave-SUBJ’) is generally intuited to communicate ‘They left’ and ‘We caused this to happen with some difficultly’, the former being felt to be the main point of the utterance.

246 / MARK JARY choice in Spanish. In the next section, I will present and apply an account that meets this challenge.

9.4

A Relevance-Theory Account of the Indicative Mood

In this section, I present an account of the encoded meaning of the indicative/subjunctive contrast that is grounded in a cognitive theory of utterance interpretation: Sperber and Wilson’s (1986/1995) relevance theory. This theory views utterance interpretation in terms of the cognitive processes involved in the identification, by the hearer, of the speaker’s meaning. The fundamental idea is that linguistic communication is a form of ostensive-inferential communication. Utterances are seen as stimuli which present themselves as worthy of the hearer’s attention. Because of their overt nature, the hearer is justified in assuming that the first interpretation he arrives at that justifies the effort he has expended is the one that the speaker intended, as long as this is consistent with the speaker’s preferences and competence. In processing an utterance in this way, the hearer is said to be guided by considerations of relevance, this being a matter of optimising effort and effect. The claim I want to make about the indicative is that its use indicates that the speaker’s intended meaning can be inferred by employing the proposition expressed by that clause as a premise in a context formed of assumptions available to the hearer prior to the utterance. The subjunctive differs from the indicative in that it gives no such indication. Consequently, the contribution towards the relevance of an utterance made by a proposition expressed by a subjunctive clause is indicated to be less direct than that made by the proposition expressed by an indicative. The basic claim to be made can thus be stated quite succinctly: Claim: The indicative, uniquely, presents the proposition expressed as relevant in its own right.

What will take time is explaining this claim and spelling out its implications. To do this, I need to draw distinctions between:

a proposition simply being relevant and its being relevant in its own right;

factual and non-factual contexts;

consistency-aiming and non-consistency-aiming assumptions.

A COGNITIVE APPROACH 9.4.1

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Relevance versus a Proposition’s Relevance in its Own Right

The claim being made is that the indicative is unique in presenting the proposition expressed as potentially relevant in its own right. It is therefore necessary to be clear about the distinction between a relevant proposition and one which is relevant in its own right. Consider the inference (45): (45) If Peter tells Mary that her dress looks nice, she’ll dance with him Peter is telling Mary that her dress looks nice Mary will dance with him Given an initial context consisting of only the first premise in (45), the addition of the second premise results in the conclusion that Mary will dance with Peter. The proposition ‘Peter is telling Mary her dress looks nice’ is thus relevant in this (very simple) context. This second premise, however, contains two propositions: ‘Peter is telling Mary that her dress looks nice’ and ‘Mary’s dress looks nice’. Only the first of these is relevant in its own right, for only this proposition serves as a premise. However, it would be wrong to say that the embedded proposition was irrelevant, as without it, the embedding proposition would have no effect. The embedded proposition makes a contribution to relevance, therefore, but not in its own right. The distinction between a proposition contributing directly to relevance in its own right and making an indirect contribution to utterance meaning is crucial to an understanding of the different roles that propositional forms can play in linguistic communication. Utterances convey a range of propositions, some of which may play a direct role in the derivation of contextual effects, and others of which may not. Consider (46) (capitals mark focal stress): (46) a. JOHN gave Peter a lift b. Someone gave Peter a lift (46b) is implied by (46a), but in a context in which (46b) is present prior to the utterance (i.e. one which would justify this stress pattern), its implications will have been derived prior to the utterance, the consequence being that it can have no further effect in that context. However, the premises involved in utterance interpretation are not abstract entities that can be supplied cost free. Rather, supplying the contextual assumptions necessary to interpret the utterance involves effort on the hearer’s part. Any means the speaker can use to facilitate the selection of the appropriate contextual assumptions will thus contribute indirectly towards the relevance of the utterance. And it is

248 / MARK JARY in just this way that (46b) can be relevant. For example, assume (47) is common ground: (47) The person who gave Peter a lift probably murdered him. Making accessible the assumption that someone gave Peter a lift will also make (47) more accessible and thereby facilitate the derivation of the implication that John probably killed Peter. Thus, in the utterance of (46a), two propositions play very different roles: (46b) activates a context in which the proposition expressed by (46a) is relevant. Both propositions contribute to overall relevance, but only (46a) contributes directly to the relevance of the utterance. Any implications that follow from (46b) were available to the listener before the utterance took place. It can therefore be said that the proposition expressed by (46a) is relevant in its own right, while (46b) is not, even though it makes a contribution to the overall relevance of the utterance.7 That is one way a proposition can contribute towards the relevance of an utterance without being relevant in its own right. To see another, consider an utterance of (48a) used to communicate (48b). (48) a. Stand up! b. The speaker wants the hearer to stand up As Carston (2002: 120) points out, the proposition expressed by (48a) (that the hearer stand up) makes no direct contribution to the relevance of the utterance. Rather, relevance is achieved by the communication of a higher-order explicature such as (48b). Like the implicit proposition (46b), then, the proposition explicitly expressed by an utterance of (48a) makes an indirect contribution to the relevance of the utterance. There are thus two ways that a proposition can contribute towards the relevance of an utterance without being relevant in its own right: either by making more accessible contextual assumptions that were available to the hearer prior to the utterance, or by serving as a constituent of a complex proposition such as (48b). As we will see in Section 9.4.6, though, embedding does not necessarily preclude a proposition from being relevant in its own right in a context accessible to the hearer. 7 For a relevance-theory account of contrastive stress, in which the notion of relevance in its own right is employed, see Wilson and Sperber (1979) and Sperber and Wilson (1986/1995: 202–217).

A COGNITIVE APPROACH 9.4.2

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Factual and Embedded Contexts

Sperber and Wilson posit two types of propositional mental representation. The most basic type is a factual assumption. Mental representations of this type are, by virtue of their format alone, treated as true by the mind. As Sperber and Wilson put it: ‘a fundamental propositional attitude of belief or assumption is pre-wired into the very architecture of the mind. As a result, a representation can be entertained as an assumption without the fact that it is an assumption being explicitly expressed’ (1986/1995: 74). The second type of mental representation they posit is an assumption that is embedded in a factual assumption. Unlike factual assumptions, these are not necessarily treated as true, and they need not represent the actual world, but may represent, for example, the beliefs of others, the content of a fiction, premises assumed for the sake of arguments, plans or desires. Call these ‘embedded assumptions’. These two types of assumptions – factual and embedded – allow for two types of contexts in which a proposition can be presented by a speaker as relevant: a factual context and an embedded context. A factual context is made up of factual assumptions, i.e. assumptions of the type that constitute the individual’s basic representation of the world. An embedded context is one formed of embedded assumptions. Clearly, some contexts will contain both types of assumptions: for example, when reading a novel we rely on factual assumptions we have about the world as well as non-factual assumptions concerning the plot, characters, etc. I will assume, though, that in such cases any conclusion drawn from inferences involving more than one type of assumption will be entertained as assumptions of the most embedded type. This may be an idealisation, but it is not one that will have significant consequences in this paper. 9.4.3

Consistency-Aiming and Non-Consistency-Aiming Assumptions

Factual assumptions can serve as the individual’s representation of the world because they aim at consistency. If one factual assumption contradicts another, then the less weakly held of the pair must be cancelled (Sperber and Wilson, 1986/1995: 114). Consistency is a means of preserving truth, and so the goal of consistency is a requirement of any propositional system of world representation. Some embedded assumptions also aim at consistency: for example, embedded assumptions representing the beliefs of another individual. In such a case, though, the consistency of that set of assumptions is not aiming at truth, but accurate representation of a representation. Of course, if that representation

250 / MARK JARY is accurate, then the factual assumptions in which the non-factual assumptions are embedded will be true, but the embedded assumptions themselves need not be. (This is just another way of saying that the truth of a belief report does not depend on the truth of its sentential complement.) It is not the case, though, that no embedded assumptions aim at truth. A conjecture, for example, is an embedded assumption, yet it aims at truth. Finally, not all embedded mental representations of states of affairs aim at consistency. Consistency is not a requirement of desires, for example: one can have incompatible desires. Having such desires leads to dilemmas, but not irrationality, as would be the case if one held incompatible beliefs. Consequently, a factual assumption that ascribes a desire to an individual will contain as an element an embedded representation that does not aim at consistency. Importantly, nonconsistency-aiming mental representations cannot serve as premises in inference, which precludes them both from serving as contextual assumptions and from being relevant in their own right. This taxonomy of assumption types is summarised in Figure 1: In sum: because factual assumptions are truth-aiming, they aim also at consistency. Of those embedded, non-factual assumptions that also aim at consistency, only some, such as conjecture, aim at truth. Consistency is a means of representing a particular world: in the case of factual assumptions, it is the actual world that is represented, while non-factual consistency-aiming assumptions can represent either the Mental representation

Non-factual (embedded)

Factual assumption (consistency & truth aiming)

Consistency-aiming

Truth-aiming assumptions

Non-truth-aiming assumptions

FIGURE 1 Types of assumptions.

Non-consistency-aiming mental representations


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actual world (in which case they are truth-aiming), another particular world (e.g. a fictional world) or another representation of the actual (or another particular) world (such as the beliefs of another individual). Non-consistency-aiming mental representations can neither serve as representations of particular worlds nor as contextual assumptions. Before applying this framework to the data on the mood selection in Spanish, it will be helpful to relate this use of possible worlds to that of Stalnaker (1978/1999), so that a comparison can later be made between the current account and certain formal semantic accounts of mood that have been put forward. Stalnaker claims that an assertion is potentially informative about the nature of the actual world because its acceptance results in the removal of possible worlds from the context set, i.e. the set of candidates for actual world. The set of assumptions in a relevance-theory type of context, factual or not, will pick out a set of candidate possible worlds. If the context is truth-aiming, then these will be candidates for the actual world. If not, they will be candidates for another world (e.g. a fictional world or an individual’s ‘belief world’). However, these candidate possible worlds are not represented, in the sense intended here, by the assumptions that pick them out. Rather, they are candidates for the particular world that is represented by those assumptions: they are ways that the world, or the world view, that is represented might be. Thus while relevance-theory type assumptions are propositional, they are representations by virtue of their functional role in the model of the mind, not by virtue of their propositionhood alone. Stalnaker’s model, however, posits no type of propositional form, dealing only with propositions as functions from possible worlds to truth values. It thus operates at a higher level of abstraction than relevance theory.8

9.4.4

Predictions

Having now drawn the distinctions that are crucial to the following analysis, we can return to the claim made at the beginning of this section and consider its predictions. The claim, recall, is that the Spanish indicative, uniquely, presents the proposition expressed as relevant in its own right. From this claim, we can derive two predictions: Prediction 1: When an intended interpretation relies on a proposition being employed as a source of contextual effects in 8 For a more detailed comparison of relevance theory and Stalnakerian contexts, see Jary (Forthcoming).

252 / MARK JARY its own right, the indicative will be used to express that proposition. Prediction 2: Where Spanish allows alternation between the indicative and the subjunctive, the difference in interpretation should be explainable in terms of the indicative presenting the proposition expressed as potentially relevant in its own right.

We will now test these predictions by relating them to the data presented in Section 9.2. 9.4.5

Verbs of Desire and Associated Speech-Act Verbs

Verbs of desire, such as ‘querer’ (‘want’), and associated speech-act verbs, such as ‘mandar’ (‘order’), express or report desires, or report speech acts that express desire. The propositional object of sentence such as (15) is therefore a non-consistency-aiming representation. Consequently, its object cannot be presented as relevant in its own right in any context, embedded or otherwise. It is therefore no surprise, on the current account, that the subjunctive is selected in these cases. (15) Silvia quiere que Juan se vaya ‘Silvia wants Juan to go-SUBJ’ 9.4.6

Mental-State Verbs

We noted that affirmative mental-state verbs such as ‘creer’ (‘believe’) and ‘saber’ (‘know’) obligatorily take indicative complements. This is to be expected on the present account, as the proposition expressed by that complement is presented as potentially relevant in its own right in an embedded context, that context being formed of assumptions that are part of a representation of the world according to the subject of the matrix verb. Thus, (2) presents the proposition that Juan is coming as relevant in a context formed of embedded assumptions representing Silvia’s beliefs. (2)

Silvia cree que Juan viene ‘Silvia believes that Juan is coming-IND’

Recall, though that negative third-person uses of such verbs can take either an indicative or a subjunctive complement. In ‘believe’-type cases, use of the indicative signals speaker commitment to the proposition expressed by the complement clause. This is explained on the current account as follows: regardless of mood choice, a negative third-person ‘believe’ sentence denies that the proposition expressed by


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the complement clause is relevant in a context formed of embedded assumptions representing the subject’s world view; an indicative complement, however, indicates that the proposition expressed is relevant in its own right; this creates a potential contradiction which is avoided by assuming that the proposition is potentially relevant in another accessible context, i.e. the hearer’s representation of the speaker’s world view. In negative third-person knowledge or acquisition-of-knowledge type cases (e.g. ‘enterarse’ (‘to find out’)), though, use of an indicative complement indicates more than this, due to the potential factive nature of these predicates. We noted above that a factive reading results in such cases only if the complement is indicative. This can be explained as follows: again, such sentences deny that the proposition expressed is relevant in its own right in an embedded context that constitutes a representation of the subject’s world view. However, there are two possible reasons for this: it may be that there is no fact to be known, or there may be such a fact, but the subject is ignorant of it. If there is a fact to be known, then this is a proposition expressing this fact potentially relevant in its own right in a factual context, and, on the current account, we would therefore expect the indicative to be used. This potentiality will only be fulfilled if the hearer is also ignorant of the fact, but it is crucial that the potentiality be marked regardless of this consideration. Failure to do so would indicate an absence of this potentiality, an absence that could be explained by the assumption that the speaker did not wish to commit herself to the truth of the proposition expressed, resulting in a non-factive reading. The use of the subjunctive in negative third-person knowledge or acquisition-ofknowledge type cases, as predicted, has just this effect. 9.4.7

Verbs Reporting Reactions to a State of Affairs

As was noted above, verbs reporting reactions to a state of affairs are often called ‘factive-emotives’ on the mistaken view that they are always factive. In truth, we noted, factivity results in some case only if the reading is episodic. Along with a number of other authors (Bosque, 1990; Heim, 1992; Giorgi and Pianesi, 1997; Quer, 1998), I think that the key to understanding these cases is the causal nature of the relationship between the state of affairs described by the complement clause and the consequence described by the matrix verb. Where there is a causal relationship, neither the cause nor the consequence is relevant in its own right; rather relevance lies in the complex proposition that expresses that causal relationship. Moreover, there is

254 / MARK JARY evidence that, in Spanish, the subjunctive can be used to force a reading on which the causal relationship is processed as single unit. Consider, for example, the following data from Lunn (1992): (49) El mundo no va dejar de girar porque me hayan dado el Nobel (remark attributed to Camilo Jose´ Cela by Lunn) ‘The world’s not going to stop turning because they have-SUBJ given me the Nobel’ According to Lunn, the motivation for the use of the subjunctive in (49) is modesty: by expressing in the subjunctive mood the fact that he has won the Nobel Prize, Cela downplays its importance. Although this can be explained by the hypothesis that the subjunctive marks information as not presented as relevant in its own right (in terms of the use of the indicative subjunctive contrast as a marker of discourse structure – see Section 9.4.11), there is another explanation of Cela’s choice of mood that Lunn does not consider, but which, I think, is more likely. The English translation of (49) is ambiguous (depending on intonation) between (50) and (51): (50) [Not[the world is going to stop turning]] because they’ve given me the Nobel (51) Not[the world is going to stop turning because they’ve given me the Nobel] In (50), that the world is not going to stop turning is presented as the result of Cela having been awarded the Nobel Prize, while in (51) the idea that the world could stop turning because he has been awarded a Nobel is denied. Clearly the latter is Cela’s intended meaning and the use of the subjunctive ensures that this is the only possible interpretation. On the current analysis: this is explained by the fact that the ‘because’-clause is in subjunctive mood means that the propositional form it represents must be treated as contributing to the relevance of the utterance as a constituent of a more complex representation, not as a relevant constituent in its own right. This analysis can be extended to the so-called ‘factive-emotives’: because the proposition expressed by the complement is presented as the cause of the reaction described by the matrix verb, it is not presented as relevant in its own right but as a constituent of a complex proposition. Note, though, that if the speaker does want to present the proposition expressed by the complement of a ‘factive-emotive’ as relevant in its own right, there are syntactic means for doing so, the ‘what’-cleft construction illustrated by (52) being an example. This


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utterance presents the proposition expressed by the ‘that’-clause as the main source of relevance (it is most acceptable in a situation in which it is known that the speaker is bothered by something, and just what bothers him is at issue). (52) What bothers me is that she doesn’t talk to me The present account predicts that the equivalent construction in Spanish should allow an indicative complement, as long as the interpretation of the non-clefted sentence is factive. If it is not, then the state of affairs described by the complement clause is unrealised and the proposition expressed is not potentially relevant in its own right. And indeed, this prediction is borne out. In the non-clefted version of (53a), only the subjunctive is acceptable, while the clefted version allows both complements. (53) a. Me molesta que ella no me hable/*habla ‘It bothers me that she doesn’t talk-SUBJ/*IND to me’ b. Lo que me molesta es que ella no me hable/habla ‘What bothers me is that she doesn’t talk-SUBJ/IND to me’ However, in the case of an unrealised state of affairs being described by the complement clause, the subjunctive is the only option in both the standard and clefted cases (these examples are based on Quer, 1998: 101). This is predicted on the current account, for a representation of an unrealised state cannot be relevant in its own right. (54) a. Prefiero que no me hable/*habla ‘I prefer for her not to talk-SUBJ/*IND to me’ b. Lo que prefiero es que ella no me hable/*habla-SUBJ/*IND ‘What I prefer is for her not to talk-SUBJ/*IND to me’

9.4.8

Causative Predicates

The hypothesis that the subjunctive is chosen for complement clauses when there is a causal relationship is further supported by the fact that causative predicates mandatorily select the subjunctive. This applies both to clear causatives such as ‘evitar’ (‘avoid’) and ‘conseguir’ (‘manage’) and verbs of helping and letting such as ‘ayudar’ (‘help’) and ‘dejar’ (‘allow’, ‘let’) (Quer, 1998: 46–50): (55) El profesor evito´ que los estudiantes le engan ãran ‘The teacher stopped the students deceiving-SUBJ him’

256 / MARK JARY (56) Consiguio´ que todos sus alumnos aprobasen ‘He managed to ensure that all of his pupils passed-SUBJ’ (57) La acreditacioń ayudo´ a que cada profesional conociera mejor su labor ‘The accreditation helped each professional to understand-SUBJ his/her job better’ (58) Dejo´ que los alumnos saliesen antes ‘She let the pupils go-SUBJ out early’ But while providing some support for the present analysis, this type of construction also provides a challenge, as the proposition expressed by the complement clause is potentially relevant in its own right: the speaker of any one of (55)-(58) could intend both the proposition expressed by the complement clause (e.g. that the students got out early, in (58)) and the complex proposition in which it is embedded to result in contextual effects. Moreover, there is no requirement that the proposition expressed by the complement clause be common ground and, unlike in the case of the factive-emotives, there is no option to shift to the indicative if the speaker wishes to emphasise the relevance in its own right of the complement. This raises, then, a problem: the prediction is that the propositions expressed by the complement of such verbs, due to their being expressed by a clause with a subjunctive verb form, should not be relevant in their own right. The data, however, are inconsistent with this hypothesis. A solution to this problem is to suggest that the complements of these constructions are processed in a different way to those which have an indicative complement. It could be the case that, rather than automatically processing the proposition expressed by the complement for relevance in an accessible context, in these causative constructions the system processes only the indicative main clause and derives the proposition expressed by the complement as an entailment. Thus, in processing an utterance containing an indicative complement, such as (6) (repeated below), the system will blindly seek to derive effects both from the complex proposition expressed by the whole utterance, and from the embedded proposition, devoting most resources to that which provides greatest effects. In processing an utterance such as those exemplified by (55)-(58), by contrast, the system will seek to derive effects only from the proposition expressed by the whole clause, one effect being the derivation of the proposition expressed by the embedded clause. (6)

Silvia se ha enterado de que Juan viene ‘Silvia found out that Juan is coming-IND’


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There are two factors which lend support to this view. First, unlike other predicates which entail their complements, the truth of the complement of a causative results from the relationship between the embedding predicate and its complement. Compare (59) and (60), both of which entail (61): (59) Pedro sabıá que Juan habıá mentido ‘Peter knew that John had-IND lied’ (60) Pedro hizo que Juan mintiera ‘Peter made John lie-SUBJ’ ´ (61) Juan mintio ‘John lied-IND’ While the speaker of (59) is not claiming any dependency between Peter being in a state of knowing and John’s having lied, the speaker of (60) is indeed claiming a dependency between the proposition expressed by that utterance and that expressed by (61). In other words, the entailment relationship is distinct in each case. This can be seen most clearly by comparing their negations: (62) Pedro no sabıá que Juan habıá/hubiera mentido ‘Peter didn’t know whether/that John had-IND/SUBJ lied’ (63) Pedro no hizo que Juan mintiera ‘Peter didn’t make John lie-SUBJ’ As noted in Section 9.2.1, (62) has the possibility of an indicative complement, in which case the speaker is committed to (61). With the subjunctive complement, by contrast, the commitment to (61) disappears, as it does with (63) (which is not to say that the truth of (61) is necessarily denied in these cases: there is simply a lack of linguistically determined speaker commitment). In other words, the clausal entailment of a positive knowledge or acquisition-of-knowledge verb has a life of its own, as evidenced by the fact that it can survive the negation of the embedding predicate (as indicated by the indicative mood). The complement of a causative, by contrast, is dependent on its embedding predicate for its survival as an entailment. This lends support to the view that the complements of positive causatives are not automatically processed as candidates for relevance in their own right but that, rather, the complex proposition is processed for relevance in its own right, and one way it achieves this is through the implications of the entailed embedded clause. The second factor in support of this hypothesis is the fact that the proposition to which the speaker is committed in the case of (55) is not

258 / MARK JARY that which is expressed by the complement clause (that the students deceived the teacher), but the negation of that proposition (that the students didn’t deceive the teacher). In this case, then, it cannot be claimed that the proposition expressed by the embedded clause is presented relevant in its own right. Rather, the proposition that the students did not deceive the teacher, though relevant in its own right, must be derived as an entailment. And once it is established that this is the case for (55), we are justified in assuming that it is the case for (56)-(58). On this analysis, while the proposition expressed by a causative can be relevant in its own right, it is not presented as such by the choice of mood. Consequently, these cases are not counterexamples to the claim that the indicative is unique in presenting the proposition expressed as relevant in its own right.

9.4.9

Communication Verbs

The challenge provided by communication verbs is to explain the effect of mood alternation, such that the choice of a subjunctive results in the sentence being interpreted as a report of a directive speech act or of an associated mental state. Ahern and Leonetti suggest that this phenomenon is best explained by positing that the contribution of the embedding predicate to utterance meaning is determined in part by mood choice, with the indicative resulting in an assertive reading of the predicate, the subjunctive in a directive reading. The process involved is suggested to be along the lines of contextually motivated conceptual adjustment discussed by Carston (2002). Procedural encoded information9 made available by the choice of mood, they argue, influences the conceptual representation that results from processing the embedding predicate. The key question that this account raises concerns just what procedure is encoded by mood. Ahern and Leonetti suggest that the procedural information encoded by the indicative is that the proposition expressed is an assertion, while the subjunctive encodes nonassertion. Unfortunately, Ahern and Leonetti do not offer an account of what ‘assertion’ means in this case, claiming that their main aim is not to argue that the subjunctive be treated as an indicator of non-asserted information. Rather, they say, it is to show that the subjunctive’s content is procedural. 9 On the procedural/conceptual distinction in relevance theory, see Blakemore (1987, 2004) and Wilson and Sperber (1993).


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The claim that the subjunctive encodes procedural information is worth making to the extent that (a) there are competing claims that it is conceptual; and/or (b) a description of the procedure encoded can be given. Ahern and Leonetti do not show that it is a commonly held view that the subjunctive is a case of conceptual encoding. As regards a description of the procedure given, throughout their paper they describe the subjunctive as indicating that the proposition expressed is not asserted, without ever defining what it is for a proposition to be asserted. They face, then, similar problems to those of Terrell and Hooper. In contrast, this paper puts forward precise claims concerning how the mood system contributes to the processing of utterances. On this account, what is encoded by mood is clearly non-conceptual. However, the term ‘procedural’ has been avoided for two reasons. First, a great number of linguistic forms have been discussed in these terms (determiners, tenses, pronouns, discourse particles and interjections) and employing the same term for mood might suggest a commonality that, while possible, would have to be shown. Second, in assigning a phenomenon a positive term (such as ‘procedural’) one is liable to think that something has been explained, when perhaps little has in fact been said; a negative term such as ‘non-conceptual’, by contrast, is a reminder that the nature of the phenomenon under examination is unknown and in need of further analysis. How, then, does the present account deal with cases such as (27) and (28) (repeated below)? (27) a. Dice que pones mucha sal ‘S/he says that you put-IND a lot of salt in’ b. Dice que pongas mucha sal ‘S/he tells you to put-SUBJ a lot of salt in’ (28) a. He pensado que pones mucha sal ‘I thought you put-IND a lot of salt in’ b. He pensado que pongas mucha sal ‘I’ve decided that you should put-SUBJ a lot of salt in’ In the cases where an indicative complement is chosen, the proposition expressed is potentially relevant in its own right and thus the report can safely be assumed to be a report of a consistency-aiming mental representation such as belief. When a subjunctive is used, the proposition expressed is not relevant in its own right and the inference that the attitude reported is belief-like is blocked. However, as Ahern and Leonetti point out, it is not immediately clear why a directive interpretation should follow. The subjunctive is also associated with

260 / MARK JARY possibility and doubt, for example. Why then, should (28), say, not receive an interpretation on which it is an expression of doubt? One possible solution to this question can be found by considering again the nature of linguistic communication. In acting ostensively, the speaker gives the hearer grounds to attribute to her a mental state on the basis of that behaviour. The basic mental attitudes are belief and desire. Belief is a consistency-aiming form of mental representation, desire is not. Consequently, the objects of desire reports cannot be relevant in their own right. On being presented with a report of an attitude towards a mental representation which is not relevant in its own right, the most accessible assumption is therefore likely to be that this is a report of an expression of a desire, for this is the most basic mental state associated with this type of non-consistency-aiming mental representation. This would explain the so-called suppletive use of the subjunctive exemplified by (64), on which it receives an imperative interpretation (see Silva-Villar, 1996, for a discussion of the suppletive/non-suppletive distinction):10 (64) a. ¡;Coma! Form: eatþ3SGþSUBJ; Use: second-person singular imperative, formal ‘Eat-SUBJ!’ b. ¡;Coman! Form: eatþ3PLþSUBJ; Use: second-person plural imperative, formal ‘Eat !’ c. ¡;No coman! Form: not eatþ3PLþSUBJ; Use: negative second-person plural imperative, formal ‘Don’t eat!’ The directive interpretation given to cases such as (64) results, on the current account, because the speaker has expressed a proposition using a form which marks it as not aiming at consistency. Not aiming at consistency is a feature of desire representations and hence the directive reading is highly accessible. This is not to say that the imperative use of this form is not now standardised, but rather to suggest what drove it 10 In Spanish, the subjunctive is used for all forms of the imperative except the positive second-person singular informal form (where the third-person singular present indicative form of the verb is used) and the positive second-person plural informal form (where the stem plus ‘-ad’, ‘-ed’ or ‘-id’ is used).


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to be standardised in this way. Similar considerations can reasonably be thought to underlie the directive interpretation of communication verbs with subjunctive complements as reporting desires and associated speech acts. 9.4.10

Non-Restrictive Relative Clauses11

In this section, I will show how the claim that the subjunctive marks the proposition expressed as not relevant in its own right is capable of explaining the difference in interpretation between cases such as (36) and (37): (36) Quiero casarme con un ‘I want to marry a boy (37) Quiero casarme con un ‘I want to marry a boy

chico que tiene ojos azules who has-IND blue eyes’ chico que tenga ojos azules who has-SUBJ blue eyes’

In terms of the referential/attributive distinction, the presence of the indicative in the relative clause of (36) requires a referential reading, while in (37) the subjunctive requires an attributive one. That is to say, in uttering (36) the speaker indicates that she has a particular blue-eyed boy in mind, while in uttering (37) she indicates that having blue eyes is a necessary feature that her future husband must have, whoever he turns out to be. It might be thought that the difference between (36) and (37) should be explained in terms of Donnellan’s (1966) referential/ attributive distinction. However, it has been shown that mood choice cannot be explained entirely in these terms (Rivero, 1975, 1977; Rojas, 1977). Rather, what (36) appears to communicate that (37) doesn’t is the implication that there exists a specific referent known to the speaker. This difference in interpretation is best captured in terms of scope differences. The logical forms of (36) and (37) can be represented as (65) and (66), respectively: (65) (x (boy(x) & blue eyes (x) & WANT (speaker, MARRY (speaker, x))) (66) WANT (speaker, [(x (boy(x) & blue eyes (x) & MARRY (speaker, x))]) The crucial difference is that the logical form for the subjunctive example (66) has the existential quantifier within the scope of the intensional operator, while the reverse is the case for (65). This is just the sort of result that is predicted by the current analysis, on which the proposition expressed by an indicative relative clause should be 11

Thanks to George Powell for useful discussions on this section.

262 / MARK JARY potentially relevant in its own right. A proposition’s being relevant in its own right entails that it must be able to have effects on a context independently of others communicated by the utterance, and this capacity is what the representation in (65) highlights. However, the data are not quite so neat, as can be seen when (67) is prefaced by the adverbial ‘por fin’ (‘finally’) to form (68):12 (67) He encontrado un libro que entiendo/*entienda ‘I have found a book I understand-IND/*SUBJ’ (68) Por fin he encontrado un libro que entienda ‘I have finally found a book I understand-SUBJ’ That the relative clause in (67) is acceptable in the indicative but not in the subjunctive is what one would expect given that one cannot find something that does not exist. The addition of ‘por fin’ (‘finally) in (68), though, licenses the subjunctive and adds another layer of meaning, namely that finding such a book was significantly desirable to the speaker. What is happening here, I suggest, is that there is a tension between the mood choice and the semantics of the embedding clause: one cannot, one the one hand, claim to have found something while, on the other, refusing to acknowledge that thing’s existence. This fact forces a specific reading of the modified noun phrase despite mood choice. However, mood choice still needs to be accounted for, and this can be done by deriving an implicature in which the proposition expressed by the subjunctive clause is not relevant in its own right. In the case of (68), this would be something like (69): (69) Deseaba un libro que entendiese ‘I wanted a book I could understand-SUBJ’ 9.4.11

Discourse Features

The information backgrounding effects of the Spanish subjunctive, as described in Section 9.2.7, can be explained straightforwardly on the present account. The subjunctive does not indicate that the proposition expressed is potentially relevant in its own right. Consequently, the assumptions activated in processing subjunctive clauses will not, under normal circumstances, be treated by the cognitive system as a potential source of contextual effects. Rather, their activation will make them available as potential contextual assumptions, members of a context in 12

(67) and (68) are based on examples discussed by Ahern and Leonetti (2004).


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which propositions marked – by being expressed by an indicative clause – as potentially relevant in their own right might be processed.13 9.4.12

Summary of Section 9.4

The predictions made at the start of this section have been confirmed. One prediction was that when an intended interpretation relies on a proposition being used as a source of contextual effects in its own right, the indicative will be used to express that proposition. This was shown to be the case with ‘believe’-type mental-state verbs: positive sentences present the proposition expressed by the indicative clause as relevant in its own right in a context formed of embedded assumptions. These are consistency-aiming assumptions and can therefore serve as a representation of the world view of the subject of the matrix sentence. Negations of these sentences can take either indicative or subjunctive complements: the former present the proposition expressed as relevant in its own right in a context constituting the hearer’s representation of the speaker’s view of the world. ‘Know’-type mental-state verbs differ in that the embedded proposition is presented as potentially relevant in its own right in a factual context. In causal predicates, of which the so-called ‘factive-emotives’ are a type, the relevance of the utterance lies in the effects of a complex proposition of which the proposition expressed by the complement clause is a constituent. Consequently, the proposition expressed by the embedded clause does not contribute to the relevance of the utterance in its own right, and it is no surprise, on the present account, to find this expressed by a subjunctive clause. Causal predicates and ‘factiveemotives’ differ, though, in the direction of causation: causal predicates present the subject of the matrix verb as the agent who has brought about the state of affairs described by the subordinate clause, while the ‘factive-emotives’ present the subject of the matrix verb as affected by the state of affairs (token, in episodic cases, type in episodic cases). Consequently, the negation of a causal predicate does not present the state of affairs described by the complement clause as having occurred, while the negation of a ‘factive-emotive’ allows that the state of affairs 13 Lunn has also suggested that relevance theory might be used to explain the discourse role of the indicative/subjunctive contrast in Spanish. However, she makes no use of the formal mechanisms of the framework, simply suggesting that in employing the subjunctive ‘a speaker licenses a hearer to pay a low degree of attention’ (Lunn, 1989b: 251). While there is some truth in this, I have shown here that much more can be said about the means by which this licence is granted.

264 / MARK JARY described by the complement clause occurred (if the reading is episodic) but denies that it causes the reaction predicated of the subject on the matrix verb. This is why ‘factive-emotives’ are often said to presuppose the proposition expressed by the complement clause. What is crucial for the current analysis, though, is that in neither case is the proposition expressed by the complement clause presented as relevant in its own right, which explains the preference for the subjunctive. The second prediction was that where Spanish allows alternation between the indicative and the subjunctive, the difference in interpretation should be explainable in terms of the indicative presenting the proposition expressed as potentially relevant in its own right. This has been confirmed by the negative mental-state verbs, the communication verbs, the restricted-relative clauses and the discourse features. In each case, an account has been given in which the interpretation of the indicative clause relies on the proposition being presented as potentially relevant in its own right.

9.5

Alternative Accounts

In this section, I briefly compare the present account with others that have been proposed to account for the indicative/non-indicative contrast, either in Spanish or other Romance languages. I divide these into three: versions of Hooper and Terrell’s assertivity account, worldlinking accounts and a model-shift account. 9.5.1

Versions of the Assertivity Account

Some researchers have attempted to modify or elaborate Hooper and Terrell’s account. What those who have taken this route see as problematic for the assertivity approach is that while the subjunctive appears to be associated with presupposition in certain cases, as the assertivity account would predict, in other cases supposedly presupposed propositions are expressed by an indicative clause. So, while the subjunctive complement in (19) is associated with the presupposition, according to these authors, of the proposition it expresses, it is the indicative clause which has this characteristic in (8), the subjunctive in this latter case indicating that the speaker does not undertake a commitment to the truth of the proposition expressed. (19) Silvia se alegra de que Juan este´ aquı´ ‘Silvia is happy that Juan is-SUBJ here’

A COGNITIVE APPROACH (8)

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Silvia no sabe que Juan viene/venga ‘Silvia doesn’t know that Juan is coming-IND/SUBJ’

Guitart’s (1991) proposed solution is to draw a distinction between semantic and pragmatic presupposition, the former being dependent on tests such as survival under negation and the latter depending on speaker-hearer assumptions about the background to the conversation and whether information is new to a hearer. Following Kempson (1975), Guitart argues that it is pragmatic presupposition that is mutually exclusive with assertion: a proposition which is semantically presupposed may be asserted, but a proposition must be either pragmatically asserted or pragmatically presupposed, never both. As an example of the assertion of a semantically presupposed proposition, Guitart offers (70) (his (14)): the fact that the bar is closed is clearly something the speaker assumes to be unknown to the hearer, and hence she might be said to be asserting this. However, this proposition counts as semantically presupposed, for it is preserved (remains entailed) under negation, as (71) shows. This only follows, as we have seen, if the mood of the embedded clause in the negated sentence is indicative. Thus the role of the indicative/subjunctive contrast on knowledge and acquisition-of-knowledge accounts, according to Guitart, is for distinguishing between ‘semantic presupposition and non-presupposition’ (1991: 191). (70) Note´ que el bar estaba cerrado: no te molestes en ir ‘I noticed that the bar was-IND closed, don’t bother to go’ (71) No note´ que el bar estaba cerrado ‘I didn’t notice that the bar was-IND closed’ However, Guitart offers no explanation why subjunctive complements such as those in (19), which are semantically presupposed according to him, cannot be pragmatically asserted. Rather, he argues that these form a distinct class of predicates (in that they do not relate to knowledge or its acquisition), and that an account of mood selection that holds across all matrix types should not be sought: ‘if our interest is to correlate mood choice both with meaning and with sentence use, we should analyse separately the different types of matrices that take sentential complements’ (1991: 191). Guitart, then, does not see as feasible an account of the indicative/subjunctive contrast that can explain mood choice across the range of cases. This is in contrast to the position taken in this paper, where just such an account has been put forward, though without the need to employ notions of assertion and presupposition as fundamentals.

266 / MARK JARY Another author who has attempted to maintain the link between assertivity and the indicative is Mejıás-Bikandi (1994, 1995, 1996, 1998). He differs from Guitart in that he seeks to explain complement choice in all predicates in which the indicative and subjunctive are found. He does this by adopting the mental spaces approach of Fauconnier (1985) and positing mental spaces that correspond to world views of individuals. These mental spaces can embed, so in the mental space corresponding to Mary’s world view, for example, there might be embedded a mental space corresponding to Mary’s view of Peter’s world view. Indicative complements, according to him, present the proposition expressed as part of the world view of the subject of the matrix clause, while subjunctives do not. On this view, negative mental-state verbs with an indicative complement present the proposition expressed by that complement as part of the mental space that constitutes the speaker’s world view. He treats cases such as (19) as cases in which the proposition is presented as already part of the common ground (‘logically presupposed’ in his terms). Hence, the purpose of the utterance, he claims, is not to present the proposition expressed as part of any mental space. Mejıás-Bikandi’s account suggests, though, that a sentence such as (19), but with an indicative complement should be acceptable if the speaker aims to inform the hearer that the subject of the matrix sentence is both aware of and happy about a state of affairs. That is to say, just because it is common ground between speaker and hearer of (19) that Juan is present, it does not follow that it is common ground that Silvia knows that Juan is present. It should therefore be possible, on Mejıás-Bikandi’s account, to use a sentence such as (72) to indicate that the hearer should add the proposition expressed by the complement clause to the mental space corresponding to Silvia’s world view. However, this is not possible: (72) is ungrammatical. (72) *Silvia se alegra de que Juan esta´ aquı´ ‘Silvia is happy that Juan is-IND here’ While, in its use of embedded contexts corresponding to representations of world views, the present account, the account proposed in this paper has some similarity with Mejıás-Bikandi’s, it does not treat presupposition as central to the analysis of cases such as (19). This is to be desired, given Quer’s observation that it is episodicity that makes a case such as (19) factive, rather than factivity being inherent in the semantics of the class of verbs denoting emotional reactions. On the current account, it is the fact that, due to their causal


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nature, such sentences present the proposition expressed by the sentence as a whole as relevant that underlies the selection of the subjunctive. Generally, both Guitart’s and Mejıás-Bikandi’s accounts posit too tight a relationship between assertion and the indicative. While not denying such a relationship, the present account sees this as a consequence of the indicative presenting the proposition expressed being potentially relevant in its own right.14 The approach is then to consider, in the subjunctive cases, the way in which the proposition expressed is not presented as relevant in its own right and explain mood selection in this way. Consequently, there is no impetus to explain subjunctive use in any sense of non-assertion and no dilemma posed by the apparent ability of both indicative and subjunctive complements to mark as presupposed the proposition expressed. 9.5.2

World-Linking Accounts

Within a more formal approach to semantics, attempts have been made to explain the mood selection in terms of linkage between the indicative and a particular world or world view. Thus, Farkas (1992) argues that what unites verbs that govern the indicative is that the proposition expressed by the complement must be evaluated at a particular world ‘anchored’ to the individual who is the referent of the subject of the matrix clause. This is what, according to her, belief predicates, reported-speech verbs and fictional verbs such as ‘dream’ and ‘imagine’ have in common. ‘Anchoring’ thus means that the objects of belief predicates are to be evaluated at the world ‘represented as reality’ by the individual to whom the belief is attributed: the objects of reported speech at the world that the participants in the conversation took to be reality; the objects of fiction verbs at an unreal fictional world. These predicates contrast with those that govern the subjunctive across the Romance languages, notably directives such as ‘order’ and desideratives such as ‘want’, in that the objects of the latter are to be evaluated not at a particular world, she says, but at a set of worlds. In the case of a desiderative, for example, the set is made up of ‘the worlds towards which the referent of the subject has a positive attitude’ (1992: 90–91). In later work, Farkas (2003) modifies her position somewhat and argues that the indicative/subjunctive distinction is to be understood in terms of potential to modify a Stalnakerian context set. Following 14 For a discussion of assertion from the perspective taken in this paper, see Jary (2004, 2006, Forthcoming)

268 / MARK JARY Heim (1992), she calls this ‘context-change potential’ (CCP). Farkas argues that what unites assertions and the indicative complements of positive epistemic predicates such as ‘believe’ and ‘know’, predicates of assertion such as ‘say’ and ‘claim’, and fiction predicates such as ‘dream’ and ‘imagine’, is that whereas assertions have a CCP in the basic Stalnakerian context set, the complements of these predicates have ‘assertive CPP’ in an embedded context. These contrast with the subjunctive complements of desideratives and directives, which have no CCP in an embedded context. Rather than removing all those worlds from the context set that do not return a positive truth value, which is the effect of successfully processing an indicative, subjunctives require that worlds be ordered, those in which the proposition expressed is true being more desirable to the subject of the matrix verb than those in which it is not.15 As in her previous account, indicatives are still linked to particular worlds or world views, but now this is by virtue of their CCP rather than an anchoring relationship. In a similar vein, Schlenker (2005) argues that what the indicative encodes is that the proposition expressed is true in a particular world within a context set relating to an individual, be this the speaker or the subject of a verb such as ‘believe’. The subjunctive is then chosen, on Schlenker’s account, when to choose the indicative would lead to a presupposition failure on account of there being no world in the relevant context set in which the proposition expressed is true. This would be the case, for example, in a negative belief report: if the report is true, then there is no world in the context set representing the world view of the attribuee in which the proposition expressed by the complement of ‘believe’ is true. As the previous section will have made clear, that the indicative has a special relationship with particular worlds or world views is not denied by the present account, but stressed. Indeed, a proposition that is relevant in its own right will have the effect of reducing the set of worlds picked out by the context in which it is processed. Thus, the present account and those proposed by Farkas and Schlenker are in partial agreement. However, these accounts face problems which the present account does not. For example, Farkas (2003) distinguishes between ‘believe’ and ‘know’ by claiming that ‘know’ presupposes its complement and must therefore be decided in the embedding context. However, there are good reasons to think that ‘know’ is not 15 The notion of ordering possible worlds is common in possible-world accounts of modality, such as Kratzer (1977, 2001), and has been applied to the semantics of ‘want’ by Heim (1992), and to the Spanish subjunctive by Villalta (2000).


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presuppositional in this sense:16 Simons (2007) has shown that it can be used to present the proposition expressed by the complement clause as the main point of the utterance without giving rise to intuitions of presupposition accommodation. The present account, by contrast, faces no problem with this observation: the indicative indicates that the proposition expressed is potentially relevant in its own right in a factual context. If the proposition expressed is already part of that context, then the potentiality is not fulfilled; if it is not part of that context, then the potentiality is fulfilled. The commitment to truth can be explained as a consequence of indicating potential relevance in such a context: in a factual context, only true propositions are likely to result in an improvement in the individual’s representation of the world. The problem faced by Schlenker lies in his treatment of the subjunctive in factual constructions. These clearly carry the presupposition that the proposition expressed by the subjunctive clause is present in the context set: this is pretty much a definition of factivity. His account, however, predicts that such complements should be indicative not subjunctive. The case that Schlenker discusses is ‘be happy that’, which in French, as in Spanish, is both factive and takes a subjunctive complement: (73) Jean est heureux qu’il pleuve/*pleut ‘Jean is happy that it rains-SUBJ/*IND’ Schlenker deals with these cases by first noting they are best analysed as causal statements. In this he is in agreement with the current analysis. However, he also argues that causal statements require recourse to a counterfactual statement to explicate their meaning (roughly, ‘Jean would be less happy if it were not raining’). On a standard Stalnakerian account of conditionals (Stalnaker, 1975/ 1999), counterfactuals require recourse to worlds outside the context set. This removes the presupposition that the context set contains a world in which the proposition expressed by the subjunctive clause is true, and consequently, on Schlenker’s account, warrants the use of the subjunctive.

16 That is in the sense that its complement is treated as common ground. Clearly, ‘know’ is presuppositional in the sense that the proposition expressed by the complement can survive negation. As we have seen, though, this is the case in Spanish only if the complement clause is indicative.

270 / MARK JARY While this is a neat manoeuvre (a similar one is made by Quer, 2001), it is an expensive one: it requires buying a whole theory of causality (i.e. Lewis’s, 1973) and thereby attempts to resolve semantic issues by appeal to metaphysics. Moreover, even if causality is correctly analysed in terms of counterfactuality, it is still a somewhat desperate move to say, when faced with a sentence that threatens an analysis, that we should instead consider a different sentence (viz. a counterfactual) which would confirm that analysis. The present account avoids these problems: while the encoded meaning posited for the indicative imbues the proposition expressed with context-change potential (i.e. relevance in its own right), and is thus compatible with the view that the indicative requires that the proposition expressed be true in at least one world in the context set, the absence of the indicative does not require that the proposition expressed be false in all worlds in the context set. All that is required (if we transpose the relevance theory view propounded here to the Stalnakerian model favoured by Schlenker) is that the relevance of the utterance not be determined by adding the proposition expressed by a subjunctive clause to that context set. The claim is, recall, that the subjunctive is chosen in cases such as (73) because the relevance of the utterance lies in the causal relationship. This means that the embedded proposition is not presented as relevant in its own right, but as a constituent of the proposition expressed by the sentence as a whole. Like the other accounts discussed in this section, the current account posits a link between the indicative and the presence of the proposition expressed in a context set, and hence between the indicative and particular possible worlds. However, this is not a fundamental claim: it follows from the claim that the indicative marks a proposition as potentially relevant in its own right in a context. As contexts, in the relevancetheory sense, are consistency-aiming, they can serve as representations of particular worlds. From the fact that a proposition is not presented as relevant in its own right, though, it does not follow that it is not present in a context set. Rather, all that follows is that the relevance of the utterance is not to be identified by adding that proposition to a context. 9.5.3

Mood Shift as Model Shift

According to the current account, the indicative/subjunctive contrast, while having truth-conditional consequences, is not a semantic distinction. Rather, it is best explained in terms of how the proposition expressed is to be processed: in its own right as a new premise or in some


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other way. If this view is correct, then any account that seeks to explain this mood alternation in model-theoretic terms will face problems when the mood distinction has no impact on truth conditions. This is what happens, for example, in the ‘el hecho de que’ (‘the fact that’) cases discussed in Section 9.2.7. In these cases, mood selection has no truthconditional consequences: rather, it is motivated entirely by informationstructure concerns. Such data might reasonably be thought to pose a particular problem for model-theoretic accounts of mood, for these are primarily motivated by a desire to account for truth-conditional, rather than discourse, phenomena. For this reason, Quer’s (1998, 2001) account is of significant interest: although it lies within the model-theoretic tradition, it claims to be able to handle not only the complement-selection cases of mood alternation, but also the information-structure data. Quer does not attempt to assign specific interpretations to the indicative and subjunctive moods but rather argues that a switch from one mood to another indicates a shift in the type of model against which the proposition expressed should be evaluated. Like Farkas (1992), Quer employs the notion of individual anchors to domains of interpretation or models. Mood shift, according to Quer, correlates with, and signals a change in, the type of model at which the proposition expressed is to be evaluated. Take (74) and (75) as examples (subscripts indicate the type of model in which the proposition expressed by the bracketed clause it to be evaluated): (74) [Marıá cree [que Pedro esta´ loco]ME(Marıá)]ME(speaker) ‘Mary believes-IND Peter is-IND insane’ (75) [Marıá quiere [que Pedro se marche]MBul(Marıá)]ME(speaker) ‘Mary wants-IND Peter to leave-SUBJ’ On Quer’s account, both the embedded clause and the main clause in (74) are interpreted against the same type of model: the main clause against the epistemic model (ME) of the speaker and the embedded clause against the epistemic model of Mary (the anchor). In (75), by contrast, two types of models are employed: the epistemic model of the speaker, against which the main clause is interpreted, and the buletic (i.e. desire state) model (MBul) of Mary. For Quer, where mood selection is obligatory, it is this shift in model type which is crucial, rather than the type of model per se. Quer distinguishes between cases where mood is selected by a predicate and those where the choice is free. In the former case, a change in the anchor cannot trigger a change in mood. In cases where the choice is open, by contrast, Quer suggests that a change in the anchor can result in mood alternation. The example he gives concerns

272 / MARK JARY negated attitude descriptions such as (76) and (77) (these are Spanish versions of Quer’s (2001) (17)): (76) El jurado ‘The jury (77) El jurado ‘The jury

no cree doesn’t no cree doesn’t

que es inocente believe that he is-IND innocent’ que sea inocente believe that he is-SUBJ innocent’

What distinguishes (76) and (77), according to Quer, is that the indicative complement in (76) is interpreted against the same model as the main clause, i.e. the epistemic state anchored to the speaker, while the subjunctive complement of (77) is interpreted against the jury’s epistemic state. Moreover, when a mood change is triggered by a change in anchor, the way in which the context is changed differs from that found when it is triggered by a change in model type: rather than being added to the model in question, the proposition expressed by the embedded clause is marked as not to be added, according to Quer. In (76), by contrast, the embedded proposition is added to the model of the speaker’s epistemic state. In short, on Quer’s account, when mood is selected by a predicate, change in mood signals a change in the type of model at which the proposition expressed is to be evaluated; when mood is not selected but there is a free choice, then a mood shift signals a change both in the anchor and in the manner in which the proposition expressed is to affect the relevant model. Quer argues that the main advantage his model has over alternative model-theoretic accounts is that the semantics he assigns to the moods is ‘non-rigid’ in that no specific interpretation is posited: in particular the subjunctive is not directly linked to modality. This allows him to account for the information-structure cases, such as ‘el hecho de que’, where a subjunctive complement is most successfully analysed as signalling presupposition or low information value. On Quer’s account (although he doesn’t discuss this particular form), what happens here is that the shift to the subjunctive signals that the proposition expressed is to be interpreted against the model of the participants’ common ground (as opposed to a model of the speaker’s epistemic state). Crucial to Quer’s account is the view that the notion of truth needs to be relativised to individuals (Quer, 1998: 23). But while one might accept that this is a necessary move in order to explain the semantics of belief reports, so that ‘x believes that P’ is true iff P is true


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in the worlds compatible with x’s doxastic state, Quer wants to go further than this when he says that: For unembedded assertions the individual anchor is the speaker and the relevant model is the epistemic model of the speaker, ME(speaker), which is the default one: it stands for the speaker’s worldview and it represents his or her epistemic status, what s/he knows and believes. (Quer, 2001: 84)

The view that assertions are essentially sources of information about a speaker’s epistemic state is not unique to Quer: Grice (1989: 123) and Bach and Harnish (1979), among others, hold similar views. It is, however, a highly unattractive view in that, as Dummett points out (1989/1993: 171), treats the use of assertions as a source of information about the world beyond the speaker’s epistemic state as a secondary phenomenon. Moreover, it offers no explanation of why, in uttering (78), the speaker grants warrant for the hearer to adopt the proposition that it is raining as a belief of his own, while in uttering (79) she offers no such warrant. (78) It’s raining (79) I believe that it’s raining There are, therefore, good reasons to reject the view that unembedded indicatives are evaluated at the speaker’s epistemic state. However, this greatly undermines Quer’s story. If there is a shift from some other type of model to an epistemic model in belief reports, then his account predicts that the object of positive belief reports should be in the subjunctive. As (74) (repeated below without the model tags) shows, however, there is no mood shift in these constructions. (74) Marıá cree que Pedro esta´ loco ‘Mary believes-IND Peter is-IND insane’

9.6

Conclusion

In this paper, I have presented a cognitive account of the indicative/ subjunctive contrast in Spanish and shown how this account is capable of explaining the data relating to mood selection. In doing so, I have also shown how this account is able to maintain the insights offered by alternative accounts while avoiding their pitfalls. Yes, the indicative is closely related to assertion, in the sense that it can be used to commit the speaker to the truth of the proposition expressed or attribute assertoric commitments to others. However, this is best

274 / MARK JARY explained not by positing that the indicative encodes assertivity, but by considering, from the perspective of a cognitive model of utterance interpretation, how assertions achieve their effect. On the account put forward here, assertions differ from other key speech acts in that the proposition expressed by the sentence is itself the primary source of the relevance of the utterance. In this way, assertions differ from orders and questions which, on the relevance-theory view, present the proposition expressed as relevant only as a constituent of a complex proposition (i.e. a ‘higher-order explicature’). Assertions present the proposition expressed as relevant in its own right, and as the indicative is the standard mood for assertion, it is reasonable to hypothesise that the relevance in its own right of the proposition expressed is what this mood encodes. But relevance in its own right is not all there is to assertion. A proposition may be relevant in its own right in a range of context types: only if the proposition is presented as relevant in this way in a factual context can assertoric consequences follow. Having the notion of relevance in its own right feature in the analysis of assertion without thereby equating relevance in its own right with that act gives an adequate semantics for the indicative. The advantage is that the absence of an indicative does not need to be explained in terms of presupposition or other terms that contrast with assertion. All that is required, rather, is that the relevance of the utterance not rely on the proposition expressed by a nonindicative serving as a source of contextual implications in its own right. As we have seen, this may be because that proposition is already available to the hearer, or because it serves as a constituent in a complex proposition which is the main source of the relevance of the utterance. Acknowledgments I would like to thank the editors of this volume for very helpful comments on earlier drafts. Thanks are also due to Nicholas Allott, Robyn Carston, Eva Eppler and Deirdre Wilson.

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Utterance Interpretation and Cognitive Models, Volume 20

Log-linear models, Volume 20

Cognitive Models

Cognitive Models of Science

Models Of Cognitive Development

Cognitive Models of Memory

Decision Making: Cognitive Models and Explanations

Mental Models In Cognitive Science

Integrated Models of Cognitive Systems

Animal Models of Cognitive Impairment

Cognitive Techniques in Visual Data Interpretation

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Index, Volume 20

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Horticultural Reviews (Volume 20)

Volume 20: Storytelling

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Imagining Metaphors: Cognitive Representation in Interpretation and Understanding

Cognitive Models of Memory (Studies in Cognition)

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Advances in Computers, Volume 20

Advances in Agronomy, Volume 20

Business Plans Handbook, Volume 20

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Advances in Genetics Volume 20

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