Levinson, Stephen C.;
Presumptive Meanings: The Theory of Generalized Conversational Implicature
MIT Press, 2000, 480 pages http://books.google.com/books?id=wmVDkTTi620C&printsec=frontcover&lr=
ISBN 0262621304, 9780262621304
topics: | cognitive | semantics | language | vision
Deals with the pragmatic penumbra surrounding utterance-meaning - about utterance-type meaning, not the utterance-token meaning that is usually the focus of pragmatics. Grice's central idea: "every artificial or non-iconic system is founded upon an antecedent iconic system." [Grice 1989, Studies in the way of Words p.358] Both drawings [Rafael sketch] and language is underspecified. 2-3 ready: Supper's / motorway is / flight is _ cooked / surfaced / refuelled soon: dinner will be served / my dissertation will be over Constitutes a renaissance of information-theoretic ideas: These notions went out of fashion in theoretical linguistics -- and I think this is the right way to put it -- when Chomsky (1956, 59) criticized (correctly) their association with radical, tabula rasa, behaviourism and finite-state models of language acquisition and grammaticality. Their rehabilitation with in the framework of more satisfactory models of the structure and use of language is very much to be welcomed. [Lyons 95: Ling Sem - an Intro] Human speech articulation is very slow ... bottleneck without which the system can run about 4x faster ==> pressure on frequent words to be shortened [Zipf 49: Human behaviour and the principle of least effort: An introduction to human ecology] ==> Language: balance between - speaker's need for economy - hearer's need for more info Solution: not only the content, but also the metalinguistic properties of the utterance (e.g. its form) - carries meaning. Believes that: - Semantics / Pragmatics distinction is an essential distinction in the study of meaning; it may be that in the long run, the distinction will dissolve into a larger set of distinctions but nothing is gained by lumping... - Semantics is not to be confused with "conceptual structure" or the "language of thought", a nontrivial relation between nonisomprphic structures [Levinson 97] - Aspects of semantic content (enriched by pragmatics) can be specified by the apparatus of recursive truth-definition - but this is unlikely to have a direct cognitive counterpart. The brain does something like Realism - how it actually does it is a separate matter. - pragmatic resolution is crucial before semantic interpretation - hence no algorithm can crank out a logical form from a syntactic string.
QUOTE: "immense regularity" - certain kinds of GCI systematically block lexicalization of certain concepts [Horn's obsvn] Grice's (1957) meaning_nn: non-natural meaning - total signification of an utterance S means_nn p by "uttering" U to A iff S intends a) A to think P b) A to recognize that S intends (a) c) A's recogn of S's intending (a) to be the prime reason for A thinking p See Avramides 89 for revisions of this formula. Total Signification / \ / \ what is SAID what is IMPLICATED / \ / \ CONVENTIONALLY CONVERSATIONALLY / \ / \ GENERALIZED PARTICULARIZED there may be other types of signification also - e.g. pre-supposition, non-conventional, non-conversational implicature etc. [Harnish 76]. S +> p = S conversationally implicates p Grice: hints at a distinction: Particularized CI, PCI, based on specific contextual assumptions hat would not invariably or even normally obtain, as opp to Generalized CI (GCI): normal (4) What time is it? Some of the guests are already leaving. PCI: It must be late GCI: Not all of the guests are already leaving (5) Where's John Some of the guests are already leaving PCI: Perhaps J has already left GCI: Not all of the guests are already leaving PCI's follow maxim of relevance (or relation)