The original article has been corrected. Unfortunately, not all corrections indicated by the auth... more The original article has been corrected. Unfortunately, not all corrections indicated by the author were implemented. Most importantly the correction to the article title was overlooked.
First, the wide applicability of the relevance-theoretic pragmatic account of how new (ad hoc) se... more First, the wide applicability of the relevance-theoretic pragmatic account of how new (ad hoc) senses of words and new (ad hoc) words arise spontaneously in communication/comprehension is demonstrated. The lexical pragmatic processes of meaning modulation and metonymy are shown to apply equally to simple words, noun to verb 'conversions', and morphologically complex cases with non-compositional (atomic) meanings. Second, this pragmatic account is situated within a specific view of the cognitive architecture of language and communication, with the formal side of language, its recursive combinatorial system, argued to have different developmental, evolutionary and cognitive characteristics from the meaning side of language, which is essentially pragmatic/ communicative. Words straddle the form/meaning (syntax/pragmatics) divide: on the one hand, they are phrasal structures, consisting of a root and variable numbers of functors, with no privileged status in the syntax; on the other hand, they are salient to language users as basic units of communication and are stored as such, in a communication lexicon, together with their families of related senses, which originated as cases of pragmatically derived (ad hoc) senses but have become established, due to their communicative efficacy and frequency of use. Third, in an attempt to find empirical evidence for the proposed linguistic formmeaning divide, two very different cases of atypical linguistic and communicative development are considered: autistic children and deaf children who develop Homesign. The morpho-syntax (the formal side of language) appears to unfold in much the same way in both cases and is often not much different from that of typically developing children, but they diverge markedly from each other in their communication/pragmatics and their development of a system (a lexicon) of meaningful words/signs.
The Cooperative Principle: Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stag... more The Cooperative Principle: Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged. Note: Grice presented this as a 'first approximation to a general principle' (Grice 1975/89b: 26). Conversational Maxims and Submaxims These will, in general, yield results in accordance with the Cooperative Principle. They are grouped according to four Kantian categories: Category of quantity 1 Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange). 2 Do not make your contribution more informative than is required. Category of quality Supermaxim: Try to make your contribution one that is true. Submaxims: 1 Do not say what you believe to be false. 2 Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
This chapter focuses on the pragmatic adjustment (or modulation) of word meanings in context, a p... more This chapter focuses on the pragmatic adjustment (or modulation) of word meanings in context, a process which is often required in order to recover the concept that a speaker intends to communicate on a particular occasion of use of a word. According to the relevance-theoretic account, which is outlined here, the interpretation process involves the construction of an ad hoc concept whose denotation differs from that of the encoded meaning of the word. Different positions on encoded word meaning, whether it is fully conceptual or semantically underspecified, are also reviewed. The discussion inevitably involves assessment of ‘minimalist’ versus ‘contextualist’ positions on truth-conditional semantics, as well as the more communication-based view labelled ‘pragmaticism’.
Main claims and the question that arises As reflected in the title of their book, Ernie Lepore an... more Main claims and the question that arises As reflected in the title of their book, Ernie Lepore and Matthew Stone maintain that there are two ways in which language productions (spoken or written) can engage our minds. On the one hand, there are linguistic conventions, which are entirely responsible for the public propositional content that our utterances convey, so grasping that content is a matter of knowing the relevant conventions. These contents are entered on the conversational scoreboard, which keeps a record of our meaning-making and the constraints on it. 1 On the other hand, certain uses of language call for an (often open-ended) imaginative engagement with the imagery of an utterance; these include various kinds of figurative uses of language, certain evocative literal uses, and cases of 'invited inference'. This kind of activity has an essentially private significance; although interlocutors may end up sharing insights by this means, those are not components of the public meaning-making endeavour. I am grateful to Emma Borg for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this review.
Many people report experiencing mental imagery (visual, auditory and/or kinetic) when they compre... more Many people report experiencing mental imagery (visual, auditory and/or kinetic) when they comprehend verbal metaphors. The question whether imagery is merely an incidental side-effect of processes of metaphor understanding or plays a key role in comprehension remains unresolved, with diametrically opposed views expressed among psychologists, philosophers and literary theorists. I survey a wide array of evidence (behavioural and neurocognitive) concerning the activation and use of imagery in language processing generally and metaphor processing in particular. I conclude that mental imagery is not an essential component in the comprehension of language, whether literal or metaphorical, but it is often automatically activated in the minds of hearers or readers as a by-product of their linguistic and pragmatic processes. Writers may exploit this fact and enhance the impact of imagery by producing extended and/or creative metaphors, so that, although not essential, imagistic effects can be as significant as propositional cognitive effects. inference and ad hoc concepts. In N. Burton-Roberts (Ed.), Pragmatics (pp. 230-259). Basingstoke UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
The Pragmatics of 'And'-Conjunction 222 3.1 Preserving the Truth-functionality of 'And' 222 3.2 A... more The Pragmatics of 'And'-Conjunction 222 3.1 Preserving the Truth-functionality of 'And' 222 3.2 A Relevance-based Pragmatics of Conjunction 226 vi Contents My greatest intellectual debt, as evident throughout this book, is to Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, the founders of Relevance Theory, and I am deeply grateful to them. Noel Burton-Roberts's meticulous comments on the first complete draft were an enormous help to me in the long process of reworking what was a PhD thesis into this book. Special thanks also to Corinne Iten, Deirdre Wilson and Vladimir Ž egarac who have been very generous in reading and commenting on my work. Discussions with
don't look at compounds in this paper, a complex topic with a large literature. The meaning of co... more don't look at compounds in this paper, a complex topic with a large literature. The meaning of compounds is virtually never semantically compositional, requiring pragmatics, at a minimum, to determine the relevant relation between their component parts (see Bezuidenhout 2019). 3 There are two kinds of functors, a point which will be of interest in Sect. 3 on delimiting the domain of non-compositional content: (i) categorizers (nominal, verbal, adjectival) which may be phonologically realized by various affixes, including '-tion', '-ize', '-al', and (ii) functional items that project further levels of structure like the determiners (e.g. 'the') and number (e.g. plural) for nominal structures; or tense (e.g. past) and aspect (e.g. the perfective/imperfective contrast, as in 'has eaten the apple' vs. 'was eating the apple') for verbal structures. (2017) for a clear account of developments within the lexicalist approach and of the issues that led to a radical redrawing of the lexicon/syntax boundary on constructivist and other root-based accounts.
John Benjamins Publishing Company eBooks, Mar 15, 1998
1. List of contributors 2. Preface 3. Pragmatics and time (by Wilson, Deirdre) 4. The Japanese ad... more 1. List of contributors 2. Preface 3. Pragmatics and time (by Wilson, Deirdre) 4. The Japanese adverbial yahari or yappari (by Tanaka, Keiko) 5. A relevance-based analysis of hearsay particles: With special reference to Japanese sentence-final particle tte (by Itani, Reiko) 6. Intonation and relevance (by Imai, Kunihiko) 7. Metaphor and metonymy (by Song, Nam Sun) 8. Procedural semantics and metalinguistic negation (by Yoshimura, Akiko) 9. Assessing a scenario-based account of bridging reference assignment (by Matsui, Tomoko) 10. Text and relevance (by Uchida, Seiji) 11. Informativeness, relevance and scalar implicature (by Carston, Robyn) 12. Symposium on Irony 13. On non-echoic irony (by Seto, Ken-ichi) 14. Irony from a cognitive perspective (by Hamamoto, Hideki) 15. Some issues in the treatment of irony and related tropes (by Yamanashi, Masa-aki) 16. Irony and relevance: A reply to Seto, Hamamoto and Yamanashi (by Sperber, Dan) 17. Glossary of relevance-theoretic terms
The original article has been corrected. Unfortunately, not all corrections indicated by the auth... more The original article has been corrected. Unfortunately, not all corrections indicated by the author were implemented. Most importantly the correction to the article title was overlooked.
First, the wide applicability of the relevance-theoretic pragmatic account of how new (ad hoc) se... more First, the wide applicability of the relevance-theoretic pragmatic account of how new (ad hoc) senses of words and new (ad hoc) words arise spontaneously in communication/comprehension is demonstrated. The lexical pragmatic processes of meaning modulation and metonymy are shown to apply equally to simple words, noun to verb 'conversions', and morphologically complex cases with non-compositional (atomic) meanings. Second, this pragmatic account is situated within a specific view of the cognitive architecture of language and communication, with the formal side of language, its recursive combinatorial system, argued to have different developmental, evolutionary and cognitive characteristics from the meaning side of language, which is essentially pragmatic/ communicative. Words straddle the form/meaning (syntax/pragmatics) divide: on the one hand, they are phrasal structures, consisting of a root and variable numbers of functors, with no privileged status in the syntax; on the other hand, they are salient to language users as basic units of communication and are stored as such, in a communication lexicon, together with their families of related senses, which originated as cases of pragmatically derived (ad hoc) senses but have become established, due to their communicative efficacy and frequency of use. Third, in an attempt to find empirical evidence for the proposed linguistic formmeaning divide, two very different cases of atypical linguistic and communicative development are considered: autistic children and deaf children who develop Homesign. The morpho-syntax (the formal side of language) appears to unfold in much the same way in both cases and is often not much different from that of typically developing children, but they diverge markedly from each other in their communication/pragmatics and their development of a system (a lexicon) of meaningful words/signs.
The Cooperative Principle: Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stag... more The Cooperative Principle: Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged. Note: Grice presented this as a 'first approximation to a general principle' (Grice 1975/89b: 26). Conversational Maxims and Submaxims These will, in general, yield results in accordance with the Cooperative Principle. They are grouped according to four Kantian categories: Category of quantity 1 Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the exchange). 2 Do not make your contribution more informative than is required. Category of quality Supermaxim: Try to make your contribution one that is true. Submaxims: 1 Do not say what you believe to be false. 2 Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
This chapter focuses on the pragmatic adjustment (or modulation) of word meanings in context, a p... more This chapter focuses on the pragmatic adjustment (or modulation) of word meanings in context, a process which is often required in order to recover the concept that a speaker intends to communicate on a particular occasion of use of a word. According to the relevance-theoretic account, which is outlined here, the interpretation process involves the construction of an ad hoc concept whose denotation differs from that of the encoded meaning of the word. Different positions on encoded word meaning, whether it is fully conceptual or semantically underspecified, are also reviewed. The discussion inevitably involves assessment of ‘minimalist’ versus ‘contextualist’ positions on truth-conditional semantics, as well as the more communication-based view labelled ‘pragmaticism’.
Main claims and the question that arises As reflected in the title of their book, Ernie Lepore an... more Main claims and the question that arises As reflected in the title of their book, Ernie Lepore and Matthew Stone maintain that there are two ways in which language productions (spoken or written) can engage our minds. On the one hand, there are linguistic conventions, which are entirely responsible for the public propositional content that our utterances convey, so grasping that content is a matter of knowing the relevant conventions. These contents are entered on the conversational scoreboard, which keeps a record of our meaning-making and the constraints on it. 1 On the other hand, certain uses of language call for an (often open-ended) imaginative engagement with the imagery of an utterance; these include various kinds of figurative uses of language, certain evocative literal uses, and cases of 'invited inference'. This kind of activity has an essentially private significance; although interlocutors may end up sharing insights by this means, those are not components of the public meaning-making endeavour. I am grateful to Emma Borg for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this review.
Many people report experiencing mental imagery (visual, auditory and/or kinetic) when they compre... more Many people report experiencing mental imagery (visual, auditory and/or kinetic) when they comprehend verbal metaphors. The question whether imagery is merely an incidental side-effect of processes of metaphor understanding or plays a key role in comprehension remains unresolved, with diametrically opposed views expressed among psychologists, philosophers and literary theorists. I survey a wide array of evidence (behavioural and neurocognitive) concerning the activation and use of imagery in language processing generally and metaphor processing in particular. I conclude that mental imagery is not an essential component in the comprehension of language, whether literal or metaphorical, but it is often automatically activated in the minds of hearers or readers as a by-product of their linguistic and pragmatic processes. Writers may exploit this fact and enhance the impact of imagery by producing extended and/or creative metaphors, so that, although not essential, imagistic effects can be as significant as propositional cognitive effects. inference and ad hoc concepts. In N. Burton-Roberts (Ed.), Pragmatics (pp. 230-259). Basingstoke UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
The Pragmatics of 'And'-Conjunction 222 3.1 Preserving the Truth-functionality of 'And' 222 3.2 A... more The Pragmatics of 'And'-Conjunction 222 3.1 Preserving the Truth-functionality of 'And' 222 3.2 A Relevance-based Pragmatics of Conjunction 226 vi Contents My greatest intellectual debt, as evident throughout this book, is to Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, the founders of Relevance Theory, and I am deeply grateful to them. Noel Burton-Roberts's meticulous comments on the first complete draft were an enormous help to me in the long process of reworking what was a PhD thesis into this book. Special thanks also to Corinne Iten, Deirdre Wilson and Vladimir Ž egarac who have been very generous in reading and commenting on my work. Discussions with
don't look at compounds in this paper, a complex topic with a large literature. The meaning of co... more don't look at compounds in this paper, a complex topic with a large literature. The meaning of compounds is virtually never semantically compositional, requiring pragmatics, at a minimum, to determine the relevant relation between their component parts (see Bezuidenhout 2019). 3 There are two kinds of functors, a point which will be of interest in Sect. 3 on delimiting the domain of non-compositional content: (i) categorizers (nominal, verbal, adjectival) which may be phonologically realized by various affixes, including '-tion', '-ize', '-al', and (ii) functional items that project further levels of structure like the determiners (e.g. 'the') and number (e.g. plural) for nominal structures; or tense (e.g. past) and aspect (e.g. the perfective/imperfective contrast, as in 'has eaten the apple' vs. 'was eating the apple') for verbal structures. (2017) for a clear account of developments within the lexicalist approach and of the issues that led to a radical redrawing of the lexicon/syntax boundary on constructivist and other root-based accounts.
John Benjamins Publishing Company eBooks, Mar 15, 1998
1. List of contributors 2. Preface 3. Pragmatics and time (by Wilson, Deirdre) 4. The Japanese ad... more 1. List of contributors 2. Preface 3. Pragmatics and time (by Wilson, Deirdre) 4. The Japanese adverbial yahari or yappari (by Tanaka, Keiko) 5. A relevance-based analysis of hearsay particles: With special reference to Japanese sentence-final particle tte (by Itani, Reiko) 6. Intonation and relevance (by Imai, Kunihiko) 7. Metaphor and metonymy (by Song, Nam Sun) 8. Procedural semantics and metalinguistic negation (by Yoshimura, Akiko) 9. Assessing a scenario-based account of bridging reference assignment (by Matsui, Tomoko) 10. Text and relevance (by Uchida, Seiji) 11. Informativeness, relevance and scalar implicature (by Carston, Robyn) 12. Symposium on Irony 13. On non-echoic irony (by Seto, Ken-ichi) 14. Irony from a cognitive perspective (by Hamamoto, Hideki) 15. Some issues in the treatment of irony and related tropes (by Yamanashi, Masa-aki) 16. Irony and relevance: A reply to Seto, Hamamoto and Yamanashi (by Sperber, Dan) 17. Glossary of relevance-theoretic terms
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