Pragmatic Structures for Action‐Directed Pragmatics

PhilPapers, 2018

Abstract Posted in PhilPapers on 12-30-2018: PERMANENT Posting Igal Kvart: A Coding Conception in Action-Directed-Pragmatics. I present formal Pragmatics for a domain in Pragmatics that I call Action-Directed Pragmatics, which focuses on the Pragmatic riddle of how implicit contents are conveyed and understood, by adopting a coding model, in which the speaker and addressee simulate each other iteratively in a deliberative context (an ‘action-pregnant’ one). The implicit content, conveyed by a speaker and decoded by her addressee, in such cases, consists in the specified steered-to action, plus modulations on the action-polarity (pro or con) and the degree of the so-called Steering Thrust that accompanies such assertions and is conveyed by verbal locutions, intonation, and/or bodily and facial gestures. There are two main tasks to model (in a given setup and conversational context): First, how is the speaker, with a steered-to action in mind (and Steering Thrust), to select an assertion so as to (say) optimize the successful transmission and decoding of its implicit pragmatic content by her and her addressee? Second, how does the addressee, given an assertion by the speaker, decipher the implicit pragmatic content conveyed via it? Both will invoke pertinent information they have about each other and the setup/context in order to best encode and best decode the implicit pragmatic content. (This coding mechanism proposed here is not offered for the ubiquitous ‘frozen’, ‘trivial’ or ‘routinized’ pragmatic messages.) A prelude to this formal Pragmatics is a general formal Pragmatic account of Assertibility in contexts that are multi-normative (which is the common case). I focus here only on Epistemic/Semantic and Instrumental Norms. A linear representation of degrees of Overall Assertibility (i.e., taking into account various operative norms) will be an n-dimensional qualitative vector space with a function that computes them given different degrees of sub-normative Assertibility on each axis.

This is genuinely an interdisciplinary book, full of insights and careful analysis, very informative, clearly written and all the epigraphs are wisely selected. Although these opening remarks might suggest perfection, there is of course some room for improvement. This review will summarise chapter by chapter, emphasizing strengths and potential weakness. Viviana Masia's research manifested in this book is a great contribution to the study of this sometimes regrettable, and sometimes necessary human behavior: manipulating reality and people by means of discourse. It is both a scientific and a humanistic enterprise, using rigorously evidence-based examples to illustrate the issues, using scientific methodology and multi-perspective analysis. The book is accessible to beginners and challenging for advanced scholars, with social and political consequences. It is up-to-date research, which references classic works. It is a generous book, because it provides many new ideas for further investigations for anyone interested in the topics covered. In the introduction, Masia declares in the first sentence that she tackles the analysis as a linguist. In this introduction the main goals are spelled out: "My focus on language in this book will be on what could be roughly called its underencoding power, that is, the ability to convey meanings without openly expressing them in discourse" (2). The purpose is: "… is to draw a path along some of the most common and compelling manifestations of implicit communication, the manipulative tricks it relies on and the threats it can pose in different contexts of language use" (2). However, Masia is considering one way in which presumptions work, but the relationship between persuasion and presumptions is not sufficiently described considering the role of the later in argumentative dialogues, that is, considering the reaction of audience when a presumption is offered as a point of departure. The examples provided are only the speaker's discourse, no real exchanges of points of view in terms of critical reactions. The first chapter provides almost all the necessary conceptual background. It begins with the perfect frame with the epigraph, making explicit a kind of machiavellistic mind of the manipulator. However, the type of mind that tend to use manipulations, unfortunately, is not fully described in the chapters to come. It continues with a basic definition of implicit communication by first addressing the notion of indirect speech act, using a rather out of date reference (Pinker, 2007). The author continues with some cognitive elements, assuming a general cognitive view about why we, humans, use implicit communication to convey important messages and actions, namely, that our cognitive system is geared to optimization. This cognitive approach is controversial; there are other approaches (i.e. Barrett, 2015) according to which our cognitive system is geared to work collectively with our human fellows to build and maintain niches, in which optimization is a secondary aim; in the same vein, and very important for persuasion, Mercier and Sperber (2017) demonstrate that our epistemic cognitive system is built in such a way that speakers tend to be guided less by optimization than by a dedicated balance within a cognitive division of labor. Masia describes the use of manipulative language, via well-selected examples, offering a complete description of one of her specific conceptual tools: packaging. It is defined as "… the linguistic clothing of information, irrespective of its givenness or newness status in sentence" (23). Despite the strong metaphorical flavor ("clothing"), the explanation is perfectly clear. Masia continues by focusing on the main way implicit communication is delivered: 1) presuppositions (to be used as pretended common information by the manipulator), 2) implicatures (a la Gricean), 3) topicalization (topic and focus being the crucial analytical categories), and 4) vagueness. The author explains difficult concepts in a helpfully pedagogical manner. Masia adds a subsection on content-commitments and discourse-commitments, which, again, demonstrates her ability to identify what is needed to analyze a multilayer problem. The notion of commitment is important because, as Masia points out (28), we not only "pack" the information sent, but also commit ourselves to the truth of the information itself in different degrees. Although we can't be totally sure about the mental state of the speaker in terms of her degrees of commitment to the information expressed (content commitment), we still have access to the way commitments are manifested in the use of language. Masia here refers to Hamblin's (1970) approach, a key reference in argumentative studies. Hamblin's background is nicely applied to interpret the (political) corpus, pointing out that politicians strategically induce assumptions in the audience

2002

2003

The avowed aim of this first volume in the Current Research in the Semantics/ Pragmatics Interface series is, according to its editor, ''to begin to take some steps to reducing the heat of [.. .] discussions [relating to how linguistically-conveyed meaning should be defined, and therefore studied; M.T.] and to begin to increase the light that might profitably be shed on some of the problems of interdigitating content and context'' (p. 14). It is in the light of this pronouncement that the current review will assess the contribution made by the 15 articles of this volume to the ongoing debate regarding the boundary between semantics and pragmatics, and whether there should be any such. In the 'Introduction', Ken Turner prepares the ground for the volume, if not the entire series, by tracing the development from semantics to pragmatics (and back again). Carnap's distinction between ''pure'' and ''descriptive'' studies, Montague's model theoretic semantics, Gricean pragmatics, and finally current dynamic semantic approaches serve as intellectual milestones in this broad classification of modern approaches to linguistic meaning. The boundaries of the canvas are thus set out, while the details remain to be filled in. This is no small feat, given the introduction's intended brevity (implicit in the subtitle ''seven-inch version''), and it is accomplished in an informative, critical, and entertaining fashion. In Chapter 1, 'Discourse structure and the logic of conversation', Nicholas Asher picks up the discussion where the introduction left it, arguing for a way of potentially reconciling (Gricean) pragmatics and (dynamic) semantics. Discourse structure is the key to this, as it can provide evidence for modelling (agents'/systems') cognitive states, and vice versa, allowing us to re-cast Gricean maxims in Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT) terms. 1 Meaning construction is incremental, drawing on clues provided by different levels of interpretation: logical forms of sentences, discourse structure analysable in SDRT terms, and agents' cognitive states. While one may question the fact that one cannot know another's intention

Non-Verbal Predication in Ancient Egyptian, 2017

The fields of semantics and pragmatics are devoted to the study of conventionalized and context-or use-dependent aspects of natural language meaning, respectively. The complexity of human language as a semiotic system has led to considerable debate about how the semantics/pragmatics distinction should be drawn, if at all. This debate largely reflects contrasting views of meaning as a property of linguistic expressions versus something that speakers do. The fact that both views of meaning are essential to a complete understanding of language has led to a variety of efforts over the last 40 years to develop better integrated and more comprehensive theories of language use and interpretation. The most important advances have included the adaptation of propositional analyses of declarative sentences to interrogative, imperative and exclamative forms; the emergence of dynamic, game theoretic, and multi-dimensional theories of meaning; and the development of various techniques for incorporating context-dependent aspects of content into representations of context-invariant content with the goal of handling phenomena such as vagueness resolution, metaphor, and metonymy. The fields of semantics and pragmatics are devoted to the study of the semiotics of language. The fact that two separate disciplines have developed for this purpose reflects the complexity of human language as a semiotic system, as well as the debate as to how it should be analyzed. This complexity is of at least four types. First, we use language not only to represent information (or thought) to ourselves and convey it to others, but also to act on and interact with others in ways that do not directly have to do with the transmission of information, such as greetings, exclamations or orders 1,2. Second, language is simultaneously highly systematic and flexible. On the one hand, interlocutors are under strong pressure to be consistent in their use of language to transmit messages; otherwise, communication would be more difficult and less reliable than it is. On the other, they continually innovate in using existing linguistic forms to convey new, and sometimes even radically different, messages via metaphor 3 , irony 4 , and other devices 5. Third, even if we assume a certain stability in the relation between linguistic form and what is communicated, the immediate context of use is Related Articles Article ID Article title COGSCI-086 Lexical Semantics COGSCI-106 Semantics, Acquisition of COGSCI-201 Discourse Processing

Lodz papers in pragmatics 8/1: 37-59, 2012

This paper aims at showing how pragmatics, today a discipline developing in close connection with cognitive science and evolutionary psychology, provides new ways to envisage Discourse Analysis. In this article, we first discuss the relationship between pragmatics and Discourse Analysis, focusing on the links between the process of utterance understanding, which is in the scope of pragmatic theories, and consenting to beliefs (influence), which is in the scope of Discourse Analysis (Section 2). Next (Section 3), we introduce an extended notion of "presuppositions" which we name "discursive presuppositions", which are unexpressed contents but nonetheless propositions that need to be incorporated in the background and thus consented to in order to provide not meaning proper but relevance to the utterance. Last section (Section 4) is dedicated to the examination of two examples where discursive presuppositions are exploited in persuasiveness.

Semantics and Pragmatics, 2012

A framework for pragmatic analysis is proposed which treats discourse as a game, with context as a scoreboard organized around the questions under discussion by the interlocutors. The framework is intended to be coordinated with a dynamic compositional semantics. Accordingly, the context of utterance is modeled as a tuple of different types of information, and the questions therein -modeled, as is usual in formal semantics, as alternative sets of propositions -constrain the felicitous flow of discourse. A requirement of Relevance is satisfied by an utterance (whether an assertion, a question or a suggestion) iff it addresses the question under discussion. Finally, it is argued that the prosodic focus of an utterance canonically serves to reflect the question under discussion (at least in English), placing additional constraints on felicity in context.

Hans-Joerg Schmid, ed., Cognitive Pragmatics. (Handbook of Pragmatics, vol. 4.) Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 587-311., 2012

2010

Abstract: Context figures in the interpretation of utterances in many different ways. In the tradition of possible-worlds semantics, the seminal account of context-sensitive expressions such as indexicals and demonstratives is that of Kaplan's two-dimensional semantics (the contentcharacter distinction), further pursued in various directions by Stalnaker, Chalmers, and others.