PROCEDURAL MEANING STATE OF THE ART AND POTENTIAL FUTURE - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

PROCEDURAL MEANING STATE OF THE ART AND POTENTIAL FUTURE DIRECTIONS

Stavros Assimakopoulos stavros@ugr.es

Granada, 9/3/2010

RELEVANCE THEORY (SPERBER & WILSON 1986/95)

Relevance is a psychological property, a property of cognitive input to mental processing. Relevance of an input to an individual

 Other things being equal, the greater the processing effort

expended, the lower the relevance of the input to the individual at that time.

 Other things being equal, the greater the positive

cognitive effects achieved by processing an input, the greater the relevance of the input to the individual at that time. “The goal of the interpretation process as we see it is […] to work out the logical consequences of adding it to a pre- existing stock of beliefs and assumptions to which the hearer has access”. (Wilson & Sperber 1985:83)

RELEVANCE THEORY

This is achieved via non-demonstrative inference: a process that takes a set of premises as input and yields as output a set of conclusions which follow logically from, or are at least warranted by, the premises. Sets of conclusions: Positive cognitive effects An input provides cognitive effects when it

 strengthens some existing assumption in the context

• f processing.

 contradicts an assumption in the context of processing

and eliminates it from it.

 provides new contextual implications, i.e. new

assumptions deductively inferred from the unification of the input with the context.

RELEVANCE THEORY

Two principles of Relevance: Cognitive Principle of Relevance Human cognition tends to be geared to the maximization of relevance. Communicative Principle of Relevance Every act of ostensive communication communicates a presumption of its own optimal relevance. Presumption of optimal relevance

 The ostensive stimulus is relevant enough to be worth the

addressee’s effort to process it.

 The ostensive stimulus is the most relevant one

compatible with the communicator’s abilities and preferences.

RELEVANCE THEORY

Communicative Principle of Relevance: Communication recognised as deliberate is automatically treated as

• ptimally relevant.

“Communicators do not ‘follow’ the communicative principle

• f relevance; and they could not violate it even if they

wanted to. The principle of relevance applies without exception”. (Sperber & Wilson 1995:162) So, how does the relevance-driven comprehension module work? Relevance-theoretic comprehension procedure

 Follow a path of least effort in computing cognitive effects:

Test interpretive hypotheses (disambiguations, reference resolutions, implicatures, etc.) in order of accessibility.

 Stop when your expectations of relevance are satisfied.

MEANING IN RELEVANCE THEORY

Remember: Inference is a process that takes a set of premises as input and yields as output a set of conclusions which follow logically from, or are at least warranted by, the premises. Premises for inference in linguistic communication:

 The content of the sentence uttered  The context of utterance

The context of an utterance: a psychological construct, a subset of the hearer’s assumptions about the world. It is these assumptions, of course, rather than the actual state of the world, that affect the interpretation of an

• utterance. (Sperber & Wilson 1995:15)

MEANING IN RELEVANCE THEORY

What about the content of the uttered sentence? “The semantic representation of a sentence deals with a sort of common core of meaning shared by every utterance of it”. (Sperber & Wilson 1995:9) The linguistic underdeterminancy thesis: Linguistic meaning underdetermines what is said. (Carston 2002) A sentence encodes a logical form. Upon utterance, the sentence’s logical form needs to be enriched pragmatically to gain full propositional content  explicature(s).

• Basic explicature: the proposition expressed by an utterance.
• Higher-level explicatures: speech-act and propositional-

attitude descriptions. What is conveyed without being said: implicature.

MEANING IN RELEVANCE THEORY

“Semantic representations are not recovered as a whole and then worked on by the pragmatic inferential system; rather, the mechanisms here (the parser and the pragmatic system) are performing on-line, millisecond by millisecond, so that very often pragmatics is making a hypothesis about an intended word sense, or an indexical referent, or even an implicature, before the entire acoustic stimulus has been processed by the linguistic system”. (Carston 2004:820) There are two types of encoded meaning in Relevance Theory:

• Conceptual meaning: fully-propositional, representational

content (including pro-concepts, such as ‘my’, ‘near’).

• Procedural meaning: computational content which guides

the interpretation process by foregrounding certain contextual assumptions and cognitive effects over competing ones.

MEANING IN RELEVANCE THEORY

Information conveyed by an utterance (Wilson & Sperber 1993:3) Ostensively communicated Non-ostensively communicated Linguistically communicated Not linguistically communicated Linguistically encoded Not linguistically encoded Conceptually encoded Procedurally encoded Contributes to Contributes to Constraints on Constraints on Explicatures Implicatures Explicatures Implicatures Contributes to Contributes to Constraints on Constraints on proposition higher-level proposition higher-level expressed explicatures expressed explicatures

MEANING IN RELEVANCE THEORY

Information conveyed by an utterance (Wilson & Sperber 1993:3) Ostensively communicated Non-ostensively communicated Linguistically communicated Not linguistically communicated Linguistically encoded Not linguistically encoded Conceptually encoded Procedurally encoded Contributes to Contributes to Constraints on Constraints on Explicatures Implicatures Explicatures Implicatures Contributes to Contributes to Constraints on Constraints on proposition higher-level proposition higher-level expressed explicatures expressed explicatures

CONCEPTUAL MEANING

 Conceptually encoded information that contributes to the

proposition expressed (truth-conditional content): Most regular content words (e.g. cat, dog, table, run etc.)

 Conceptually encoded information that contributes to

higher-level explicatures: Various types of sentence and illocutionary adverbials (e.g. Ifantidou 1993, 2001, Wilson & Sperber 1993) e.g. “Frankly speaking, she is one of the most charismatic personalities I have ever met”. “Unfortunately, we lost the game”.

 Conceptually encoded information that contributes to

implicatures: More or less, the usual Gricean scenario.

PROCEDURAL MEANING

 Procedurally encoded information that constrains the

derivation of the proposition expressed (truth-conditional content):

• Pronominals (e.g. Wilson & Sperber 1993, Hedley 2007):

their character is procedural and their content is conceptual.

• ‘And’ (e.g. Carston 1988, 1993, 2002, Blass 1990, Wilson &

Sperber 1998): best analysed not as implicature but as pragmatically derived aspect of truth-conditional content. e.g. I took out my key and opened the door. John dropped the glass and it broke. They planted an acorn and it grew. Peter left and Mary got angry. It’s always the same at parties: either I get drunk and no-

• ne will talk to me or no-one will talk to me and I get drunk.

PROCEDURAL MEANING

 Procedurally encoded information that constrains the

derivation of higher-level explicatures

• Interjections (e.g. Wilson & Sperber 1993, Wharton 2003)

e.g. “You like the cake, eh?”. “He is smart, huh!”

• Parentheticals (e.g. Wilson & Sperber 1993, Ifantidou 2001,

Wilson 1998, Blakemore 2006) e.g. “This is, I suppose, true.”

 Procedurally encoded information that constrains the

derivation of implicatures:

• Discourse connectives such as ‘but’, ‘although’, ‘so’ etc. (e.g.

Blakemore 1987, 2000, 2002, 2006, 2007, Iten 2005, Hall 2007) e.g. He is lazy; so, he didn’t clean the room. He is lazy; after all, he didn’t clean the room.

PROCEDURAL MEANING

Procedurality tests (Wilson & Sperber 1993, Blakemore 2002)

 Procedural encodings are difficult to define or provide

paraphrases for.

 Procedural encodings do not have synonymous truth-

conditional counterparts.

 Procedural encodings cannot be semantically complex

in the same way that expressions which encode conceptual meaning are. Other procedural expressions: ‘Let’ and ‘Let’s’ (Clark 1993), ‘well’ (de Klerk 2005), ‘believe’ (Jary 2008), “the’ and ‘a’ (Breheny 1999)

PROCEDURAL MEANING

 Other types of procedural units:

1) Grammatical aspects: e.g. Non-declarative verbal mood as a constraint on the identification of speaker propositional attitude (e.g. Wilson & Sperber 1988, Clark 1991, Rouchota 1994, Jary 2004, Ahern 2006) 2) Phonological properties e.g. Intonation and prosody (e.g. Escandell Vidal 1998, Fretheim 1998, Wilson & Wharton 2006)

PROBLEMS WITH THE EXISTING ACCOUNT

1) How is procedural information represented in the lexicon? “One cannot regard procedural knowledge as embodied in semantic rules without turning it into something with conceptual content, and thus turning it into something that loses its procedural character”. (Bezouidenhout 2004:101) One possible solution: From a relevance-theoretic perspective concepts are triple of entries: lexical, logical and encyclopaedic. So: Maybe procedural encodings lack an encyclopaedic entry. Procedural encodings are not parts of propositions. What are they?

PROBLEMS WITH THE EXISTING ACCOUNT

2) How do procedural encodings encode certain kinds of inferences? Blakemore’s original assumption (1987): Discourse connectives that encode constraints on interpretation can be classified according to the cognitive effects they encode.

• Contextual implication. e.g. ‘so’.
• Strengthening of an existing assumption. e.g. ‘after all’,

‘indeed’.

• Elimination of an existing assumption e.g. ‘but’, ‘however’.

However, as Blakemore (2002) acknowledges, this analysis does not allow us to account for the differences between discourse connectives linked to the same cognitive effect. e.g. A: Come on, we’ve got time for another coffee. B: But/?However, I’ve got a meeting at 2.00.

PROBLEMS WITH THE EXISTING ACCOUNT

3) Can an encoding be both procedural and conceptual? “In principle, it is possible for an expression classified as a discourse marker to encode either a concept or a procedure”. (Blakemore, 2002:82) However, it has been suggested that certain expressions might be both conceptual and procedural:

• Conjunction (Takeuchi 1997, Wilson & Sperber 1998,

Carston 2002, Lee 2002)

• ‘Decir’ in Spanish (Pons Bondería 2008)
• Parentheticals in Russian (Grenoble 2004)
• ‘well’ (de Klerk 2005)

Possible solution: A continuum of cases ranging from fully conceptual to fully procedural

POTENTIAL FUTURE DIRECTIONS

1) If we accept that pronouns and other deictic elements are merely instructions to recover reference, we should apply this perspective more thoroughly. (Wedgwood 2009) Dynamic Semantics: e.g. indefinites as suppliers of discourse referents, presuppositions/anaphora as instructions to find antecedents, propositional meanings as transitions from one context to another (‘meaning = context change potential’) Dynamic Syntax: Grammar is constituted of instructions of how to get from forms to meanings (i.e. parsing), not pairings of form and meaning. Hence, grammar itself consists in procedural meaning and syntactic representations/derivations play no role.

POTENTIAL FUTURE DIRECTIONS

2) If Relevance Theory endorses some version of radical contextualism (Assimakopoulos 2008), and it is indeed the case that conceptual and procedural meaning can coexist in an expression’s conceptual entry, there is a sense in which all lexical items can be thought to be procedural. After all, if procedural encodings constitute “pointers to the pragmatic inferences the hearer is to carry out” (Carston 2002:161), and a lexical item’s corresponding concept is always to be found inferentially, then lexical items can be viewed as pointers to referents much like pronouns. However, there is a clear difference between pronouns, pro- concepts, and concepts like ‘happy’, ‘good’ and concepts like ‘table’ or ‘cat’, which needs to be acknowledged by every semantic theory, even one based on procedural meaning.

References (a):

Ahern, A. (2006) ‘Spanish mood, propositional attitudes and metarepresentation’, in von Heusinger, K. & Turner, K. (eds,) Where Semantics Meets Pragmatics. Amsterdam: Elsevier, pp. 445-470 Assimakopoulos, S. (2008) Logical Structure and Relevance. PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh. Bezouidenhout, A. (2004) ‘Procedural meaning and the semantics/pragmatics interface’, in Bianchi, C. (ed.) The Semantics/Pragmatics Distinction. CSLI Publications, pp. 101-131. Blakemore, D. (1987) Semantic Constraints on Relevance. Oxford: Blackwell. Blakemore, D. (2000) ‘Indicators and procedures: Nevertheless and But’, in Journal of Linguistics 36:463-486. Blakemore, D. (2002) Relevance and Linguistic Meaning: The Semantics and Pragmatics of Discourse

• Markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Blakemore, D. (2006) ‘Division of labour: the analysis of parentheticals’, in Lingua 116:1670-1687. Blakemore, D. (2007) ‘Constraints, concepts and procedural encoding’, in Burton-Roberts, N. (ed.)

• Pragmatics. Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 45-66.

Blass, R. (1990) Relevance Relations in Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Breheny, R. (1999) Context-Dependence and Procedural Meaning: The Semantics of Definites. PhD thesis, UCL. Carston, R. (1988) ‘Implicature, explicature, and truth-theoretic semantics’, in Kempson, R. (ed.) Mental Representations: The Interface between Language and Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carston, R. (1993) ‘Conjunction, explanation and relevance’, in Lingua 90:27-48 Carston, R. (2002) Thoughts and Utterances: The Pragmatics of Explicit Communication. Oxford: Blackwell. Carston, R. (2004) ‘Explicature and semantics’, in Davis, S. & Gillon, B. (eds.) Semantics: A Reader. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Clark, B. (1991) Relevance Theory and the Semantics of Non-Declaratives. PhD thesis, UCL. Clark, B. (1993) ‘Let and Let’s: procedural encoding and explicature’, in Lingua 90: 173-200 Escandell Vidal, (1998) ‘Intonation and procedural encoding: the case of Spanish interrogatives’, in Rouchota,

• V. & Jucker, A. Current Issues in Relevance Theory. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 169-204.

Fretheim, T. (1998) ‘Intonation and the procedural encoding of attributed thoughts: the case of Norwegian negative interrogatives’, in Rouchota, V. & Jucker, A. Current Issues in Relevance Theory. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 205-236. Grenoble, L.A. (2004) ‘Parentheticals in Russian’, in Journal of Pragmatics 36:1953-1974.

References (b):

Hall, A. (2007) ‘Do discourse connectives encode concepts or procedures?’, in Lingua 117:149-174. Hedley, P. (2007) Anaphora, Relevance, and the Conceptual/Procedural Distinction. PhD thesis, University

• f Oxford.

Ifantidou, E. (1993) ‘Sentential adverbs and relevance’, in Lingua 90:65-90. Ifantidou, E. (2001) Evidentials and Relevance. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Iten, C. (2005) Linguistic Meaning, Truth Conditions and Relevance. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Jary, M. (2008) ‘The relevance of complement choice: a corpus study of ‘believe’’, in Lingua 118:1-18 Lee, H.-K. (2002) ‘Towards a new typology of connectives with special reference to conjunction in English and Korean’, in Journal of Pragmatics 34:851-866. Pons Bondería, S. (2008) ‘Do discourse markers exist? On the treatment of discourse markers in Relevance Theory’, in Journal of Pragmatics 40:1411-1434. Rouchota, V. (1994) The Semantics and Pragmatics of the Subjunctive in Modern Greek: A Relevance- Theoretic Approach. Phd Thesis: UCL. Sperber, D. & Wilson, D (1995) Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell. Wedgwood, D. (2009) ‘Interpreting procedures: some conceptual issues’. Paper delivered at Procedural

• Meaning. Problems and Perspectives. Madrid.

Wharton, T. (2003) ‘Interjections, language, and the ‘showing/saying’ continuum’, in Pragmatics & Cognition 11:39-91. Wilson, D. (1998) ‘Linguistic structure and inferential communication’. Paper delivered at the 16th International Congress of Linguists. Paris. Wilson, D. & Sperber, D. (1985) ‘On choosing the context for utterance interpretation’, in Allwood, J. & Hjelmquist, E. (eds.) Foregrounding Background. Doxa, pp. 51-64. Wilson, D. & Sperber, D. (1988) ‘Mood and the analysis of non-declarative sentences’, in Dancy, J., Moravcsik, J. & Taylor C. (eds.) Human Agency: Language, Duty and Value. Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 77-101. Wilson, D. & Sperber, D. (1993) ‘Linguistic form and relevance’, in Lingua 90:1-25. Wilson, D. & Sperber, D. (1998) ‘Pragmatics and time’, in Carston, R. & Uchida, S. (eds.) Relevance Theory: Applications and Implications. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 1-22. Wilson, D. & Wharton, T. (2006) ‘Relevance and prosody’, in Journal of Pragmatics 38:1559-1579.