RT list:

Greetings.

I was very favourably impressed by Alison Hall's paper on subsentential
utterances in Pragmatics & Cognition 17/2 (2009), p. 222-

I assume you know the content of the paper, which is a defence of ideas
initially published by Stainton, against philosophers such as Ludlow and
Stanley.

The most itneresting point is a reply to Ludlow who posits hidden
structure in subsentential utterances reconsructing NPs, Vs, etc.

Hall is right that given the fact than a number of alternative structures
would have to be posited, pragmatics would be essential in determining
which one is intended, and therefore free enrichment would be more
parsimonous than a hidden indexical plus pragmatic disambiguation story.

A referee raises an interesting objection:

see p. 240

If one accepts, as Hall does, that the interpretation of subsentential
fragments is indeterminate (in other words the proposition recoved may
have a different syntactic structure

e.g.

The editor of Mode:

That is the editor of Mode

The editor of Mode has just come in)

then it is possible to recover, on the basis of

"The editor of Mode"

two different utterances:

17 a The woman who is standing next to the door is the editor of Mode
17b The editor of Mode has just walked in

17a/b could give rise to indirect reports such as:

18 a B said that the woman who is standing next to the door is the editor
of Mode:

18 b B said that the editor of Mode has just walked in

but (crucial objection) 18 a and 18 b may be said to say different things,
because in 18a the editor of Mode is a woman, while 18b said in a world in
which there are not women (clearly a remote possibility, in my opinion) is
compatible with an interpretation according to which the editor of Mode is
a man.

Hall answers this by a discussion of indeterminacy of pragmatic meaning,
which is ok.

However, a more direct reply would be the following:

1) 18 a and 18 b in any case say different things;

2) indirect reports like any other type of utterance have
truth-conditional meaning as a contribution of explicatures. Presumably
the explicature of 18b enriches the NP The editor by providing a referent
(which implies that the editor of mode is a woman) or by at least
providing an apposition phrase - who is a woman, which solves the problem
noted by the referee.

End of the story.
Received on Tue Oct 6 10:51:56 2009