RT list: Non-member submission from ["Raymond W Gibbs" <gibbs@ucsc.edu>]

This is the email from Ray Gibbs that Jose Luis Guijarro was replying to in his email to the list earlier today. It got bounced to me rather than circulated because of a glitch (a bit too technical to be worth explaining here, and no one's fault).

Best,
Nick

Nicholas Allott
RT list admin

> Dear Relevance Theory Fans:
>
> I am a psychologist with a long interest in relevance
> theory as a possible,
> psychologically-real account of different aspects of
> language use. I have
> conducted many studies in psycholinguistics that are
> strongly supportive of
> different RT claims, but have also raised other
> criticisms, in a few places,
> about some parts of the theory.
>
> The ongoing discussion about logical form and
> understanding poetry, for example,
> has been wonderful, and I appreciate those who have
> contributed. But I would like
> to ask one very simple, important question that directly
> touches on one long-standing
> complaint of mine.
>
> Is there ANY empirical/experimental evidence to suggest
> that people compute anything
> like a 'logical form' during their online understanding of
> language?
>
> Frankly, from my perspective, there is no such evidence.
> The idea that people must
> start from some skeletal structure (i.e., the logical form
> of an expression) is
> really nothing more than a linguistic/philosophical
> idealization that has little to
> do with what people really are engaged in during speaking
> and understanding. Language
> is processed in a dynamic, incremental fashion where the
> build-up of meaning occurs
> moment-by-moment without any need to start off with some
> abstract, logical structure onto which
> one can build linguistic and contextual meanings.
>
> I would be interested if anyone can cite certain
> psychological evidence that directly
> supports the idea that language processing is build around
> logical forms.
>
> For what it is worth, my dismissal of logical form in no
> ways diminishes the
> power of RT as plausible account of language use. Indeed,
> many RT scholars have
> acknowledged many aspects of online processing in their
> explications of different
> linguistic phenomena (e.g., mutual adjustment processes in
> the creation of explicatures
> and implicatures). My gut belief is that RT works just
> fine without needing to
> posit logical forms as a starting place for linguistic
> understanding.
>
> Thanks for your attention.
>
> Cheers
>
> Ray Gibbs
> University of California, Santa Cruz
>
>
>
>
> On Mon, 14 Feb 2011 19:51:42 +0100 (CET)
> Jose Luis Guijarro Morales <joseluis.guijarro@uca.es>
> wrote:
>>
>>
>> This is indeed an interesting issue. I know of no
>> particular investigation on it, but my hunch is that the
>> understanding of verbal messages needs to cover all the
>> steps I pointed to above; otherwise its functioning will
>> not be able to reach a satisfactory result. As I further
>> stated to Stavros, I feel that the neat separation of
>> steps does not (or, rather, should not) preclude
>> feed-back relationships between them. It may be true that
>> the non verbal communication achieved in your #4
>> situation (I prefer to call it situation than context) is
>> a step ahead in reaching understanding; Perhaps it is a
>> result of the way we process verbal input as opposed to
>> visual (or, imagistic -to cover all the senses) input
>> which seems to give reason to the folk dictum "an image
>> is better than many words", which, to say the truth, is
>> actually not true, for, more often than not, images need
>> to be interpreted using so many words (i.e., all
>> scientific images, and many non scientific as well).
>> However, the intuitive impression is that an image offers
>> an instantaneous set of communicative effects which,
>> typically, seems to be quicker (instantaneous!) and more
>> accurate than verbal messages. I can explain to you how
>> the view from my terrace is, or I can show you a
>> photograph of the view in which you may extract more
>> communicative effects than those I can speak about. Here
>> you are not only one step ahead, but a lot more!
>>
>> It may be well possible that it is not clear what a LF
>> really is. I am really hopeless at building logical
>> expressions and, therefore, I have accepted an intuitive
>> description of what such a thing could be. In the case of
>> the gardener, as you show, the constructed object that
>> corresponds to that one NP expression, would be
>> represented in my mind as
>> [SOMEONE] [DID SOMETHING [LEAVE OPEN] [TO SOMETHING] or,
>> if you prefer [LEAVE OPEN, GARDENER, DOOR] which, then
>> goes through a deletion process, leaving only GARDENER,
>> which has to be explicated (i.e., determined, referring
>> to a certain person, whatever.) and implicated as a
>> relevant response to the question, or, in our present
>> case, as a relevant example of your question/claim
>>
>> The situation #3, in the shop, is more complex
>> descriptively, but should follow the same steps, by first
>> making sense of the shop assistant question and answering
>> accordingly. That this is so, should be clear if you
>> build a ludicrous situation like
>>
>> Situation 5: You are watching birds with a friend, and
>> you ask her all excited "is that a bull finch?", to which
>> she answer "two cokes".
>>
>> Now, the answer may first baffle you, but humans being
>> what they are, compulsive interpreters, you try
>> desperately to find some sense to her answer. How would
>> you go about it? If you slowly mark what your
>> interpretative steps are in this case, you will probably
>> get an account of steps that could match my list of
>> processes.
>>
>> I am not sure about my arguments here -I just follow a
>> hunch as I told you at the beginning. Perhaps, my hunches
>> will not convince you for you have though about it longer
>> than I have. Anyway, from my perspective it has been a
>> nice food for thought, and I thank you for it.
>>
>> José Luis Guijarro
>> Facultad de Filosofía y Letras
>> Universidad de Cádiz
>> 11002 Cádiz, España (Spain)
>> tlf: (34) 956-011.613
>> fax: (34) 956-015.505
>
Received on Tue Feb 15 17:28:47 2011