RT list: VS: Ray Gibbs on logical form

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Fra: Thorstein Fretheim [mailto:thorstein.fretheim@hf.ntnu.no]
Sendt: 16. februar 2011 13:26
Til: 'relevance@linguistics.ucl.ak.uk'
Emne: Ray Gibbs on logical form

Dear all,
 
I was thrilled by Ray Gibbs' submission to the RT list on February 15. He
asks a rhetorical question, "Is there ANY empirical/experimental evidence to
suggest that people compute anything like a 'logical form' during their
online understanding of language?", and he concludes that, "RT works just
fine without needing to posit logical forms as a starting place for
linguistic understanding". I am sympathetic to the idea that 'logical form'
with its current properties, understood as the interface between language
and communicated thought, should be abandoned, but what is it to be replaced
by? The demise of 'logical form' was argued for quite explicitly by Noel
Burton-Roberts in his paper "Varieties of semantics and encoding" in the
volume Pragmatics that he himself edited (Palgrave, 2007). The big question
is what you're going to put in its stead. Like Recanati who has criticized
the concept of 'logical form' in RT in "Pragmatics and logical form", a
paper that appears in his new book Truth-conditional Pragmatics (Oxford
U.P., 2010), I am not so sure that I'm ready to renounce semantic
composition. Is Gibbs prepared to do that? Recanati presumes that semantic
composition is a context-dependent process and that a workable notion of
'logical form' cannot be the relevance-theoretic, context-free "proposition
schema", a level of representation that is semantically gappy so that it
doesn't count as a "propositional form". Rather, a logical form must be a
post-pragmatic level for pragmatic modulation or enrichment to operate on,
says Recanati. Free ("top down") pragmatic processes must be allowed to
impact on the input to rules of semantic composition. Exactly how different
from the encoded linguistic semantics must this input to semantic
composition be in order to meet Gibbs' reminder to us in yesterday's mail:
"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 believe that semantic composition does not operate on 'logical form'
understood as the output of the grammar module. In a couple of forthcoming
papers - "Description as indication: the use of conceptual meaning for a
procedural purpose" and "Relevance Theory and Direct Reference Philosophy -
a suitable match?" - as well as one published paper, "Conceptual pointers to
antecedent information and reference resolution" (in Meaning, Content and
Argument, ed. by J.M Larrazabal & L. Zubeldia, University of the Basque
Country Press, 2009), I advocate a view that I believe to be keeping with
Direct Reference philosophy (cf. Kaplan 1898 on "Demonstratives", but also
Kripke, Perry, and Recanati's book Direct Reference, Blackwell, 1993) and
with George Powell's approach to reference in his important book Language,
Thought and Reference (Palgrave, 2010). In my opinion we have a reason to
lament the fact that RT permits no encoded conceptual meaning to be
eliminated as input to those pragmatic processes of enrichment that are
necessary for the hearer's 'mental representation' a fully-fledged
proposition. .Powell makes an interesting distinction between a speaker's
"informative intention" and her "derivational intention" (2010: 29), saying
that, "... separate from the informative intention itself, a speaker will
have intentions concerning the route via which her audience should reach the
content of her informative intention." The (primary) role of certain
linguistic items is to give an indication of the speaker's derivational
intention in Powell's sense. Such items encode a "procedural" meaning in the
sense of Relevance Theory. In my recent work on reference I discuss sets of
natural language data which I believe to show that in referential
expressions even lexical items and descriptive phrases that do encode a
conceptual meaning (according to the standard view) deliver nothing to the
content of the utterance, though they may provide important information
about what is in Powell's terminology the speaker's "derivational
intention"; in other words, they offer exclusively procedural information
for the benefit of the hearer, in spite of the conceptual meaning that the
output of the grammar module provides.
 
Best regards,
 
Thorstein Fretheim
Norwegian university of Science and Technology
Received on Wed Feb 16 12:33:12 2011