Re: RT list: VS: Ray Gibbs on logical form

I have been following this discussion with great interest and I think
it gets more to the point as contributions pile up... For what it's
worth I think that the real question is precisely what sort of mental
entity a logical form is taken to be. My own understanding of the term
as used in RT lies somewhere in between the two notions that Billy has
suggested. In this respect, a logical form could be thought of as a
logical representation which encompasses solely the encoded meaning of
an utterance's words, so it can't be fully propositional if we take
the linguistic underdeterminancy thesis seriously. Looked at from this
angle, which I have for long believed to be Sperber & Wilson's
original point, a logical form is nothing more than what the grammar,
or whatever we take to be a purely language oriented module of the
mind, feeds into the ostension inferential device. In this sense,
recovering a logical form might simply amount to saying that the
hearer recognizes the stimulus on offer as a linguistic input, which
triggers the relevant part of the brain into generating some
conceptual schema which will then serve as the basis for inferential
enrichment. I assume that this is what Hanno suggested too with
respect to Ray's question and Jose Luis' point, and I don't see any
way in which this could be experimentally proven (if logical forms are
fragmentary, incomplete and subpropositional).

What is crucial though, if my line of thinking is correct, is that
this logical form should not be thought of as incorporating any sort
of full syntactic representation either (otherwise the incorporation
of certain so called unarticulated constituent wouldn't be a matter of
free enrichment). Let's not forget that Chomsky's system is a
"perfect" competence system, and parsing might be working on this
basis, but is nonetheless a performance system, which for all Chomsky
cares (I assume...) could have several feedback relations with other
peripheral systems like the relevance comprehension one. Now, the
problems in this picture arise when we look at interpretation from the
perspective of cognitive architecture and the encapsulation of the
relevant "modules" this entails. So, it all boils down to what sort of
feedback relations RT is prepared to allow between the basic
linguistic level (syntax+semantics) as a PARSER and the inferential
processor, since RT is related to actual processing rather than
linguistic competence per se. Here the implicit argument for the
Chomskyan is arguably what Jose Luis has been pressing for, and I take
Ray's comment to suggest that it wouldn't bind very well with
psycholinguistic evidence. Regarding Jose Luis' "that" sentence, I
cannot but think that syntactically valid though it may be, it would
require a lot of effort to process in any non-linguistics specialist
situation, because it wouldn't bind well with any reasonably easily
constructed context. It is in this respect that Dynamic Syntax has a
clear advantage over the Chomskyan paradigm, as it essentially
suggests that all the interpretative operations take place on-line and
in tandem, incorporating the RT argument that what the speaker
essentially does (and cannot help but do) is try to make sense of some
acoustic stimulus (thanks Hanno for underlining this). The latest
arguments of DS with respect to dialogue can even provide an answer
(I'm unaware of what this would be in detail at the moment) to
Ernst-August's initial question, since they don't take all
interpretation to result in complete propositions (in the sense of the
original DS axiom).

All in all, I believe that the only way in which we can entertain the
idea that there are no logical forms per se (in the RT and NOT the
Chomskyan sense, which I take to be distinct from each other), is by
assuming that there is no specifically linguistic knowledge. My gut
feeling is that such a path would be immensely difficult to follow for
various obvious reasons. Maybe by assuming different types of
crucially underspecified information as encoded by the "grammar", we
can start approaching the topic from a psychological viewpoint and
deal with the real issues that competence idealisations are used to
masquerade.

I hope this contributes something more to the ongoing discussion...
What I take to be clear is that the RT notion of development and
logical form indeed need to be more carefully delineated, as Burton
Roberts discusses in the paper that Thorstein mentioned.

All the best,
Stavros

On 16 February 2011 16:02, Billy Clark <b.clark@mdx.ac.uk> wrote:
> Thanks for this link, Ruth. I'm sure I'm not the only person on this list who is aware of but not well enough informed on dynamic syntax.
>
> Can I also ask a question to everyone about the meaning of 'logical form'? And also about the meaning of 'semantic representation'. I wonder whether 'logical form' has been used in two ways in Relevance Theory. In one sense, a logical form is a representation with logical properties. A subset of logical forms are fully propositional and so they're termed 'propositional forms'. I think these terms can both be used without any reference to linguistic meaning or utterance interpretation. In another sense, 'logical form' has been used as a synonym (or near synonym) for 'semantic representation', i.e. as a representation of the linguistically encoded meanings of linguistic expressions. I don't think it follows from Relevance Theory that we entertain logical forms in this latter sense as part of the interpretation process, even though we might want to represent them as part of our theory to account for linguistic meaning and utterance interpretation. Maybe we should use a term such as 'semantic representation' f
or a theoretical representation of the encoded meanings of linguistic expressions, which is understood as separate from claims about processing?
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Billy
>
>
>
>
> ________________________________________
> From: owner-relevance@linguistics.ucl.ac.uk [owner-relevance@linguistics.ucl.ac.uk] On Behalf Of Ruth Kempson [ruth.kempson@kcl.ac.uk]
> Sent: 16 February 2011 14:31
> Cc: relevance@linguistics.ucl.ac.uk
> Subject: [SPAM: 11.135] Re: RT list: VS: Ray Gibbs on logical form
>
> Ray Gibbs  observes that there is no need to posit a relevance-theoretic concept of logical form, and Thorstein  Fretheim asks whether there is a framework to hand which replaces the  concept of logical form as a context-independent output  with a competitive alternative.  As Chris Lucas has already pointed out, the answer is that indeed there is.   This is the Dynamic Syntax framework of  Kempson et al 2001, Cann et al 2005, Cann et al 2010.   Dynamic Syntax involves an explicit characterisation of ellipsis and split utterances of the type discussed in this debate; and those of us working on this framework have been advocating for some time that  no concept of logical form is warranted.  On this view syntax itself is the set of mechanisms for incremental projection of a propositional formula as identified in context, with both speakers and hearers projecting a propositional structure relative to their own context (with actual choices being determined by  relevance constraints)  The shift of perspective is
 radical in that one aspect of "performance" is incorporated into the model of grammar --  the concept of incrementally projecting structural representations of content in a way that reflects real-time dynamics. So underspecification and mechanisms for progressive update become core parts of the grammar.
>
> As noted by Chris Lucas, contributors to this debate might like to access the Dynamics of Conversational Dialogue website, where papers  accumulated during the progression of our  research project of this name, along with other Dynamics Syntax related papers:
> http://www.kcl.ac.uk/research/groups/ds/publications.html
>
> Ruth
>
>
>
>

-- 
Stavros Assimakopoulos
Postdoctoral Investigator
Department of Philosophy I
University of Granada
------------------------------------
http://www.ugr.es/~stavros/