RT list: Question about procedural meaning and truth conditions

Dear all,

As argued in Sperber and Wilson (1993), procedural meaning can impose
constraints either on the explicatures or the implicatures of an utterance.
So, for example, discourse connectives are procedural but non-truth
conditional as they contribute to the implicit side of meaning, as
discussed by Blakemore. While intonation (Clark 2007, and Clark & Wharton
2009) is procedural but contributes to higher-level explicatures. And then
other studies (Hedley 2007, Scott 2008) discussed pronouns and determiners
as procedural but truth conditional since they contribute to the explicit
side of meaning.

Now, I am woking with a particle in Modern Standard Arabic which seems to
be encoding two types of procedural meaning, depending on the tense of the
following verb as follows:

particle + perfect tense verb --> procedural constraint on implicatures (or
higher-level explicature?) which is non-truth conditional with the overall
interpretation of emphasis on the action expressed in the verb

particle + imperfect tense verb --> procedural constraint on explicature
which is truth-conditional with the overall interpretation of probability
in relation to the action expressed in the verb.

So I was wondering if there are any other examples in other languages of
similar cases. Is it just a case of ambiguity then?

Thanks,

Mai

Mai Zaki
American University of Sharjah
Received on Sun Nov 17 11:47:45 2013