Hi all,
I've been reading Diane Blakemore's paper on "nevertheless" and "but"
in Journal of Linguistics 36:3 (2000) with interest. Diane is making
the point that "nevertheless" gives information about the CONTEXT in
which the utterance is to be interpreted rather than information
about its intended effects (p. 482), and she concludes, therefore,
that the notion of procedural meaning as a constraint on contextual
effects is too narrow and must be extended to include information
about inferential processes involved in context selection.
I always thought that procedural information about the intended
context IS one subtype of cognitive effect that may contribute to
relevance. Isn't this what is standardly (in RT literature) referred
to as "implicated premises"? In Diane's own example from her 1992
book UNDERSTANDING UTTERANCES (p. 126) Barbara's answer to "Me"
enables the hearer to supply the contextual information "The music we
are listening to is atonal":
Me: Do you like this music?
Barbara: I've never liked atonal music.
How can it be that the implicated premise "The music we are listening
to is atonal" does affect derivation of intended effects that
constrain relevance, while the procedural marker "nevertheless" does
NOT constrain the hearer's computation of intended effects, even if
it facilitates the process of context selection just like Barbara's
reference to "atonal music" in the above example?
And then a question addressed directly to Diane: One of the two bits
of procedural information that you postulate for "nevertheless" is
that this word encodes the information that the utterance is relevant
as an answer to a question whose relevance has been established in
the preceding discourse (p. 481). Isn't that condition too strong?
Cannot the apparent incompatibility/contradiction to be resolved by
the elimination of an assumption sometimes be *evoked* - activated by
the hearer - by means of the communicator's use of the word
"nevertheless"? Isn't your reference to "a question whose relevance
has been established in the PRECEDING DISCOURSE" (my capitals) too
narrow?
Best regards,
Thorstein Fretheim
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