Excerpts from review of
A. Kasher, ed.
Presupposition, Implicature
& Indirect Speech Acts.
London: RKP.
(by AS, LINGUIST 12.2154).
JL
Grice Circle.
====
The volume contains 27 essays divided in three parts: presupposition (6),
conversational implicature (17) and indirect speech acts (4).
SECTION ON CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURE:
1. H.P.Grice, St John's, Oxford.
2. H.P.Grice
3. H.P.Grice
Retrospective Epilogue. Strand Six.
-- discussion and "criticism" inter alia, of Wilson & Sperber.
"Only after the identification of a focus of _relevance_ can
[an] assessment [of underinformativeness] be made; the force
of this consideration seems to be blunted by writers like
Wilson and Sperber who seem to be disposed to sever the notion
of relevance from the specification of some particular direction
of relevance" (Studies, p.372).
In 'Reply to Richards', Grice sees he is moved and honoured that
people like Wilson and Sperber contributed to the festschrift
(PGRICE Philosophical Grounds of Rationality: Intentions, Categories,
Ends, ed. R. Grandy), seeing that the contributors are "not just
a haphazard band of professional colleagues" but "every one of them"
"a personal friend". (p.45).
4. A.P.Kasher, Tel Aviv.
5. E.Ochs, UC/B
6. R.M.Harnish, MIT
7. J.M.Sadock, Stanford.
8. J.D.Mccawley, Chicago
* 9. Sperber/Wilson (irrespectively,
UCL & CNRS, and P.G.R.I.C.E.)
Groupe pour la reserche de la inference & la comprehension
elementaire, Paris)
((The authors are the mother and father, irrespectively, of
RT, and members of this list)).
* 10. Sperber/Wilson. Same as 9.
11. LR Horn, Yale.
12. J.K. Hintikka, Gainesville.
* 13. R Carston, UCL
((moderator to this list))
15. J. Fretheim
* 16. F Recanati, GRICE
((member of this list)).
* 17. F Recanati, GRICE
NOTES on RT-relevant essays.
"Sperber and Wilson's essay (No. 9) is "On Grice's Theory of Conversation"
Originally published in S. Levinson as a Pragmatics Microfiche and repr. in
P. Werth, Conversation & Discourse, London: Croom Helm.
Essay No 9 is "Mutual Knowledge & Relevance in Theories of Comprehension"
Their contribution to the symposium on "Mutual Knowledge" held by NV Smith
at USx/Brighton, and to which Grice contributed with "Meaning Revisited".
The proceedings published by Smith for Academic Press.
The reviewer writers:
"Wilson and Sperber find Grice's distinction between "what is said" and
"what is conversationally implicated" inadequate."
"They claim, instead, that the proposition expressed by an utterance ("what
is said") is also derived using pragmatic processes."
"They further criticize Grice's pretense-based, as it was called, analysis
of irony and metaphor, and call for a separate treatment of these within a
theory of rhetoric."
((cfr. R. Carston's contribution on "metaphor and effort" to this list)).
"Wilson and Sperber suggest a reduction of Grice's maxims to a single
principle of relevance: a rational speaker will choose an utterance that
will provide the hearer with a maximum number of contextual implications in
a minimum processing effort."
This view is first developed by Wilson in Smith & Wilson, Modern
Linguistics: The results of Chomskyan revolution and her PhD for MIT under
Chomsky.
"A feature of Sperber and Wilson's theory which is significantly different
from Grice's is that the processing of an utterance involves a construction
of a context in which the effects of the utterance are evaluated. The
context is not given, but enriched in such a way that facilitates the
processing of the utterance. For a recent critique of relevance theory see
Levinson, Presumptive Meanings: The Theory of Conversational Implicature".
Distributed by JLS with this list.
Levinson launches an extensive attack on Relevance Theory, his
sparring-partner throughout. His main critique resides in the observation
that Wilson and Sperber and their followers do not allow for an
intermediate level of generalized conversational implicatures, in between
"literal meaning" (semantics) and once-off ("nonce") inferences. Levinson
proceeds to show how semantics and implicatures interpenetrate. What he
calls "semantics" seems to encompass the traditional semantic
representations (even though Levinson advocates a much more abstract
"meaning representation", and as such embraces the trend toward
"underdetermined" meanings, and a second, truth-conditional level that
enriches the semantic structure of the first component (taking into account
implicatures, presuppositions and other pragmatic meaning contributions).
An example
concerns the ellipsis in an answer like
1. John.
to the question of for example, "Who came?". The semantics of the answer
can be enriched to
2. John came
by means of an Informativeness-based inference and thus acquires a
truth-conditional content. In constant, often implicit, but sometimes
vehement discussion with the rivaling accounts of Relevance Theory, which
deny the existence of an intermediate level between "once-off" inferences
and "literal" or "conventional" meaning, he offers data that suggest the
existence of such a level, thereby crucially relying on the difference
between entailment and defeasible inference.
Essay 13 is R. Carston, "Implicature, Explicature, and Truth-theoretic
Semantics",
First published in relevance-list member
RM Kempson, ed
Mental Representations, Cambridge.
Carston introduces here -- she she had done it already in "A realanysis of
some quantity implicatures" the notion of
"explicature",
viz. the proposition explicitly expressed by an utterance. Carston argues
that this is not the minimal proposition that we get from the *logical
form* (or truth-condition) of an utterance after the three
Wilsonian-Sperberian processes of 1. disambiguation, 2. reference
assignment, and 3. semantic enrichment, but something which is derived by a
pragmatic process. She considers the problem of distinguishing explicatures
from implicatures in a relevance-theoretic framework. The paper is followed
by a postscript especially written for this volume, which she probably has
in attach format (:)).
Essays 16 and 17 are relevance-list member F. Recanati, "Truth-Conditional
Pragmatics" and "Primary Pragmatic Processes", which, the reviewerer
writes, are intimately related to R Carston's contribution.
And which I'd love if the author would have it in attach format as I'd love
to have them, or else as offprints to
JLS
Calle 58, No 611
La Plata CP 1900
Pcia BUENOS AIRES, Argentina.
"Recanati argues that many cases that were analyzed as implicatures are
pragmatic constituents of the proposition expressed. He rejects the popular
view in formal semantics that "what is said" is derived from "sentence
meaning" by filling in empty slots -- such as an appropriate domain of
quantification -- on the grounds that there are cases who cannot be
explained in this way."
"However, it is not at all clear that the cases Recanati discusses in this
context are not just implicatures and are indeed a part of the proposition
expressed by the sentence. He proposes instead that there are pragmatic
processes which operate locally, below the sentence level, before the
computation of the proposition from word meanings.
"I guess that adherents of Relevance theory would miss a contribution by
Blakemore."
Yes I guess he's right. I miss Blakemore. Should she have any essay in
attach form or a second hand copy of her book I could get from her (I can
send check in sterling drawn on a UK bank or work with credit card -- or
should I cc Blackwell direct) I should love to read her (or any other
worker who has attach's et al).
==
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Sep 04 2001 - 21:22:49 GMT