Kasher, Asa, ed. (1998) Pragmatics: Critical Concepts,
Volume V: Communication, Talk in Interaction, Discourse.
Routledge, vi+490pp, hardback ISBN 0-415-16938-0,
Routledge Critical Concepts series (Reviewed M. T.,
LINGUIST List: Vol-12-2917.
"The articles have all appeared before in print. Some of them have been
updated with postscripts."
Contents:
75. JR Searle, Meaning, Communication and Representation.
"He furthers previous explorations, by himself and by Grice [...] Unlike
Grice, who thinks that speakers have the intention that hearers believe
their utterances, Searle asserts that the only intention is that the hearer
understand the utterance" ((The essay was especially written for the Grice
festschrift, PRGRICE, Philosophical Grounds of Rationality, Intentions,
Categories, Ends -- Clarendon, 1986, ed. Richard Grandy & Richard Warner
(the "RichardS" of Grice's reply, 'Reply to Richards'). It is I think the
_only_ essay in the collection cited by SC Levinson in his _Presumptive
meanings: the theory of generalised conversational implicature_, MIT 2000).
76. A. N. Chomsky, Reflections on Language. A discussion of Grice, too.
77. Language Without Communication: A Case Study. Marion Blank, Myron
Gessner and Anita Esposito.
78. Overcoming Inadequacies in the 'Message-model' of Linguistic
Communication. Adrian Akmajian, Richard A. Demers and Robert M. Harnish.
79. Precis of _Relevance: Communication and Cognition_. Dan Sperber and
Deirdre Susan Moir Wilson.
From Behavoural & Brain Sciences, 10:697-754.
"This is a summary of the 1986 book in which the authors explain their view
of communication, a view based on Grice's (1975) maxims, reduced to one
principle of relevance: that communicated intention comes with a guarantee
of relevance. Every communicative act carries a presumption of optimal
relevance, which involves a guarantee that
(i) the communicative act is relevant enough
to make it worthwhile for the hearer to process it, and
(ii) the stimulus is the most relevant one
available to the speaker.
When processing utterances that are assumed to be relevant, the hearer
interprets each utterance relative to the context, built for each utterance
out of the logical form, implicatures and presuppositions. Communication
can be achieved, it has been argued, by encoding and decoding messages
(Shannon and Weaver's 1949 view, discussed earlier), or by providing
evidence for the inferences to be drawn about the speaker's communicative
intention. The two types of processes have traditionally been seen as
exclusive of each other; one could conceive of communication as one or the
other. Sperber and Wilson propose that both can be combined, especially in
verbal communication. The final part of the paper is devoted to explaining how
relevance accounts for poetic effects. Given a principle of relevance that
is mindful of least effort, an utterance that has more implicatures (in the
form of repetition, metaphor, irony, etc.), and therefore requires extra
effort, will be justified because of the extra effect.
((This is mentioned by Levinson as a good intro to S&W's thought. He quotes
it and his reply in the journal where the precis was first published.
Levinson's ref. being:
'Explicature Explicated'. Behavioural and Brain Sciences 10:722-723.))
80. MAE Dummett, Language and Communication.
I like the following quote from Dummett, in Truth & Other Enigmas, so much
_mis-interpreting_ Grice:
the notion of conversational implicature was invented
in place of the general semantic concepts which had
been expelled in the original determination to pay
attention to nothing but the actual use of particular
utterances. 1978:445.
81. A Pragmatic Model for the Dynamics of Communication. J Verschueren.
82. Communication and Strategic Inference. Prashant Parikh.
"The model lays out the tools for a systematic account of Gricean
communication."
Part Ten: Talk In Interaction
83. A Simplest Systematics for the Organization of Turn-taking for
Conversation. Harvey Sacks, Emanuel A. Schegloff and Gail Jefferson.
84. The Preference for Self-correction in the Organization of Repair in
Conversation. Emanuel A. Schegloff, Gail Jefferson and Harvey Sacks.
85. Response Cries. Erving Goffman.
86. Collectivities in Action: Establishing the Relevance of Conjoined
Participation in Conversation. Gene H. Lerner.
Part Eleven: Discourse
87. The Pragmatics of Discourse. Teun A. van Dijk. Postscript (1995): The
New Pragmatics.
88. Pragmatics and the Description of Discourse. Charles J. Fillmore.
89. Generative Discourse Analysis in America. Susumo Kuno.
90. Speech Acts, Discourse Structure and Pragmatic Connectives. Eddy Roulet.
91. Discourse Analysis: A Part of the Study of Linguistic Competence. Ellen
F. Prince.
92. On the Informativeness Requirement. Rachel Giora. Postscript (1995).
"Giora explains the informativeness constraint, which states that
(narrative) texts proceed from a generalization to the most informative
content, the Discourse Topic. This is based on Grice's (1975) maxims,
and on Relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson 1986), with relevance being
viewed here as informativeness."
Wonder what Levinson would say about _that_!
"The author shows, with a number of experiments, that readers prefer texts
where the most informative message occupies paragraph-final position. She
compares this progression to the organization of categories (e.g. Rosch
1973). A text is organized like a category, going from the most typical
member (the least informative message) to the least typical member (the
most informative message). In the Postscript,
Giora discusses her work after the paper, and how it has expanded the
informativeness requirement to cover non-narrative texts, jokes, and irony."
REFERENCES
Grice, P. H. (1975) Logic and Conversation. In P. Cole and J.
Morgan (eds.) Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Acts. New York:
Academic Press. Repr. in _Studies in the Way of Words_,
Harvard University Press.
Sperber, D. and D. Wilson (1986) Relevance: Communication and
Cognition. Blackwell: Oxford. Second edition, with a postface,
1995.
==
==
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