>Date: Tue, 11 Jun 2002 10:54:15 +0100 (BST)
>
>This is in responce to both Steve Nicolle's question about RT and other
>theories, and M. J Murphy's question about "The present king of France
>is bald".
>
>About five or six years ago I brought up the question that Steve
>recently brought up, and argued that RT is much more compatible with a
>functional approach to language, such as Hopper's "emergent grammar"
>view, than with the Chomsky/Fodor view and wrote a paper which showed
>how an RT-informed perspective can explain the origin and function of
>language, and the typological varieties we find. Basically, the idea is
>that there is no "coding" stage, as assumed by the modular approach. The
>whole process of communication is based on ostension and inference. A
>communicator makes an ostensive act, and even the recognition of the
>ostensive act (what it is) and the fact that it is an ostensive act
>(i.e. an action with a communicative intention) involves inference. The
>observer/hearer of the ostensive act begins this inferential process
>because of the assumption of the principle of relevance (i.e. assumes
>the person is rational and is doing the ostensive act for a reason and
>that it is worth it for the observer to try to figure out what the
>reason is). The rest of the process is then figuring out the reason for
>the communicator making that particular ostensive act. It isn't
>important what the ostensive act is; what is important is figuring out
>the communicator's communicative intention (i.e. why the communicator
>made the ostensive act). The whole process of communication then is one
>of ostension and inference. The role of language is simply to be a more
>explicit ostensive act to constrain the observer/hearer's inferential
>process (and it isn't just grammatical forms that do this, as suggested
>by the "conceptual-procedural" distinction; all use of language has this
>function). Language is a tool like any other tool, and also part of and
>influenced by the overall culture in which it develops and is used: it
>is a conventionalized way of performing an action, and so each culture
>will develop different forms as individuals, in attempting to
>communicate, constrain the interpretation of different aspects of
>semantic domains or not constrain them, constrain them to different
>degrees, and use different formal mechanisms to constrain them. The
>patterns that a society conventionalizes into its language are those
>that are used repeatedly by many individuals to constrain the
>inferential process in a particular way, just as a path develops in a
>field because many people walk the same way through the field.
>
>My problem with the whole "The present king of France is bald"
>discussion is that it assumes what we are doing in communication is
>interpreting linguistic expressions, and so these can be interpreted out
>of context, though some contexts may disambiguate particular "ambiguous"
>expressions. My view is that what we are doing in communication is
>trying to understand the communicator's communicative intention, and we
>do this by creating a context in which the communicator's ostensive act
>is relevant (i.e. "makes sense"). Having a linguistic form as an
>ostensive act makes construction of the context of interpretation
>easier, as it constrains the assumptions that could possibly be part of
>the context of interpretation. Therefore, rather than saying it is the
>context that constrains the interpretation of the linguistic form, it is
>the linguistic form that constrains the context (of interpretation).
>
>In terms of the particular syntactic theory one uses to look at the
>linguistic forms that develop, any theory compatible with the idea of
>language as a way of constraining the search for relevance (essentially
>any theory that takes meaning and communication as basic rather than
>abstract form) would be OK. Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar (and
>his whole way of looking at language and communication) is particularly
>compatible with this approach. Role and Reference Grammar is also
>compatible, and in fact I put a bit of this theory in the discussion of
>the motivations for different focus structures in Chapter 5 of the book
>Van Valin and I did together (Syntax: Structure, Meaning and Function.
>CUP, 1997). (I'm not sure what Christoph Unger meant by saying we
>'attempt putting "pragmatic functions"
>into the syntax'--what we are doing is trying to show that pragmatic
>factors are the initial motivation for some syntactic patterns.)
>Theories that are simply formal models and not based on communication at
>all (such a Chomsky's), I feel, are not compatible with this way of
>looking at language. The modular approach is particularly incompatible,
>as it assumes the modules are informationally incapsulated. The
>inference involved in communication is of coursed based on all sorts of
>information, and so the assumption of ostension and inference as the
>basis of communication implies language use is based on general
>cognitive abilities, not on informationally encapsulated modules.
>
>The original paper I wrote back in 1997 and presented at the University
>of Melbourne as "Grammaticalization as the development of constraints on
>the search for relevance." on August 15, 1997, is available at
>http://personal.cityu.edu.hk/~ctrandy/GACRT.pdf. This paper was really
>written for an RT audience, and so I never published it.
>
>Randy
>
>
>------
>Randy J. LaPolla, PhD
>Associate Professor of Linguistics
>CTL, City University of Hong Kong
>Tat Chee Ave., Kowloon
>HONG KONG
>
>ctrandy@cityu.edu.hk or Randy.LaPolla@cityu.edu.hk
>Tel: (852) 2788-8075 (O)
>FAX: (852) 2788-8706
>http://personal.cityu.edu.hk/~ctrandy/index.htm
>
--------------------------------------------
Robyn Carston
Department of Phonetics & Linguistics, UCL
Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, UK
Tel: + 44 (0)20 7679 3174
Fax: + 44 (0)20 7383 4108
http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/robyn/home.htm
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