This is a response to Randy LaPolla's posting:
>> 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, ... Language is a tool like any other tool,
If language is a tool like any other tool then it is most appropriate and
necessary to study the structure of the tool itself and not only the purpose
that it is used for. In other words: not studying the formal properties of
language as a formal system is certainly inadequate.
>> 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,
I don't understand this: what does it mean that 'language is a ... Way of
performing an action'? Producing an utterance (or another stimulus) is an
action, but 'language'?
Also, once a certain way of constraining the interpretation of an utterance
utilizing a given linguistic form is conventionalized, how does this differ
from it being encoded in the language?
>> ...
>>
>> 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.
Halliday's Systemic-Functional Grammar is particularly _incompatible_ with
RT as it is based on a rather pure code model of communication (a
"socio-semiotic" approach). It is also built on an inadequate account of
context which it treats as given before the interpretation process and
determined by the "co-text" and situation of utterance. For a detailed
criticism of this approach from a relevance-theoretic perspective see Unger,
C. (2001) _On the cognitive role of genre: a relevance-theoretic
perspective._ University of London PhD thesis. Chapter 8, pp. 233-262. (I
can send it as PDF files.)
>> 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.)
What I said was that I was not sure where Role and Reference Grammar stands
with respect to 'attempting to put "pragmatic functions" into the syntax.'
With 'attempting to put "pragmatic functions" into the syntax' I mean
theories that include something like Lambrecht's (1994 _Information
structure and sentence form_. CUP) "information structure" as layer in the
grammar or use notions such as "topic", "focus", "foreground", "background"
etc. as grammaticalized "pragmatic functions" e.g. As in Simon Dik's
'Functional Grammar.'
The problems I see with such approaches are:
1. The notions "topic, focus, foreground, background" etc. would need to be
theoretically primitive notions if they were to be encodable in the grammar.
2. This is not the case, as Sperber & Wilson (1995 _Relevance_: 202-217)
have argued convincingly.
3. Correlations between sentence form and topicalization- or
grounding-interpretations which are typically achieved by them are not
necessarily related by the grammar. Sperber & Wilson (1995:202-217) show
that there is a natural linkage between them rather than a linkage relying
on information structure.
(With regard to information grounding [the foreground-background distinction
in discourse], I have argued this in more detail in Chapter 4 of my above
mentioned thesis and outlined a relevance-theoretic alternative in Chapter 7
section 2 pp. 203-208.)
>> 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.
Why? Generative grammars explain why certain structures lead to specific
interpretations given the nature of the interface systems. It is designed to
be supplemented by and interact with theories of utterance interpretation.
Therefore it seems to me to fit rather well with pragmatic theories such as
relevance theory which take the contribution of the linguistic form of the
utterance to be (but a small) piece of the evidence for inferring the
communicator's informative intention.
>> 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.
I don't quite follow what you are arguing here. In Fodor's modular theory of
mind there are modules and there are central systems. On this view, one
could of course say that the inferences in communication are handled in the
central system and that the communicative principle of relevance is a law of
this central system. This was Sperber & Wilson's view in the 1986 book.
There is thus nothing in this modular approach which is incompatible with
RT's outlook on communication.
On the other hand, the relevance-theoretic comprehension procedure is only
triggered by stimuli which communicate the presumption of optimal relevance,
i.e. Which have the information "this stimulus is optimally relevant to the
addressee" in the set of assumptions communicated. This is a very specific
type of information indeed, and it is easy to see that a module could take
this type of information as it's input domain - thus, it is quite possible
that the interpretation of ostensive stimuli can be handled in a module
which is informationally encapsulated in the appropriate sense.
Sperber & Wilson in their paper "Pragmatics, Modularity and Mind-reading"
(http://www.dan.sperber.com) have presented arguments not only that it makes
sense that the interpretation of ostensive stimuli is handled in a module
akin to the Theory-of-Mind-Module, but that there is evidence that utterance
comprehension is not just done by applying general mind-reading abilities,
or in other words, that there must be a specialised comprehension module.
Thus, there is much to say that a modular approach is in fact required for
an adequate account of communication along the lines of RT.
Best,
Christoph
-----------------------
Christoph Unger
In den Gaerten 62
D-35398 Giessen
Germany
Phone: (49) 6403 73782
Office: (49) 6403 776630
Fax: (49) 6403 7759420
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