Dear list members
I'm glad to be able to tell you that the following has (finally) been
published. It's out now in Britain and will be out in the US in October:
"Thoughts and Utterances: The Pragmatics of Explicit
Communication" by Robyn Carston, 418pp.
Publishers: Blackwell
Year: 2002
Paperback ISBN: 0631214887
Price: 19.99 pounds
Hardback ISBN: 0631178910
Price: 60.00 pounds
I try to do two main things in this book:
1. Provide a full and enquiring account of Dan Sperber and Deirdre
Wilson's relevance-theoretic approach to pragmatics, with close
investigation of the concepts of 'logical form', 'proposition expressed',
and, especially, 'explicature', as used within the theory, and of the two
distinctions 'semantics/pragmatics' and 'explicit/implicit' communication.
2. Compare the RT approach with frameworks and analyses developed by other
theorists, in particular those of Paul Grice, Francois Recanati, Kent Bach
and Stephen Levinson.
I'll append a table of contents for those who are interested in getting
more of an idea of the areas covered.
Best wishes,
Robyn
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
Chapter 1: Pragmatics and Linguistic Underdeterminacy
1.1 Saying and meaning
1.2 The underdeterminacy thesis
1.2.1 Sources of linguistic underdeterminacy
1.2.2 Underdeterminacy: essential or merely convenient?
1.3 Eternal sentences and effability
1.3.1 Eternal sentences and Platonism
1.3.2 Effability principles
1.3.3 Eternal reference?
1.3.4 Eternal predication?
1.4 Metarepresentation, relevance and pragmatic inference
1.4.1 Mind-reading and ostension
1.4.2 Relevance and utterance understanding
1.5 Underdeterminacy, truth conditions and the semantics/
pragmatics distinction.
1.5.1 A truth-conditional semantics for natural language?
1.5.2 A translational semantics for natural language?
1.6 Radical underdeterminacy and the Background
1.6.1 The Background
1.6.2 Radical underdeterminacy and expressibility'
1.6.3 Radical underdeterminacy and semantic compositionality
1.7 Underdeterminacy of thought?
1.7.1 Mentalese, pragmatics and compositional semantics
1.7.2 Mental indexicals and the mind-world connection
1.8 Summary
Notes
Chapter 2: The Explicit/Implicit Distinction
2.1 Semantics/pragmatics distinction
2.1.1 Truth-conditional semantics and formal pragmatics
2.1.2 Semantic/pragmatic circles
2.2 Grice: saying/implicating
2.2.1 Odd statements but true
2.2.2 Contextual contributions to what is said'
2.2.3 Implicature: conventional and conversational
2.2.4 Saying, meaning and making as if to say'
2.3 Sperber & Wilson: relevance-theoretic distinctions
2.3.1 Explicature
2.3.2 Multiple speech acts and multiple logical forms
2.3.3 Implicature
2.3.4 Deriving explicatures and implicatures
2.3.5 Subsentential utterances, saying and explicating
2.3.6 Explicature and non-literalness
2.3.7 Blakemore: the conceptual/procedural distinction
2.4 Travis and Recanati: enriched what is said'
2.4.1 Contextualist saying
2.4.2 Availability to intuitions
2.5 Bach: what is said/impliciture/implicature
2.5.1 Impliciture vs. explicature
2.5.2 What is said and linguistic meaning
2.5.3 What is said and indexicality
2.5.4 What's to be said about what is said'?
2.6 Pragmatic meaning: enrichment or implicature?
2.6.1 Minimalist principles
2.6.2 Functional independence
2.6.3 Embedding tests
2.7 Postscript: hidden indexicals or free' enrichment?
2.8 Conclusion: from generative semantics to pro-active pragmatics
Notes
Chapter 3: The Pragmatics of And'-Conjunction
3.1 Preserving the truth-functionality of and'
3.2 A relevance-based pragmatics of conjunction
3.2.1 Cognitive scripts and accessibility
3.2.2 Enrichment or implicature?
3.3 The semantic alternatives
3.4 Cognitive fundamentals: causality and explanation
3.5 Relevance relations and units of processing
3.5.1 The conjunction unit
3.5.2 Elaboration relations
3.6 Processing effort and iconicity
3.7 Residual issues
3.7.1 Pragmatic enrichment or unrepresented Background?
3.7.2 The semantics of and' and the logic of and'
3.8 Conclusion: from generalised conversational implicature to
propositional enrichment
Notes
Chapter 4: The Pragmatics of Negation
4.1 Some data and some distinctions
4.1.1 The scope distinction
4.1.2 The representational distinction
4.2 Semantic ambiguity analyses
4.2.1 Lexical ambiguity and/or scope ambiguity?
4.2.2 Arguments against ambiguity
4.3 Strong pragmatic analyses
4.3.1 Analyses in the Gricean spirit
4.3.2 Grice: structural ambiguity and implicature
4.3.3 Sense-generality and implicature
4.3.4 Pragmatic narrowing of negation
4.4 Presupposition'-cancelling negation and metalinguistic negation
4.4.1 Semantic presupposition and negation
4.4.2 Metalinguistic negation
4.4.3 Negation and echoic use
4.4.4 Truth-functional negation and metarepresentational enrichment
4.5 The pragmatics of presupposition'-denial
4.5.1 Presupposition'-denial and contradiction
4.5.2 Negation and two kinds of pragmatic enrichment
4.6 Conclusion: from multiple semantic ambiguity to univocal semantics
and pragmatic enrichment
Notes
Chapter 5: The Pragmatics of On-Line Concept Construction
5.1 Encoded concepts and communicated concepts
5.1.1 Ad hoc concepts via narrowing
5.1.2 The problem of concept broadening
5.2 A symmetrical account of narrowing and broadening
5.2.1 Consequences of the unified account
5.2.2 Arguments for the unified account
5.3 Metaphor: loose use and ad hoc concepts
5.3.1 Where does metaphorical meaning come from?
5.3.2 Ad hoc concepts, explicature and indeterminacy
5.4 Word meaning and concepts
5.5 Conclusion: the long road from linguistically encoded meaning to
the thought(s) explicitly communicated
Notes
Appendices:
1. Relevance Theory terms
2. Gricean conversational principles
Bibliography
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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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