Randy LaPolla suggested something along these lines in a paper entitled 'The language habit: the conventionalization of constraints on inference', where he wrote:
Contrary to most work in pragmatics which assumes that context disambiguates language, I am proposing that it is not context that disambiguates language, but language that disambiguates the context of interpretation. That is, the more explicit the linguistic form, the more constrained the addressee is in constructing the context of interpretation. On this view a language and the rules for its use in a particular society are a set of social conventions which have evolved in the particular way they have in that society in response to the need to constrain the inferential process involved in communication in particular ways thought to be important in that society.
Steve
----- Original Message -----
From: Jan Straßheim
To: relevance@linguistics.ucl.ac.uk
Sent: Wednesday, November 23, 2005 4:06 PM
Subject: RT list: Semiotic code model
Dear all,
there's no doubt that the RT integration of coding and inference works very elegantly. I've just been wondering whether some non-Chomskyan relevance-theorist might not aim for a strong inferential model (dismissed in S&W 1986/95, p. 26f.) that would picture linguistic meaning as, say, a system of temporarily and locally more or less stabilised foci of relevance expectations which are similar enough across a set of people for practical purposes. The quasi short-circuited nature of inference from such foci would then put them at the bottom of a scale measuring efforts required for an inference. For even an automatic and unconscious process (as in "hearing" linguistic structure, cf. S&W 1986/95, p. 177) could still be analysed as an inference (as the "spontaneous, instantaneous and unconscious inferences about the movements of other vehicles while driving a car": ibid. p. 67).
Do you know of any such thinking within an RT framework, or of any arguments that once and for all preclude it?
Thanks a lot and all the best from freezing Berlin
Jan
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