Notice that in 3) of my previous post, I generalise from Dor's argument (that newspaper headlines are relevance optimisers, or procedural) to the conclusion that every can be argued to be procedural. Now I will consolidate this conclusion with an example of my own.
General situation: There are ten people in the office. The window is broken. Susan, the manager is determined to find out the culprit. Linguistically speaking, what Susan need to do is to fix referent. She asks Mary ‘‘Who broke the window?’
Situation 1: Of the ten people in the office there is only one male.
(a) He broke the window.
It has been argued in RT that a pronoun such as he is procedural, not conceptual. It guides the hearer towards the intended referent, in this case, the culprit. In this situation, (a) would be seen as a relevant answer, simply because there is only one person that can be described or pointed to as he, or can fit the ‘meaning’ of he whatever it is, in the office. Using he is sufficient to constrain the interpretation. Susan will certainly be able to fix the intended referent or to find out the culprit (and punishes him!). The procedure encoded in he, I would say, is ‘look for a male’
Situation 2: Of the ten people in the office, there are three males.
In this situation, if Mary’s answers is like (a) above, she will be seen as unhelpful: because there are three males in the building and Susan is left to work out which one he refers to, and her chance of success is minimal. In other words, Mary is not constraining enough and could be charged by Susan of unnecessarily wasting her efforts. More constraining on interpretation is needed. It might be better for Mary to use a proper name as in (b).
(b) Tom broke the window.
Notice that (b) involves the use of the proper noun Tom, and it will be optimally relevant as an answer to the question if of the three males in the office there is only one named Tom. Susan will certainly find out the culprit. Since the use of Tom narrows the choices of interpretations available, or it maximises relevance by reducing Susan’s processing efforts thus increasing her cognitive effects, it can be argued that proper nouns/names such as Tom are procedural [I would say: ‘look for the one with the name Tom’]
Situation 3: Of the 10 people in the office, two has the name Tom, one of the two Tom is a cleaner. There is only one cleaner in the office.
In this situation, an answer like (b) would not be seen as optimally relevant since the Susan is still left to work out which of the two Tom’s is the one who broke the window. In other words, on the basis of (b), reference assignment cannot be done successfully for successful interpretation to take place. More constraining is needed. To do this, Mary could say (c) or (d).
(c) Tom, the cleaner, broke the window.
(d) The cleaner broke the window.
Both answers (c-d) would fit the bill here, enough to constrain Susan’s interpretation without wasting her valuable managerial/processing effort, enough to guide her towards the right referent or culprit. It is generally argued that general nouns like cleaner are conceptual, yet the question is: any chance we can argue that it is procedural? I think we certainly can, for the rationale behind the use of the cleaner1 in this situation is exactly the same as the rationale behind the use of pronoun he in the first situation or proper name Tom in the second. If it can be argued that he in the first situation is procedural in the sense that it points to the intended reference thus optimising relevance saving processing effort, why not with the cleaner? Mary uses the cleaner in order to narrow Susan’s choices of interpretations available (in this case, choices of potential/candidate referents) thus assisting Susan’s interpretation process and saving her processing efforts. And
so on so forth. Depending on the specific situation of the office, Mary may even choose to say something like (e).
(e) The tall dark handsome relevance-theorist cleaner broke the window.
I have argued that proper nouns/names and general nouns can be also seen as procedural. In effect, it can be generalised that everything is procedural! It seems to me the notion of procedural encoding/meaning can be extended to such an extent that it covers all linguistic expressions to say the least, or even more broadly, all communicative behaviours (linguistic and non-linguistic), not just some particular classes of expressions or constructions. Is this a threat to the distinction?
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1 I am just ignoring the effect/impact of article the. I think it is not important, since even without the (Cleaner broke the window as may be uttered by a foreign learner of English), Susan would have no significant problem in identifying the culprit.
Minh Dang <minhducdang@yahoo.com> wrote:
Dear all,
Just a further question on the issue.
How is it possible for a linguistic expression or just anything perform the guiding or constraining work in communication if it is conceptually empty?
Minh
Minh Dang <minhducdang@yahoo.com> wrote:
Dear all,
I am looking into the conceptual-procedural distinction, and I would be grateful if you could share with me your opinions on the following.
1) As far as I know, the standard RT position on personal subjective pronouns such as I, he is that they are procedural though I have known of no one specifying exactly what procedural information is encoded in each. I would imagine the procedure encoded in he is something like this: look for a male person, but I have problem with I. Is it: look for the speaker/utterer or else? I also have problem with the it in It’s great to hear from you.
In addition, what is the RT position on personal objective pronouns such as me, him? And what is the RT position on other pronouns such as one, someone, somebody, anyone, nobody, nothing?
Also, what is the RT position on proper nouns such as Blair, Scotland, Amazon?
2) I read in Blakemore (2006) that because is not procedural but conceptual. Now, if because encodes a concept, it should be amenable to semantic compositionality. The best examples I can think of are simply because, just because, partly because, but honestly I am not sure. Could someone clarify this for me please? I am also wondering what logical and encyclopaedic properties of because are, for these are defining properties of concepts according to Wilson (unpublished lecture 2002-3).
In addition, I assume that the RT position on prepositions is that they are conceptual. But again, it seems to me they do not look susceptible to semantic complexity as suggested by Fraser (2006)
3) It has been argued by Dor (2003) that ‘newspaper headlines are designed designed to optimize the relevance of their stories for their readers: Headlines provide the readers with the optimal ratio between contextual effect and processing effort, and direct readers to construct the optimal context for interpretation.’ My understanding of the above quote from the abstract of the article is that newspaper headlines are in effect procedural. Now, if Dor is right, I would like to say two things. First, a quick look at newspaper headlines reveals that they are often loaded with conceptual expressions. For example, BECKS FACES CROATIA AXE; SICK NOTICE; NIGHT FOR PRIDE, TERRY READY TO ROAR... all taken from The Sun of 19 Nov 2007. Thus, I find it difficult to say that these headlines are not conceptual. Second, if it is true that newspaper headlines are procedural or relevance optimisers (I think it is true), it should be possible to argue along similar lines that the topic
sentence in a passage, titles of books, subtitles, abstracts, summaries, tables of content, preface, illustration on the cover, paragraphing, chaptering, choice of conceptual words in an utterance, intonation, stress, formating (bold, italic, ..), pause, punctuation, silence, and so on, all serve the same function, i.e. optimising relevance or procedural. It looks like everything that is used is relevance optimisers/procedural! What do you think? For me, I think concepts and procedures are like two sides of one and the same coin: no coin has only one side, be it conceptual or procedural. When we talk about procedural meaning of an expression, it seems to me that we are not talking about its ‘per se’ meaning. Rather, it looks like we are talking about function(s) of the expression. Of course, I am assuming that function and meaning are two different things of one and the same thing – by the latter ‘thing’ I mean an expression or a linguistic form, or even more broadly
anything that is used for commutative purpose.
Thank you very much for reading. And thank you very much more for any comments you are going to have.
Minh
Quick Reference
Blakemore, D. (2006). Meaning, Procedural and Conceptual. In Encyclopaedia of Language and Linguistics, Elsevier.
Dor, C. (2003). On newspaper headlines as relevance optimizers. Journal of Pragmatics, Vol 5, Issue 5, pp 695-721.
Bruce Fraser (2006) "On the conceptual-procedural distinction". Style. Spring-Summer 2006. FindArticles.com. 27 Nov. 2007. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2342/is_1-2_40/ai_n17113874
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Received on Sun Dec 2 15:16:02 2007
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