RT list: procedural/conceptual

(I've sent this posting to the list twice but have not succeeded in
getting through. I hope this is third time lucky, with Nicholas's help).

Dear all,

I have a few comments to make on the latest discussion on the list
concerning the distinction conceptual/procedural, and whether all
linguistic expressions should be seen as procedural. In his reply to
Minh Dang, Dan Sperber says that it would not be inconsistent for RT to
view all lexical items as encoding procedural information. Dan says that
lexical items which encode a conceptual content simultaneously encode an
instruction to construct an ad hoc conceptual content taking the encoded
conceptual content as a starting point of the inferential process. In
this sense, Dan says, all content words could also be seen as
procedural. In Sperber & Wilson 1997/1998, Wilson & Sperber (2000/2002)
we’re already told that all words behave as if they encoded proconcepts,
which they define as “pointers to speakers’ intended concepts”. This is
also how I understood Robyn Carston’s view of concepts as “pointers to
cognitive space”, and as encoding something “… very schematic, which
simply sends the system off to a particular region in long-term memory”
(Carston 2002:104). (It is true, though, that she distinguishes verbal
and adjectival encodings, from the full concepts that are encoded by
natural kinds. She concludes that there are three different sorts of
encoded meaning: concepts for natural kind terms, non-conceptual
procedures, for things like ‘so’ etc. and pro-concepts for verbs and
adjectives, (partly conceptual, partly procedural). (Carston 2002:102)).

I agree with the idea that all linguistic expressions are partially or
totally procedural, and following the work of Marjolein Groefsema, I
would like to add that there’s another crucial sense in which all words
can be seen to encode procedural information, broadly conceived of as
instructions for processing –constructing and manipulating- conceptual
representations. What I have in mind is the syntax of conceptual
structure, which as she shows, is independent from that of the sentence.

Very roughly, in her proposal, the logical entry at the conceptual
address for content words gives structural information on how to
construct conceptual/LOT representations, in the form of logical
selection frames. This allows her to account for the building of
anticipatory hypotheses while avoiding the problems of basing them on
syntactic hypotheses (cf. Groefsema 1992). All of the information in the
selection frames –including the conceptual category the concept belongs
to and what it must and can combine with, can be seen as broadly
procedural, as I suggested in Vicente 2005. I think that this also helps
overcome some inconsistencies in the characterisation of the
logical/encyclopaedic distinction in RT (cf. Vicente 2005) –as I see it,
anyway.

Marjolein’s proposal is in fact to go all the way conceptual, rather
than procedural, but this can easily be seen to boil down to a
terminological issue, again, as I see it. She claims that the way to
draw the line is between concepts that occur in conceptual structure and
concepts that do not. The latter encode logical selection information
that shows how they constrain the inferential process, but no
encyclopaedic information. Thus concepts like that expressed by
complementizer ‘that’ ”occur simply to constrain what type of logical
hypothesis can be built by signalling that a proposition follows, while
the concept expressed by ‘an’ puts a constraint on a how a particular
constituent is interpreted (basically, ‘a THING follows’)
(1992:219-220). One important advantage of talking about the different
types of constraint in conceptual terms is that this is a format that
can be read by the central cognitive device, a possibility we don’t have
in the standard way procedures are understood in RT.

It seems to me her ideas are well worth pursuing.

This has come out longer than I thought. I hope I’m not wasting
anybody’s time.

I wish a happy new year to everyone.
 

Carston, R. (2002) “Metaphor, ad hoc concepts and word meaning. More
questions than answers”. UCl Working Papers in Linguistics 14:83-105.
Groefsema, M (1992 ) Processing for relevance: A pragmatically based
approach of how we process natural language. PhD Thesis, UCL.
Vicente, B. (2005) “Meaning in relevance theory and the
semantics/pragmatics distinction”, in The literal and the non-literal in
language and thought. Ed. by S. Coulson., Peter Lang: Francfurt am Main,
pp. 179-200.
Sperber D. & Wilson (1997) “The mapping between the mental and the
public lexicon” UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 9:107-125.
Wilson, D & Sperber, D. (2000) “Truthfulness and relevance”, UCL Working
Papers in Linguistics 12:215-254. Revised version (2002) Mind111 (443):
583-632.

Begoña Vicente
University of the Basque Country (Spain)
Received on Mon Dec 31 12:05:43 2007