Re: RT list: Non-sentential utterances, logical form, explicatures (e.g. in poetry)

I take this answer to be exactly what Sperber and Wilson seem to
accept by endorsing a squarely Chomskyan syntax. I cannot but wonder,
however, how psychologically plausible such a model would be.. There
are certainly many alternatives in the market these days which do not
emphasise syntax as the basic level and, in the face of poetic
language like the one we are discussing, they seem to have an
advantage over a DS --> SS rationale. I suspect that inference has a
far deeper role here than to merely operate on some logical form, but
again this is merely my intuition...

On 12 February 2011 18:57, Jose Luis Guijarro Morales
<joseluis.guijarro@uca.es> wrote:
> In the course of a communicative process, the steps that happen when one
> perceives a linguistic communicative act are:
>
> (1) One aims at finding out what its deep structure is (by mentally creating
> a set of phrase structure rules with access to a lexicon)
>
> (2) Subsequently, its S structure is arrived at (by adopting the necessary
> movement possibilities). This triggers almost simultaneously the following
> two sub-processes:
>
> (3.a) By finding out what deletions can be done, one arrives at the surface
> structure of the linguistic communicative act.
>
> (3.b) One arrives at its logical form which is the first step to achieve a
> semantic interpretation.
>
> (4) One extracts the explicatures of that semantic interpretation, thereby
> understanding what the proposition of the act is.
>
> (5) Finally, one draws inferentially all the implicatures that fit the
> occasion, and so, eventually, one understands the message communicated
>
> In order to understand a coded linguistic message you have to do a lot of
> work in the code before trying to understand it. I am sure we are able to
> find a phrase structure to the poem. What we may perhaps not be able to do
> is to match the phrase structure terminal elements with lexicon elements for
> here is precisely where e.e.cummings is violating the English code --for a
> purpose, of course!
>
> What its logical form should be like is debatable, and so is the semantic
> interpretation (note that I am not saying those two steps do not exist! They
> do, of course). Therefore, it is difficult (but not impossible) to derive
> its explicatures. Finally, if I am right, most of the interpretative work
> needs to be done at the implicature level.
>
> José Luis Guijarro
> Facultad de Filosofía y Letras
> Universidad de Cádiz
> 11002 Cádiz, España (Spain)
> tlf: (34) 956-011.613
> fax: (34) 956-015.505

-- 
Stavros Assimakopoulos
Postdoctoral Investigator
Department of Philosophy I
University of Granada
------------------------------------
http://www.ugr.es/~stavros/