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

> At the end of the day, the answers to these questions should be empirical. For example, when a verbal expression consisting only of a noun or noun phrase is given, either the mind passes it through the grammar, trying to construct a well-formed sentence, or it does not but uses the decoded concept directly as input to inferential processes. Perhaps this has already been investigated - if so I'd be happy to know.

If I have understood correctly what you are after, there has been quite a bit of debate about this in recent years. Some references:

Progovac, L., Paesani, K., Casielles, E., & Barton, E. (Eds.). (2006). The Syntax of Nonsententials: Multidisciplinary Perspectives. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

http://books.google.com/books?id=I22xD1Abb28C&lpg=PT17&ots=X60Yp-6F2F&dq=Progovac%2C%20L.%2C%20Paesani%2C%20K.%2C%20Casielles%2C%20E.%2C&pg=PT7#v=onepage&q=Progovac,%20L.,%20Paesani,%20K.,%20Casielles,%20E.,&f=false

Elugardo, R. & Stainton, R. (Eds.). (2005). Ellipsis and Nonsentential Speech. Berlin: Springer.

http://books.google.com/books?id=rDYoaBaD3ZEC&lpg=PA109&ots=ZNkyO47R6u&dq=sententialists&pg=PA109#v=onepage&q=sententialists&f=false

Arguing that uttered fragments are syntactically elliptical:

Merchant, J. (2005). Fragments and ellipsis. Linguistics and Philosophy, 27(6).

Arguing that apparent fragments are either syntactically elliptical or are not used to perform 'genuine speech acts':

Stanley, J. (2000). Context and logical form. Linguistics and Philosophy, 23(4), 391-434.

Arguing (on the contrary) that some utterances are of non-sentential bits:

Stainton, R. J. (2006) "Neither Fragments nor Ellipsis" The Syntax of Nonsententials. In L. Progovac et al.
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/robertstainton/94

"not only is there not ellipsis going on, there aren’t genuinely “fragments” at play either (hence the title of the chapter). Instead, precisely as the appearances suggest, people are using plain old words and phrases, rather than “fragments” of anything, to perform speech acts." (p. 94)

Shaer, B. (2005). Discourse properties of topicalization and the syntax and semantics of fragments. Paper presented at the IPrA. (Sadly never published as a paper, to the best of my knowledge.)

The argument here -- against Merchant -- was that certain properties of fragments suggest that they are not topicalisation structures but rather that they share properties with so-called Hanging Topics like 'John' in 'John, Mary saw'. The fronted elements in Hanging Topics have been argued to be syntactically independent of the host sentence. The implication is that fragments are unembedded phrases.

And of course, Robyn Carston:

> Consider the following very ordinary situation: it’s breakfast time and, coming into the kitchen, I see my companion searching around in the lower reaches of a cupboard; knowing his breakfast habits, I guess that he’s looking for a jar of marmalade and I utter:
>
> (4) On the top shelf.
>
> Although the proposition I have expressed here is something like The marmalade is on the top shelf, the linguistic semantic input to the pragmatic processor is, arguably, just whatever meaning the language confers on that prepositional phrase, that is, a far from fully propositional logical form, one which consists of just a location constituent (which denotes a property).

(p. 130 of Carston, R. (2002). Linguistic meaning, communicated meaning and cognitive pragmatics. Mind & Language, 17(1/2), 127–148.)

And Alison Hall (e.g.):

Hall, A. (2007). Subsentential utterances, ellipsis, and pragmatic enrichment. UCL Working Papers in Linguistics, 19, 235.

> Abstract: It is argued that genuinely subsentential phrases, such as a discourse-initial utterance of “From France” to indicate the provenance of an item, provide evidence for the reality of the pragmatic process of free enrichment. I consider recent attempts to treat such discourse-initial fragments as linguistic ellipsis of some kind while accommodating the difference between these cases and accepted types of ellipsis such as sluicing and gapping (for example Merchant 2007a,b). I claim that the mechanisms they posit to save an ellipsis story have no role in an account of performance (an account of the processes of utterance interpretation). An argument against the enrichment approach from the indeterminacy of the content of subsentential utterances is discussed, and refuted, and it is shown how this indeterminacy is accommodated in a contextualist pragmatic theory.

By the way, I very much like your example:

3) Context: Shop assistant asks customer who has just come in, "How can I help?". Customer's response: "Two cokes".

I suppose that some sententialists would find themselves committed to claiming that the proposition expressed here is "You can help by (giving me) two cokes." Not a comfortable position.
Received on Mon Feb 14 17:21:18 2011