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

Dear all,
 
Thank you very much for all contributions to this discussion and all the
work people have put into them - it has been very helpful and informative,
to me at least. Let me try to summarise my impression from this exchange -
for what it is worth:
 
If this brief exchange is anything to go by, with regard to 'logical form',
the current state of affairs in RT seems to be as follows:
a) There is no clear consensus as to what exactly a 'logical form' is -
whether the encoding of a concept by a verbal expression constitutes in
itself a logical form of that expression, or whether it does so only if it
has been further developed into some predicative expression.
b) There is no clear consensus as whether the concept of 'logical form'
represents an empirical phenomenon.
c) There is no clear consensus as to whether an adequate relevance-theoretic
account of verbal communication requires this concept.
 
Regarding the concept of 'explicature':
d) there is no consensus about the theoretical significance of this concept
and
e) there appears to be much less concern about its existence and function in
verbal communication (than about 'logical form').
 
My own provisional position would be roughly as follows: with some
simplification, all that is presumed by an ostensive communicator is to make
more manifest a set of assumptions {I} that she expects to be optimally
relevant to the audience. As far as I can see, the theory contains no
inherent constraint by which verbal stimuli need to do more than this - e.g.
that for verbal stimuli at least one of these assumptions ought to be the
development of some logical form of the verbal expression. On the other
hand, there is nothing that would - in principle - exclude the possibililty
that one or more of the assumptions in {I} are developments of some logical
form of the verbal expression used (unless it can, of course, be shown that
logical forms do not exist in the first place).
 
This would seem to take care of the following two examples:
1) Situation: Someone shows his badly damaged car to a friend. The friend
asks: "How did this happen?"
Utterance by the owner: "My brother - icy road ..."
2) Situation: Someone asks: "Wem hast du von diesem Brief erzählt?"
Utterance: "Meinen Eltern." [Whom did you tell of this letter? My parents.]
 
In case 1, the two expressions "my brother" and "icy road" make enough
assumptions available through the encyclopaedic entries for the audience to
construct a set of assumptions {I} that would meet the requirement of
optimal relevance. The respondent does not seem to encourage the audience to
look for or to build up specific 'logical forms' around the concepts encoded
that would then be enriched into propositional forms.
 
In case 2, by contrast, the fact that the respondent chose a case marked
phrase (hence the choice of German for this example), and furthermore
assuming that case is assigned here by grammatical structure, this would be
a strong incentive to the audience to build up a well-formed grammatical
structure of which this phrase would be a constituent, and so the specific
assumption THE SPEAKER TOLD HIS PARENTS ABOUT THE LETTER would be quite
strongly communicated. (In fact, if the response had not been appropriately
case marked, e.g. "Meine Eltern", it would have been felt unfelicitous.)
Whether this process necessitates the theoretical recognition of concepts
like 'logical form' and/or 'explicature' seems unclear at this time.
 
I think I can live with this situation, at least for the time being.
 
Best wishes,
Ernst-August
 

  _____

From: Jose Luis Guijarro Morales [mailto:joseluis.guijarro@uca.es]
Sent: 14 February 2011 18:52
To: ernst-august_gutt@sil.org; relevance@linguistics.ucl.ac.uk
Subject: RE: RT list: Non-sentential utterances, logical form, explicatures
(e.g. in poetry)

This is indeed an interesting issue. I know of no particular investigation
on it, but my hunch is that the understanding of verbal messages needs to
cover all the steps I pointed to above; otherwise its functioning will not
be able to reach a satisfactory result. As I further stated to Stavros, I
feel that the neat separation of steps does not (or, rather, should not)
preclude feed-back relationships between them. It may be true that the non
verbal communication achieved in your #4 situation (I prefer to call it
situation than context) is a step ahead in reaching understanding; Perhaps
it is a result of the way we process verbal input as opposed to visual (or,
imagistic –to cover all the senses) input which seems to give reason to the
folk dictum “an image is better than many words”, which, to say the truth,
is actually not true, for, more often than not, images need to be
interpreted using so many words (i.e., all scientific images, and many non
scientific as well). However, the intuitive impression is that an image
offers an instantaneous set of communicative effects which, typically, seems
to be quicker (instantaneous!) and more accurate than verbal messages. I can
explain to you how the view from my terrace is, or I can show you a
photograph of the view in which you may extract more communicative effects
than those I can speak about. Here you are not only one step ahead, but a
lot more!

It may be well possible that it is not clear what a LF really is. I am
really hopeless at building logical expressions and, therefore, I have
accepted an intuitive description of what such a thing could be. In the case
of the gardener, as you show, the constructed object that corresponds to
that one NP expression, would be represented in my mind as
[SOMEONE] [DID SOMETHING [LEAVE OPEN] [TO SOMETHING] or, if you prefer
[LEAVE OPEN, GARDENER, DOOR] which, then goes through a deletion process,
leaving only GARDENER, which has to be explicated (i.e., determined,
referring to a certain person, whatever.) and implicated as a relevant
response to the question, or, in our present case, as a relevant example of
your question/claim

The situation #3, in the shop, is more complex descriptively, but should
follow the same steps, by first making sense of the shop assistant question
and answering accordingly. That this is so, should be clear if you build a
ludicrous situation like

Situation 5: You are watching birds with a friend, and you ask her all
excited “is that a bull finch?”, to which she answer “two cokes”.

Now, the answer may first baffle you, but humans being what they are,
compulsive interpreters, you try desperately to find some sense to her
answer. How would you go about it? If you slowly mark what your
interpretative steps are in this case, you will probably get an account of
steps that could match my list of processes.

I am not sure about my arguments here –I just follow a hunch as I told you
at the beginning. Perhaps, my hunches will not convince you for you have
though about it longer than I have. Anyway, from my perspective it has been
a nice food for thought, and I thank you for it.

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
Received on Wed Feb 16 17:14:35 2011