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2023-08-31 来源:好走旅游网


Discuss the Gricean account of the semantics and pragmatics of conjunctive

utterances

Introduction

Semantics studies the meaning and it is concerned with the literal meaning of words and sentences. Semantics focuses on the relationship between signifiers, such as words, phrases, symbols and signs, and what they stand for. While the transmission of meaning doesn’t only depend on the linguistic knowledge (e.g. lexicon, grammar etc.) of the listener and speaker but also depend on the context of the utterance, the inferred intent of the speaker, knowledge about the status of those involved, and so on. (Shaozhong, Liu, 2009) Pragmatics is the study of the contributions of context to meaning, and it encompasses conversational implicature, speech act theory, talk in interaction and other approaches to language behavior in sociology, philosophy, and linguistics. (Mey, Jacob L, 1993)

The semantics and pragmatics of conjunctive utterances

Generally many semantic theories (Russell 1905, Frege 1892, Davidson 1967, Kaplan 1977/89, Segal and Larson 1995) concern truth conditions (Carston, 1999). Grice’s (1967) influential concepts showed in addition to what a speaker says, that is both largely conventional and the content on the basis of which her utterance will be judged true or false, and a speaker may also convey implicatures which don’t affect the truth-value of what she says; so these conversational implicatures are calculated by assuming speakers are being cooperative and

adhering to the certain expected standards of informativeness, truthfulness, relevance, and manner of expression (Grice, 1975). That suggests a natural way of drawing the semantics-pragmatics distinction that is semantics will correspond to the truth-conditional content of the utterance, and the pragmatics to the conveyed meaning which falls outside the truth-conditional content.

So semantic content could be equated with Grice’s what is said, and it has two features. Firstly it is the truth-conditional content of the utterance, and secondly it is determined almost entirely by the encoded, conventional meaning of the linguistic expressions used. And as Grice acknowledged, the truth-conditional content isn’t completely free of contextual input, and in some brief comments on the utterance of “He is in the grip of a vice”, one says, “for a full identification of what the speaker has said, one will need to know (a) the time of utterance, (b) the identity of x, and (c) the meaning, on the particular occasion of utterance, of the phrase in the grip of a vice” (1975/89: 25). But he seemed not to see these processes of reference assignment and disambiguation as requiring appeal to the conversational maxims; instead, the concept seems to be that they are resolved more automatically, and the requisite values being something like objective features of the utterance’s context (Carston, 2002).

A particular division of labor between semantics and pragmatics of Grice (1967) has prevailed in the account of what is communicated by utterances of and-conjunctions. For instance:

a. It’s autumn in New Zealand it is spring in England and.

b. He handed her the scalpel and she made the incision.

c. We spent the day in town and I went to Harrods.

d. She fed him poisoned stew and he died.

e. I left the door open and the cat got in.

“And” is taken to be pretty well semantically empty and it’s taken to be the natural language equivalent of the truth-functional logical conjunction operator. The pragmatics focuses on variety of cause-consequence, temporal and other sorts of relationships understood to hold between the states of affairs which are described, some of that come through in the asymmetrical examples in (1b)-(1e). For example, we all understand the making of the scalpel and the interval of a few seconds to have intervened; and a quite different temporal relation is understood to hold between the states of affairs which are described in (1c), and the event of going to Harrods interpreted as contained within the period of time that is spent in town. The different sorts of consequence relationships are understood in (1d) and (1e): and the feeding of poisoned stew is the sufficient cause for death the leaving open of the door is just one of the range of factors contributing to the cat’s getting in.

These relationships are taken to be derived inferentially via the interaction of the decoded-semantic content with the general knowledge assumptions about the way things connect up and relate in the world, the interaction constrained by

some general criterion and criteria of rational communicative behavior.

An interpretation has the two properties as following:

An utterance, on a given interpretation, is optimally relevant:

(a) it achieves enough effects to be worth the hearer’s attention;

(b) it puts the hearer to no gratuitous effort in achieving those effects.

(Wilson and Sperber, forthcoming)

Once the listener has accessed an interpretation consistent with the expectation he looks no further but takes this to be the interpretation the speaker intended. The utterance, on a given interpretation is consistent with the presumption of optimal relevance if the speaker can rationally have expected it to be optimally relevant to the listener on that interpretation. The implications of the definition are fully discussed elsewhere.

As with any utterance there is a range of possible interpretations of (1d) that are compatible with the linguistically encoded, semantic and content. Two of the logical possibilities for (1d) are as following:

a. She fed him poisoned stew and as a result he died shortly after.

b. She fed him poisoned stew and he died years later in a car crash.

Though these are both possible and consistent, the first sentence is absolutely more likely to be recovered by the listener, and to have been intended by the speaker, than the second sentence. That’s because everyone knows that poison can cause the death and that one who knowingly feeds someone poison is most likely doing that with the intention of killing the person. And the relevance-theoretic pragmatic account captures the intuitions without seting up any special principles telling listeners to interpret in accordance with their standard stereotypic assumptions.

Conclusion

The current state of the debate relating the interface between semantics and pragmatics is the upshot of the revolutionary period in the research of meaning known as radical pragmatics and aided by the views of ordinary language philosophers. The two relatively separate disciplines, the formal research of sentence meaning and the relatively informal research of the properties of speech acts became more and more intertwined as a result of the adoption of the semantic underdetermination and the admittance of the pragmatic inference about the speaker’s intentions, as well as other contextbound informations, into the semantic content. That facilitated the shift of the centre of attention from the sentence to the utterance. But the direction of change hasn’t been steady throughout the past three decades. Attempts keep semantics and pragmatics apart either through denying that semantics has to provide the propositions and hence truth-conditional content, or through keeping the objectives of the semantics and pragmatics apart and stressing the theoretical utility of the

sentence’s truth conditions, just like minimalists of the syncretic flavour do. And the dominant orientations are however various forms of contextualism. The state of affairs is undoubtedly aided by the overall desideratum to stay faithful to the speakers’ intuitions about meaning and to the view that the aim of the semantic theory is to cater for these intuitions. Whether contextualism will retain its power, succumb to the minimalism, or evolve into the radical form of occasion-meaning of the meaning eliminativism remains to be seen.

References

Carston, R. 1999. The semantic-pragmatics distinction: A view from relevance theory. In The Semantics/Pragmatics Interface from Different Points of View (CRiSPI 1), ed. K. Turner, 85-125. Oxford: Elsevier.

Davidson, D. 1967. Truth and meaning. Synthese 17: 304-323. von Fintel, K. and Gillies, A. 2011. Might made right. In Epistemic Modality, eds. A. Egan and B. Weatherson, 108-130. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Frege, G. 1892. Über Sinn und Bedeutung. Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Philosophische Kritik 100: 25-50.

Grice, H. P. 1975/1989. Logic and conversation. In Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Acts, eds. P. Cole and J. Morgan, 41-58. New York: Academic Press; reprinted in Grice, H. P. 1989, 22-40.

Grice, H. P. 1989. Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Kaplan, D. 1977/89. Demonstratives. In Themes from Kaplan, eds. J. Almog, J. Perry and H. Wettstein, 481-563. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Larson, R. and Segal, G. 1995. Knowledge of Meaning: An Introduction to Semantic Theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Mey, Jacob L. (1993) Pragmatics: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell (2nd ed. 2001).

Shaozhong, Liu. (2009) “What is pragmatics?” http://www.gxnu.edu.cn

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