Pragmatics & Cognition - Volume 15, Issue 1, 2007

This essay lays out a view of linguistic content in which discourse context plays an essential role. It provides a role for sentential content by using underspecification but argues that discourse level phenomena are essential not only to determining content but even grammaticality judgments in certain cases. It is thus argued that the traditional view which separates very strictly the areas of semantics — a context insensitive notion of meaning — and pragmatics — a non linguistic notion of speaker meaning — is inaccurate. In this line of thought, the paper pays a particular attention to hidden indexicals, anaphora and tense. The necessity of taking into account discursive parameters in order to solve semantic indeterminacy in such cases is argued for.

This paper is a voice in the ongoing discussion on the source and properties of pragmatic inference that contributes to the representation of discourse meaning. I start off from the contextualist standpoint of truth-conditional pragmatics (TCP, Recanati 2002, 2003, 2004) and develop a proposal of representations of utterance meaning, the so-called merger representations, that incorporate the output of pragmatic inference. The move from TCP to pragmatics-rich semantics of acts of communication is facilitated by rethinking the compositionality of meaning and predicating compositionality of such pragmatics-rich structures. I argue that the advantage of ‘semanticizing’ the output of pragmatic sources of meaning is that we can relax the view on compositionality of meaning and offer an algorithm of the interaction of such sources where the requirement of compositionality is imposed on the output of the interaction rather than on the output of the syntactic processing of the sentence. This proposal is applied to belief reports for which it offers representations of their various readings.

Grice proposed to investigate ‘the total signification of the utterance’. One persistent criticism of Grice’s taxonomy of signification is that he missed an important category of information. This content, and/or the process of providing it, goes by a variety of labels: ‘generalized implicature’, ‘explicature’, ‘unarticulated constituents’, ‘default heuristics’, ‘impliciture’. In this study we first take a sample of such phenomena and, from the point of view of pure pragmatics, survey the central descriptions of the content expressed and the mechanisms that might deliver these contents. We then, from the point of view of experimental pragmatics, focus on two accounts: Levinson’s I-heuristic, and Bach’s standardization. We find experimental evidence for the existence of such implicitures, and for the use of language specific standardizations over language neutral background ­information.

The paper has two related aims. One is to outline a proposal for a spatially motivated model of discourse, called Discourse Space Theory. The other is to use this framework to explore, in a relatively formalised way, the spatial basis of the conceptual complexities arising in the uses of the English progressive verb form (be+-ing). The theory utilises an abstract space in three dimensions (time, space and modality). Verb stems are associated with Aktionsart schemas; aspectual forms like the progressive are viewed as operations on these schemas. The proposal is that geometric concepts, specifically coordinate systems and vectors, can provide a motivated formalism for investigating conceptual structures generated by a human discourse processor.

After discussing some difficulties that contextualism and minimalism face, this paper presents a new account of the linguistic exploitation of context, situationalism. Unlike the former accounts, situationalism captures the idea that the main intuitions underlying the debate concern not the identity of propositions expressed but rather how truth-values are situation-dependent. The truth-value of an utterance depends on the situation in which the proposition expressed is evaluated. Hence, like in minimalism, the proposition expressed can be truth-evaluable without being enriched or expanded. Along with contextualism, it is argued that an utterance’s truth-value is context dependent. But, unlike contextualism and minimalism, situationalism embraces a form of relativism in so far as it maintains that semantic content must be evaluated vis-à-vis a given situation and, therefore, that a proposition cannot be said to be true/false eternally.

The term discourse is generally used either as a technical equivalent for ‘verbal communication’ or as referring to a particular scientific notion, where discourses are spans of texts or of utterances obeying specific principles of organisation. The aim of this paper is to suggest that an account of discourse is possible, in both cases, only through a theory of utterance-meaning construction. If discourse stands for verbal communication, then it can be explained only with regard to speaker’s intended meaning. If discourse stands for organised spans of texts or utterances, then they must be meaningful spans of texts or meaningful utterances. Yet it is argued that a pragmatic explanation of meaning provides all the elements that discourse analysis describes. In the end, the paper claims that a theory of context combined with a theory on the semantic-pragmatic interface should prove sufficient to explain discourse, in whichever sense, along the idea that discourse should be viewed as a process, not as a whole, following the claims of a number of scholars in the field. A possibility to tackle this process is proposed in terms of procedures through the approach of procedural pragmatics.

In the study of argumentation there is a sharp and ideological separation between dialectical and rhetorical approaches, which needs to be remedied. The authors show how the pragma-dialectical theory of argumentation can be instrumental in bridging the gap. By adopting a research programme that involves engaging in ‘normative pragmatics’, not only the critical normative and the empirical descriptive dimensions of the study of argumentation can be brought together, but also the dialectical and the rhetorical perspectives. In the research programme, which includes philosophical, theoretical, analytical, empirical and practical components, dialectical and rhetorical perspectives are articulated in each component. The authors make clear that the two perspectives can be reconciled with the help of the notion of ‘strategic manoeuvring’. Strategic manoeuvring, which is inherent in argumentative discourse, is aimed at reconciling the simultaneous pursuit of dialectical and rhetorical aims.

This paper investigates the tentative compatibility of two pragmatic approaches, Pragma-Dialectics (PD) and Relevance Theory (RT). The development of pragmatics historically led to conceptions of communication that supplied answers formal logic approaches had trouble capturing. Within argumentation studies, PD took this pragmatic turn while at the same time pursuing a normative agenda. This gives evidence of an external approach to language (in that argumentation follows norms imposed by the theorist) excluding, though not closing the door to cognitive insights. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the extent to which PD can operate from an internal cognitive perspective — i.e., with explicit ambitions of dealing with cognitive mechanisms of meaning construction and belief fixation.

This paper discusses important and fruitful links between (Critical) Discourse Analysis and Pragmatics. In a detailed analysis of three utterances of an election speech by the Austrian rightwing politician Jörg Haider, it is illustrated in which ways a discourse-analytical and pragmatic approach grasps the intricacy of anti-Semitic meanings, directed towards the President of the Viennese Jewish Community. The necessity of in-depth context-analysis in multiple layers (from the socio-political context up to the co-text of each utterance) moreover emphasizes the importance of interdisciplinary approaches when investigating such complex issues as racism and anti-Semitism as produced and reproduced in discourse. More specifically, the relevance of pragmatic devices such as insinuations, presuppositions and implicatures, is discussed when analyzing instances of ‘coded language’, i.e., utterances with indirect and latent racist and anti-Semitic meanings as common in official discourses in Western Europe.