Non-Lexical Pragmatics

Time, Causality and Logical Words

Jacques Moeschler

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783110394634
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book presents both general issues in pragmatic theories and specific arguments for an inferential approach to pragmatics. At the present time, pragmatics is generally approached from the neo- and post-Gricean perspectives. These perspectives, which stem from philosophical theories of meaning, can be viewed as paradigms, that is, sets of concepts, procedures and results which structure scientific investigations.

The main purpose of the book is to defend a new post-Gricean approach to the substantial lexicon and to the functional lexicon (tenses, connectives), and more specifically to explore lexical and non-lexical pragmatics. A precise approach to lexical and non-lexical pragmatic contents will be developed, with special emphasis on non-lexical temporal and causal information. A model for inferring temporal relations in discourse (the directional inferences model based on French data) is developed. This approach to temporal representations and inferences will be completed by a discussion on how causal inferences are triggered in discourse interpretation. The role of conceptual causal relations, as well as causal procedural information encoded in discourse connectives (mainly parce que 'because', donc 'therefore', et 'and'), is empirically and theoretically supported. Pragmatic theory can be described as a very powerful interface system which gives access to lexical and functional information, and which contains rich pragmatic enrichment processes, for non-lexical information (quantifier, tenses, connectives) as well as for lexical information (event predicates).

The book's originality stems from its demonstration that pragmatic enrichment is structurally constrained, and occurs at the level of explicature.

Part I: Theoretical foundations

1 Types of meaning and the semantics-pragmatics interface

1 Introduction

All semantic and pragmatic approaches to meaning share the idea that meanings are diverse, and that some of them are structured. First, one of the basic distinctions is between literal and non-literal meaning, of crucial relevance to the analysis of speech acts (Searle 1969, 1979). In speech act analysis, an utterance like (13) literally means (14), but communicates (15):

(13)

Can you pass the salt?

(14)

Are you able to pass the salt?

(15)

I request that you pass the salt.

In speech act theory, there is a clear and explainable relation between literal and non-literal meaning. The main assumption of indirect speech act theory (Searle 1979) is that one way of realizing an indirect speech act is to ask one of the addressee’s condition defining the meaning of an act of requesting. This is the preparatory condition 1 (Searle 1969: 66): “H[earer] is able to do A[action], S[peaker] believes that H is able to do A”. So, asking whether the hearer is able to pass the salt is equal to a request for the salt.¹

Second, in Gricean pragmatics, it is common in most situations to associate what is implicated with what is said. For instance, (16) is a classic example of conversational implicature, where B implicates in her answer to A that C “is the sort of person likely to yield to the temptation provided by his occupation” (Grice 1989: 24), put succinctly in (17):

(16)

A:

How is C getting on his job?

B:

Oh, quite well, I think; he likes his colleagues, and he hasn’t been in prison yet.

(17)

C is dishonest.

Third, when a speaker asserts a sentence, such as I stopped smoking in (18), she does not just assert something she believes to be true, but also presupposes a true proposition, which is not communicated but is necessary for the assertion to receive a truth value.

(18)

Doctor:	Are you a smoker?
Patient:	I stopped smoking seven years ago.

(19)

The patient used to smoke.

The assertion I stopped smoking cannot be true if it is false that the patient smoked in the past. So, the patient in this situation should have answered No, or I never smoked; but in the case of (18), her answer presupposes that the doctor thinks, or has reason to think, that the patient used to smoke. Similarly, if the doctor had asked (20) instead of (18), the patient – if she never smoked – is placed in a less-than-optimal situation where she is required to cancel the relevant presupposed proposition that she used to smoke:

(20)

Doctor:	When did you stop smoking?
Patient:	I did not stop smoking, because I have never smoked.

Last but not least, some implicit content is even more covert than presuppositions, which cannot be false if the assertion is true – that is, which are not defeasible without contradiction. Buying a Chow certainly entails “buying a dog”, and if a proposition is true of a Chow, it is true of a dog, as (21) shows:

(21)

# I bought a Chow, but not a dog.

These facts are uncontroversial, but they seem to belong to different categories of issues: the direct vs. indirect speech act is a pragmatic issue; the difference between what is said and what is implicated shows the difference between semantic and pragmatic meanings; the assertion/presupposition distinction is a semantic and pragmatic issue (the target is a presupposition, but the trigger is an utterance); and finally, entailment is a semantic relation between what is said and what is entailed.

So why is the distinction between what is literal and non-literal not of the same type? The usual answer is that an indirect speech act has a pragmatic meaning as well as an implicature, whereas presuppositions and entailments are defined as semantic. So, the literal/non-literal distinction is not homogeneous, whatever the property of the trigger and the target, as Table 2 shows:

Table 2:Different types of meaning.

	target
trigger	semantic	pragmatic
semantic	entailment	presupposition
pragmatic	implicature	indirect speech act

This initial analysis is unfortunately incomplete: first, the list of types of meaning is not exhaustive; second, at least one type of meaning (presupposition) is not always considered as semantic, but as pragmatic (Stalnaker 1977); third, nor is there any consensus on the nature of one type of implicature – that is, conventional implicature, defined in Potts (2005) as semantic meaning. The primary goal of this chapter is to fix the definition of these meaning relations. To do so, I will propose a method of disentangling meaning relations from one another. The first step is to propose certain tests; the second provides a truth-conditional analysis, which is to say a contrastive analysis of entailment, presupp...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Theoretical foundations
• 2 Conceptual and procedural meaning:lexical and non-lexical pragmatics
• Part II: Time and tenses
• 4 Directional inferences: A conceptual/procedural approach to tenses
• Part III: Causality
• 6 Causal connectives, conceptual and procedural meanings
• Part IV: Logical words
• 8 Descriptive and metalinguistic negation
• Conclusion: How much is meaning conventional?
• Bibliography
• Name Index
• Subject Index