Abstract
Work in the last two decades on semantics and pragmatics has given rise to a multitude of different positions on where to draw the distinction between them, whether such a distinction can be drawn at all, and to what extent, if any, pragmatics contributes to semantic content. I outline the relevance-theoretic view that the semantics-pragmatics distinction corresponds to the distinction between linguistically encoded and pragmatically provided meaning, and the reasons for the rejection of any intermediate level of semantic content such as a minimal proposition. In the second part of the paper, I survey a range of recent frameworks (indexicalism; certain versions of minimalism) that potentially avoid those objections, and consider whether these approaches motivate the need for some variety of semantic content as a psychologically real or theoretically valid level of representation distinct from encoded meaning and explicit utterance content.
Thanks to Robyn Carston, Rob Stainton and Catherine Wearing for their comments on earlier forms of much of this material, which is drawn from my University of London PhD dissertation. This work is funded by a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Page references to Grice are to his 1989 collection.
- 2.
The use of this embedding procedure can be traced back to Cohen (1971).
- 3.
I use small caps to indicate mental representations.
- 4.
See Stainton (2006) for an extended defence of the idea that such fragmentary utterances are genuinely subsentential and used to perform speech acts.
- 5.
A further complication is the fact that certain linguistic items seem not to contribute to explicature at all, but are probably best analyzed as constraining the implicit side of communication, by indicating what sort of inferences are to be drawn from the explicit content. Discourse connectives or particles such as “but” and “although” communicate a contrast or contradiction of some sort between the clauses they conjoin, but this contrastive meaning is generally agreed not to affect the truth or falsity of the utterance. In (1) above, the use of “again” does not affect truth conditions but affects the inferences drawn from the explicature: its use here indicates that Max has previously been a heavy drinker. Arguably, “well” is another such expression, though what it communicates is less determinate. Grice (1989) suggested that such items are conventional implicature triggers; see Blakemore (1987, 2002) and Wilson and Sperber (1993) for a relevance-theoretic treatment.
- 6.
Bach seems to hold this version of the underdeterminacy thesis: he writes, ‘…what is being communicated could have been made fully explicit by the insertion of additional lexical material’ (1994: 134).
- 7.
Kaplan’s list of indexicals is this: The personal pronouns “I”, “you.” “he”, “she”, “it” in their various cases and number, the demonstrative pronouns “that” and “this” in their various cases and number, the adverbs “here”, “now”, “today”, “yesterday”, “tomorrow”, “ago”, “hence(forth)”, and the adjectives “actual” and “present.” Cappelen and Lepore (2005: 1) add words and aspects of words that indicate tense, and suggest that they might also include ‘contextuals’—common nouns like “enemy”, “outsider”, “foreigner”, “alien”, “immigrant”, “friend”, and “native” as well as common adjectives like “foreign”, “local”, “domestic”, “national”, “imported”, and “exported.”
- 8.
They say nothing about disambiguation, but are clear that Gricean mechanisms do a lot of work in getting to their semantic content—i.e. in saturation.
- 9.
Impliciture and the relevance-theoretic explicature consist of the same amount of content in most cases, except that Bach is not inclined to count figurative uses of expressions as cases of impliciture, whereas relevance theorists believe that at least some figurative uses are cases of modulating the encoded meaning of an expression, for example “bulldozed” in example (2), and the modulated meaning is part of the explicature. See Bach (2010) on the differences between explicature and impliciture.
- 10.
‘Completion’ and ‘expansion’ are Bach’s terms for different kinds of ‘free’ (that is, non-linguistically mandated) pragmatic processes, some of which were illustrated in examples (1)–(3). ‘Completion’ occurs when the sentence, after saturation, is semantically incomplete, that is, does not express a full proposition. An utterance of “He is ready,” for example, after saturation of the indexical “he,” is still semantically incomplete, and requires the hearer to work out what the person is ready for (assuming here, with Bach, that “ready” is not, and does not encode, an indexical or variable). Expansion occurs when the sentence, after saturation (and maybe completion) is semantically complete, but that complete proposition is not the intuitive asserted content. An example would be a mother saying to a child screaming about a grazed knee, “You’re not going to die.” This expresses a proposition (after saturation): You x are not going to die {ever}, but the asserted content, or impliciture, would be You x are not going to die from that cut.
- 11.
Stanley (2000) suggests another kind of evidence for certain hidden indexicals, the argument from binding. An utterance of “Every time John lights a cigarette, it rains” has an interpretation where the location of the raining co-varies with the location of the cigarette lighting, an interpretation which, according to Stanley, could not arise from pragmatic inference alone, meaning that it must be underpinned by a linguistic variable. However, Stanley offers no argument for this claim, which has been rejected by Carston (2002), Neale (2004), and Recanati (2002).
- 12.
Other good candidates for free pragmatic enrichments are loose uses such as “This steak is raw,” “Jane has a round face” and “Holland is flat”. The same arguments apply as given in the text for examples (15)–(17): they are optional pragmatic effects (not occurring on every use of the expression) and are intuitively part of the truth-conditional content. See Hall (2008: Sect. 3) for more discussion. Another plausible case is provided by referential uses of definite descriptions, whose truth conditions are widely agreed to be distinct from those of attributive uses (see, among many others, Recanati 1993; Larson and Segal 1995; Bezuidenhout 1997; Neale 1999, and King and Stanley 2005), but there is no argument for a hidden indexical or parameter here. Assuming, along with these authors, that the encoded meaning is attributive, then the move from encoded meaning to referential truth conditions is a free pragmatic effect.
- 13.
- 14.
It seems likely that the central inferential system itself has a far more modular structure than Fodor (1983, 2000, etc) has been prepared to admit (see Sperber 2002, Carruthers 2006). But whatever view on its internal structure is correct does not affect anything I say here, so I remain neutral: the distinction between perceptual and language modules on the one hand, and the central inferential system(s) on the other, is sufficient.
- 15.
Carston (2008b: 364) notes that there is a worry about whether Borg’s account can deal with descriptive uses of indexicals and demonstratives, for example, where the speaker points at a massive footprint and utters “He must be a giant,” or holds up a book and says “This is my favourite author.” Borg (2002) argued that even for descriptive cases, the semantic content is singular, and seemed to see the descriptive content as an implicature. Intuitively, the descriptive content is part of the explicit content, but it is not clear how this could be accommodated by Borg given that dthat is a rigidifier.
- 16.
Carston (2008b: 365) questions whether the semantic content really does meet the ‘(Davidsonian) truth-conditional desideratum’ that Borg appears to want semantic content to meet, which requires that ‘the language user who grasps [the] truth condition [be able] to tell worlds in which it is satisfied from worlds in which it is not’ (Borg 2004: 235).
- 17.
It appears that this token-reflexive content can include reflexive descriptions of elements that are not part of the linguistic meaning, such as in whatever domain the speaker of u intends (Korta and Perry 2006).
- 18.
British Prime Minister in Grice’s day.
- 19.
Relevance theory makes a distinction between the basic explicature (= asserted content, intuitive truth-conditional content, etc) and higher-level explicatures, which are speech-act or propositional-attitude descriptions. Where the term “explicature” is used without any qualification, it refers to a basic explicature of the utterance.
- 20.
- 21.
- 22.
Probably at least one more type should be distinguished: the transfer involved in referential uses of definite descriptions, and the metonymy illustrated in (13)–(14).
- 23.
Perry (1986) considers the case of Z-land. Z-landers are a small, isolated group who are unaware of any locations other than the small area they live in. They do not have a concept of Z-land as opposed to other places. When a Z-lander utters or hears “It’s raining,” he does not have in mind the location at which it is raining: the location is not articulated even in his thought. While the rest of us do have a concept of the place where we are as opposed to other locations, this does not mean that we contrastively represent our location when we utter weather-predicates; it may be that, as Perry says, ‘there is a little of the Z-lander in the most well-travelled of us’.
- 24.
The location can, of course, be relevant in certain contexts, e.g. “I’m going to the concert at the school tonight. Mary’s singing.”
References
Bach, Kent. (1994). Conversational impliciture. Mind and Language, 9, 124–162.
Bach, K. (2001). You don’t say. Synthese, 128, 15–44.
Bach, K. (2010). Impliciture vs explicature: What’s the difference. In B. Soria & E. Romero (Eds.), Explicit communication: Robyn Carston’s pragmatics (pp. 126–137). Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Barton, E. (1990). Nonsentential constituents. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Bezuidenhout, A. (1997). Pragmatics, semantic underdetermination and the referential/attributive distinction. Mind, 106, 375–409.
Bezuidenhout, A. (2002). Truth-conditional pragmatics. Philosophical Perspectives, 16, 105–134.
Bezuidenhout, A. (2006). The coherence of contextualism. Mind and Language, 21, 1–10.
Blakemore, D. (1987). Semantic constraints on relevance. Oxford: Blackwell.
Blakemore, D. (2002). Linguistic meaning and relevance: The semantics and pragmatics of discourse markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Borg, E. (2002). Pointing at Jack. Talking about Jill: Understanding deferred uses of demonstratives and pronouns. Mind and Language, 17, 489–512.
Borg, E. (2004). Minimal semantics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cappelen, H. (2007). Semantics and pragmatics: Some central issues. In G. Preyer & G. Peter (Eds.), Context-sensitivity and semantic minimalism (pp. 3–22). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cappelen, H., & Lepore, E. (2005). Insensitive semantics: A defense of semantic minimalism and speech act pluralism. Oxford: Blackwell.
Carruthers, P. (2006). The architecture of the mind. Oxford: OUP Press.
Carston, R. (1988). Implicature, explicature and truth-theoretic semantics. In R. Kempson (Ed.), Mental representations: The interface between language and reality (pp. 155–181). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Carston, R. (1999). The semantic-pragmatics distinction: A view from relevance theory. In K. Turner (Ed.), The semantics/pragmatics interface from different points of view (CRiSPI 1) (pp. 85–125). Oxford: Elsevier.
Carston, R. (2002). Thoughts and utterances: The pragmatics of explicit communication. Oxford: Blackwell.
Carston, R. (2004). Truth-conditional content and conversational implicature. In C. Bianchi (Ed.), The semantics/pragmatics distinction (pp. 65–100). Stanford: CSLI.
Carston, R. (2008a). Linguistic communication and the semantics-pragmatics distinction. Synthese, 165, 321–345.
Carston, R. (2008b). Review of Minimal Semantics by Emma Borg. Mind and Language, 23, 359–367.
Carston, R., Hall, A. in preparation. Pragmatic pragmatics and the extent of linguistic systematicity. Ms, UCL.
Cohen, J. L. (1971). Some remarks on Grice’s views about the logical particles of natural language. In Y. Bar-Hillel (Ed.), Pragmatics of natural language (pp. 50–68). Dordrecht: Reidel.
Davidson, D. (1967). Truth and meaning. Synthese, 17, 304–323.
Fodor, J. (1983). The modularity of mind. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Fodor, J. (2000). The mind doesn’t work that way. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Frege, G. (1892). Über Sinn und Bedeutung. Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Philosophische Kritik, 100, 25–50.
Garcia-Carpintero, M., & Kölbel, M. (Eds.). (2008). Relative truth. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Glanzberg, M. (2007). Context, content, and relativism. Philosophical Studies, 136, 1–29.
Grice, H. P. (1967). Logic and conversation. William James lectures. Harvard University.
Grice, H. P. (1975)/(1989). Logic and conversation. In: P. Cole, J. Morgan, (Eds.), Syntax and semantics 3: Speech Acts (pp. 41–58). New York: Academic; reprinted in H. Paul Grice 1989, 22–40.
Grice, H. P. (1989). Studies in the way of words. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Hall, A. (2008). Free enrichment or hidden indexicals? Mind and Language, 23, 426–456.
Hall, A. (2009). Free pragmatic processes and explicit utterance content. University College London PhD dissertation.
Hall, A. (2014). 'Free' enrichment and the nature of pragmatic constraints. International Review of Pragmatics 6.1.
Kaplan, D. (1977)/(1989). Demonstratives. In J. Almog, J. Perry, H. Wettstein (Eds.), Themes from Kaplan (481–563). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
King, J., & Stanley, J. (2005). Semantics, pragmatics, and the role of semantic content. In Z. G. Szabó (Ed.), Semantics versus pragmatics (pp. 111–164). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kölbel, M. (2008). Introduction: Motivations for relativism. In M. Garcia-Carpintero, M. Kölbel (Eds.), (1–38).
Korta, K., & Perry, J. (2006). Three demonstrations and a funeral. Mind and Language, 21, 166–186.
Korta, K., & Perry, J. (2008). The pragmatic circle. Synthese, 165, 347–357.
Larson, R., & Segal, G. (1995). Knowledge of meaning: An introduction to semantic theory. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Lasersohn, P. (2005). Context dependence, disagreement and predicates of personal taste. Linguistics and Philosophy, 28, 643–686.
Levinson, S. (2000). Presumptive meanings: The theory of generalized conversational implicature. Cambridge: MIT Press.
MacFarlane, J. (2007). Relativism and disagreement. Philosophical Studies, 132, 17–31.
MacFarlane, J. (2012). Relativism. In Graff Fara, D., Russell, G. (Eds.), The Routledge companion to the philosophy of language (pp. 132–142). New York: Routledge.
Neale, S. (1999). Coloring and composition. In K. Murasugi & R. Stainton (Eds.), Philosophy and linguistics (pp. 35–82). Boulder: Westview.
Neale, S. (2004). This, that, and the other. In A. Bezuidenhout & M. Reimer (Eds.), Descriptions and beyond (pp. 68–182). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Neale, S. (2007). On location. In M. O’Rourke & C. Washington (Eds.), Situating semantics: Essays on the philosophy of John Perry (pp. 251–393). Cambridge: MIT Press.
Nunberg, G. (1993). Indexicality and deixis. Linguistics and Philosophy, 16, 1–43.
Nunberg, G. (1995). Transfers of meaning. Journal of Semantics, 12, 109–132.
Perry, J. (1986). Thought without representation. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 60, 137–151.
Perry, J. (2001). Reference and reflexivity. Stanford: CSLI Publications.
Predelli, S. (1998). I am not here now. Analysis, 58(2), 107–115.
Pupa, F., & Troseth, E. (2011). Syntax and interpretation. Mind and Language, 26, 185–209.
Recanati, F. (1987). Contextual dependence and definite descriptions. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 87, 57–73.
Recanati, F. (1993). Direct reference: From language to thought. Oxford: Blackwell.
Recanati, F. (1994). Contextualism and anti-contextualism in the philosophy of language. In S. Tsohatzidis (Ed.), Foundations of speech-act theory (pp. 156–166). London: Routledge.
Recanati, F. (1996). Domains of discourse. Linguistics and Philosophy, 19, 445–475.
Recanati, F. (2002). Unarticulated constituents. Linguistics and Philosophy, 25, 299–345.
Recanati, F. (2004). Literal meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Recanati, F. (2007). Perspectival thought: A plea for (moderate) relativism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Recanati, F. (2010). Truth conditional pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Russell, B. (1905). On denoting. Mind, 14, 479–493.
Sag, I. (1981). Formal semantics and extra-linguistic context. In P. Cole (Eds.), Syntax and semantics 13. Radical pragmatics (pp. 273–294). New York: Academic.
Salmon, N. (1991). The pragmatic fallacy. Philosophical Studies, 42, 37–45.
Searle, J. (1978). Literal meaning. Erkenntnis, 13, 207–224.
Searle, J. (1980). The background of meaning. In J. Searle, F. Kiefer, & M. Bierwisch (Eds.), Speech act theory and pragmatics (pp. 221–232). Dordrecht: Reidel.
Searle, J. (1992). The rediscovery of the mind. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Soames, S. (2002). Beyond rigidity: The unfinished semantic agenda of naming and necessity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sperber, D., Deirdre W. (1986)/(1995). Relevance: communication and cognition. Oxford: Blackwell.
Sperber, D. (2002). In defense of massive modularity. In E. Dupoux (Ed.), Language, brain and cognitive development: Essays in Honor of Jacques Mehler (pp. 47–57). Cambridge: MIT Press.
Stainton, R. J. (2006). Words and thoughts: subsentences, ellipsis, and the philosophy of language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Stalnaker, R. (1999). Indicative conditionals. In Context and content, Robert Stalnaker (pp. 63–77). Oxford: OUP.
Stanley, J. (2000). Context and logical form. Linguistics and Philosophy, 23, 391–434.
Stanley, J. (2002). Making it articulated. Mind and Language, 17, 149–168.
Stanley, J. (2005). Semantics in context. In G. Preyer & G. Peter (Eds.), Contextualism in philosophy: Knowledge, meaning, and truth (pp. 221–254). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Stanley, J. (2007). Language in context. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Stanley, J., & Szabó, Z. G. (2000). On quantifier domain restriction. Mind and Language, 15, 219–261.
Stephenson, T. (2007). Judge dependence, epistemic modals, and predicates of personal taste. Linguistics and Philosophy, 30, 487–525.
Stern, J. (2000). Metaphor in context. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Stern, J. (2006). Metaphor, literal, and literalism. Mind and Language, 21, 243–279.
Szabó, Z. G. (2006). Sensitivity training. Mind and Language, 21, 31–38.
von Fintel, K., & Gillies, A. (2011). Might made right. In E. Andy & W. Brian (Eds.), Epistemic modality (pp. 108–130). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wedgwood, D. (2007). Shared assumptions: semantic minimalism and relevance theory. Journal of Linguistics, 43, 647–681.
Wilson, D., & Carston, R. (2007). A unitary approach to lexical pragmatics: relevance, inference and ad hoc concepts. In N. Burton-Roberts (Ed.), Advances in pragmatics (pp. 230–260). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Wilson, D., & Sperber, D. (1993). Linguistic form and relevance. Lingua, 87, 53–76.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Robyn Carston, Rob Stainton and Catherine Wearing for their comments on earlier forms of much of this material, which is drawn from my University of London PhD dissertation. This work is funded by a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2013 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Hall, A. (2013). Relevance Theory, Semantic Content and Pragmatic Enrichment. In: Capone, A., Lo Piparo, F., Carapezza, M. (eds) Perspectives on Linguistic Pragmatics. Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01014-4_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01014-4_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-01013-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-01014-4
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawPhilosophy and Religion (R0)