Abstract
Subsentential utterances provide an ideal testing ground for issues central to the topic of the syntax–pragmatics interface such as the exact nature of the interaction between the information derivable from the structure and information obtained through pragmatic inference or default (automatic) pragmatic adjustments of meaning. Our case study for the purpose of this chapter is incomplete disjunction of the form ‘p or…’, in particular in interrogative constructions, with the second disjunct missing—unpronounced or, in some cases, even ‘unthought’ as our analysis of the corpus data shows. The chapter offers an attempt at a formal treatment, using the theoretical framework of default semantics (DS), of the compositional representation of such expressions, accounting for the sources of information, the processes involved in the recovery of the intended meaning, as well as allowing some preliminary insight into their interaction. It makes use of the database of incomplete disjunctive interrogatives in English complied out of the Great British component of the International Corpus of English, supplemented with examples taken from the Australian National Corpus and thereby offers theoretically motivated explanations for the pragmatic effects that incomplete disjunctive interrogatives have been observed to occasion in naturally occurring interactions. The category of disjunction is semantically and pragmatically complex: It can communicate, among others, that (i) the addressee is given a choice out of a set of alternatives (ii) the addressee has to think of possible alternatives, (iii) the speaker lacks information to make a stronger claim, and (iv) it would not be correct to make an informatively stronger assertion because two or more states of affairs are (equally) plausible. In Sect. 2, we point out the variety of functions that or can adopt. In Sect. 3, we introduce the theoretical problem with incomplete disjunction, and in Sect. 4, we move to the discussion of the semantics and pragmatics of incomplete utterances, focusing on contextualist pragmatic vis-à-vis syntactic ellipsis accounts. Section 5 offers a DS-theoretic analysis of the sources of information about completions and the associated processes that produce the truth-conditional representation. Section 6 lays out theoretical foundations for the mechanism of establishing relevant alternatives by proposing an extension to alternative semantics. Section 7 follows with the presentation of the merger representations for selected examples from the corpus, pertaining to different categories of ‘or…?’ constructions we previously identified.
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Notes
- 1.
Whose formal equivalent is called by Mey a pragmeme (Mey 2001).
- 2.
We are aware that terms such as ‘unsaid’, ‘unuttered’, and ‘unpronounced’ all come with some theoretical baggage. Unless we refer to an extant source outside this chapter, we settle on the term ‘unpronounced’, leaving the nuances to be discussed in separate work. The term ‘unpronounced’ allows us to stay away from the discussions surrounding the scope of ‘what is said’ and the sense of ‘unarticulated’—both in the focus of cutting-edge debates but tangential to the current project in which the composition of meaning is understood in terms of merger representations.
- 3.
- 4.
We will ignore for the moment the instances of natural-language disjunction with more than two disjuncts ( p or q or r…) and the fact that a lot of the instances of incomplete disjunction are non-declaratives (mostly questions: ‘p or..?’, see also Haugh 2011).
- 5.
Not to be confused with the category (ii.a).
- 6.
The tagging used throughout the chapter refers to the corpora stated in the prefix (ICE-AUS, GCSAus, ICE-GB). For example, in (1), S1A-025 is an identifier of the conversation and 187 refers to the line number in the transcript. Where there is no such indexing of examples, examples are either created for explanatory purposes or their source is acknowledged.
- 7.
This is an important issue concerning the behaviour of connectives but we cannot tackle it here in more depth. Compare also the discourse use of a single-word utterance ‘And?’
- 8.
Interrogatives in category (ii) can be argued to display the closed/open set as well, but since they do so in virtue of the juxtaposition of different speech acts, this is almost impossible to include in the typology.
- 9.
This breakdown is consistent with Koike’s (2010) study of incomplete disjunction in the Switchboard Corpus, where 69 % instances co-occurred with interrogatives, and 31 % co-occurred with declaratives (although he provided no information on cases of incomplete disjunction arising through interruption).
- 10.
For the purpose of this discussion, we refrain from committing ourselves to a particular theory or model of linguistic politeness but this claim could be easily rephrased, for example, as attending to the addressee’s negative as well as positive face-needs in terms of Brown and Levinson’s (1987) model. See Kádár and Haugh (2013) for further discussion of reasons for avoiding premature theorisation, particularly from a crosslinguistic perspective.
- 11.
- 12.
Stanley (2000, p. 402) explicitly claims that there is no such thing as a non-sentential assertion.
- 13.
Indexicalism has not yet offered accounts that exhaust context dependency but instead has dealt with specific cases such as quantifier domain restriction and classes of comparison related to adjectives (e.g. ‘John is tall’ (for a 10-year-old kid; see Stanley 2007). This is one of the reasons why we focus on questioning the motivation behind the approach and its general potential.
- 14.
Treating such cases as shorthand for ‘this is X’ is also suggested by Stanley (2000, p. 409).
- 15.
In a revised version of his account, Merchant (2010) moves closer to Stanley’s indexicalism, in that he treats more complex cases of incomplete utterances as providing slots in their structure, to be completed on the basis of contextual information.
- 16.
- 17.
Or, as Haugh (2011, p. 217) puts it, ‘those arguing against the existence of default inferencing have been locating defaults in the wrong place’. ‘Inferencing’ is used here in the wide sense and subsumes automatic processing of information.
- 18.
- 19.
On this topic, see also Jaszczolt (2012) for ‘flexible inferential bases’ and ‘fluid characters’.
- 20.
See Rooth (1996) for a detailed comparative assessment of the traditional and alternative- semantic accounts of focus.
- 21.
Our emphasis.
- 22.
One could also construe it as an output of the SCWD source but invoking such a set automatically seems less likely. As always, the merger representation will model the actual situation of discourse, so both options are feasible.
- 23.
In DS, temporal reference is represented by means of the modal operator of acceptability (ACC), loosely modelled on Grice’s (2001) sentential operator by means of which he attempted to represent alethic and practical modality. It is argued in DS that temporality as a semantic, conceptual, as well as metaphysical category is reducible to degrees of epistemic commitment to the situation represented in Σ and this is captured by the ACC operator on Σs, indexed with a symbol pertaining to the degree of this commitment (∆). So, for example, for the sentence with future-time reference ‘We will rehearse from the solo’ we will have [ACC∆ rf├ Σ']WS, read as ‘It is acceptable to the degree pertaining to regular future that it is the case that Σ'’, which is recoverable through the processing of word meaning and sentence structure (WS). For a detailed account of the representation of temporal reference in DS see Jaszczolt (2009).
- 24.
Introduced briefly in Footnote 23.
- 25.
Alternatively, we could represent the exclusive disjunction by ¬ ( p˄q) but it is preferred to capture the Gricean pragmatic strengthening of disjunction and treat the exclusive reading as a cognitive default marked by CD.
- 26.
In this light, it is surprising to note that Geurts interprets Grice’s theory as ‘deeply imbued with such psychological notions as belief, intention, and so forth’ (2010, p. 67). Grice follows the noble Fregean tradition and very clearly dissociates himself from any forms of psychologism. His use of the notions of belief and intention make it very clear that he does not mean to ‘psychologise’ in making recourse to them.
- 27.
The need for moderate psychologism in post-Gricean pragmatics is discussed at length in Jaszczolt (2008).
- 28.
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Jaszczolt, K., Savva, E., Haugh, M. (2016). The Individual and the Social Path of Interpretation: The Case of Incomplete Disjunctive Questions. In: Capone, A., Mey, J. (eds) Interdisciplinary Studies in Pragmatics, Culture and Society. Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, vol 4. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12616-6_9
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