Figurative Meaning and the
Semantics/Pragmatics
Divide
Emma Borg
‘Go figure’ workshop, June 2013.
© University of Reading 2008
www.reading.ac.uk
Structure of the talk:
Aim: to explore the models of meaning and
communication in minimalism and pragmaticism,
outlining how figurative language is handled in each
model. To raise some questions for the pragmaticist
approach.
1. The Gricean Model
2. The Minimalist Model
3. The Pragmaticist Model
4. How do we constrain free pragmatic effects?
5. Do we really need explicatures?
6. Minimalism and communication
The Gricean Model
Total signification of an utterance
(a) What is said
(b) What is implicated
- Compositional linguistic meaning - Plus:
 Disambiguation
 Reference assignment
- Propositional
various forms of implicature:
conventional, generalised
conversational, particularised
conversational
(a) & conversational maxims allow
hearer to infer (b)
(a) = what is asserted (semantics) (b) = what is merely implied (pragmatics)
Objections to the Gricean model:
1. Fails to match on-line processing, e.g. ignores ‘direct
access metaphors’, etc.
2. (a) doesn’t fit with intuitive judgements of what a
speaker asserts: asserted content is often
pragmatically enhanced content.
3. Problems with the maxims (e.g. doesn’t work for nonliteral uses where speaker only ‘makes as if to say’,
how many maxims?)
The Minimalist model
Total signification of an utterance
(a) What the sentence means
(b) What the speaker means
Compositional linguistic meaning - usually pragmatically enhanced
- includes both minor and major
- Plus:
 Disambiguation
alterations to (a)
 Reference assignment
- often indeterminate
- Propositional
- includes figurative meaning
(a) = what is literally expressed
(semantics)
(b) = what is conveyed (pragmatics)
• (a) and (b) = different types of meaning, underpinned by
different kinds of cognitive process.
Objections to the Minimalist model
1. Words and structure alone always/often/sometimes
fail to yield propositions
2. Model fails to fit with on-line processing
3. Ignores important divisions between different types
of speaker meaning.
The Pragmaticist model
Total signification of an utterance
(a) Linguistically
(b) explicit content of the
(c) what is implicated
encoded content
utterance: explicature
- proposition the speaker
further relevant
- Compositional
directly communicates
propositions hearers
linguistic meaning
- an expansion or
can infer on basis
Always/often/ subdevelopment of (a),
of (b)
propositional.
involving reference
assignment and certain
free pragmatic effects
(a) = linguistic
semantics
(FPEs)
(b) = what is asserted
(c) = what is merely
implied
• FPEs = top-down pragmatic effects, e.g. modulation
and unarticulated constituents.
What is an explicature?
i.
A pragmatically inferred development of logical form
(where implicatures are wholly pragmatically
derived); S&W 1986: 182, Carston 2009: 41
ii. The content the speaker intends to communicate
directly; S&W 1986: 183, Carston 2009: 36
iii. The first content hearers recover via relevance
processing; S&W 1986:184-5
iv. The essential premise for inferring further
(implicated) propositions; Carston 2009: 41
v. The proposition on which S’s utterance is judged true
or false; Carston 2009: 36
Example
A: ‘How was the party?’
B: ‘There was not enough drink and everyone
left’
• Explicature: there was not enough alcoholic
drink to satisfy the people at [the party]i and so
everyone who came to [the party]i left [the
party]i early.
• Implicature: the party was no good.
Figurative uses
• On the RT model there exists a continuum of loose
uses, with minor alterations at one end of the scale
and metaphor at the other end (or perhaps involving a
special, meta-representational process; Carston).
Irony is off the scale.
• Example: “Robert is a computer”:
• Explicature: Robert is a computer* (via modulation)
• Implicatures: Robert lacks feelings, processes
information well…
(Wilson 2011: 180)
• Problem: How do we individuate explicature-relevant
FPEs?
1)
How many kinds of FPEs?
• Why do we need both modulation and UCs? E.g. why treat
‘in London’ as an added UC in “It’s raining” as opposed to
allowing the meaning of ‘rain’ to be modulated (either
narrowed or loosened)?
• Carston & Hall 2012 reject a modulation treatment for the
locations in weather predicates, but I’m not quite clear
why.
• Since it isn’t clear what the constraints on
broadening/narrowing of senses are, it is unclear whether
there remains any role for UCs.
• If it’s all modulation, is this occasionalism?
• If it’s all modulation, how does this fit with idea of
‘developing LF’?
2)
What constrains explicature
-relevant FPEs?
• What stops ‘snow is white’ literally expressing
(on some occasion) the proposition ‘snow is
white & 2+2=4’?
• Availability Principle, Scope Principle, appeal to
Relevance?
• A recent suggestion (Hall 2008, Carston & Hall
2012) appeals to ‘the derivational distinction
between local and global pragmatic inference’.
• An effect which modifies a part of the utterance
content counts as part of its literal meaning,
one which modifies a whole proposition does
Problems for locality?
A:
Do you want to have dinner?
B:
I’m going to the cinema.
• How should B’s utterance content be modulated?
– Narrowed from GOING-TO-THE-CINEMA to GOINGTO-THE-CINEMA-TONIGHT
– Narrowed from GOING-TO-THE-CINEMA to GOINGTO-THE-CINEMA-AT-A-TIME-THAT-MAKESHAVING-DINNER-WITH-A-IMPOSSIBLE
• Both of these are local effects, but they give different
accounts of what the speaker has literally asserted vs.
only implied.
• Perhaps problems with isolating explicature-relevant
effects are instructive.
Do we need the notion of
an explicature? (1)
i.
Explicatures need not be what a speaker intends to
communicate directly as may not be psychologically
real for her. Thoughts are just as underdetermined as
utterances (if S utters ‘pass me the red pen’ she
need not have internally specified that she wants the
pen that writes in red, the one that contains red ink,
the one that is red on the lid, the one that says ‘red’
on it, etc. Compare ‘I want to travel to London’.)
ii. Explicatures need not be psychologically real for the
audience: all hearers may consciously entertain is
‘implicature’ content.
Do we need explicatures? (2)
• As theorists explicatures do play a role in a
rational reconstruction of a route from literal
meaning to conveyed content, but why should
we think hearers must or even typically do
follow this route, either explicitly or implicitly?
• Soliciting judgements of truth/falsity for
utterance content is inappropriate, it influences
the phenomena it is supposed to be uncovering
(a kind of ‘quantum effect’):
Truth/Falsity Judgements
• Is B’s utterance true in a situation where there was more
wine but it was held in a locked cabinet?
– there wasn’t enough easily available alcoholic drink and everyone
at the party left after one hour
• Is it true in a situation where there was plenty of crème de
menthe available at the party, or where those hosting the
party didn’t leave?
– there wasn’t enough available and attractive alcoholic drink and
everyone who came to the party as the result of an invitation left
early.
• In asking these questions we prompt the audience to
sharpen the original content of the utterance, but these
are decisions about how to sharpen not an uncovering of
material which is already somehow present.
Minimalism and communication (1)
• Perhaps then we just need the standard Kripkean
distinction (adopted by minimalism) between what a
sentence means and what a speaker says.
• Socio-linguistic structures allow a direct move from
literal meaning to communicated content (it’s not
understanding a language which requires
understanding a way of life but understanding a
speaker).
• Assertion can go either with what is literally expressed
(e.g. legal discourse: ‘use a firearm’) or what is
pragmatically conveyed.
Minimalism and communication (2)
• Speakers can demur from any content attributed
on the non-literal side without contradiction, but
they do not have final veto on what is
communicated (consider libel cases).
• There is a threshold of tolerance within which
differences between the propositional content
assigned by speaker and hearers as
communicated content can simply be ignored. The
boundaries of tolerance are set in context,
depending in part on the kind of conversational
exchange in which agents are engaged.
Minimalism and communication (3)
“[T]he process through which [speakers and hearers]
determine which values to assign is not governed by a
‘uniform rule’ but is shaped by a common goal:
successful communication…It is unsurprising that
accommodation and negotiation should be central to this
enterprise, and it is equally unsurprising that so many
‘factors’ should be involved…[T]here is in fact no limit to
the information on which the speaker and her audience
may draw as they attempt to converge.”
-- Heck, forthcoming, ‘Semantics and Contextdependence’, draft p.40
Minimalism and communication (4)
• If a proposition risks falling outside the contextually
determined limits of tolerance, there are two options:
i.
the speaker/hearer puts her interpretation on the
record (‘are you saying…?’/‘did you mean…?’) and
interlocutors negotiate over the content to be added
to the conversational record.
ii. the potential divergence between speaker and
hearers take on the communicated content goes
unnoticed and communication fails.
Conclusion
• It is in this sense that all communicated
content is ‘an expedition abroad’, no longer
part of linguistic understanding per se but
instead relying on a culturally entrenched
network of beliefs and practices.
• Metaphor, etc, may be a rather more exotic trip
but all non-literal content is a journey way
beyond linguistic understanding.