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FIGURATIVE UTTERANCES AND SPEAKER’S MEANING
Deirdre Wilson and Dan Sperber
UCL Linguistics and Institut Jean Nicod, Paris
1. Introduction
The contribution of metaphor to linguistic meaning
“metaphors mean what the words, in their most literal interpretation, mean, and nothing more.”
(Davidson 1978: 32)
The contribution of metaphor to speaker’s meaning, or communication
“The central error about metaphor is most easily attacked when it takes the form of a theory of
metaphorical meaning, but behind that theory, and statable independently, is the thesis that
associated with a metaphor is a cognitive content that its author wishes to convey and that the
interpreter must grasp if he is to get the message. This theory is false, whether or not we call the
purported cognitive content a meaning.” (Davidson 1978: 46)
“The commonplace view about metaphorical interpretation is that it can be characterised in
traditional semantic and pragmatic terms, thereby assimilating metaphor to other familiar uses of
language. We will reject this view, and propose in its place the view that, though metaphors can
issue in distinctive cognitive and discourse effects, they do so without issuing in metaphorical
meaning and truth, and so without metaphorical communication.” (Lepore & Stone 2010: 1)
Perceived problem: The non-paraphrasability of metaphorical effects
“When we try to say what a metaphor ‘means’, we soon realise that there is no end to what we
want to mention. If someone draws his finger along a coastline on a map …, how many things are
drawn to your attention? You might list a great many, but you could not finish since the idea of
finishing has no clear application. How many facts or propositions are conveyed by a
photograph?” (Davidson 1978: 48-49)
“Metaphorical meaning … requires an audience to recognise the specific content a speaker wants
to get across, and to use the signal of the metaphor as a basis for the uptake of that content. Since
we deny this must happen in normal confrontations with metaphors, we therefore reject
metaphorical meaning.” (Lepore & Stone 2010)
Common assumptions
1a. Grice’s notion of speaker’s meaning forms an adequate basis for a theory of communication
1b. Theories of communication cannot deal with non-paraphrasable effects
Aims
2a. To show that Grice’s notion of speaker’s meaning excludes aspects of both verbal and nonverbal communication that an adequate theory of communication should explain.
2b. To show that a theory of communication that cannot handle non-paraphrasable effects will
exclude not only ‘figurative’ but also many ‘literal’ utterances.
2c. To show how non-paraphrasable effects can be handled in a broader theory of communication.
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2. Speaker’s meaning and communication
Grice’s notion of speaker’s meaning:
To mean that P by a declarative act, the communicator must intend the audience
(1) to believe that P
(2) to recognise that the communicator intends them to believe that P,
and must also intend
(3) the audience’s recognition of the communicator’s intention in (1) to be at least part of
their reason for believing that P
Two problems with basing a theory of communication on the notion of speaker’s meaning.
A. The indeterminacy issue
Standard reason for scepticism about the contribution of metaphor to communication
Prototypical cases of speaker’s meaning are determinate and paraphrasable without loss (e.g.
‘The speaker meant that P’). But metaphorical uses often convey non-paraphrasable effects.
Grice’s on indeterminacy
“Since, to calculate a conversational implicature is to calculate what has to be supposed in order
to preserve the supposition that the Cooperative Principle is being observed, and since there may
be various possible explanations, a list of which may be open, the conversational implicature in
such cases will be an open disjunction of such specific explanations, and if the list of these is
open, the implicatum will have just the kind of indeterminacy that many actual implicata do in
fact seem to possess.” (Grice 1989: 39-40)
Standard response to the indeterminacy issue
“Because indeterminacy is hard to handle formally, I shall mostly ignore it in the discussion that
follows. A fuller treatment of implicatures would not be guilty of this omission, which is really
only defensible on formal grounds.” (Gazdar 1979: 40)
The pervasiveness of indeterminacy in communication
3a.
Passenger: What time is the next train to Oxford?
3b.
Railway official: 12.48.
4a.
4b.
Peter: We can’t afford La Cantina
Mary: I’ve got money.
5.
Mary: I could kill for a glass of water.
6.
The season approaches on tortoise feet. (John Ashbery)
7.
Romeo: Juliet is the sun
“Romeo means that Juliet is the warmth of his world; that his day begins with her; that only in her
nourishment can he grow. And his declaration suggests that the moon, which other lovers use as
emblem of their love, is merely her reflected light, and dead in comparison, and so on. … The
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‘and so on’ which ends my example of paraphrase is significant. It registers what William
Empson calls ‘the pregnancy of metaphors’, the burgeoning of meaning in them.
(Stanley Cavell 1976: 78)
Some sources of indeterminacy in communication
8a. Showing (e.g. the scene outside the window; photos of one’s holiday)
8b. Demonstrations (e.g. how to open a champagne bottle; ‘Look at this’)
8c. Expressions of attitude (apologetic, worried, sceptical, ironical)
8d. Lexical pragmatics (e.g. ‘money’, ‘kill’, ‘glass’, ‘sun’)
B. The nature of the intended effects
Grice’s view: The intended cognitive effects of communication are beliefs, or activated beliefs,
which are individually represented in the minds of both communicator and audience.
But
(a) Not all the intended effects need be individually intended by the communicator or mentally
represented as distinct propositions by the audience.
9a.
9b.
Peter (serving drinks): Would you like vodka?
Jane: I don’t drink alcohol.
Implicatures:
9c.
Jane doesn’t want vodka.
9d.
The reason Jane is refusing vodka is that she doesn’t drink alcohol.
9e.
Jane doesn’t want whisky, gin, tequila, wine, beer, brandy, Campari…..
9f.
Jane might like orange juice, apple juice, cola, water ….
(b) Often, what is communicated is not a belief or set of beliefs but something much vaguer – an
impression – which is not necessarily reducible to a set of individually represented beliefs.
Susan, working at her desk, is wondering whether to take a break and go for a walk. She gets
up, opens the window: the sky is grey; the air is chilly; clouds, some of them rather dark, are
moving fast. The impression she forms of the conditions outside make her change her mind.
She will stay at home.
Robert says to Susan, “Let’s go for a walk”. She opens the window and shows him the poor
weather outside. She intends Robert to form an impression of the weather that will make him
change his mind and decide not to go for a walk.
Consequence: A theory of communication based on Grice’s notion of speaker’s meaning is to
narrow to handle the full range of intended cognitive effects of both verbal and non-verbal cases,
including the formation of impressions rather than determinate sets of beliefs.
3. Ostensive-inferential communication
Goal: To find a psychologically more plausible version of the first two intentions in Grice’s
characterisation of speaker’s meaning (to make the audience believe that P, and to make the
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audience recognise that one intends them to believe that P) which will provide and adequate basis
for a theory of communication and solve the two problems above.
Distinctions standardly drawn among types of belief:
10a. ‘activated’, or ‘occurrent’ (full propositional representation in working memory)
10b. ‘inactive’, or ‘dispositional’ (bits of information in long-term memory from which full
propositions can be inferentially reconstructed)
10c. ‘tacit’ beliefs (or propositions one does not believe but is ‘disposed to believe) (propositions
inferentially derivable from ‘activated’ or ‘dispositional’ beliefs)
What all these ‘beliefs’ have in common is that they are manifest to the individual.
Manifestness: A proposition is manifest to an individual to the extent that he is likely to some
positive degree to entertain it and accept it as true.
Degrees of manifestness: Depend on two factors (a) strength of belief and (b) salience. The
greater the epistemic strength, and the greater the salience, the more manifest the proposition.
Manifestness and impression: A change in the manifestness of an array of propositions which
all bear on understanding the same phenomenon, answering the same question, or deciding the
same issue (e.g. whether to go for a walk, whether to accept a certain view, whether to hurry, etc.)
Consequences:
11a. A proposition can be manifest to an individual even if it is not mentally represented (e.g. it
may merely be perceptually salient, or derivable from what is mentally represented).
11b. The more manifest a proposition, the more likely it is to play a causal role in the individual’s
thought or behaviour.
11c. The notion of manifestness provides a better basis for analysing the intended cognitive
effects of communication than the notions of belief, or activated belief.
Ostensive-inferential communication: This involves two intentions
12a. Informative intention: To make manifest or more manifest to the audience an array of
propositions I
12b. Communicative intention: To make the informative intention mutually manifest
Implications for pragmatics
13a. As a result of an act of communication, an array of propositions I becomes manifest, or more
manifest, to the audience.
13b. At one extreme, the array I may be a single srongly manifest proposition; at the other, it
may be a wide array of weakly manifest propositions; or there may be a mixture of strongly
and weakly manifest propositions (illustrated by (9c)-(9f).
Question for pragmatic theories: How does the audience identify the array of propositions I that
the communicator intended to make manifest, or more manifest?
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Answer: Different pragmatic theories offer different answers to this question. The notion of
ostensive-inferential communication is theory-neutral, and could be used by any of them.
Relevance theory’s answer: A communicative act makes many propositions manifest or more
manifest. The array I consists of those propositions whose increase in manifestness makes her
communicative behaviour relevant in a way she may have intended and expected.
Three ways by which the audience can characterise the intended array of propositions I:
14a. By enumerating some of its members (e.g. if Susan says ‘The weather is awful’ when Robert
suggests a walk, the explicature ‘The weather is awful’ and implicature ‘Let’s not walk’.)
14b. By a description (e.g. if Susan replies non-verbally by opening the window, the array I is the
set of propositions which have become more manifest to both of them and which are relevant
because they imply an answer to his proposal, i.e. that she doesn’t want to go for a walk.)
14c. By metacognitive awareness (e.g. by registering that an act of communication has had a
certain psychological effect on us – shaming us, pleasing us, or making us see things in a
new light, etc.)
Claim: This account of communication deals with the full range of intended cognitive effects of
both verbal and non-verbal communication, and provides a unified account of what is
communicated by the full range of ‘literal’ and ‘figurative’ utterances.
4. Illustrations
3a.
3b.
Passenger: What time is the next train to Oxford?
Railway official: 12.48.
A prototypical case of Gricean speaker’s meaning. However, add an urgent tone or a warning
look, and the railway official would convey an impression there are reasons to hurry. In this
framework, expressions of attitude, e.g. in irony, typically convey impressions.
4a.
4b.
Peter: We can’t afford La Cantina
Mary: I’ve got money.
MONEY* denotes
an indeterminate amount of money such that Mary can afford to pay for a meal
at La Cantina. Since both narrowing and broadening may be required to imply a relevant answer
to Peter’s question, this is no longer a prototypical case of Gricean speaker’s meaning.
5.
Mary: I could kill for a glass of water.
Here, ‘kill’,‘glass’ and ‘water’ are merely clues to the intended import (KILL*. G;ASS*. WATER*.
Although the explicature is not a prototypical case of speaker’s meaning, there is a fairly clear
implicature (that Mary has an urgent need or desire to drink some water).
6.
The season approaches on tortoise feet. (John Ashbery)
ON TORTOISE FEET*
7.
conveys an impression of a slow, relentless, near-imperceptible advance.
Romeo: Juliet is the sun
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What Romeo conveys is an impression of the impression that the sight of Juliet had on him.
5. Concluding remarks
15a, Grice’s notion of speaker’s meaning does not have the degree of unity or autonomy needed
to form the object of a philosophical definition or a scientific theory.
15b. Relevance theory’s notion of ostensive-inferential communication is such a proper object of
inquiry.
15c. Metaphor, hyperbole and irony fall squarely within the scope of a theory of ostensiveinferential communication.
15d. The considerations about non-paraphrasable, non-propositional effects that have led some
people to exclude figurative utterances from a theory of communication apply equally well
not only to non-verbal acts (e.g. showing a photograph) but to quite ordinary, ‘literal’
utterances (e.g. ‘I have money’).
References
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in Philosophy 25: 156-86.
Carston, R. 2002. Thoughts and Utterances: The Pragmatics of Explicit Communication. Blackwell.
Carston, R. 2010. Metaphor, ad hoc concepts, literal meaning and mental images. Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society 110: 297-323.
Cavell, S. 1976. Aesthetic problems of modern philosophy. In S. Cavell Must we Mean what we Say? pp.
73-96. Cambridge University Press.
Davidson, D. 1978. What metaphors mean. Critical Inquiry 5: 31-47.
Gazdar, G. 1979. Pragmatics: Implicature, Presupposition and Logical Form. London: Academic Press.
Grice, H.P. 1968/89 Logic and Conversation. In H.P. Grice, Studies in the Way of Words: . Cambridge
MA: Harvard University Press
Lepore, E. & Stone, M. 2010. Against metaphorical meaning. Topoi 29, 2: 165-80.
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Handbook of Metaphor in Language and Thought, pp. 84-105. Cambridge University Press.
Reprinted in Wilson & Sperber 2012: 97-122.
Sperber, D. & Wilson, D. 2013. Beyond speaker’s meaning. (draft manuscript)
Wharton, T. 2009.Pragmatics and Non-Verbal Communication. Cambridge University Press.
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Wilson, D. & Carston, R. 2007. A unitary approach to lexical pragmatics: Relevance, inference and ad hoc
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Wilson, D. & Sperber, D. 2012. Meaning and Relevance. Cambridge University Press.