Deirdre Wilson (invited speaker)
Department of Linguistics, UCL and CSMN, University of Oslo
What would it take for pragmatics to be systematic?
A central goal of pragmatic theory is to explain how the hearer of an utterance constructs
a hypothesis about the speaker’s meaning. Evidence for the systematicity of pragmatic
processes comes from the fact that the resulting hypotheses tend to be predictable
enough, and accurate enough, to make the continued use of this form of communication
worthwhile. The challenge for pragmatic theory is to show how this degree of
predictability and accuracy is achieved. Currently two main ways of doing this are being
explored. The first starts by narrowing the focus and (using techniques adapted from
formal semantics where possible) investigating pragmatic processes operating in
particular sub-domains (e.g. scalar inference, presupposition, questions, metaphor,
irony), hoping that some unifications will eventually emerge. The second starts from a
broad-focus approach, looking for general principles or properties (e.g. informativeness,
relevance, truthfulness, coherence, consistency with the context) that cut across
pragmatic domains and can be seen as playing a guiding role in overt communication in
general. I will argue, using a variety of examples, that although the narrow-focus
approach has produced a wealth of subtle descriptive data, progress in pragmatics is
being hampered by insufficient attention to issues arising at the broad-focus level.
Regina Blass
NEGST, Nairobi Kenya
Could and have anything to do with interpretive resemblance?
None of those having worked on and in RT, such as Carston (1993, 2002) and
Blakemore (1997, 2002) have taken the possibility of metarepresentation and
interpretive resemblance into account between the conjuncts of and. No explicit mention
is made in the literature to that effect. However, Blakemore (1997:1-17) states that
reformulation cannot really occur in coordinate structures because and constructions
carry the presumption of relevance as a whole. She mentions Carston (1993) as seeing
the syntactic structure as a reason for this. Blakemore herself states as reason that the
extra processing cost for and would be justified only if the conjunction yielded
contextual effect by each conjunct taken on its own. Reformulation, of course, exhibits
interpretive resemblance. If we consider reformulation as a complete restatement,
basically saying the same as before, Blakemore is definitely right, and would not make
sense. However, co-ordination often does exhibit a copy of at least part of the conjunct
which is often in part or left elliptically implicit.
What is interesting is that many African languages that have interpretive use
markers which mark such well known constructions as report, echoic use, propositional
attitude, questions and their answers also mark and with the same marker. Should we
consider this as a homonymic occurrence or take seriously into account that interpretive
resemblance and metarepresentation does play a role? Maybe homonymy could be taken
into consideration if we were dealing with an isolated case, but there are a number of
languages exhibiting the same phenomenon.
Some of those languages have separate and markers and only use the interpretive
use markers to replace and optionally, as in Budu, a Niger Congo, Bantu language,
spoken in the Democratic Republic of Congo, others have no other marker for a
particular syntactic category of coordination, as NP coordination in Sissala, a Niger
Congo, Gur language, spoken in Burkina Faso and VP and S coordination in Luhya, a
Bantu language spoken in Kenya . The only way to mark and is by using the so-called
‘interpretive use marker’.
Interesting is that we have alternative ways to express coordination in
English and in German also:
John as well as Mary won the game.
John and Mary won the game.
Johann sowie Maria haben das Spiel gewonnen.
Johann und Maria haben das Spiel gewonnen.
In German we find something similar to African languages, so is used in report,
echoic use, propositional attitude, etc. and it can be used to replace and together with
wie.
Why do some languages turn to interpretive use markers to indicate
coordination? In my paper I will provide a cognitive explanation as hypothesis.
References
Blakemore, D., “Restatement and exemplification: A relevance theoretic
reassessment of elaboration.” Pragmatics and Beyond, Volume 5, No. 1, 1997.
Blakemore, D., Relevance and Linguistic Meaning: The Semantics and
Pragmatics of Discourse Markers, CUP, Cambridge, 2002.
Blass, R., Relevance Relations in Discourse: A study with special reference to
Sissala., CUP, Cambridge 1990.
Carston, R., “Conjunction, explanation and relevance” Lingua 90 (2), 1993, 2748.
Carston, R., Thoughts and Utterances, Blackwell, Oxford, 2002.
Danga, A. & R. Blass, “Interpretive use markers and logical operators”, Paper
presented at the IprA conference in Toronto, 2003.
Katarzyna Bromberek-Dyzman
Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland
Attitudinal aspects in irony processing
The range and complexity of mental processes connected with irony online
comprehension have not so far been explained by any pragmatic theory. The extant
research results are inconclusive as to the number, sequence, complexity of mental
processes and levels of metarepresentation necessarily connected with irony processing
(e.g. Gibbs 1986; Giora et al. 1998). Although many theories (e.g. relevance theory;
direct access model; the standard pragmatic model) posit that irony comprehension
necessitates context availability and involves recognition of the speaker’s attitude in
producing an ironic remark, neither the role and extent of context contribution, nor the
nature of attitude recognition and attribution are clear.
To interpret interactions, verbal and nonverbal, people continually evaluate
situations and objects for their relevance (e.g. Sperber and Wilson 1986/1995) and value
(e.g. Cacioppo and Gardner 1999; Bargh and Ferguson 2000; Barrett 2006) in an attempt
to figure out whether or not they signify something important, good or bad. Both aspects
of situational and psychological context: relevance and valence, seem to be particularly
important in irony comprehension. Irony is mostly used in situations provoking negative
affect (Utsumi 2000) and is accompanied by disapproval, contempt, and scorn (Sperber
and Wilson 1986/1995). In order to successfully interpret ironic intent, the listener must
identify the opposition between the literal meaning (cognitive processing) of the
utterance and the attitude (evaluative processing) of the speaker to criticize.
So far in linguistic studies affective aspects of irony processing have been
neglected. Irony has been almost exclusively examined in terms of literal as opposed to
figurative meanings. Recent findings in developmental and neuropsychological research
underscore that understanding irony involves the understanding of social cues and
requires the theory of mind (e.g. Firth and Firth 2003; Shamay-Tsoory et al. 2005) both
of which are rooted in affective processing. Both aspects of irony computation:
semantic/pragmatic incongruity (cognitive processing) and attitudinal disparity
(evaluative processing) will be addressed in this paper. New experimental data on the
role of evaluative processing in irony will be provided.
References
Bargh, J., & M. J. Ferguson, “Beyond behaviorism: On the automaticity of
higher mental processes”, Psychological Bulletin 126, 2000, 925-945.
Barrett, L., F.,“Valence is a basic building block of emotional life”, Journal of
Research in Personality, 40, 2006, 35-55.
Cacioppo, J. & W. L. Gardner, “Emotion”, Annual Review of Psychology 50,
1999, 191-214.
Firth U. & C. D. Firth, “Development and neurophysiology of mentalizing”,
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 358, 2003, 459-473.
Gibbs, R., “On the psycholinguistics of sarcasm”, Journal of Experimental
Psychology: General 115, 1986, 3-15.
Giora, R., O. Fein, & T. Schwartz, “Irony: Graded salience and indirect
negation”, Metaphor and Symbol 13, 1998, 83-101.
Shamay-Tsoory, S. G., R. Tomer, &J. Aharon-Peretz, “The neuroanatomical
basis
of
understanding
sarcasm
and
its
relationship
to
social
cognition”,
Neuropsychology 19 (3), 2005, 288-300.
Sperber, D. & D. Wilson, Relevance: Communication and Cognition, Blackwell,
Oxford, 1986/1995.
Utsumi, A., “Verbal irony as implicit display of ironic environment:
Distinguishing ironic utterances from nonirony”, Journal of Pragmatics 32, 2000, 17771806.
Joanna Janecka
University of Warsaw, Poland
On monetary character of EMU:
calque as an (un)justified technique in English-Polish EU translation
In the European language for specific purposes (EU LSP), two approaches have
been considered the best method of translation; either the translator treated as educator,
ever cautious of the language quality and the appropriateness of style, or the translator as
communicator, whose immediate aim should be the successful communication of the
message, at the cost of the TL purity. In the light of the very precise function of LSP
texts as containers of specialist knowledge, it seems that the priority should be given to
what is widely known as optimal relevance, i.e. achieving “adequate contextual effects
without unnecessary processing effort” (Gutt 2000), with the latter being of the utmost
necessity.
The above is especially crucial given the fact that by definition the native
languages of Member States are considered authentic, with none taking prevalence over
another; therefore here, even more than in any other LGP or LSP context, the rendition
of a message from English into Polish should be considered as an act of European
communication rather than translation per se, and the mutual cognitive context defined
in such a way should be a “guarantor” (to use an EU term) of success. To rid the TL
recipient of the necessity to localize a term in an appropriate context, in other words to
limit their processing effort to minimum, LSP translators should rather follow the
terminological principle of standardization (Felber 1984: 32, Pieńkos 2003: 204), which
advocates one-to-one correspondence of terms in the source and the target languages.
With such assumptions in mind, the choice of a calque seems an intended and justified
technique, as it guarantees narrowing the domain to EU matters only, as opposed to
Polish-wise terminology used outside the scope of the EU LSP.
The paper aims at discussing the continuous influx of English calques into the
Polish LSP in the EU domain ever since Poland’s accession to the European Union, with
special consideration of the term monetary, translated into Polish either as monetarny or
walutowy with seemingly no consistency. With the above emphasized, the
interchangeable use of two Polish terms (monetarny and walutowy) for the English
monetary may result in unnecessary chaos, unless it is governed by clear and easily
recognizable criteria, which the present paper aims at examining.
Maria Jodłowiec
Jagiellonian University, Krakow
The implicit revisited
The major goal of this paper is to show how relevance theory approaches and
elucidates the implicit level in verbal communication.
The meaning as recovered in utterance processing embraces both explicit and
implicit import. At the level of explicitly communicated meaning, according to
relevance theorists, explicatures are formulated (Carston 2002, Sperber and Wilson
1986/9595, Wilson and Sperber 2002, 2004). An explicature is a full propositional
content of a given utterance as derived by the processes of pragmatic enrichment from of
its logical form. What is communicated implicitly, it is postulated, comes either in the
form of implicated premises or implicated conclusions. The assumptions accessed as the
context in which the incoming information is to be processed are identified as implicated
premises, whereas inferences derived from the contextual implications combined with
the explicit content of the utterance form implicated conclusions. The Communicative
Principle of Relevance, which is assumed to be tacitly adhered to by language users in
ostensive communication, provides the mechanism explaining how inferential
processing (geared to achieving adequate cognitive effects for the expended effort)
results in arriving at the speaker intended meaning (Sperber and Wilson 1986/95, 2002,
2005, 2006).
This very orderly and elegant heuristic procedure of utterance interpretation that
the relevance model offers becomes slightly less straightforward when the problem of
different degrees of strengths of implicatures is addressed. On the relevance theoretic
approach it is argued that an utterance makes manifest a number of assumptions, which
the hearer uses in recovering what is being communicated (1986/95). Manifestness is
treated on this model as a technical term, and should be understood as “the degree to
which an individual is capable of mentally representing an assumption and holding it as
true or probably true at a given moment” (Carston 2002: 378). The assumptions that are
made manifest by the speaker saying something in a given communicative context come
with varying degrees of strength. In other words, among the assumptions that an
utterance will make manifest, some may be strongly, while others only weakly made
manifest in a certain communicative act (cf. Sperber and Wilson 1986/95: 59–60;
Carston 2002: 378; Wilson and Sperber 2004: 620). Thus the implications and
implicatures that can be derived from a given utterance will come as strongly or weakly
communicated. How does the relevance theoretic framework account for the speaker’s
and hearer’s responsibilities with respect to strong and weak communication? Can all
implicitly recovered meaning be viewed as communicated by the utterance in view of
the fact that weakly communicated import may go well beyond the speaker’s intentions?
Is the relevance oriented comprehension heuristics capable of yielding determinate
predictions about the recoverable implicit import (cf. Davis 2007)? These crucial
questions pertaining to working out what the utterance implies will be addressed in the
paper and relevance based answers attempted.
References
Carston R., Thoughts and utterances. The pragmatics of explicit communication,
Blackwell, Oxford 2002.
Carston R., “Relevance theory and saying/implicating distinction”. In: L. Horn &
G. Ward (eds.) The handbook of pragmatics, Blackwell, Oxford 2004, 633–656.
Mason, I.,”On mutual accessibility of contextual assumptions”, Journal of
Pragmatics 38, no. 3, 2006, 359–373.
Davis, W., “How normative is implicature”, Journal of Pragmatics 39, 2007,
1655–1672.
Saul, J., “Speaker meaning, what is said, and what is implicated”, Nous 36, 2002,
228–248.
Sperber, D. ”Understanding verbal understanding“, In: J. Khalfa (ed.) What is
intelligence?, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1994.
Sperber, D. & D. Wilson, Relevance: Communication and cognition, Blackwell,
Oxford, 1986/95.
Sperber, D. & D. Wilson, “Pragmatics, modularity and mind–reading”, Mind and
Language 17, nos. 1-2, 2002, 3–23.
Sperber, D. & D. Wilson, “Pragmatics”, UCL Working Papers in Linguistic 17,
2005, 353-388.
Sperber, D. & D. Wilson, “A deflationary account of metaphor”, UCL Working
Papers in Linguistic 18, 2006, 71-203.
van der Henst, J–B. & D. Sperber, ”Testing the cognitive and communicative
principles of relevance”, In: I. Noveck & D. Sperber (eds.) Experimental pragmatics,
Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, New York, 2004.
van der Henst, J–B., D. Sperber & G. Politzer, „When is a conclusion worth
deriving? A relevance–based analysis of indeterminate relational problems”, Thinking
and Reasoning 8, 2002, 1–20.
Wilson, D., “Metarepresentation in linguistic communication”, UCL Working
Papers in Linguistics 11, 1999, 127–161.
Wilson, D., “New directions for research on pragmatics and modularity.” Lingua
115, no.8, 2005, 1129–1146.
Wilson, D., “The pragmatics of verbal irony: Echo or pretence?”, Lingua 116,
no.10, 2006, 1722–1743.
Wilson, D. & D. Sperber, “Truthfulness and relevance”, Mind 111, 2002, 583632.
Wilson, D. & D. Sperber, “Relevance theory”, In: L. Horn & G. Ward (eds.),
The handbook of pragmatics, 2004, Blackwell, Oxford.
Kamil Kamiński
University of Warsaw, Poland
Verbing and two approaches to lexical encoding
The aim of this presentation is to compare two ways of accounting for the
processes related to the comprehension of verbs, in particular innovative verbs resulting
from verbing (Kamiński, forthcoming), i.e. a special case of conversion/zero-derivation
producing verbs from other parts of speech.
One account is within the standard relevance theory (RT) framework with special
regard to the unitary approach to lexical pragmatics (Wilson and Carston 2007). Lexical
items are assumed to encode atomic concepts that are underdeterminate and schematic;
whenever used in an utterance, the concepts undergo adjustment in the ad hoc concept
construction process which is triggered by the search for relevance and depends on the
interplay of background knowledge and contextual assumptions. The ad hoc concept can
be the result of broadening or narrowing of the encoded one, or a combination of the
two.
The other account is inspired by Young's (2002) idea to combine RT and
representational hypothesis (RH) (e.g. Burton-Roberts 2007) in a joint framework. The
basic difference between RT and RH is the idea of lexical meaning. RH sees words not
as encoding schematic concepts but as directly representing communicated concepts. In
RH there is no linguistic/real semantics distinction. The only locus of semantic
properties is at the conceptual-intentional level and the link between lexical items and
concepts is conventional. Thus rather than being a process of lexical adjustment or ad
hoc concept construction, the comprehension process may involve concept selection.
To my knowledge, neither of the approaches has dealt with neologisms in
general, and verbing in particular, in a detailed way. This is an attempt to find out which
conception of lexical meaning is more plausible.
References
Burton-Roberts, N., "Varieties of semantics and encoding: negation,
narrowing/loosening and numericals." In: N. Burton-Roberts (ed.), Pragmatics,
Palgrave, Basingstoke 2007, 90-114.
Kamiński, K. (forthcoming) "Verbing in English, its reasons and consequences."
In: M. Kuźniak & B. Rozwadowska (eds.), PASE Papers. Vol. 1. Studies in Language
and Methodology of Teaching Foreign Languages, Oficyna Wydawnicza ATUT,
Wrocław, 2008, 55-63.
Wilson, D. & R. Carston , "A unitary approach to lexical pragmatics: Relevance,
inference and ad hoc concepts." In: N. Burton-Roberts (ed.), Pragmatics, Palgrave,
Basingstoke 2007, 230-259.
Young, D. , "'Encoding' and linguistic semantics." Newcastle and Durham
Working Papers in Linguistics 8, 2002, 183-196.
Magdalena Kizeweter
University of Warsaw, Poland
Untranslatability and relevance
The issue of limits of translatability is quite often brought up in various
publications devoted to translation. The debate may result in postulates in favour of
absolute untranslatability on the one extreme (cf. Sapir-Whorf hypothesis), and absolute
translatability (cf. language and culture universals) on the other. Nevertheless, since
extremes are rarely welcome when it comes to practical applications of theoretical
approaches, it is usually agreed, having disposed of both “absolute” points of view, that
what translators face in their work is more or less significant translatability problems,
never leading to full untranslatability. This is especially true given the fact that the unit
of translation is almost always of a higher rank than a word, and that the ultimate unit to
be translated is a text. The question remains, however, whether absolute untranslatability
may be encountered in the case of individual lexical items, namely words and phrases,
which exhibit some degree of source language or culture specificity. What follows, in
turn, might be an inquiry into the influence of this potential untranslatability of
individual elements on the translatability of the wider context in which they appear.
The notion of (un)translatability seems to be closely connected with the way in
which translation is defined in the first place. Thus, the paper discusses several
definitions of the term translation in order to establish relationships between the two
concepts, and to stress the fact that the interpretation of (un)translatability – accepting it
or denying, as well as establishing its types and degrees – depends on the understanding
of the process and product of translation. The focus is then shifted to the approach to
translation drawing on relevance theory and basing on the principle of relevance in order
to compare it with some of the “non-relevance” points of view as regards the
implications for the significance of the untranslatability phenomenon as part of the
translation process. The question that the paper attempts to answer is whether the
relevance-theoretic framework for discussing translation may in fact help eliminate the
issue of untranslatability from the agenda of theoretical considerations relating to
translation, both on the level of individual lexical elements and on the level of whole
texts, but concentrating on the former. Additionally, it comments on the relevance of the
influence that potential translatability problems connected with small translation units
might exercise on the translatability of longer stretches of text in the process of
rendering a message from one language to another.
The realization of the theoretical assumptions in translation practice is illustrated
with examples of English-Polish and Polish-English translations of language- and
culture-bound lexical items in context.
Paweł Kornacki
University of Warsaw, Poland
Narzekanie – Towards an Ethnopragmatic Account
of a Polish Verbal Activity
This paper is an ethnopragmatic (Goddard 2006) study of the selected key verbal
elements of an everyday Polish speech practice of narzekanie (roughly, grumbling,
complaining). The study of narzekanie has featured prominently on the recent research
agenda of Polish social psychologists (see, for example, Drogosz 2005). As the work of
scholars such as Wojciszke and Baryła 2001 has demonstrated, Poles (unlike, e.g.,
Anglo-Americans, or Anglo-Australians) seem to tolerate and possibly enjoy having a
sustained verbal expression of dissatisfaction as a prominent part of their daily
discourse. The label Polska Kultura Narzekania (lit., ‘ Polish Culture of Complaining’)
was coined by the psychologists studying this phenomenon (see Wojciszke and Baryła
2001). As a number of standard questionnaire and polling studies conducted in Poland
since the early 1990s (e.g., Czapiński 1993) have shown, over fifty percent of their
participants agreed that ‘the Polish people liked to narzekać (‘complain’) without a
reason’(Czapiński 1993: 43). As the authors observed, ‘a large number of the Polish
people seemed to suffer from the paradise lost syndrome, i.e., they consistently believed
the past to be better than the present.’ One of the consequences of that psychological
stance was, they claimed, ‘that the majority of Poles tend to think that their fellow
countrymen change for worse as the time goes by’. Such results spurred Wojciszke et al.
(1995) to formulate the hypothetical Polska Norma Negatywności (lit., ‘ Polish Norm of
Negativity’). They envisaged it as a series of cultural scripts which tell people to see the
social world as bad, the social order as unjust and harmful, not to trust other people, and
to perceive the self
as a helpless victim of bad people and institutions. Such a
worldview was claimed to be accompanied by the negative feelings of złość (roughly,
displeasure, anger), żal (roughly, sadness, grudge), and zdenerwowanie (roughly,
nervous, on edge) (see also Wierzbicka 2001:339).
The Polish language-and-culture data presented and interpreted in this study
draws mainly on a corpus of written narzekanie-texts obtained from the largest and the
most popular of Polish Internet sites devoted to the practice of narzekanie –
Narzekalnia.pl (lit., ‘a place for narzekanie’). Cultural significance of narzekanie was
additionally explored through a series of interviews with monolingual speakers of Polish
(see Duranti 1997:102-121). It is argued that the discourse of narzekanie displays the
major features of a communicative genre in the sense of Günthner and Knoblauch
(2001). Selected elements of its internal structure (i.e., its main lexico-semantic
elements, cultural keywords, morpho-syntactic devices, medium-specific effects) are
examined, in particular the colloquial Polish words for emotions, speech acts and
communicative behaviour, derivational morphology expressive of affective social
meanings, as well as the semiotic effects accompanying the creative uses of spelling and
graphic representation in the electronic medium.
References
Czapiński, J., Polski Generalny Sondaż Dobrostanu Psychicznego. PTP,
Warszawa-Olsztyn, 1993.
Drogosz, M (ed.), Jak Polacy przegrywają, jak Polacy wygrywają, GWP,
Gdańsk, 2005.
Duranti, A., Linguistic Anthropology. CUP, Cambridge, 1997.
Goddard, C. (ed.), Ethnopragmatics: Understanding Discourse in Cultural
Context. Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter, 2006.
Günthner, S. & H. Knoblauch, “Culturally Patterned Speaking Practices. The
Analysis of Communicative Genres”, Pragmatics 5:1, 2001, 1-32.
Wierzbicka, A., “A culturally salient Polish emotion: Przykro (pron. pshicro)”.
In: J. Harkins & A. Wierzbicka (eds.), Emotions in Crosslinguistic Perspective, Mouton
de Gruyter, Berlin and New York, 2001, 337-359.
Wojciszke, B. et al., ”Polska norma negatywnego myślenia o świecie
społecznym”, Kolokwia Psychologiczne, 4, 1995, 23-41.
Wojciszke, B. & W. Baryła, „Polacy jako uczestnicy kultury narzekania”, In:
J.Bralczyk, K.Mosiołek-Kłosińska (eds.), Zmiany publicznych obyczajów językowych,
Rada Języka Polskiego przy Prezydium PAN, Warszawa, 2001, 45-64.
Ewa Mioduszewska
University of Warsaw, Poland
Obscurity, underdeterminacy and indeterminacy
from relevance-theoretic perspective
In her book Thoughts and Utterances (2002), Robyn Carston formulated the
linguistic (semantic) underdeterminacy thesis, according to which “ Linguistic meaning
underdetermines what is said”1 (Carston 2002: 19). The sources of the underdeterminacy
are manifold and include “(1) multiple encodings; (2) indexical references; (3) missing
constituents; (4) unspecified scope of elements; (5) underspecificity or weakness of
encoded conceptual content; (6) overspecificity or narrowing of encoded conceptual
content.” (Carston 2002: 28). Underdeterminacy differs from (referential, predicational,
conceptual or translational) indeterminacy. (Carston 2002: 20)
In terms of Grice’s (1989) Cooperative Principle and its maxims, obscurity2 may
be understood as intentional flouting of the supermaxim “Be perspicuous” or the first
submaxim “Avoid obscurity of expression” (Grice 1989: 27) of Grice’s category of
manner as in
Example
Context: Mother (A) and father (B) discuss the choice of dessert in the
presence of their children.
A: Let’s get the kids something.
B. OK. But I veto i-c-e-c-r-e-a-m-s. (Levinson 1983: 104)
In relevance-theoretic terms, in the absence of the CP and the maxims, it is the
Principle (cognitive and communicative) of Relevance and the Relevance-theoretic
1
The thesis together with two more claims (Carston 2002: 19): (a) Linguistic meaning underdetermines
what is meant (b) What is said underdetermines what is meant make up the set of underdeterminacy
theses.
2
Obscurity may be intentional or unintentional (or possibly both when it is intentional though presented as
unintentional (cf. Mioduszewska 2008)).
Comprehension Procedure (Wilson & Sperber 2004) that ‘are responsible’ for an
explanation of how obscure utterances are understood.
The
question
asked
here
is
what
predictions
Carston’s
linguistic
underdeterminacy thesis makes about obscure (in Grice’s sense) utterances.
References
Carston, R., Thoughts and Utterances, Blackwell, Oxford, 2002.
Grice, P. H., Study in the Way of Words, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1989.
Levinson, S., Pragmatics, CUP, Cambridge, 1983.
Mioduszewska, E. “On relevance of non-communicative stimuli: the case of
unintentional obscurity.” In: E. Mioduszewska & A. Piskorska (eds.) Relevance Round
Table I. Warsaw University Press, Warsaw, 2008, 67-77.
Wilson, D. & D. Sperber, “Relevance Theory.” In: L. Horn & G. Ward (eds.) The
Handbook of Pragmatics, Blackwell, Oxford, 2004, 607–632.
Anabella-Gloria Niculescu-Gorpin
Romanian Academy
Why round may be rounder
As a cognitive approach to human communication in general, relevance theory
was dedicated initially to utterance interpretation. In time, the theory developed to
include words and word meaning. Lexical pragmatics focuses on explaining “how
linguistically specified (‘literal’) word meanings are modified in use” (Wilson 2004:
343) or on investigating how the semantics-pragmatics distinction could apply at word
level (Wilson and Carston 2007: 1). In this context, relevance theory attempts to provide
a unifying account of lexical pragmatics, i.e. to show that “narrowing, loosening and
metaphorical extension are simply different outcomes of a single interpretive process
which creates an ad hoc concept, or occasion-specific sense, based on interaction among
encoded concepts, contextual information and pragmatic expectations or principles”
(Wilson and Carston 2007: 1).
This presentation discusses gradability as a property of adjectives from a
relevance-theoretic perspective. More specifically, it tries to analyse several adjectives
traditionally considered to be non-gradable but which tend to occur in comparative or
superlative contexts.
Traditionally, adjectives have been classified into gradable and non-gradable,
according to their meaning. Gradable adjectives describe measurable qualities such as
size, age, etc., they can be used in comparative and superlative constructions, and may
also occur with grading adverbs such as very or extremely. On the other hand, nongradable adjectives designate qualities that are either present or absent, and they cannot
be used in comparative and superlative constructions or with grading adverbs.
Nevertheless, to emphasise the uniqueness of these qualities, such adjectives can
sometimes be accompanied by grading adverbs, e.g. The weather was absolutely superb.
Gradability is a scalar property, i.e. gradable adjectives describe different points
on a scale. For instance, on the scale of temperature, very cold will be placed somewhere
at the bottom end of a continuum describing different temperatures.
Non-gradable adjectives are non-scalar, but evince a different kind of behaviour.
For instance they can classify the nouns they occur with as belonging to a particular
type, e.g. mathematical equation, a round table; the property thus assigned is nongradable, because we cannot say that an equation is more or less mathematical.
However, although theoretically a table cannot be more or less round, since a circle is
either round or it is not a circle, ordinary language usage tells us that round may behave
as a gradable adjective in certain conditions to be analysed in this presentation.
In order to illustrate my point, I will use examples taken from Romanian and
English. The Romanian adjective round ‘rotund’ is used in comparative and sometimes
even superlative constructions in real-life situations. Since roundness should be a yes-orno or non-scalar property, such contexts should be ungrammatical or at least they should
be felt as odd. However, as demonstrated in my paper, mai rotund (more round/rounder)
or foarte rotund (most round/ the roundest) are used in Romanian. Thus, my hypothesis
is that what makes such adjectives gradable in certain contexts is the fact that, in
communication, they are interpreted based on ad hoc concepts, in this case the ad hoc
concept ROUND*. Following the lexical pragmatic approach, such occurrences can be
interpreted as instances of narrowing, loosening and metaphorical extension.
My findings also point to another potential path for further research: the meaning
of many adjectives is contextual, i.e. the context ultimately determines whether an
adjective is gradable or not. Labels such as gradable and non-gradable may be useful
for educational purposes, but they fail to capture all real-life situations and should be
more flexible.
References
Wilson, D., “Relevance Theory and Lexical Pragmatics”, Italian Journal
of Linguistics/Rivista di Linguistica , 15, 2004, 273-291. Earlier version
published in UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 16, 2004, 343-360.
Wilson, D. & R. Carston, “A unitary approach to lexical pragmatics:
Relevance, inference and ad hoc concepts”. In: N. Burton-Roberts (ed.)
Pragmatics, Palgrave, London 2007, 230-259.
Manuel Padilla Cruz
University of Seville, Spain
On the relevance of attitude combination
Relevance theoretic pragmatics has shown that the expression of attitudes is
crucial for the generation of some communicative effects and for the interpretation of
some types of utterances. After Sperber and Wilson’s (1981, 1986, 1989, 1995, 1998)
work on irony, it is now widely accepted that ironic utterances are cases of echoic
metarepresentations with which the speaker expresses an attitude of rejection of or
dissociation from a certain proposition or manifest (set of) assumption(s). That same
attitude is also characteristic of denials (Carston 1996). Blakemore (1994) and Noh
(1995, 1998, 2000) have in turn argued that echo-questions are characterised by the
expression of a questioning attitude. In some contexts, speakers convey with phatic
utterances an attitude of endorsement, acceptance or approval of assumptions, thoughts
or opinions metarepresented (Padilla Cruz 2004, 2005, 2007).
Wilson (1999, 2000) believes that the relevance of some utterances may lie in the
expression of a particular attitude or even in the expression of a mixture of two (or
more) attitudes. This work will argue that a combination of attitudes is essential for the
achievement of specific communicative effects. It will show that in those cases in which
the assumptions metarepresented by ironic utterances are already manifest to
interlocutors, such ironies become phatic and, as a consequence, the characteristic
attitude of rejection or dissociation typical of irony blends with the attitude characteristic
of phatic utterances. In addition, when the assumptions some complaints make manifest
are already manifest to interlocutors and those complaints become phatic, their defining
attitudes also blend with the attitude characteristic of phatic utterances. Accordingly, this
work will suggest labels for those combinations of attitudes and will explain that such
combinations contribute to the generation of solidarity, rapport and reciprocity between
interlocutors.
Agnieszka Piskorska
University of Warsaw, Poland
The more is shared the less is in fact shared –
a RT analysis of rows
Arguments are a special kind of conversations in which participants’ ends do not
seem to meet. In some arguments parties may at least hope to persuade each other or to
reach a compromise. Such arguments are in fact a positive experience leading to the
improvement in the individual’s representation of the world, which is the ultimate aim of
information processing. Quite too often, however, arguments turn into pointless rows.
In this paper I would like to claim that the latter are characterized by at least two
properties: Speakers draw on different sets of contextual premises in working out
contextual implications, which may be intentional or not, and few (if any) positive
cognitive effects are achieved, since improvements in one’s representation of the world
are only apparent.
Speakers’ tendency to retrieve differing contextual assumptions from their
respective memories can be illustrated by the following example:
A: You forgot to pay the electricity bill so I did it.
Context envisaged by A: If one does something for another person it is a sign of
friendliness.
Contextual implication intended by A: A’s being friendly to B.
Context used by B: If one mentions not doing something by somebody one rebukes this
person.
Contextual implication derived by B: A is rebuking B for not paying the bill.
It is evident that if the exchange proceeds in this manner speakers do not enhance the
stock of mutually shared assumptions, as the more is said - the more is shared at the
level of utterances, the less is shared at the level of contextual implications.
The analysis of rows will be assumed after RT that context for processing is a
variable whereas relevance is given (Sperber and Wilson 1986/95) and that relevancetheoretic comprehension procedure obtains (Wilson and Sperber 2004). Apart from
observing the paradox mentioned in the title, studying the cases of non-shared
communicated content may also hopefully contribute some insights into the alleged
problem of the Non-Shared Content (NSC) principle as described by Cappelen and
Lepore (2007).
References
Cappelen, H.& E. Lepore, “Relevance Theory and Shared Content”. In: N.
Burton-Roberts (ed.), Pragmatics, Palgrave, Basingstoke 2007, 115-135.
Sperber, D. & D. Wilson, Relevance: Communication and Cognition”,
Blackwell, Oxford 1985/96.
Wilson, D. & D. Sperber, "Relevance theory." In: G. Ward & L. Horn (eds.),
Handbook of Pragmatics, Blackwell, Oxford, 2004, 607-632.
Jolanta Sak-Wernicka
The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland
Blind learners’ gaps in the knowledge – can Relevance Theory account for
them?
In human cognition the role of the senses cannot be overestimated. Sight,
hearing, touch, smell and taste provide us with the information about the world that our
cognitive environment comprises. Each sense supports the other in order to make the
picture of reality complete and logical. The formed pictures (or representations of the
world) allow us to draw new assumptions, as well as compare and contrast them with the
old ones. The interdependence and co-operation of the senses is automatic and hardly
anyone realises how much we rely on them. Excluding any of the senses from cognition
results in the impoverished and incomplete picture of reality. To illustrate this, we may
try to imagine an abstract object that we have never seen, for example a molecule. For
any person not particularly interested in chemistry, the task will pose a serious problem.
On the basis of the information we obtain from a knowledgeable chemist we may try to
take on the challenge and understand its functioning, structure and role. However, doing
our utmost to comprehend the problematic issue, we are very likely to ask numerous
questions which for the expert may seem silly or weird.
In the case of visually impaired learners we can observe a very similar
phenomenon. Very often they ask intriguing questions which may astonish sighted
people but, having reflected on them, they seem reasonable and justified. What colour is
the wind? How does a fish walk? or How can you see a big mountain through a small
window?, the following questions asked by visually impaired learners make us wonder
how the congenitally blind children perceive the reality explained to them by sighted
parents, teachers or peers. What is more, it is thought-provoking which mechanisms lead
the visually impaired learners to draw the extraordinary assumptions on the basis of the
acquired knowledge and how far the premises reach in their reasoning. Finally, we could
ask if the gaps in their knowledge are the results of accepted but not fully comprehended
concepts or wrongly interpreted concepts presented by a sighted person. How seriously
does the existence of the gaps influence the functioning of visually impaired people in
the world and communication with sighted people and how easily can the gaps be
bridged? In this presentation we will attempt to confront Relevance Theory with the
problem and find answers to the above questions in the theory. We hope that the
pragmatic and cognitive approach of RT will be able to account for the gaps in the
knowledge of the visually impaired children which other linguistic or psychological
theories disregarded or couldn’t deal with.
References
Marek, B., “A blind child in an English ...”, Network vol.2 No.1 April 1999.
Sperber, D. & D. Wilson, Relevance: Communication and Cognition. 2nd ed.,
Blackwell, Oxford, 1995
Daniel J. Sax
University of Warsaw, Poland
"Weak" predictability and all-new utterances
in English and "free word order" languages like Polish
Sperber and Wilson (1995) suggest that the special stress marking pattern
("SUBJECT verb" or Sv) found in English utterances such as (1a) (variously known as
all-new, event-reporting, sentence-focus, or thetic utterances), as viewed in contrast to
(1b), can be derived from general pragmatic principles, rather than requiring ad-hoc
stress assignment rules.
(I'm sorry I'm late...)
(1a) My CAR broke down
(1b) My car was BOOBY-TRAPPED.
This presentation will firstly seek to take some steps towards formalizing this
treatment, namely the intuition of predictability it appeals to, by refining the procedural,
"pro-active focus" approach of Breheny (1996, 1998) to suggest a useful distinction
between "strong"/"weak" predictability.
By Breheny's formalization, post-stress material is predictable "iff it is accessible
in the B-space [bridging space] of the penultimate hypothesis" (Breheny 1996:30).
Breheny's predictability, which we suggest be recast as "strong predictability," is
evidenced in clear-cut and well-studied cases such as (2), with an obvious
presupposition in prior context, as well as (3), where the givenness of non-stressed final
material derives from an inference drawing upon previously-triggered encyclopedic
knowledge:
(2)
A) What happened to the vase?
B) John BROKE the vase. / John BROKE it.
(3)
(I want to learn the violin,) because I LIKE string instruments.
(Büring 2005)
We will argue that Breheny's generalization misses the intuition of predictability
evident in cases like (4), which differs from (3) precisely in that the givenness of the
non-stressed final material derives from an inference drawing upon encyclopedic
knowledge triggered by the stressed element itself, and similarly in all-new or eventreporting utterances like (5), on the analysis outlined by S&W.
(4)
(Next month we may be out on the street.) I'm looking for a HOUSE to
rent. (Bolinger 1972)
(5)
(thief one to thief two after long period of silence)
A) The POLICE are here!
This we call "weak" predictability following S&W's analogy to "weak
implicature and weak communication" (S&W 1995, 212). By our definition, post-stress
material is weakly predictable iff it is accessible in the B-space of the ultimate
hypothesis (i.e. at the stage when the stress-bearing constituent itself is processed; this
allows the kind of bridging inference involved in the predictability of the unstressed
material in (4) and (5) draws upon encyclopedic knowledge about "HOUSE" or
"POLICE" + context).
This broader notion of predictability is thus suggested as a pragmatic
generalization offering a uniform explanation for the destressing of post-focal material
in all the English examples above (1-5).
However, might our "weak" predictability itself merely be an ad-hoc mechanism
posited for explaining cases of special stress marking in English? A second part of this
presentation will venture some cross-linguistic observations in support of "weak"
predictability and its link to word order by looking at all-new utterances in "free word
order" languages like Polish.
We conclude that "weak" predictability seems to be involved in the processing of
all-new utterances with Sv orders, but not with vS orders, and that the prevalence of
"weak" predictability in all-new sentences in English seems to be a consequence of rigid
subject-verb order.
References
Sperber, D. & D.Wilson, Relevance: Communication and Cognition. 2nd ed.,
Blackwell, Oxford, 1995.
Bowlinger, D., “Accent is predictable (if you're a mind-reader)”, Language
48, 1972.
Büring, D. “Semantics, Intonation and Information Structure”, Oxford
Handbook of Linguistic Interfaces, 2005.
Breheny, R. “Pro-active focus”, UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 8, 1996.
Breheny, R., “Interface economy and focus”. In: V. Rouchota & A. H.
Jucker, (eds.), Current issues in relevance theory, John Benjamins, Amsterdam
1998, 105-139.
Wedgwood, D., Shifting the Focus: From Static Structures to the Dynamics
of Interpretation. Elsevier, 2005.
Agnieszka Solska
University of Silesia, Poland
On the so-called pragmatic ambiguity
One of the fundamental elements of natural language is ambiguity, which can be
found at the level of words, phrases and sentences as well as utterances, all of which can
on occasion carry multiple meanings. Words can be lexically ambiguous, i.e. they may
have more than one clearly demarcated sense, as is the case with the word file in
example (1), where the absence of contextual information makes it impossible to
determine whether the object needed is a folder for keeping papers, a metal tool for
smoothing surfaces or a collection of computer data. Phrases and sentences can be
structurally ambiguous, i.e. they can have more than one underlying structure, as can be
seen in (2), which can refer either to an Egyptian who teaches history or to a teacher
who teaches the history of Egypt, and in (3), whose diverse readings depend on whether
the prepositional phrase with a book is to be treated as the postmodifier of the noun
student or as the adjunct adverbial in the verb phrase.
(1)
We need a bigger file.
(2)
An Egyptian history teacher.
(3)
The teacher hit the student with a book.
In linguistics ambiguity is typically treated as a property of linguistic expressions
rather than utterances since it is lexical and structural ambiguities that allow for the
different truth conditions of the proposition expressed by the utterance in which they
occur. The need to distinguish pragmatic ambiguity as another subcategory of ambiguity
is often questioned (cf. Kent, 2002) since speaker meaning by its very nature is not fully
determinable, which is why confused addressees sometimes feel compelled to produce
requests for clarification and ask such questions as Are you being ironic? or Is this a
threat or a promise? Obviously resolving ambiguities concerning the illocutionary force
or the communicative intention of the speaker is tantamount to establishing the speaker
meaning of the utterance. However, apart from such non- truth conditional ambiguities,
it is possible to find utterances which are ambiguous in the sense that it is not clear
whether the utterance should be treated as a case of a represented thought or a
metarepresented thought, which would cause the addressee to entertain two diverse
interpretations at the same time. Quite a few examples of such utterances are discussed
by Reboul (2001).
The aim of this paper is to offer some thoughts on what constitutes pragmatic
ambiguity of the type described by Reboul, to specify what makes this type of ambiguity
different from linguistic ambiguity, and to determine what types of merarepresentational
discourse are likely to trigger it.
References
Bach, K., ”Ambiguity”, Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2002, online
at www.rep.routledge.com
Cruse, D. A., Lexical Semantics, CUP, Cambridge, 1986.
Fredsted, E., “On semantic and pragmatic ambiguity”, Journal of Pragmatics
30, 1998, 527-541.
Mioduszewska,
E.,
“Multiplicity
of
senses,
relevance-theoretic
comprehension procedure and metarepresentation”. In: A. Korzeniowska & M.
Grzegorzewska (eds.), Relevance Studies in Poland: Volume II, Wydawnictwo
Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, Warszawa, 2005, 29-36
Noh, Eun-Ju., Metarepresentation: A relevance-theory approach, Benjamins,
Amsterdam, 2000.
Reboul, A., “Represented speech and thought and auctorial irony: ambiguity
and metarepresentation in literature”. In: J. Rooryck, P. Smith & P. Bogaards (eds.)
Hommages à Ronald Landheer, Rodopi, Amsterdam, 2001, 253-277.
Solska, A., “Accessing multiple meanings: the case of zeugma”. In: E.
Mioduszewska & A. Piskorska (eds.), Relevance Round Table I., Wydawnictwo
Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, Warszawa, 2008, 109-122.
Sperber, D. & D. Wilson, Relevance: Communication and Cognition.
Blackwell, Oxford & Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1986/1995.
Wilson, D., “Metarepresentation in linguistic communication”. In: D. Sperber
(ed.), Metarepresentations: A Multidisciplinary Perspective, OUP, Oxford, 2000,
411-448.
Wilson, D., “Relevance and lexical pragmatics”, UCL Working Papers in
Linguistics 16, 2004, 343-360.
Patrycja Szmyd
University of Warsaw, Poland
A relevance-theoretic account of idiom comprehension: the duality of
idiom’s meaning
This is an attempt to present the comprehension strategy of familiar idioms
within the framework of Relevance Theory. The idiom comprehension theory presented
here argues that familiar idiomatic expressions encountered in metaphorical contexts are
understood just as familiar metaphors in the sense of Sperber & Wilson (2006) and
Wilson & Carston (2007).
The comprehension of familiar idiomatic expressions combines the strategies
described by Glucksberg (2001) and Vega Moreno (2003, 2005).
As Sperber & Wilson (2006) and Wilson & Carston (2007) claim, metaphorical
expressions which are often used in a figurative context, may undergo semantic change ad hoc concepts may become a new encoded sense. Wilson & Carston (2007) give an
example of the words ‘saint’ and ‘angel’, which, as a result of frequent use in
metaphorical contexts, receive a new encoded sense SAINT* and ANGEL* and become
polysemous as a result. Comprehension of such familiar metaphorical expressions does
not involve the ad hoc concept construction. Instead, the meaning is retrieved from the
mental lexicon in the process of disambiguation, just as the meaning of literal
expressions.
According to the Relevance Theory, our cognitive mechanisms are geared to
maximize relevance with the lowest possible effort. It thus seems that constructing the
meaning of a familiar idiom anew, whenever the phrase is heard in an idiomatic context,
seems to be uneconomical. Therefore the author argues that the ad-hoc concept
construction defended by Vega Moreno takes place only at the beginning of acquisition
of an idiom’s meaning, when the idiomatic string is heard for the first time. Once the
idiomatic meaning is learnt, it enters the mental lexicon as yet another literal sense and
is retrieved whenever the idiomatic meaning appears in the metaphorical context.
According to the author the acquisition of idiomatic meaning would proceed as follows:
When the hearer hears an idiomatic expression for the first time, the figurative
meaning is imposed on the whole idiomatic phrase [spill the beans]* = reveal secrets,
just as Vega Moreno (2003, 2005) claims. Overtime the idiom’s constituents acquire
their metaphorical meanings SPILL*, via concept broadening, which starts to be
associated with the act of revealing and BEANS*, via concept narrowing, which comes
to be associated with secrets. At this point idiom’s constituents become polysemous,
accordingly with Glucksberg’s (2001) comprehension account. Once the idiomatic
meaning had been memorized, the comprehension of the idiom involves only
disambiguation between two senses: the metaphorical and the literal one.
SPILL THE BEANS 1 (throw legumes from a container)
SPILL THE BEANS 2 (reveal secrets)
In a metaphorical context, the sense that will gain relevance is SPILL THE
BEANS 2, in a literal context SPILL THE BEANS 1 will be relevant.
Metaphorical meanings of idioms in their standard forms are conventionalized,
highly predictable and commonly found in speaking and writing. For this reason they are
worth being stored in memory. Retrieving their meaning form mental lexicon in simple
disambiguation process is a shortcut effort-saving comprehension procedure. In the case
of standard-form idioms it would be uneconomical and pointless to construct the
familiar meaning anew on every occasion when the idiom is heard. Idiom variants,
though, occur spontaneously in the conversation and serve a particular purpose. They
may be called one-off expressions, because once they fulfilled their conversational task,
they fall into non-existence. There is virtually infinite number of possible alternations
and meanings of idiom variants and language users are unable to predict which meaning
they will come across. What is more, storing all the possible idiom variants with their
meanings takes storage space. Hence, it would be extremely effort-consuming, and
probably even unfeasible for a human mind, to store in memory all the possible senses
that may emerge in different contexts. For this reason it is more economical to apply the
ad-hoc concept formation procedure and construct the meaning of an idiom variant from
scratch . For this reason the hearer will apply concept adjustment procedure every time
they encounter an idiom variant.
References
Glucksberg, S., Understanding Figurative Language: From Metaphors to
Idioms. OUP, Oxford, 2001, 68-89.
Sperber, D. & D. Wilson, “A Deflationary Account of Metaphor”, ULC Working
Papers in Linguistics 18, 2006: 171-203.
Vega Moreno, R., “Relevance Theory and the construction of idiom meaning”.
UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 15, 2003, 83-104.
Vega Moreno, R., ”Idioms, Transparency and Pragmatic Inference”, UCL
Working Papers in Linguistics 17, 2005.
Wilson, D. & R. Carston, “A unitary approach to lexical pragmatics: Relevance,
inference and ad hoc concepts”. In: N. Burton-Roberts (ed.) Pragmatics, Palgrave,
Basingstoke 2007, 230-259.
Sławomir Śniatkowski
Pedagogical University of Cracow, Poland
Relevance in educational discourse: some chosen issues
The presentation is an attempt to show some problems connected with relevance
that are discussed from the perspective of educational linguistics. As a branch of applied
linguistics it interprets theories and concepts of general linguistics for educational needs.
The branch has been dynamically developed abroad for over thirty years (B.Spolsky,
M.Stubbs, et al.). In Poland many theoretical and methodological issues have been
considered by T.Rittel and her research co-workers at the Pedagogical University of
Cracow since the early nineties of the twentieth century. The problem of relevance
(including achievements of relevance theory) was one of the latest ones that were
analyzed in the volume Relevance and Redundancy in Educational Discourse (2008). It
appears that relevance is a notion involved in such linguistic and educational concepts as
diagnosing
language,
classroom
language
description,
language
acquisition,
understanding notions, defining meaning, and many others.
One of the most challenging problems connected both with cognitive
linguistics and relevance theory is the process of acquisition of lexical categories and
their meanings. For educational linguistics it would be especially important to discover
which elements are relevant and which ones are redundant in the acquisition of
knowledge. Hitherto existing findings make it possible to state that relevance of
semantic features creating categories depends on a context (scientific or colloquial
utterances) and may be graded (conditioned by personal or social experiences). Because
both context and gradation belong to basic criteria defining the principle of relevance, it
seems to be possible to apply the principle to a method of describing the acquisition of
lexical categories. An analysis of pupils’ opinions on human communication helped to
separate main and prototypical categories as well as to describe the inner structure of
them. It was also possible to state that the levels of relevance reflect cognitive and
educational efforts concomitant with the acquisition of metalinguistic knowledge.
Ewa Wałaszewska
University of Warsaw, Poland
Lexical entry in lexical pragmatics – a relevance-theoretic view
Relevance theorists (see Carston 2002: 321; Wilson 2004: 344; Wilson
and Carston 2007: 254, fn. 6) explicitly claim to have adopted Fodor’s (1998) view of
mentally-represented concepts encoded by words, according to which such mental
concepts are atomic rather than decompositional, and cannot be defined in terms of
necessary and sufficient component features or structured around prototypes and
stereotypes. It seems that this Fodorian view has been incorporated into the classic
relevance theory account on which a concept consists of an address in memory which
makes accessible different kinds of mentally-represented information via three types of
entry: logical, encyclopaedic and lexical. Sperber and Wilson (1986/95: 92) explain that
the distinction between ‘address’ and ‘entry’ is best understood as a distinction between
form and content, which means that the address is the form of a concept while the three
entries make available its logical, encyclopaedic and lexical content. While most
relevance-theoretic literature focuses on the type of information provided by logical and
encyclopaedic entries, the issue of lexical entry is typically brought up in passing and
not given much attention. A notable exception is Groefsema (2007), who investigates
the claim that the content of a concept is made up by a triple of entries and finds it
highly questionable. While she agrees that logical and encyclopaedic entries may
constitute the content of a concept, she argues that the lexical entry of a concept cannot
possibly contribute to its content.
This paper is an attempt to examine the status of lexical entry in the
relevance-theoretic framework enriched with some insights from the relatively new but
rapidly developing field of lexical pragmatics, whose prime objective is to explain how
lexically-encoded (‘literal’) meanings are adjusted and modified in use (Wilson 2004).
One of the questions posed by the paper is whether the information stored in the lexical
entry of a concept may have any influence on the process of meaning adjustment, as it
seems to happen in the case of words whose phonetic shape (the information included in
the lexical entry of a corresponding concept) makes them (completely or partly)
homonymous/homophonous with taboo-words.
References
Carston, R., Thoughts and Utterances, Blackwell, Oxford, 2002.
Fodor, J., Concepts: Where Cognitive Science Went Wrong, Clarendon Press,
Oxford, 1998.
Groefsema, M., “Concepts and word meaning in relevance theory”. In: N.
Burton-Roberts (ed.), Pragmatics, Palgrave, Basingstoke, 2007,136-157.
Sperber, D. & D. Wilson, Relevance: Communication and Cognition,
Blackwell, Oxford, 1986/1995.
Wilson, D., “Relevance and lexical pragmatics”, UCL Working Papers in
Linguistics 16, 2004, 343-360.
Wilson, D. & R. Carston, “A unitary approach to lexical pragmatics:
relevance, inference and ad hoc concepts”. In: N. Burton-Roberts (ed.), Pragmatics,
Palgrave, Basingstoke 2007, 230-259.
Jerzy Warakomski
NKJO Puławy
The relevance of being rude
For the best part of the last couple of decades many media talk show hosts in the
UK have resorted to rudeness to attract attention to themselves, their programmes and,
last not least, the commercials broadcast on them. Rudeness is a strong form of, in this
case verbal, impoliteness, perhaps the most general term for breaching the commonly
observed manners of interpersonal behaviour. The hosts’ uncommon manners became
their trademark, earning them ‘almost a celebrity’ status.
The proposed poster considers the phenomenon in the context of a late night
show on a regional radio in Britain at the turn of the last decade of last century. Its host
once remarked: ‘I do one of these programmes where people phone in and I tell them to
get stuffed’. And again: ‘I’m not known for my pleasantness. My language is blue, too,
so at least you have to realise these things.’ For many, this proved no deterrence, and
hardly any more defence.
Up to a hundred examples of utterances are analysed, a number which allows to
attempt the first goal of this study, a data-driven taxonomy of verbal misdemeanour. On
the other hand, the author’s ambition is also to verify the grounds for the variety of terms
such as impertinence, insolence or irreverence. Despite a rich heritage of not necessarily
synonymous expressions, no simple matching of names with examples seems possible.
The main purpose of the poster, however, is pragmatic, not semantic. It is to try
to draw a line between gratuitous abuse, either intended only to shock or – even more
shockingly – unintended, and caller criticism. Rudeness is rife on the show for its own
sake, but also in order to censor arguable nonsense. Due to their idiosyncrasy, the data
yield an interesting insight into the pursuit of sense – opposing its opposite.
Several categories of rudeness can be distinguished in the data, which it may be
an idea to order up according to their strength or degree of impact. But impact itself is
not an unambiguous effect, ranging between sheer shock and perhaps some reflection on
the part of the addressee. An attempt will be made to see the result achieved (or at least
felt to occur) as being a function of the form of the language used.
Perhaps predictably, the most relevant rudeness will not be that due to lost
temper, nor yet one felt to be somehow deserved, but rather those instances of it which
can be argued to be worth their while –if only by amusing some of those involved, and
ideally also by affecting the addressee (as well as the audience) in a positive way. This
may seem like a tall order from an essentially negative phenomenon, but it is seen as its
redeeming condition.
Since internal impact can often at best only be postulated, a more accessible
criterion of the topical thesis is also proposed, being an effect of rudeness on the rest of
the encounter. All too often talk is terminated because a harsh phrase is too hard to
follow. Alternatively, relevance may be preserved – and conversation continued –
through a proper balance between the offence in the content and the recompense in the
intent.
Anna Wiechecka
University of Warsaw, Poland
Linguistic impoliteness from P. Grice’s
and Relevance Theoretic perspectives
The aim of this paper is to examine impoliteness within both Grice’s
pragmatics and Relevance Theory. Linguistic impoliteness has been recognized as a
separate phenomenon by Culpeper (1996, 2003, 2005) and Bousfield (2008). Both
authors, who rely on Gricean pragmatics, claim that impoliteness should not be treated
merely as a by-product of politeness; it promotes disharmony and disequilibrium in
conversation and has its own rules, features and strategies.
The interplay of linguistic politeness and Relevance Theory has been the subject
of numerous studies. However, possible correlations of impoliteness with Relevance
Theory still require detailed examination. This paper is an attempt to compare and
contrast Grice’s and relevance-theoretic approaches to impoliteness and comment on
possible differences between them. I wish to juxtapose various relevance-theoretic
approaches to politeness by: Escandell-Vidal (1996, 1998), Jary (1998) and Watts
(2003) and enquire how impoliteness fits in with these models. I also turn to Meakins
(2001) and her analysis of impoliteness within Relevance Theory to support my
findings. Finally, I focus on possible divergences between these two perspectives and
estimate their significance for further studies of impoliteness.