Summer Institute of the Chinese Cognitive Linguistics Association and the
Mouton journal Intercultural Pragmatics
‘Culture, Communication, Cognition’
Shanghai, 15-19 June 2008
Pragmatic Inference and Default
Interpretations in Current Theories
of Discourse Meaning
Kasia Jaszczolt
University of Cambridge, U.K.
http://people.pwf.cam.ac.uk/kmj21
Utterance meaning
(1)
A: Are you coming to the meeting in London on Monday?
B: I will be in Shanghai.
Primary meaning:
(1a) B is not coming to the meeting.
= implicature
(2) Everybody is applying for this job.
Primary meaning:
(2a) Every eligible linguist the speaker knows is applying for this job.
= enrichment, modulation of what is said
2
?

Speaker’ s meaning or Addressee’s meaning?

Is the recovery of primary meaning in (1) and (2)
governed by the same pragmatic processes?

Do we need the distinction between implicature (new
thought) (1) and modulation (thought conveyed by the
uttered sentence) (2)?
3
Lecture 1:
Grice and post-Griceans on pragmatic
inference: Introduction
Lecture 2:
Contextualism vs. semantic minimalism
Lecture 3:
Salient meanings: the characteristics of
default interpretations
Lecture 4:
Principles of Default Semantics
4
Lecture 1
Grice and post-Griceans on pragmatic
inference: Introduction
5
A meantNN something by x:
‘A uttered x with the intention of inducing a belief by
means of the recognition of this intention’
Grice (1957 in 1989: 219)
6
“ ‘U meant something by uttering x’ is true iff, for some
audience A, U uttered x intending:
(1)
(2)
(3)
A to produce a particular response r
A to think (recognize) that U intends (1)
A to fulfil (1) on the basis of his fulfilment of (2).”
Grice (1969 in 1989: 92)
7
Implicature:


Speaker is intentionally conveying more than the
utterance’s content.
Addressee is drawing inferences from the speaker’s
utterance, regarding them as intended by the speaker.
Content = implicatum
8
Properties of conversational implicatures:




cancellability
non-detachability
calculability
non-conventionality
9
“Suppose that Alice and Sarah are in a crowded train;
Alice, who is obviously able-bodied, is sprawled across
two seats, and Sarah is standing. Sarah says to Alice,
‘I’m curious as to whether it would be physically possible
for you to make room for someone else to sit down.’ The
implicature is that Alice should make room. It is
extraordinarily unlikely that Sarah really is curious about
whether Alice is physically capable of moving, since it is
mutually obvious that she is capable. Accordingly, Sarah
has flouted Grice’s first maxim of Quality (1989: 27), ‘Do
not say what you believe to be false’; she obviously
knows that what she says is false. This flouting indicates
that her utterance is not to be taken literally. This is a
10
paradigmatic implicature, in which an utterance conveys
something beyond what is literally said because the
speaker is flouting a conversational maxim.
Suppose now that Sarah adds, ‘Not that you should
make room; I’m just curious.’ This has the form of an
explicit cancellation of the implicature. Nevertheless, the
implicature is not cancelled. Sarah is still suggesting,
even more rudely, that Alice should make room.”
Weiner (2006: 128),
see also reply by Blome-Tillmann 2008
11
?
Are all implicatures qualitatively different from what is
said? Are they different when they act as main, primary,
salient meanings?
12
The standard post-Gricean view on what is
said vs. what is implicated:
Questions:
A.
What principles govern utterance interpretation?
B.
How does pragmatic content interact with the semantic
content?
13
Modified Occam’s Razor
‘Senses are not to be multiplied beyond necessity.’
Grice (1978 in 1989: 47)
(3)
(3a)
(4)
(4a)
Some British people like cricket.
Some but not all British people like cricket.
Tom dropped a camera and it broke.
Tom dropped a camera and as a result it broke.
14
Question A:
Neo-Griceans
Horn (1984, 1988, 2004)

The Q Principle:
Make your contribution sufficient; say as much as you
can (given R).
= maximization of information content
The R Principle:
Make your contribution necessary; say no more than you
must (given Q). =minimization of form
15
Levinson (1987, 1995, 2000):
Q-principle:
‘Don’t provide a statement that is informationally
weaker than your knowledge of the world allows,
unless providing a stronger statement would
contravene the I-principle.’
(5)
(6)
I often take sugar in my coffee +> not always
I believe that John is away +> not know
16
I-principle:
‘Say as little as necessary’, i. e. produce the minimal
linguistic clues sufficient to achieve your
communicational ends, bearing Q in mind.
(7)
(8)
John turned the key and the engine started. +> and
then
Harry and Sue bought a piano. +> together
17
M-principle:
‘Do not use a prolix, obscure or marked expression
without reason.’
Relative power of the principles: Q>M>I
(9)
John caused the car to stop. M>I
18
Sperber and Wilson (1986/95)
The principle of Relevance:
Interlocutors preserve the balance between the effort
and the effect in conversation by minimising the
expenditure, the processing effort, and at the same
time maximising the information gained, the cognitive
effect.

19
‘In Relevance, we make two fundamental claims, one
about cognition, the other about communication:
(1)
(2)
Human cognition tends to be geared to the
maximisation of relevance.
Every act of ostensive communication communicates a
presumption of its optimal relevance.’
Sperber & Wilson (1995: 260)
20
Question B:
What is the content of what is said (the explicit content)
vis-à-vis implicatures?
Grice (1978): pragmatic processes of disambiguation
(syntactic, lexical) and reference assignment to indexical
expressions (e.g. pronouns, demonstrative phrases) may
have to be taken into consideration before the
sentence’s truth conditions can be assessed.
21

Kempson (1975, 1979, 1986) and Atlas (1977, 1979,
1989, 2005)
Negation in English should not be regarded as
ambiguous between narrow-scope and wide-scope but
as semantically underdetermined.
(10)
The king of France is not bald.
22

Kempson (1975, 1979, 1986) and Atlas (1977, 1979,
1989, 2005)
Negation in English should not be regarded as
ambiguous between narrow-scope and wide-scope but
as semantically underdetermined.
(10)
The king of France is not bald.
x (KoF (x)  y (KoF (y)  y = x)   Bald (x))
23

Kempson (1975, 1979, 1986) and Atlas (1977, 1979,
1989, 2005)
Negation in English should not be regarded as
ambiguous between narrow-scope and wide-scope but
as semantically underdetermined.
(10)
The king of France is not bald.
x (KoF (x)  y (KoF (y)  y = x)   Bald (x))
 (KoF (x)  y (KoF (y)  y = x)  Bald (x))
24
radical pragmatics
sense-generality
contextualism
25
Semantic analysis takes us only part of the way towards
the recovery of utterance meaning. Pragmatic
enrichment completes the process.
Enrichment:
and +> and then, and as a result
some +> some but not all
everybody +> everybody in the room, every acquaintance
of the speaker, etc.
26
Modulation (Recanati 2004, 2005):
The logical form becomes enriched/modulated as a
result of pragmatic inference and the entire
semantic/pragmatic product becomes subjected to the
truth-conditional analysis.
27

Explicature (Carston, Sperber, Wilson)

What is said (Recanati)

Primary meaning (Jaszczolt)
28



Explicature (Carston, Sperber, Wilson)
What is said (Recanati)
Primary meaning (Jaszczolt)
?
Question:
How far can the logical form be extended? ‘How much
pragmatics’ is allowed in the semantic representation?
29

Logical form can be developed beyond the output of
syntactic processing. Development stops as soon as
optimal relevance is reached. Implicatures are
functionally independent of such an enriched semantic
representation (‘explicature’). Functional Independence
Principle (Carston).
30

Logical form can be developed beyond the output of
syntactic processing. Development stops as soon as
optimal relevance is reached. Implicatures are
functionally independent of such an enriched semantic
representation (‘explicature’). Functional Independence
Principle (Carston).

Aspects of meaning are added to the truth-conditional
content (‘what is said’) when they conform to our pretheoretic intuitions. Availability Principle (Recanati).
31

Such additions to the logical form (expansions,
completions) constitute a separate, middle level, implicit
in what is said (‘impliciture’). Semantic minimalism
(Bach, Horn).
32


Such additions to the logical form (expansions,
completions) constitute a separate, middle level, implicit
in what is said (‘impliciture’). Semantic minimalism
(Bach, Horn).
The logical form of the sentence can not only be
extended but also replaced by a new semantic
representation when the primary, intended meaning
demands it. Such extensions or substitutions are primary
meanings and their representations are merger
representations. Default Semantics (Jaszczolt). There is
no syntactic constraint on merger representations.
33
(11)
(11a)
(11b)
(11c)
You are not going to die, Peter.
There is no future time at which you will die, Peter.
You are not going to die from this cut, Peter.
There is nothing to worry about, Peter.
34
(11)
(11a)
(11b)
(11c)
You are not going to die, Peter.
There is no future time at which you will die, Peter.
You are not going to die from this cut, Peter.
There is nothing to worry about, Peter.
Truth-conditional content modelled in semantics:
Bach, Horn:
(11a) – minimal proposition
Carston, Recanati: (11b) – extended proposition
Jaszczolt, Sysoeva: (11c) – substituted proposition
(primary meaning)
35
Particularized vs. generalized
pragmatic additions:
(11)
(11b)
(11c)
(3)
(3a)
(4)
(4a)
You are not going to die, Peter.
You are not going to die from this cut, Peter.
There is nothing to worry about, Peter.
Some British people like cricket.
Some but not all British people like cricket.
Tom dropped a camera and it broke.
Tom dropped a camera and as a result it broke.
36
?

Where is the what is said/what is implicated boundary?
37
?
Where is the what is said/what is implicated boundary?
 Where is the semantics/pragmatics boundary?
(Lecture 2)

38
?
Where is the what is said/what is implicated boundary?
 Where is the semantics/pragmatics boundary?
(Lecture 2)

Is the recovery of the speaker’s intended meaning the
result of pragmatic inference or is it automatic, default?
(Lectures 3, 4)

39
Summary so far

The output of syntactic processing often leaves the
meaning underdetermined.

The underspecified logical form is further modified as a
result of pragmatic processes (inference or automatic
modifications).

According to post-Gricean contextualists, this
pragmatically modified representation is an object of
truth-conditional analysis.
40
End of Lecture 1
Thank you!
41
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