Explicature and semantics, anielski, przetwarzanie, pragmatyka, relewancja
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Explicature and semantics
*
ROBYN CARSTON
Abstract
According to the relevance-theoretic account, identifying what is communicated explicitly by
an utterance (its explicature) involves several pragmatic processes: disambiguation, saturation
of indexical elements, the recovery of unarticulated constituents and
ad hoc
concept
construction, both of the latter being free from any linguistic indication. This is at odds with
a current philosophical position according to which contextual contributions to the proposition
expressed are confined to the processes of disambiguation and saturation; this view
necessitates positing a number of hidden (unarticulated) indexicals in the logical form of
linguistic expressions. The arguments for the two positions are assessed.
1 The territory
A standard view of the semantics of natural language sentences or utterances is that a
sentence has a particular logical structure and is assigned truth-conditional content on the
basis of that structure. Such a semantics is assumed to be able to capture the logical
properties of sentences, including necessary truth, contradiction and valid inference; our
knowledge of these properties is taken to be part of our semantic competence as native
speakers of the language. The following examples pose a problem for this view:
(1)
a.
If it’s raining, we can’t play tennis
b.
It’s raining
------------
c.
We can’t play tennis
*
My thanks to Richard Breheny, Annabel Cormack, Rob Stainton, Deirdre Wilson and Vladimir
Zegarac for very helpful conversations on issues addressed in this paper. The work for this paper was
supported by a research fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust (RF&G/1/9900510).
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Robyn Carston
(2)
a.
If John stopped his car in an illegal position and Bill ran into John, then John
is liable for damages.
b.
Bill ran into John and John stopped his car in an illegal position.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
c.
John is liable for damages.
The first example seems to be a valid argument, and the second seems to be plainly
invalid.
1
However, the validity of (1) depends on requirements that do not seem to be
encoded in the sentences used: that the time and place of the raining mentioned in (b) is
the same as that of the envisaged tennis-playing mentioned in (c). If, in a telephone
conversation between my mother in New Zealand and me in London, she utters (b), I
will not draw the conclusion in (c), although I believe what she says and I believe the
first conditional premise. Similarly, the invalidity of (2) is dependent on the assumption
that there is a cause-consequence relation between the events described by the conjuncts
of the ‘and’-conjunctions, though few truth-conditionalists would want to ascribe that
property (or the property of temporal sequence) to the semantics of ‘and’ (or to anything
else in the sentence), there being good reasons to maintain a unitary truth-functional
analysis of the connective.
What is clear here is that our validity judgements depend on more than the lexical
content and syntactic structure of the sentences used, that is, on more than the meaning
provided by the linguistic system alone; the further content is recovered not from
linguistic decoding but by some other process able to take account of extralinguistic
context. So the propositional forms in these arguments are hybrids, made up of
linguistically encoded material and contextually supplied material. The proposition
expressed by (1b) in a particular context might be as in (3a), and that expressed by (2b)
might be as in (3b) (both being but rough indications, using the inadequate resources of
natural language boosted by a few reasonably transparent makeshift indicators):
(3)
a.
It’s raining in Christchurch, New Zealand at t
x
.
b.
[Bill
i
ran into John
j
at t
x
]
P
& [as a result of P, John
j
stopped at t
x+y
in an illegal
position]
Examples of this sort have received a range of treatments in the existing semantics/
pragmatics literature, two of which will be discussed in this paper. The more
1
The first example will be recognisable as an adaptation of one made famous by Perry (1986); the
second is taken from Breheny (1999).
Explicature and semantics
3
linguistically oriented explanation is that there are hidden indexicals in the logical form
of the sentences employed, so in (1b) there is a phonetically/graphologically unrealised
element marking the place for a location constituent. If this is extended to the second
example, then, as well as each of the conjoined sentences having a variable indicating
the requirement of a temporal specification, there must be a variable indicating a relation
between the conjuncts. On some formal semantic accounts, these are linked in a
stipulatory fashion to contextual indices, for instance, to a location index and a temporal
index which are among the set of indices that comprise a formally conceived context. A
more psychologically oriented semantics would accept that there is some pragmatic
inferential process involved in finding the value of the hidden element in the context. But
the crucial point of this sort of explanation is that the recovery of contextual material is
dictated by the linguistic system in pretty much the same way as it is in the case of overt
indexicals, such as those in (4), to which a contextual value has to be given before a
complete proposition is recovered and before the sentence can be fully employed in
truth-preserving inference:
(4) She put it there.
On the alternative, more pragmatically oriented, approach, there is no level of linguistic
representation of the sentences used in examples (1) and (2) in which there are variables
(or silent indexicals, or empty constituent slots) which indicate that contextual values
must be assigned in order to determine the full truth-conditional content. The
contextually supplied constituents are often termed unarticulated constituents, where
‘unarticulated’ is to be understood, not in the weak sense of a linguistic entity which is
present but not phonologically realised, but rather in the strong sense that there is no
linguistic entity here at all, these constituents being supplied on wholly pragmatic
grounds. An adequate account of how these meaning constituents become part of the
proposition expressed by the utterance, and so affect its truth conditions, is formulated
entirely in terms of pragmatic mechanisms which, not only effect their recovery, but also
motivate it. The cognitive pragmatic theory of Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson,
developed within their wider relevance-theoretic framework, is geared towards doing this
sort of work. That is, as well as accounting for the process of supplying contextual values
to indexicals, a process known as ‘saturation’, it aims to account for the process of
recovering unarticulated constituents, a process known as ‘free’ enrichment, where what
the process is ‘free’ from is linguistic control; obviously, it is tightly constrained by the
pragmatic principles involved.
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Robyn Carston
The term ‘explicature’ arose within relevance theory, as a partner to the more familiar
‘implicature’. Although it is related to the Gricean notion of ‘what is said’, it also departs
significantly from it, and while the Gricean notion is often thought of as a semantic
construct, explicature plainly is not. It is a term belonging to a theory of communication
and interpretation, and it is distinguished from most uses of the term ‘what is said’ in that
it involves a considerable component of pragmatically derived meaning, in addition to
linguistically encoded meaning. A key feature in the derivation of an explicature is that
it may require ‘free’ enrichment, that is, the incorporation of conceptual material that is
wholly pragmatically inferred, on the basis of considerations of rational communicative
behaviour, as these are conceived of on the relevance-theoretic account of human
cognitive functioning. A further unorthodox characteristic of an explicature, at least in
recent manifestations, is that some of its conceptual constituents may be rather different
from the concepts encoded by the lexical items in the corresponding position in the
logical structure of the sentence that was uttered. The idea here is that the concepts
encoded by the language system are but a small subset of the repertoire of concepts that
the human mind can manipulate and that can be communicated. Lexically encoded
meaning often serves as just a clue or pointer to the concept the speaker has in mind, but
the relevance-based comprehension strategy is such that an addressee is usually able to
figure out from the lexical concept and other contextual clues what the intended concept
is. It should be evident, then, that on this picture there may often be a considerable gap
between the logical form encoded by the linguistic expression used and the explicature
recovered by the addressee, although the logical form provides an essential framework
for the processes of pragmatic construction.
This is mainly an expository paper. I will present the semantic-pragmatic hybrid that
is ‘explicature’, outline the motivation for singling it out as a natural class of phenomena,
look briefly at some of the ways in which it departs from more semantically oriented
notions of ‘what is said’ and consider some of the objections that the concept might
prompt, or already has prompted, from semantic quarters. There is also a more
argumentative side to the paper, concerned with making a case for two hypotheses. The
first is that the pragmatic principle(s) which guide an addressee in his derivation of
conversational implicatures (the quintessential pragmatic phenomenon) are equally
responsible for those aspects of the proposition expressed by an utterance (usually an
explicature) which are contributed by context. This applies to the recovery of
unarticulated constituents and to the construction of
ad hoc
concepts, both of which are
controversial as features of truth-conditional content. But it also applies to the process
of determining which among several perceptually identical linguistic entities the speaker
has employed (that is, disambiguation) and to the task of finding the referents of
Explicature and semantics
5
indexical and other referring expressions, both of which are universally agreed to be
essential in identifying the truth-conditional content. The second argumentative strain is
concerned to establish that free enrichment remains a live option, despite recent
arguments from some semanticists that if a contextual element enters into truth
conditions (that is, if some pragmatic process affects truth conditions) that element must
have been provided for by a variable or indexical in logical form.
In the next section, I’ll outline the cognitive psychological approach of relevance
theory, within which explicature is taken to be a natural class of interpretive entity. In
section 3, I define the concept of explicature a little more carefully, and discuss its
relationship with the proposition expressed by (or the propositional form of) the
utterance. The various pragmatic tasks that may be involved in cases of explicature
derivation are surveyed and exemplified in section 4, and it is here that the contentious
issues mentioned above are aired: whether the same or different pragmatic mechanisms
are responsible for explicature and implicature, and whether or not there is free
enrichment. I sum up in the final brief section.
2 Relevance-theoretic pragmatics
2.1 Cognitive underpinnings
Relevance Theory is a cognitive theory resting on some general assumptions about the
mind which are familiar from the work of Noam Chomsky and Jerry Fodor. The mind,
or at least those aspects of it relevant to current concerns, processes information in the
form of representations by performing certain sorts of computations on those
representations. Its architecture is to some significant extent modular, in the sense that
it comprises domain-specific subsystems which are largely autonomous from other
mental systems. Peripheral perceptual systems are the best candidates for mental modules
(Fodor 1983), but recent work in evolutionary psychology makes it look increasingly
plausible that many of the more central conceptual systems of the mind are also modular
(for discussion, see Sperber 1994b). The language input system (or parser) is almost
certainly modular. It is, in effect, a perceptual system, which maps an acoustic phonetic
input onto whatever linguistic entities can have that particular phonetic form. It is a fairly
rigid system that ignores all extra-linguistic considerations, and quickly delivers material
in a format that the system(s) responsible for utterance interpretation can use in arriving
at a hypothesis about the intended meaning.
The cognitive account of utterance understanding makes a fundamental distinction
between two types of processes: the decoding processes of the language system and the
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