Volume 29, Issue 4 - Cognitive Pragmatics and its Interfaces in Linguistics

The nature of pragmatics is not generally thought to have significant implications for the form of models of grammar, even among pragmaticians. But post-Gricean cognitive pragmatic frameworks such as Relevance Theory implicitly make demands on the grammatical ‘code’ – and on how we investigate it – that cannot be accommodated within conventional approaches to grammar. Ultimately, this gives us cause to reconceptualise grammar entirely, to accommodate the dynamism that is inherent to inferential pragmatics. This amounts to a conceptual argument for the adoption of a model of grammar of the type of Dynamic Syntax.

In this paper we explore the consequences of defining natural-language syntax as procedures for context-dependent interpretation as argued within Dynamic Syntax. Dynamic Syntax is a formalism where both representations of content and context are defined dynamically and structurally, with time-linear growth across sequences of partial trees as the core notion, presumed to be manipulated by both speaker and hearer alike. The challenge of modelling the notorious heterogeneity of ellipsis effects in conversational dialogue is taken as a case study for establishing the appropriate concept of context. In the light of the success of these assumptions in capturing the diversity of ellipsis within an overall explanation, we argue that foundational assumptions like the competence/performance distinction as regards the nature of linguistic knowledge need to be reconsidered. We argue that the grammar needs to be defined in action-based terms with incrementality and context-dependence as crucial explanatory notions of syntactic/semantic phenomena. As a consequence of taking this perspective, we argue that success in communication may rest in the ongoing interaction between participants, as underpinned by low-level mechanisms of language use like the grammar, rather than in recognising some intended propositional content.

In this paper, we argue for an approach to grammatical case that treats case-marking not as the passive realisation of other morpho-syntactic properties of a construction, but as bringing its own independent contribution to the construal of a clause, through inference over possibly underspecified semantic content of a case-marker in context. We take as case studies two instances of Differential Case-Marking: the partitive alternation in Estonian and differential uses of the marker ko in Hindi/Urdu. For Estonian, it is argued that the partitive case is semantically partitive even in alternation in grammatical contexts with nominative and genitive. From this assumption, we derive the various construals of the partitive as indicating indefinite quantity or imperfective aspect and show how other uses of the case, including after negation, may be traced to the basic partitive interpretation. We also argue that the completive interpretations of nominative and genitive derive from contrast with the partitive reading, rather than as being encoded in the case marking itself. With Hindi/Urdu ‘dative’ maker ko, we argue how pragmatic inference can operate also over grammatical levels to explain the uses of the marker with human direct objects, to specify definiteness of inanimate direct objects and, in alternation with ergative ne, deontic modality.

The concept expressed by the use of a word in a context often diverges from its lexically encoded context-independent meaning: it may be more specific or more general (or a combination of both) than the lexical meaning. Grasping the intended concept involves a pragmatic process of relevance-driven adjustment or modulation of the lexical meaning in interaction with the rest of the utterance and with contextual information. The issue addressed here is the nature of the input to the pragmatic process of meaning adjustment, that is, the nature of the standing (encoded) meaning of the word type. The widespread assumption that lexical meaning is conceptual, hence directly expressible, is challenged and a case made for the merits of an account of word type meaning in non-conceptual terms.

There is currently no universally accepted general definition of logical constanthood. With a view to addressing this issue, we follow a pragmatist rationale, according to which, some notion can be identified as a logical constant by considering the way in which it is used in our everyday reasoning practices, and argue that a logical constant has to be seen as encoding some kind of dynamic meaning, which marks the presence of an inferential transition among propositional contents. We then put forth a characterisation of logical constants that takes into account their syntactic, semantic and pragmatic roles. What follows from our proposal is that logical constanthood can be best understood as a functional property that is satisfied only by certain uses of the relevant notions.

This paper contributes to the development of a relevance-theoretic account of prosody by considering how the meanings of British English nuclear tones can be embedded in a more general relevance-theoretic account and how the proposed meanings might combine with the meanings of other linguistic and non-linguistic stimuli in the interpretation of particular utterances. It presents a suggestion for the meanings of tones in Southern British English, explaining how they fit into the larger framework and into fuller accounts of the interpretation of individual utterances. It considers what this approach says about the nature of the prosodic meanings assumed and about how the semantics-pragmatics distinction might be understood with regard to prosody. Finally, it considers how this approach might be compared with approaches in other frameworks.

The intonation system of East Norwegian (EN) is such that a statement often sounds more like a question to a non-native listener. While it may be easy for a phonetically trained person to hear that a final pitch movement of an EN utterance is either a rise to a high, or a fall to a low target tone, such a perceived difference has no phonological significance unless it is exploited systematically for a communicative purpose. Imperative sentences are used for the performance of a variety of speech acts ranging from orders to offers. We carried out a listening comprehension test with imperatives produced with systematically varied intonation contours. Our hypothesis was that an imperative is generally softened by a perceived Low boundary tone but is heard as peremptory if the boundary tone is High. This hypothesis was borne out. Having established the existence of a phonological contrast between a Low and a High terminal boundary tone in EN utterance-final syllables, we argue that a phonologically Low boundary tone is even a grammatical property of EN utterances whose low-pitched final syllable is the result of a global intonation contour that simply precludes a final rise.