Explicit Import Revisited: A Critical Appraisal of Explicatures

The main goal of this paper is to argue that the way explicitly communicated content is approached in leading pragmatic theories is flawed, since it is posited that explicature generation involves pragmatic enrichment of the decoded logical form of the utterance to full propositionality. This kind of enhancement postulated to underlie explicature generation appears to be theoretically inadequate and not to correspond to the psychological reality of utterance interpretation. Drawing on earlier critique of extant pragmatic positions on explicatures, mainly by Borg (2016) and Jary (2016), I add further arguments against modelling explicitly communicated import in the way leading verbal communication frameworks do. It is emphasized that the cognitively plausible theory of communicated meaning is compromised at the cost of theory-internal concerns.

The Linearity of Verb Copying Cleft Construction in Chinese: Semantic Underspecification and Pragmatic Enrichment

In Standard Chinese, verb doubling cleft construction (henceforth VDCC) has received little attention in the linguistic literature. Recently, Cheng and Vicente (2013) claim that VDCC has the same internal syntax as regular clefts, and two verbs stand in A-bar movement relation based on the lexical identity effect. In this paper, we argue that (1) VDCC is derived in line with the principle of linearity; (2) the first verb is a reduced minimal form acting as a topic which is pragmatically enriched via contextual information; (3) the second verb is interpretively dependent on the first verb.

Rationalising Framing Effects: At Least One Task for Empirically Informed Philosophy

Human judgements are affected by the words in which information is presented —or ‘framed’. According to the standard gloss, ‘framing effects’ reveal counter-normative reasoning, unduly affected by positive/negative language. One challenge to this view suggests that number expressions in alternative framing conditions are interpreted as denoting lower-bounded (minimum) quantities. However, it is unclear whether the resulting explanation is a rationalising one. I argue that a number expression should only be interpreted lower-boundedly if this is what it actually means. I survey how number expressions might be assigned lower-bounded meanings, due to their conventional semantics or pragmatic enrichment in context. I argue that deciding between these possibilities requires foundational philosophical input.

Narrative Mikrostruktur

Text comprehension is based on the literal content of sentences and pragmatic enrichment. Theories of pragmatic enrichment in the literature include enrichment of narrative texts, but also pragmatic content conveyed by presupposition triggers. Taking texts by Ror Wolf as my test case, I illustrate that our capacity of pragmatic enrichment can be abused to understand paradoxical content, even though the literal content of the text seems coherent at the surface level. This shows that pragmatic enrichment in narration is a genuine part of language processing and must not be equated with commonsense reasoning.

Do children derive exact meanings pragmatically? Evidence from a dual morphology language

Number words allow us to describe exact quantities like sixty-three and (exactly) one. How do we derive exact interpretations? By some views, these words are lexically exact, and are therefore unlike other grammatical forms in language. Other theories, however, argue that numbers are not special and that their exact interpretation arises from pragmatic enrichment, rather than lexically. For example, the word one may gain its exact interpretation because the presence of the immediate successor two licenses the pragmatic inference that one implies “one, and not two”. To investigate the possible role of pragmatic enrichment in the development of exact representations, we looked outside the test case of number to grammatical morphological markers of quantity. In particular, we asked whether children can derive an exact interpretation of singular noun phrases (e.g., “a button”) when their language features an immediate “successor” that encodes sets of two. To do this, we used a series of tasks to compare English speaking children who have only singular and plural morphology to Slovenian-speaking children who have singular and plural forms, but also dual morphology, that is used when describing sets of two. Replicating previous work, we found that English-speaking preschoolers failed to enrich their interpretation of the singular and did not treat it as exact. New to the present study, we found that 4- and 5-year-old Slovenian-speakers who comprehended the dual treated the singular form as exact, while younger Slovenian children who were still learning the dual did not, providing evidence that young children may derive exact meanings pragmatically.

The politeness formula si placet in Late Latin: on the role of pragmatic conventions in discourse traditions

This paper analyzes uses, functions, and literary distribution of the negative politeness formula si placet ‘(lit.) if it pleases (you)’ in a corpus of Late Latin texts (third–sixth century CE). Drawing on both qualitative and quantitative observations, it is suggested that the pragmatic enrichment undergone by this conditional parenthetical clause is due to a conspiracy of factors, namely a process of semantic and pragmatic change fostered by a “politeness-induced invited inference” (Beeching 2005), which was triggered by a general process of literary imitation within the very specific discourse tradition of philosophical dialogues. The analysis shows, indeed, that si placet is very rarely used in the history of Latin and it is circumscribed to this specific literary genre. This suggests that this politeness formula developed as a genre-specific stylistic feature and as such it was replicated over centuries through the circulation of textual models and the propagation of genre-related practices, as a valuable linguistic device to render the idea of an urbane conversation among educated peers and, ultimately, as a marker of socio-cultural identity.

Pragmatic Aspects of Tense in English and Arabic: Based on a Neo-SRE Theory

The hypothesis upon which this paper is based is that in both Arabic and English the notion of tense underdetermines the notion of time, and some pragmatic enrichment is needed to the get at the correct temporal interpretation. In both languages, beside the normal unmarked tense usages, some marked usages of tense are available wherein the tense constructions do not refer to their equivalent temporal intervals; this is done for the sake of rhetorical purposes as illustrated and exemplified. Even the unmarked cases to tense are proven to require, for sound interpretation, the inclusion of pragmatic givens. Many examples are given in both languages showing the pragmatic nature of the temporal interpretive process of tense in terms of the SRE theory where the interrelationship of the three-time intervals speech, event, and reference times (S/TU, E/TSit, R/TT) is based primarily on rather pragmatic parameters within the process of temporal interpretation. Some new treatment is given concerning the theory of tense interpretation which is related to a pragmatic conception of the speaker’s temporal projection or “virtuality” via which tenses’ inherent three-time points are pragmatically interrelated and arranged in terms of the potential existence of multiple virtual and non-virtual speakers.

Expletive Negation

This chapter provides the state-of-the-art around expletive negation (EN), by discussing: (i) the relationship between EN and negative concord; (ii) EN as a real negation; (iii) EN as a special formative linked to an additional evaluative/expressive layer in the semantics of language. Moreover, the chapter offers a potentially unifying analysis of EN in comparative, exclamative, and temporal clauses: EN as an operator of implicature denial. This approach derives the fact that EN is logically and compositionally independent from what is said from the fact that EN shifts the semantics of negation to the layer of implicated meaning. Some of the interpretive effects normally linked to the expressive/evaluative analysis of EN can be arguably derived as side-effects of this semantic analysis. The proposal advanced here has a number of implications regarding the relationship among morpho-syntax, pragmatic enrichment, and the non-incremental analysis of negation in theories of negation processing.

Indirect reporting and pragmatically enriched context

This article examines the pragmatic comprehensibility of indirect reporting. The research problem is to determine how Russian EFL learners (linguists and non-linguists) are able to turn original utterances expressing the intentions of native speakers of American English in direct speech into indirect reports to a third party. Two major issues are analyzed: adequacy of semantic content and preservation of pragmatic enrichment. The study was carried out employing the framework of Kecskes’ Socio-Cognitive Approach (2008, 2010, 2014, 2017). Twelve stimulus-utterances belonging to three communicative types (statements, questions, commands/requests) were video-recorded. Qualitative and quantitative analyses revealed that the participants met with some difficulties preserving the speaker’s intention while interpreting attached pragmatic enrichment and perlocutionary effect. Both cohorts of Russian EFL learners were able to preserve the semantic content relatively efficiently, but encountered substantial difficulties inferring a complex pragmatic content.