Pragmatics

A Multidisciplinary Perspective

Louise Cummings

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135468095
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Computer Science
• Categoría: Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Semantics

The first truly multidisciplinary text of its kind, this book offers an original analysis of the current state of linguistic pragmatics. Cummings argues that no study of pragmatics can reasonably neglect the historical and contemporary influences on this discipline of neighboring fields of inquiry, particularly philosophy, psychology, artificial intelligence, and language pathology. By the same token, these fields can begin to address their own questions more productively by examining the insights of pragmatics. The book's range of topics and depth of analysis will be of interest to advanced undergraduate and more specialized readers in linguistics, communication studies, speech and language therapy, and cognitive science. Topics discussed include: *coverage of pragmatic concepts and theories;
*criticisms of Sperber and Wilson's relevance theory, Habermas's theory of communicative competence, and Kasher's views on the modularity of pragmatics;
*pragmatic deficits in a range of child and adult language disorders; and
*a pragmatic analysis of argumentation in topical issues such as AIDS and BSE theories of meaning, inferences, pragmatics and AI.

CHAPTER 1

The Multidisciplinary Nature of Pragmatics

1.1 PRAGMATICS AND ITS ACADEMIC NEIGHBOURS

In her recent book Pragmatics and Natural Language Understanding, Georgia Green (1996: 1–2) remarks:

Linguistic pragmatics … is at the intersection of a number of fields within and outside of cognitive science: not only linguistics, cognitive psychology, cultural anthropology, and philosophy (logic, semantics, action theory), but also sociology (interpersonal dynamics and social convention) and rhetoric contribute to its domain.

Dascal (1983: 43) claims ‘I have no doubt that pragmatics must be connected with psychology.’ Mey (1993: 89) states in relation to reference that:

We’re dealing here with a problem that is basically philosophical, but which has serious consequences both for theoretical linguistics and for our use of language; hence, reference is also a pragmatic problem.

These quotations serve to demonstrate the two features of pragmatics that I wish to develop within this book. The first feature is that pragmatics is significantly informed by a range of academic disciplines. Some of these disciplines – for example, philosophy – have established in large part the conceptual foundations of pragmatics. Other disciplines, particularly the recently emergent disciplines of cognitive science, have important insights to offer the study of pragmatics and are, I will argue, central to the future conceptual development of the field. However, while pragmatics receives conceptual influences from a number of disciplines, its subject matter is in no sense simply the sum of these influences. For, as I will demonstrate subsequently, pragmatics is a branch of enquiry in its own right, one which can contribute insights to neighbouring academic disciplines in much the same manner that these disciplines can contribute insights to it. This second feature of pragmatics – its capacity to influence the conceptual development of other disciplines – completes the view of pragmatics that I wish to propound in this book. Before embarking on an elaboration of this view, I want to examine how pragmatics is standardly defined. It will emerge that standard definitions of pragmatics are at least implicitly oriented to the multidisciplinary view of pragmatics that I am proposing.

1.2 PRAGMATICS: A STANDARD DEFINITION

Consider the following definition of pragmatics that is advanced by Cruse (2000: 16):

[P]ragmatics can be taken to be concerned with aspects of information (in the widest sense) conveyed through language which (a) are not encoded by generally accepted convention in the linguistic forms used, but which (b) none the less arise naturally out of and depend on the meanings conventionally encoded in the linguistic forms used, taken in conjunction with the context in which the forms are used [emphasis added].

Each of the italicised words in the above quotation introduces into this definition of pragmatics considerations that are properly multidisciplinary in nature. I discuss each of these words in turn.

1.2.1 Information

It is clear from the wider context within which this definition appears that Cruse intends this definition to be inclusive of phenomena that have an obvious pragmatic component (e.g. reference) and exclusive of phenomena that are explained by some other, non-pragmatic mechanism (e.g. inferring from a speaker’s slurred speech that he or she is drunk). It is also clear that as Cruse pursues a definition of pragmatics, his notion of pragmatics in general, and ‘information’ in particular, are sufficiently broad to render the information-processing approaches of cognitive psychologists and artificial intelligence researchers consistent with this definition. In Chapter 4, I evaluate critically one information-processing approach to the study of pragmatics, the relevance theory proposals of Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson.¹ Relevance theory has been described by Ruth Kempson as ‘unrepentant cognitive psychology’ (1988: 16). Cognitive psychology, however, is not the only cognitive scientific discipline that both assumes an information-processing view of human cognition and that converges on the field of pragmatics. Artificial intelligence is significant in this regard and forms the subject of study in Chapter 8. Finally, the information-processing approaches of cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence presuppose a certain philosophical view of the mind, that embodied by the modularity of mind thesis. In Chapter 5, I examine how philosophers conceive of this thesis. Also, I examine what various pragmatic phenomena can tell us about the tenability or otherwise of this thesis as a model of the structure of the human mind.

1.2.2 Encoding

In linguistic encoding, a thought is converted into a linguistic form that can then undergo communication. This process of encoding only makes sense against a wider communicative context in which there is a receiver who can decode the communicated linguistic form. Decoding is a complex psycholinguistic activity that involves a number of interrelated processes. Some of these processes draw upon our knowledge of the meanings of words in order to obtain the semantic meaning of the linguistic form. It is often the case, however, that this semantic meaning is not the meaning that the speaker intended to communicate through producing a particular utterance. Other processes that are inferential in nature are required in order to obtain the intended meaning of the speaker’s utterance. In Chapter 3, I examine a number of different types of inferences. These inferences, I will demonstrate, have been variously studied by philosophers, psychologists and artificial intelligence workers. The role of these inferences in the processing of language meaning in general and pragmatic meaning in particular will also be discussed in Chapter 3.

1.2.3 Convention

Semantic meaning is a conventionalised form of meaning – as part of our learning of English we come to recognise that words mean certain things by generally accepted convention. It is a generally accepted convention of English that the word ‘dog’ refers to a certain kind of animal. Semantic meaning can be contrasted with pragmatic meaning, which is distinctly non-conventional in nature. That an utterance produces a certain conversational implicature in a particular context is not part of any convention of language; rather, this implicature can only be obtained by reasoning from the conjunction of an utterance’s conventional meaning and context. In Chapter 2, I examine how philosophers analyse these two types of meaning within three main theoretical approaches to the study of language meaning. Under the social/pragmatic approach I discuss the speech act theory proposals of Austin and Searle. A speech act analysis of language is integral to Habermas’s attempt to develop an expanded, post-positivistic conception of rationality. In Chapter 7, I examine critically the details of that attempt and the specific role within it of a speech act analysis of language. Habermas’s ideas are of central importance in the present multidisciplinary study of pragmatics. For not only are they multidisciplinary in and of themselves, quite apart from anything to do with pragmatics: Habermas’s essentially social-theoretic project is pursued from within a philosophical context – an exploration of rationality. But Habermas’s ideas demonstrate how central pragmatic theories – in this case, speech act theory – can make a significant conceptual contribution to the questions of neighbouring areas of enquiry.

1.2.4 Context

No definition of pragmatics would be complete in the absence of some mention of context. The notion of context extends beyond its obvious manifestation as the physical setting within which an utterance is produced to include linguistic, social and epistemic factors. How these various factors interrelate with language to generate meaning is studied by a range of disciplines. For example, artificial intelligence researchers have produced linguistically viable models of the different types of knowledge that constitute the epistemic context of language. While the role of context in language meaning has long been recognised – even if only recently articulated in the still relatively young discipline of pragmatics – the contribution of contextual factors to the process of argumentation is only now being seriously examined by pragmaticists. I discuss in Chapter 6 what this examination has revealed both about language in general and about argumentation in particular. For example, arguers routinely leave premises implicit in argumentation in the expectation that these can be reconstructed on the basis of argumentative context. I compare the principles that guide this process of argument reconstruction to the reconstructive principles that are operative in the pragmatic interpretation of utterances. In addition to playing a central role in argument reconstruction, context is also integral to the process of argument evaluation. I demonstrate how arguments can be judged to be fallacious (invalid, unacceptable) or non-fallacious (valid, acceptable) on the basis of contextual factors. Also in Chapter 6, I discuss how theorists, following the lead of Frans van Eemeren and Rob Grootendorst, have applied the framework of speech act theory to the case of argumentation. The capacity of central pragmatic concepts and theories to shape a new and emerging area of enquiry is demonstrated through this discussion.

1.2.5 Use

If ever there were a need to justify pragmatics as a distinct branch of linguistic enquiry, no stronger justification could be advanced than that provided by the case of language disorder. Clinical linguistic studies have repeatedly revealed significant numbers of language-disordered patients for whom structural levels of language – phonology, syntax and semantics – are relatively intact, but for whom a specific breakdown occurs in the use of language. In Chapter 9, I discuss a range of these disorders in both children and adults. I examine, for example, the pragmatic deficits that characterise semantic-pragmatic disorder in children. A number of these deficits – failure of adherence to conversational maxims, excessively literal interpretations of utterances – are also evident in varying degrees in a range of other childhood language disorders and in adults with schizophrenia, right- and left-hemisphere damage and other conditions besides. Language disorders contribute to the present multidisciplinary study of pragmatics in two ways. First, they form a useful context in which to examine the claims of central pragmatic theories – for example, I examine how Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theory has been used to create a model of utterance processing, from which the cause of purported difficulties with inference in right-hemisphere-damaged adults might be deduced. Second, the observation of pragmatic deficits in language-disordered children and adults will enable pragmaticists to describe more fully the extent of pragmatics, a necessary task in what is still a relatively young discipline.

In this section, I have examined Cruse’s definition of pragmatics. I have described this definition as being ‘standard’ on account of its inclusion of notions like context and use, notions that are central to any adequate definition of the subject. What has emerged from the examination of this definition is that it is virtually impossible to describe what is involved in pragmatics without bringing considerations of a multidisciplinary nature into that description. To this extent, even standard definitions of pragmatics can be said to be implicitly oriented to the multidisciplinary view of pragmatics that I will advance in this book. Yet while I believe, and will demonstrate subsequently, that pragmatic phenomena can best be understood through a multidisciplinary examination, I adhere to this belief in the full recognition that these phenomena are ultimately linguistic in nature. In the remainder of this chapter, I present a linguistic characterisation of the pragmatic concepts and theories that will be discussed in subsequent chapters. It is expected that such a characterisation will be a form of useful revision of pragmatic notions for the linguistics reader of this text and will provide simultaneously the non-linguistics reader with a comprehensive overview of these notions.

1.3 PRAGMATIC CONCEPTS AND THEORIES

In this section, I examine a number of pragmatic concepts and theories. I draw in part on an earlier discussion in Marmaridou (2000). Each concept and theory has been chosen for its relevance to the discussion of one or more of the following chapters and, more ultimately still, for its contribution to the multidisciplinary theme of the book.

1.3.1 Speech act theory

John Austin’s views on language have been enormously influential in both philosophy and linguistics. These views achieved philosophical prominence as part of the once popular ordinary language movement in philosophy. In more recent times, they have been taken up and actively developed by linguists, many of whom were experiencing a growing unease with Chomskian linguistics. Austin first gave expression to the i...