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.

Mutual (Mis)understanding: Reframing Autistic Pragmatic “Impairments” Using Relevance Theory

A central diagnostic and anecdotal feature of autism is difficulty with social communication. We take the position that communication is a two-way, intersubjective phenomenon—as described by the double empathy problem—and offer up relevance theory (a cognitive account of utterance interpretation) as a means of explaining such communication difficulties. Based on a set of proposed heuristics for successful and rapid interpretation of intended meaning, relevance theory positions communication as contingent on shared—and, importantly, mutually recognized—“relevance.” Given that autistic and non-autistic people may have sometimes markedly different embodied experiences of the world, we argue that what is most salient to each interlocutor may be mismatched. Relevance theory would predict that where this salient information is not (mutually) recognized or adjusted for, mutual understanding may be more effortful to achieve. This paper presents the findings from a small-scale, linguistic ethnographic study of autistic communication featuring eight core autistic participants. Each core autistic participant engaged in three naturalistic conversations around the topic of loneliness with: (1) a familiar, chosen conversation partner; (2) a non-autistic stranger and (3) an autistic stranger. Relevance theory is utilized as a frame for the linguistic analysis of the interactions. Mutual understanding was unexpectedly high across all types of conversation pairings. In conversations involving two autistic participants, flow, rapport and intersubjective attunement were significantly increased and in three instances, autistic interlocutors appeared to experience improvements in their individual communicative competence contrasted with their other conversations. The findings have the potential to guide future thinking about how, in practical terms, communication between autistic and non-autistic people in both personal and public settings might be improved.

NOT-AT-ISSUE CONTENT IN THE REFLEXIVE-REFERENTIAL THEORY

ABSTRACT The Reflexive-Referential Theory is a multi-content approach to utterance interpretation. Its main proponent, John Perry, assumes that utterances of sentences with singular terms express several contents, depending on how their utterers and interpreters harness information from the situations in which they are produced. However, the theory says little to nothing about implied content, like presuppositions. Here, I discuss the possibility of including presuppositions, defined in terms of the concept of not-at-issue content, in this view. I begin with a brief characterization of the Reflexive-Referential theory in what regards its theoretical motivations and main thesis, followed by a study case of presuppositional not-at-issue content associated to a specific class of singular terms, proper names. To conclude, I ponder over a few consequences of this overall project of theoretical expansion.

Prosody and Spoken-Word Recognition

This chapter outlines a Bayesian model of spoken-word recognition and reviews how prosody is part of that model. The review focuses on the information that assists the listener in recognizing the prosodic structure of an utterance and on how spoken-word recognition is also constrained by prior knowledge about prosodic structure. Recognition is argued to be a process of perceptual inference that ensures that listening is robust to variability in the speech signal. In essence, the listener makes inferences about the segmental content of each utterance, about its prosodic structure (simultaneously at different levels in the prosodic hierarchy), and about the words it contains, and uses these inferences to form an utterance interpretation. Four characteristics of the proposed prosody-enriched recognition model are discussed: parallel uptake of different information types, high contextual dependency, adaptive processing, and phonological abstraction. The next steps that should be taken to develop the model are also discussed.

A Persona-based Semantics for Slurs

This paper presents a new style of semantic analysis for (some) slurs: linguistic expressions used to denigrate individuals based on some aspects of their identity. As an illustration, the author will focus on one slur in particular: dyke, which is generally considered to be a derogatory term for lesbians. The author argues that not enough attention in the literature has been paid to the use of dyke by members of the target group, who can often use it in a non-insulting manner; secondly, the author argues not enough attention has been paid to the use of the “neutral” form, lesbian, which is generally treated as having a simple, clear meaning, such as “engage[s] in same-sex sex” (Jeshion, 2013a, 312). Following McConnell-Ginet (2002), the author argues that taking into account all the uses of both dyke and lesbian requires a new semantics and pragmatics for both terms. More specifically, the author proposes that dyke and lesbian are associated with different sets of personae: abstract identities or stereotypes. Dyke is associated with an anti-mainstream persona, which the vast majority of speakers views negatively; whereas, lesbian is associated with a mainstream persona, which many speakers view favourably. The author proposes that the semantic puzzles associated with dyke and lesbian can be resolved through the combination of a theory of these personae and a theory of how listeners’ beliefs about their interlocutors’ ideologies affect utterance interpretation.

Or constructions

Utterance interpretation involves semantically specified codes and context-based pragmatic inferences, which complement each other. The goal of this paper is to demonstrate the very complex relation between a subset of codes, Goldbergian constructions, specifically ones centering around ‘alternativity’, and pragmatic inferences. I analyze a variety of or constructions and sub-constructions, emphasizing not only the role of coded constructions on the one hand, and of inferences, on the other hand, but also of cues, namely, linguistic forms that bias towards a specific interpretation, although they do not encode that interpretation. The synchronic variability with respect to the relative contribution of code, inference and cue reflects a grammaticization cycle whereby codes (here constructions) are routinely enriched by inferences, often supported by cues, which in turn may evolve into new codes (here sub-constructions).

Coercion

The goal of this paper is to investigate the possibility of a cross-theoretical understanding of coercion, a “kind of contextual enrichment/adjustment” (Lauwers & Willems 2011: 1220), by combining insights from Construction Grammar and Relevance Theory. In Construction Grammar, coercion has mostly been discussed in terms of the semantics of the linguistic items that occur in the sentence and how these interact with each other. Relevance Theory, on the other hand, does not distinguish cases of coercion from other instances of lexical adjustment, and discusses them in terms of the pragmatic principles involved during utterance interpretation. In order to highlight the complementarity of the two perspectives, this paper particularly consists in pinning down their respective explanatory limits. It will be shown that coercion is better described in terms of a linguistically required pragmatic process. Therefore, it will be suggested that coercion might actually instantiate a particular type of saturation.

Utterance Interpretation and Actual Intentions

In this paper I argue, from the consideration of what I hope is the complete variety of a hearer’s approaches to a speaker’s utterance, that (1) the speaker’s intention does not settle the meaning of her utterance and (2) the hearer does not take a genuine interest in the speaker’s actual intention. The reason why the speaker’s intention does not settle utterance meaning is simply that no utterance meaning determination, as presupposed by intentionalists and anti-intentionalists alike, takes place. Moreover, in the regular course of interpretation the hearer does not care about the speaker’s actual intention, but only about what the speaker presents as her intention: the hearer’s goal is to come up with an interpretation which the speaker will accept rather than an interpretation which corresponds to the speaker’s intention. In cases of accountability, suspicion and lying, the speaker’s actual intention is irrelevant; it is at most the speaker’s hypothetical intention which is at stake.

I know what you're probably going to say: Listener adaptation to variable use of uncertainty expressions

Pragmatic theories of utterance interpretation share the assumption that listeners reason about alternative utterances that a speaker could have produced, but didn't. For such reasoning to be successful, listeners must have precise expectations about a speaker's production choices. This is at odds with the considerable variability across speakers that exists at all levels of linguistic representation. This tension can be reconciled by listeners adapting to the statistics of individual speakers. While linguistic adaptation is increasingly widely attested, semantic/pragmatic adaptation is underexplored. Moreover, what kind of representations listeners update during semantic/pragmatic adaptation -- estimates of the speaker's lexicon, or estimates of the speaker's utterance preferences -- remains poorly understood. In this work, we investigate semantic/pragmatic adaptation in the domain of uncertainty expressions like might and probably. In a series of web-based experiments, we find 1) that listeners vary in their expectations about a generic speaker's use of uncertainty expressions; 2) that listeners rapidly update their expectations about the use of uncertainty expressions after brief exposure to a speaker with a specific usage of uncertainty expressions; and 3) that listeners' interpretations of uncertainty expressions change after being exposed to a specific speaker. We present a novel computational model of semantic/pragmatic adaptation based on Bayesian belief updating and show, through a series of model comparisons, that semantic/pragmatic adaptation is best captured by listeners updating their beliefs both about the speaker's lexicon and their utterance preferences. This work has implications for both semantic theories of uncertainty expressions and psycholinguistic theories of adaptation: it highlights the need for dynamic semantic representations and suggests that listeners integrate their general linguistic knowledge with speaker-specific experiences to arrive at more precise interpretations.