Acknowledgments

This excerpt from Presumptive Meanings. Stephen C. Levinson. © 2000 The MIT Press. is provided in screen-viewable form for personal use only by members of MIT CogNet. Unauthorized use or dissemination of this information is expressly forbidden. If you have any questions about this material, please contact [email protected].

Acknowledgments -

My debtsin this book reachfar, far back. As an undergraduate I was trainedby an ardentstructuralistanthropologist , EdmundLeach, and it wasat Berkeleyasa graduatestudentthat, in reactionto structuralism ,I found Paul Grice's ideasabout the derivativenature of conventional meaningquite revolutionary. His central idea, that "everyartificial or non-iconic systemis foundedupon an antecedent iconic system " of representationand communication(Grice 1989: 358), is still too radicalfor most currentthinking in linguisticsand philosophy. This book explores oneintriguingmarginbetweenthe noniconicand the iconicsystems , and it triesto establishin detailoneway in whichthe noniconicsystemstrade on the iconicbackground . Thosewho shareGrice's visionthink that lan~ guagewill neverbe understoodsolely from the inside: linguistic communicationis not explainedby a directform-meaningmappingbut only by taking into accountthe intentionaland inferentialand indeedinteractionalumbrella(see,e.g., SperberandWilson 1986; Clark 1996 ). At Berkeleyin the .early1970s , Grice's ideaswerebeingexploredall aroundme: in sociolinguistics by JohnGumperz,in grammarandmeaning by Georgeand Robin Lakoff, in philosophyby John Searleand StephenSchiffer, and of course , therewas Grice himself. Subsequently , Larry Horn, JerroldSadockandothersin the States , andGeraldGazdar, Ruth Kempson,andDeirdreWilsonin the U.K . rescuedthe crucialideas from the collapseof GenerativeSemantics . GeraldGazdar's ideasof that vintage(later publishedasGazdar1979) playa ratherspecialrole in this work, and I learneda greatdeal from him, reflectedin my textbookof pragmatics(1983). After diversionsin anthropologicallinguistics , a paper by Larry Horn (1984 ) broughtthe wholesubjectback to life for me and mademe rethink the typologyof implicatures , and this led to the paper (1987a , given at Viareggio, 1985 ) where I first exploredthe tripartite

.. XXll

Acknowledgments scheme employed here, encouraged by John Lyons , Peter Matthews , Ni gel Vincent , and Yan Huang , then all at Cambridge . Meanwhile , work by Dan Sperber, Deirdre Wilson , Ruth Kempson , and associates has spurred and goaded me into some response; while at about the same time the opportunity to teach with Larry Horn at the Linguistics Institute at Stanford in 1987 greatly increased both my confidence and competence in this area, and it was there that I first adumbrated

book . That opportunity

all the themes to be found in this

was arranged by Ivan Sag, with whom I have

discussed at length on the issues in chapter 3 (we had indeed hoped to pursue some of these issues together ). A year at Stanford followed , where the Linguistics Department and CSLI provided ideal conditions for discussion of many pertinent themes, and I taught a graduate course on the material in this book , where I received much helpful feedback . Herb Clark , Ray Perrault , Jerry Hobbs , and other participants in the CSLI implicature group forced me to clarify my ideas by describing their own alternative ones. Also at CSLI , conversations with Ivan Sag, Stan Peters, Craige Roberts , Nirit Kadmon , and David Perlmutter were important ; and a seminar on abduction organized by Jerry Hobbs and Doug Ed wards at SRI helped me understand work on the theory of inference in AI . Back in Cambridge , Yan Huang once again made me rethink my pragmatic reduction of the Binding Conditions ( I had already been unsettled by discussions with Ivan Sag and K . Mohanan at Stanford , and thus

recalled

an

earlier

conversation

with

Ann

Farmer

and

Robert

Harnsh on the Viareggio beach). An invitation to give the Nijmegen Lectures in December 1988 gave me the opportunity to condense a meandering manuscript and gave me some valuable audience response; a workshop led by Rob van der Sandt was also most helpful . At that point , the book still lacked the survey in chapter 2, but I was given the un ref usable opportunity by the Max Planck Society to pursue a quite dif ferent line of work (see, e.g., Levinson 1996), which has proved all consuming for many years. In the meantime , I had expected others to fill the gap . This didn 't happen . The need for a book of this kind remained . Encouraged by Max Planck colleagues and fellow pragmaticists , I determined at last to recast the manuscript in line with current developments . I

hope that I have succeededin acknowledging most of the recent important contributions , but the canvas is large . Throughout all these wanderings through the thickets of meaning , Jay Atlas has been a constant guide over 15 years; chapter 3 finds me follow ing him in a direction I managed to resist for 10 years- somehow I had to

... XXIII

Acknowledgments

come up with my own argumentsbefore I could believehis conclusions. I notice a number of others making the sameacknowledgment, and I look with renewedinterest at all the placesI still believe him to be wrong. A number of scholarshave commentedon the manuscript (some, alas, in print). Most recently, I have received most helpful comments from Felix Ameka, Bob Arundale, Penny Brown, Eve Clark , Yan Huang, Eric Pederson, and David Wilkins on parts of this book, for which I am most grateful. But specialmention must be made of the rich annotations I was lucky enough to receive on the whole manuscript from Jay Atlas, Kent Bach, and Larry Horn (the last two in thin disguiseas refereesfor MIT Press). Such generoushelp has rescuedme from numerous errors- faults and infelicities that remain are of coursemy own. I am also most grateful to Edith Sjoerdsmafor many kinds of assistancewith the preparation of the manuscript, to Elizabeth Lauren<;ot for copyediting and Amy Brand for seeingthe book through the Press. Finally , I would like to thank the Kroller -Miiller Museum, Otterlo, The Netherlands, for permissionto use the reproduction of " Still life with oil lamp" by Juan Gris on the dustcover, Dover publications for use of the Rembrandt sketch in figure 0.1 (from Toney 1963), and Cambridge University Press for permission to reprint some paragraphs from two earlier articles of mine that appearedin the Journal of Linguistics.

This excerpt from Presumptive Meanings. Stephen C. Levinson. © 2000 The MIT Press. is provided in screen-viewable form for personal use only by members of MIT CogNet. Unauthorized use or dissemination of this information is expressly forbidden. If you have any questions about this material, please contact [email protected].