Presumptive Meaning - Note

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].

Note

to S tuden ts

The question for students naturally is: " Do I really have to read it all ?" The answer depends on your interests . Students wishing simply to get a feel for the phenomena that modern Gricean pragmaticists wrestle with may find chapter 2 all they really need. Those with theoretical interests in the theory of meaning will find chapter 3 central , and they may want to work back to check the reasoning in chapters 1 and 2. Those students whose primary interests are in the relation between form and meaning will want to concentrate on chapters 2 and 4. But the reader who attempts to shortcut the development of the book in this way will need to use the index to check back on concepts developed earlier . This book presupposes some familiarity with the standard neo-Gricean or Radical Pragmatics approach to conversational implicature but treats only a portion of that subject . Levinson ( 1983, chap . 3) provides a text book treatment that summarizes the Gricean approach and the work of Horn ( 1972, 1973), Gazdar ( 1979), Atlas and Levinson ( 1981), and others . Updates have been provided by Horn ( 1984, 1989: chap . 4 and 5 [which is

also very useful bibliographically], 1992a, 1996b) and Huang (1994). The collections of Cole ( 1978, 1981) contain a number of relevant papers, as does the 1990 16th Proceedings of the Berkeley Linguistics Society . The readers edited by Davis ( 1991) and , more extensively , by Kasher (1998) reprint in handy form critical papers by Grice and the important early paper by Harnish ( 1976) , with much other relevant material . Grice 's ( 1967) William James lectures are (largely ) published , together with other "

.-

papers, in Grice 1989 with an epilogue , and there is useful discussion of Grice 's general philosophy (together with Grice ' s reply ) in Grandy and Warner 1986. A word of warning here: reprints of Grice 's work (includ ing his own compilation of 1989) are rarely complete - Grice 1981 for instance has substantial remarks on GCls that are missing , without

xviii

Noteto Students warning , from his 1989 chapter 17 (they were clearly felt to be redundant with earlier chapters of that book ) . This explains why I sometimes cite unpublished or earlier versions of what is apparently the same paper (quite often , for example , typographical emphasis has been removed in the reprints ) . 1 Hirschberg ( 1985) attempts to recast many of the problems in a theory of particularized implicature but also offers useful discussion of the standard approach . Atlas (in press) presents discussion of many outstanding issues. Although Horn 1989 is a difficult , if not always unhumorous , work dedicated to negation , it contains so many important observations on generalized implicature that it is a " must " for the dedicated pragmaticist : it is a goldmine , but be prepared to use your pick and shovel (and the excellent index ). The approach developed here is sketched in Levinson 1995a, which may be a useful introduction to this book ( 1 have drawn on parts of that paper for chap . 1) . Further applications of this particular system of inter acting principles have been offered by Levinson ( 1987b, 1991) (which I have in part drawn on for chap . 4) and especially Hawkins ( 1991) and Huang ( 1991, 1994) . I have tried to layout a wide range of data because I feel the range of application of pragmatic principles has been under appreciated - indeed the generality of the neo-Gricean account is pre cisely what recommends it . (Much further grist for the pragmatic mill can be found in work on linguistic typology , especially Haiman 's ( 1985a, 1985b) pioneering studies of iconicity in language .) The danger , on the other hand , is that many of the examples will be found to be under analyzed , but I felt it was better to point (possibly with a wobbly finger ) in the direction

of many future

dissertations

than to withhold

such direc -

tions in the interest of more scholarly reticence . My inadequacies , dear student , are your opportunities ! Any intellectual program is often best understood by glancing at the rival accounts . An alternative approach with much , if not more , currency is given by Sperber and Wilson ( 1986), perhaps best approached though the Behavioral

and Brain

Sciences article

with

attendant

commentary

(Sperber and Wilson 1987; see also Blakemore 1992) . Sperber and Wilson attempt to capture all implicatural phenomena with a single dualistic principle but are especially interested in particularized conversational im plicatures . The second edition of Relevance (Sperber and Wilson 1995) contains a very useful bibliographical update keyed to the new " post-

face." On the whole, the two lines of theorizing- RelevanceTheory and

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Note to Students

the neo-Gricean line exemplified by this book- are focused on quite different phenomena . However , work by Kempson ( 1986), Carston ( 1988) , and others attempts to reduce generalized conversational implicatures

to particularized ones using this principle of Relevance. A direct attack from this angle on my approach (of an earlier vintage ) may be found in Carston 1995; my own criticisms of Relevance Theory can be found in Levinson 1989, which I have not repeated here. Another direct attack , partly from a Relevance Theory perspective , is directed at my treatment of anaphora (here enlarged in chap . 4) by Ariel ( 1994) , although I believe she's mistaken the target . Another approach , never fully developed but

still much presupposedin formal semantics, involves Lewis's concept of accommodation (see Thomason 1990) . Situation semantics ( Barwise and Perry 1983) at one time looked set to swallow within semantics many of the phenomena discussed here, but again , no explicit account has been published . A more recent kind of reductionist approach , based on extended versions of discourse semantics, has been proposed by van Kup pevelt ( 1996) and Scharten ( 1997) . There is a fresh interest in implicature

in computational and artificial intelligence circles; a good idea of what is going on can be got from glancing at the proceedingsof the 1996AAAI symposium on implicature (seealso Hobbs, Stickel, Appelt, and Martin 1990). Finally , there are a number of interesting recent dissertations on im plicature to which the interested reader should refer . Those in Sperber and Wilson ' s framework are listed in the second edition of Relevance (1985, p . 296, n . 9) , but especially relevant to this book are those by HirsChberg ( 1985), McCafferty ( 1987), Wainer ( 1991), and Welker ( 1994) . Further

bibliographicalleads have been given throughout on the various topics covered

.

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].