Meaning and Thinking

New list for pragmatics in Norway

2012-01-18T11:41:00.000Z

nor-prag:

A list for

a) brief announcements of forthcoming events/activities/publications
relating to pragmatics in Norway, or otherwise likely to interest many
members of the list, and

b) substantive comments/queries/discussions focusing mainly on pragmatics,
particularly relating to research being carried out in Norway, or to the use of
languages spoken in Norway.

(Set up with Kaja Borthen of NTNU, Trondheim, where they have quite a few people working on pragmatics, due to a great extent I think to the efforts of Thorstein Fretheim, who is emeritus there now.)

More information and sign-up form.

The cooperative listener?

2011-09-23T14:08:00.002+01:00

In a comment on this post on Language Log, Spell Me Jeff wrote:

I've been doing some admittedly shallow searching on topics like Grice and cooperative principle, and all I'm finding focuses on the role of the speaker. Surely there is work describing a "cooperative listener"?

I think that there are several areas of research that may be relevant, including work on:

what expectations hearers have,
whether the Cooperative Principle is real/operative,
charity in interpretation (perhaps the hearer-side counterpart of cooperation), and
feedback that hearers provide to the speaker (also a candidate for being the hearer-side counterpart of cooperation).

There has been a lot of work on what expectations hearers have (and what they are justified in having). For example neo-Griceans such as Larry Horn and Stephen Levinson try to boil Grice's maxims down to two or three. According to Levinson, each of them can be expressed as a guideline for the speaker and a rule of thumb for the hearer.
e.g. Speaker side: Say as much as you can.
Hearer side: What isn't said, isn't. (Levinson 2000, p. 31)

A classic paper on hearer expectations (and speaker maxims) is Wilson and Sperber 2002, which argues that there is no maxim of truthfulness and, correspondingly, hearers do not expect speakers to say only things that are literally true:

"hearers expect to be provided with true information. But there is an infinite supply of true information which is not worth attending to. Actual expectations are of relevant information, which (because it is information) is also true. However, we have argued that there just is no expectation that the true information communicated by an utterance should be literally or conventionally expressed..." (pp. 627-8)

On the Cooperative Principle more specifically, a number of theorists have argued that talk-exchanges need not be cooperative, and that the fundamental explanation for speakers tailoring their utterances to their audience is simply that they want to be understood (Kasher 1976, Sperber and Wilson 1986, inter alia; but see Grice's reply to some of these criticisms: 1989, around p. 369). If this is right then hearers can't generally expect cooperation, but they can expect that utterances will have been sufficiently tailored for them to be understandable and worth processing. Relevance theory can be seen as an attempt to spell out what this amounts to, and how it could be enough for communication to work:

The goal of inferential pragmatics is to explain how the hearer infers the speaker’s meaning on the basis of the evidence provided. The relevance-theoretic account is based on another of Grice’s central claims: that utterances automatically create expectations which guide the hearer towards the speaker’s meaning. Grice described these expectations in terms of a Co-operative Principle and maxims of Quality (truthfulness), Quantity (informativeness), Relation (relevance) and Manner (clarity) which speakers are expected to observe (Grice 1961; 1989: 368-72): the interpretation a rational hearer should choose is the one that best satisfies those expectations. Relevance theorists share Grice’s intuition that utterances raise expectations of relevance, but question several other aspects of his account, including the need for a Co-operative Principle and maxims, … The central claim of relevance theory is that the expectations of relevance raised by an utterance are precise enough, and predictable enough, to guide the hearer towards the speaker’s meaning. (Wilson and Sperber, 2004, p. 607)

An interesting question is what the hearer counterpart of cooperation is. It may be charitable interpretation, as perhaps manifested in interpretations of misspeakings, such as taking someone who says 'I was feeding the penguins in the park' to have been expressing the proposition (or trying to) that she was feeding the pigeons.

There is a huge literature on the 'principle of charity' in the philosophy of language, most famously in the work of Quine and Davidson, e.g.: "Assertions startingly false on the face of them are likely to turn on hidden differences of languages." (Quine, 1960, p. 59) Note that this principle, if applied rigorously (and perhaps simplemindedly), gets the pigeon/penguin example wrong and makes a mess of irony e.g. my saying 'It's beautiful weather again' in a downpour.

Formulations of the principle of charity all seem to run into some trouble or other. Whether it is assuming the speaker is speaking the literal truth, or assuming the speaker is expressing coherent beliefs, or assuming the speaker is like the hearer in her attitudes -- all appear vulnerable to counterexamples, that is, cases where operating with one of these expectations, the hearer would fail to correctly understand the speaker. One can argue that these 'counterexamples' are just exceptions to a general rule, of course. But the failures seem rather systematic.

One way in which hearers generally are rather cooperative is in their provision of feedback to the speaker to indicate various things: that they are following (or not), that they agree (or not), that they would like to hear more (or to cut in). Herb Clark has done interesting work on this (e.g. Clark and Krych 2006). There is also work on this sort of thing, particularly the way that speakers and hearers 'negotiate' taking turns in conversation, in Conversation Analysis (e.g. Sacks et al 1992).

Clark, H. H. & Krych, M. A. (2004). Speaking while monitoring addressees for understanding. Journal of Memory and Language, 50(1), 62-81.
Grice, P. (1989). Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
Kasher, A. (1976). Conversational maxims and rationality. In A. Kasher (Ed.), Language in Focus: Foundations, Methods and Systems. (pp. 197–216). Dordrecht, Holland: Reidel Publishing Company.
Levinson, S. C. (2000). Presumptive Meanings: The Theory of Generalized Conversational Implicature. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Quine, W. V. O. (1960) Word and Object. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Sacks, H., Jefferson, G. & Schlegloff, E. (1992). Lectures on Conversation. Oxford: Blackwell.
Sperber, D. & Wilson, D. (1986). Relevance: Communication and Cognition (2nd Ed. 1995). Oxford: Blackwell.
Wilson, D. & Sperber, D. (2002). Truthfulness and relevance. Mind, 111(443), 583–632.
Wilson, D. & Sperber, D. (2004). Relevance theory. In L. R. Horn & G. L. Ward (Eds.), The Handbook of Pragmatics. (pp. 607–632). Malden, Mass: Blackwell.

Words uttered underdetermine speech act performed: comic

2011-08-31T09:00:00.002+01:00

Another xkcd about pragmatics.

Speech acts, modals and the first-person perspective

2011-08-26T10:49:00.003+01:00

In today's XKCD:

Pre-utterance utterance interpretation and the meaning of a ringing phone

2011-08-23T12:13:00.002+01:00

In yesterday's Dilbert:

This is an interesting case for Griceans and relevance theorists. Normally a ringing phone means (naturally and non-naturally?) that someone wants to speak to you, and Dilbert assumes that that is so here. I assume that Alice and Wally intend him to think this, and they don't intend to start a conversation: they were hoping that what did in fact happen, would happen. That is, their intention was to get Dilbert worrying about who could be calling him, with what problem etc. (Doing ‘pre-utterance utterance interpretation’, that is.)

According to Grice the following two intentions are essential to speaker meaning (there's also a third that is not relevant here):

i) S intends S’s utterance of x to produce a certain response r in a certain audience, A.

ii) S intends A to recognise S’s intention (i).

This is one of the examples where the producer of the stimulus has the first intention but does not want that intention to be recognised, i.e. does not have the second intention. All of which is a fairly long-winded (but illuminating) way of saying that what we have here is manipulation, not communication – and a vindication of Grice's second condition.

What colour is a peach with a dark red skin?

2011-08-21T14:37:00.001+01:00

Sometimes the answer is ‘white’, and sometimes ‘yellow’.

What I have in mind is a real-life version of a well-known example from the literature on context-sensitivity. It's a recipe, and the ingredients list calls for:

6 large or 12 tiny white or yellow peaches, with dark red skins

This brought to mind the commonly-used example of a red apple. If I tell you I have a red apple, I may mean one that is red fleshed, or one with a red skin (and there are other possibilities). The use of this example in the current debate may be due to Anne Bezuidenhout. The idea that the combination of a modifier like a colour term and a noun does not in itself determine an interpretation, because of variations in the way that the colour applies (to put it vaguely), goes back at least to Charles Travis' work:

Suppose, for example, someone says that the leaves on the tree are green. Fine. We understand what it would be for things to be that way; we grasp the thought expressed. Now suppose someone says that his bedroom walls are green. Again, we grasp that thought; know how things would be according to it. If someone says that the cheese we left in the refrigerator when we went on vacation is green, again, so far, so good. Now suppose someone calls his Uncle Hugo green. Might we not, for all of the above, be baffled as to what is supposed to be so according to that thought, unhelped by our knowledge of what being green is, adequate though it was for grasping those other thoughts? Would we not, for all that, know what being green is? (Travis, 1994, p. 168)

Travis, C. (1994). On constraints of generality. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society New Series, 94, 165–188.

Edited to add: I see that Recanati cites Lahav saying that the ‘red apple’ example comes from Quine:

For a bird to be red (in the normal case), it should have most of the surface of its body red, though not its beak, legs, eyes, and of course its inner organs. Furthermore, the red color should be the bird's natural color, since we normally regard a bird as being « really » red even if it is painted white all over. A kitchen table, on the other hand, is red even if it is only painted red, and even if its « natural » color underneath the paint is, say, white. Morever, for a table to be red only its upper surface needs to be red, but not necessarily its legs and its bottom surface. Similarly, a red apple, as Quine pointed out, needs to be red only on the outside, but a red hat needs to be red only in its external upper surface, a red crystal is red both inside and outside, and a red watermelon is red only inside. For a book to be red is for its cover but not necessarily for its inner pages to be mostly red, while for a newspaper to be red is for all of its pages to be red. For a house to be red is for its outside walls, but not necessarily its roof (and windows and door) to be mostly red, while a red car must be red in its external surface including its roof (but not its windows, wheels, bumper, etc.). A red star only needs to appear red from the earth, a red glaze needs to be red only after it is fired, and a red mist or a red powder are red not simply inside or ouside. A red pen need not even have any red part (the ink may turn red only when in contact with the paper). In short, what counts for one type of thing to be red is not what counts for another.’ (Lahav, 1989 : 264)

Lahav, Ron (1989). 'Against Compositionality: the Case of Adjectives', Philosophical Studies, 57 : 261-79.

Of course there is a significant difference between, on the one hand, the peach example and the recent use of the red apple example, and, on the other hand, Quine and Lahav's point. The recent debate is over the point that (e.g.) 'red apple' may be used to mean different things, while the older quotations argue that 'red' in 'red apple' means something different from 'red' in 'red book' etc.

Thought, interpretation and communication

2011-08-21T13:59:00.003+01:00

My teaching this term. How do we communicate? How can we know whether to believe what someone tells us? Finally, how are these questions connected?

An introduction to the Gricean programme in philosophy of language and pragmatics, then an introduction to the topic of 'testimony' in epistemology. Finally a look at some of the latest research on 'epistemic vigilance', which brings these two areas (and more) together.

The course handout.

Conference on the development of pragmatic abilities in children

2011-08-16T20:58:00.001+01:00

In Oslo. I think this is going to be very interesting. (I'm one of the local organisers, which is a privilege, but expect to be mainly an interested spectator.) Here's the description:

The last ten to fifteen years have seen a rapid proliferation of research on the development of the communicative capacity in children and its interaction with the development of other metarepresentational capacities such as those for mindreading, argumentation and epistemic vigilance. The aim of this workshop is to take stock of this research and consider some of its implications for theories of pragmatics and metarepresentation. We have therefore invited speakers working on development from a variety of theoretical perspectives, including those of Tomasello (2008), Csibra & Gergely (2009) and relevance theory (e.g. Sperber & Wilson 2002, Carston 2002), to present some of their research and to consider its implications for theories of communication and for the relation between communicative abilities and other types of metarepresentational capacity.

There are more details, including names of speakers, at the conference website. The programme will follow soon.

Edited to add: it is open to all, and there is no charge.

Chekhov egregiously twitted

2011-08-12T19:13:00.002+01:00

Adam Roberts on deliberate massive flouting of Chekhov's law of relevance (in the first part of the novel 2666 by Roberto Bolaño):

The most striking thing about Bolaño’s style is what you might call its egregious twitting of the Chekov principle. If Bolaño were to have a character hammer a nail into the wall at the beginning of Act 1 not only would the character not hang himself upon it at the end of Act 3, but he would spend Act 1 hammering nails all over the place, selling his hammer to a character who never appears again, describing elaborately detailed but wholly oblique dreams, observing, doing and thinking a blizzard of things that seem to have no relationship to the larger pattern.
[…]
[a] broken toilet is mentioned […] several times, and Pelletier even has a detailed dream about it. Is it relevant? Does it, perhaps, symbolize something important about this tale, about waste, about shit, about gaping absences […] ? Or is it just another element in a shifting mosaic of data, some relevant, most not, because that’s what the world is actually like? The problem with Chekov’s nail is that, once you’re aware of the principle, it constrains the audience’s response: like a whodunit in which there are only two characters, it closes down your interpretive options. Bolaño works hard against that.

Cheap airline ticket offers inquiry

2011-08-08T09:39:00.002+01:00

My parser/language faculty misparsed this classic bit of (British) headlinese this morning. Three reasons: the noun pileup stack atrocity, that 'offers' can be a verb, that I haven't had coffee yet.

Then I could feel some sort of pragmatic assessment kicking in. Wait, tickets don't offer things. But they might metaphorically. But not inquiries. And it snapped into place.

(From the Guardian frontpage this morning. And I got there before language log.)

I realized she meant for me to get in out of the rain

2011-08-06T16:08:00.000+01:00

From A Farewell to Arms:

"Good-by," I said. I stepped out into the rain and the carriage started. Catherine leaned out and I saw her face in the light. She smiled and waved. The carriage went up the street, Catherine pointed in toward the archway. I looked, there were only the two carabinieri and the archway. I realized she meant for me to get in out of the rain. (Book II, Ch. 24)

Just a nice example that demonstrates that non-verbal communication is inferential (not very controversial) and that part of what has to be inferred is illocutionary force (probably more controversial).

If that is too cryptic, consider this question: What does Catherine mean by pointing? What might Frederic have initially thought she meant?

Argumentics: excellent blog on pragmatics and argumentation theory

2011-04-22T14:21:00.000+01:00

Argumentics has only been around since late 2009 and already has over 200 posts. I don't know who writes them (I can't recognise him/her from the profile photo -- see below) but he/she really knows his/her stuff, and can explain it well too. Two highlights:

The pragmatics of what is said

Ljubljana meets Ducrot

Mr/Ms Argumentics

More recently there is coverage of formal semantics, with a propositional logic quiz, and lovely explanations of lambda and higher order types.

This post is as good as itself

2011-04-19T08:59:00.013+01:00

A post on the Guardian sports blog contains two new types of tautology.

In work on tautologies, in philosophy/semantics/pragmatics, it's normal to give examples like 'War is war', 'Boys will be boys', 'If it rains, it rains', and 'Either he'll come or he won't'. It's also normal to point out that tautologies can have these forms:

Equative: e is e; an e is an e
Conditional: If P then P
Disjunctive: Either P or not P

It's not so easy to think of tautologies that have forms not on this short list (of course with a bit of propositional logic you can come up with as many tautological forms as you like, but what we're after here are sentences that someone might actually produce).

The new examples are after the jump.

Here are the two novel tautologies:

This game was as good as itself.

Sachin, and only Sachin, is Sachin.

The tautologies here have these forms:

e is as a as itself
Only n is n

(Where e: term that refers to an entity; a: adjective; n: proper name)

We have to make an assumption about the semantics of proper names to see the second type as a tautology, but it's a very plausible assumption: that, in natural language, proper names refer uniquely. There are many people called Sachin (for some reason the name has been very popular since around 1990) but still it's true that only Sachin is Sachin and it's hard to see how it could ever be false.

Tautologies, like any other utterance, (outside of linguistic bughunting like this) are uttered with the intention of communicating something, of course. But what?

Tautologies present a puzzle for pragmatic theory. Since tautologies are necessarily true it is hard to see how uttering one can be informative, relevant or cooperative. Yet people do utter tautologies and are understood. (From my Key Terms book once again.)

Tautologies can convey various different things. 'War is war' seems to imply that certain aspects of warfare are inevitable, and 'boys will be boys' works similarly. There's often a different implicature: the thing under discussion is good enough for the task at hand, as in the following dialogue:

Archie: Can I borrow your pen?
Brenda: Here you are. It’s only a biro, though.
Archie: A pen is a pen. (ibid.)

Is there any underlying unity?

I put something that I've heard Deirdre Wilson say into my entry on tautology:

One thing that all interpretations of tautological utterances might have in common is that they serve as reminders of facts already known: that war is terrible; that pens are writing instruments, etc.
(ibid.)

How about the new examples?

It looks as though the observation holds up pretty well.

'Only Sachin is Sachin' is meant as a reminder to the reader (who is assumed to know, and agree) that Tendulkar has attributes that no other cricketer possesses. Here's the whole paragraph: "Sachin, and only Sachin, is Sachin: talk about big, big man-love, I come over all unnecessary just thinking about the possibility that he may, one day, retire... The thing is, he can do this stuff at the drop of the hat, whenver the mood is on him."

"This game was as good as itself' is a bit harder to understand, but is also meant as a reminder: this game has certain properties-- and therefore don't get confused by, or carried away with, comparisons to other games. The conntext makes that clear:

Comparisons are, of course, odious … . There have been plenty of other wonderful games, their place in history and our hearts assured. This game was as good as itself, and that was as good as the millions watching round the world thought it was - i.e. pretty damned bloody good.

Of course, there's no way I'm leaving this subject without linking to xkcd's 'Tautology Club'.

New tense discovered by The China Post!

2011-04-17T10:01:00.004+01:00

the singular tense!

For the (shabby political) background see this post on my other blog.

Dromiceiomimus explains exclusive-we

2011-04-15T11:52:00.011+01:00

... better than me?? Here's her explanation.

Here's mine:

Number and person [on pronouns] interact in interesting ways. One example is the first person plural (‘we’/’us’), which usually picks up from context a set containing the speaker and sometimes but not always containing the hearer too. Some languages mark this inclusive-we/exclusive-we distinction linguistically, either on the verb, or with different forms of the pronoun. For example in Taiwanese, ‘góan’ means we-excluding-you and ‘lán’ means we-including-you. (Allott 2010, p. 57)

T-rex's exclusive-you is not, as far as I know, lexicalised or otherwise encoded in any language, and, not unconnectedy, I suspect, it seems impossible to use 'you' to communicate it.

Allott, N. (2010). Key Terms in Pragmatics. Continuum.

2010-10-25T16:12:00.007+01:00

Today's XKCD is really about pragmatics, I think, given that ‘constructive and helpful’ is a pretty good synonym for ‘relevant’.

There are a lot of other XKCDs that are really about pragmatics. One day I'll post a list.

This is really reality

2010-10-25T10:10:00.002+01:00

Richard Branson, philosopher:

People are beginning to believe now. I think the drop flight two weeks ago, which went beautifully, I think it made people sit up and realize this is really reality.

(He was talking about his commercial program to put people into Earth orbit: source.)

If you aren't dead, this is a relevance conditional

2010-10-05T18:51:00.014+01:00

There's an lovely relevance (or biscuit) conditional in the latest edition of BBC Radio's More or Less, a programme about statistics. It's in the programme broadcast on 1st October 2010, currently available here, and eventually to be archived here.

The sentence uttered:
If you are still alive, that was Matt Parker, the stand-up mathematician.

The context:

Introducing a guest item about the risks of death associated with different activities, the host announces that “there is a 0.00003 % chance that you will die while listening to Matt's essay.” (This is at about 20:40 minutes into the programme.) At the end of the essay (around 24:00), the host picks up again with the sentence quoted above.

What does it mean to say that this is a relevance conditional? Well, the way that the sentence is used here, it is clear that the main clause of the conditional (‘that was Matt Parker, the stand-up mathematician’) is true regardless of whether the proposition given by the if-clause ‘you are still alive’ is true or false. So it is more like the second group of examples below than the first, or the third, and like the other relevance conditionals it sounds very odd indeed if you put then in:

?? If you are still alive, then that was Matt Parker, the stand-up mathematician.

Normal (hypothetical) conditionals

If you heat water, (then) it boils.
If John has restocked it, (then) there’s beer in the fridge.

Relevance conditionals

If I may be honest, (??then) you are not looking good.
If you are thirsty, (??then) there’s beer in the fridge.

Factual conditionals

If it is stupid (then) you shouldn’t bother with it.

If he’s so smart (then) why isn’t he rich?

These examples and the labels for the different uses of conditionals (they are not really different types*) are from Bhatt, R. & Pancheva, R. (2006). Conditionals. In M. Everaert & H. C. van Riemsdijk (Eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Syntax. (pp. 639–687). Oxford: Blackwell.

Why the alternate name, biscuit conditionals? That is what philosophers usually call them, following J.L. Austin's example:

There are biscuits on the sideboard if you want some.

(from p 212 of Austin, J.L. (1970) Ifs and cans. In Philosophical Papers, 2nd ed. London: Oxford University Press: 205–232.)

There is a post on relevance conditionals at Language Log, if you want to know more, with excellent references to the recent scholarly literature.

*Since (e.g.) there might be circumstances in which your being thirsty causes** there to be beer in the fridge (or vice versa***) and in those cases an utterance of “If you are thirsty, (then) there’s beer in the fridge,” will express a ~~factual~~ normal, i.e. hypothetical conditional. See p 406 of DeRose, K. & Grandy, R. E. (1999). Conditional assertions and ‘biscuit’ conditionals. Noûs, 33(3), 405-420.

**Other relations than causality are possible, but that is a topic for another post...

***For example, we know that Smith puts salt in your drinking water sometimes and this makes you thirsty (but you never get thirsty otherwise). We also know that he only does this if he knows that there is beer in the fridge. Then we have good grounds to think that it is true to say “If you are thirsty, (then) there’s beer in the fridge.”

Cricket, pragmatics and denial

2010-08-30T09:34:00.005+01:00

The Guardian has run a story about allegations against members of the Pakistan cricket team that they took money to bowl no-balls – with the headline, ‘Pakistan captain Salman Butt denies any wrongdoing over ‘spot-fixing’’.

What Salman Butt actually said when asked about the allegations (transcript) (video) included: “These are just allegations and anybody can stand out and say anything about you, doesn’t make them true,” and “There’s nothing that I have seen that involves me”. This is not denial of the allegations. It can’t be, because the truth of these statements (and the rest of what he said) is compatible with the truth of what is alleged. (‘involves’ is a vague word and Butt himself isn’t in the News of the World’s videos and, not being a bowler, did not bowl any of the three no-balls at issue).

The Guardian has taken Butt to have implicated denial, but I don’t think that’s correct. I think he was measuring his words carefully so as not to commit himself. Bloggers have understood this.

What should the headline have been? Pakistan captain Salman Butt fails to deny ‘spot-fixing’’. That was the news story.

I’m not going to comment on the Pakistan manager’s interesting claim in the same press conference that, “No allegations are true till they proved either way,” beyond saying that some heavy-duty pragmatics is involved in getting to an interpretation that makes any kind of sense. Either that or he’s into some pretty serious relativism about truth...

Honourable Mr Elephant: Translating honorifics

2010-08-11T19:02:00.005+01:00

Reading an interesting review of Shipwreck (or Shipwrecks) (破船 ha sen) by Yoshimura Akira (吉村昭) got me thinking about the meaning of honorifics and about translation.

The reviewer doesn’t say this (and nor do the other reviews available online), but ‘fune’ in ‘o-fune-sama’ is surely ‘boat’ or ‘ship’: ‘舟’ presumably (although there are other characters that mean ‘ship’ and are pronounced ‘fune’). The honorifics ‘o’ and ‘sama’ indicate something like auspiciousness here, I think, so ‘o-fune-sama’ might be translated as ‘the blessing of a boat’, in the sense of a boat received by the village as a kind of gift from higher forces: from the gods, or fate, say. (Cf. ‘In her ninetieth year, Sarah was surprised and delighted to receive the blessing of a child.’)

Honorifics are notoriously difficult to translate. The translator of Shipwrecks obviously judged that with ‘o-fune-sama’ it was best not to try.

Even when a good translation is possible, it often leaves out the honorific dimension. In most contexts v- and t-forms (e.g. ‘vous’ and ‘tu’) are best just translated as ‘you’, as is Spanish ‘usted’ -- a third-person pronoun used to refer to the addressee -- although in very limited contexts (at a barber’s, a tailor’s, or in a PG Wodehouse story) sir might prefer a more literal translation, hmmn? (Of course, English has other, role-specific, third person-ish honorifics: ‘Your Grace’, ‘Mr. President’.)

Returning to Japanese, ‘o-kane’ is just money, not ‘honourable money’ (while ‘kane’ can sound a bit rough and in some contexts might be best rendered into slang: something like ‘dosh’ or ‘the readies’).This demonstrates that the prefix ‘o-’ is sometimes required for polite speech, particularly for those (like women) who are not thought capable of speaking colloquially and politely at the same time.

But Japanese honorifics are particularly context-sensitive in their effects; they don’t always raise the tone. I suspect everyone has to say ‘kami-sama’ or ‘o-kami-sama’, not bare ‘kami’ (god) – or sound mildly blasphemous. But in other cases honorifics can indicate closeness as much as respect. My favourite example, ‘(o-)zou-san’ (lit. (honourable) Mr elephant) is a phrase used by children, those who speak to children, and those who speak to elephants while children are listening. A friend who speaks much more Japanese than me once suggested that ‘o-furo’ (the normal way of saying ‘bath’, but literally ‘honourable [warm] bath’) should be translated ‘lovely hot bath’.

What is the point of all these observations? Partly reinforcing my preexisting beliefs (prejudices) about translation: it is an art, or an applied science, and not a domain which could ever have its own theory. (One of the main contentions of Ernst-August Gutt’s dissertation on relevance theory and translation: published by Blackwell’s – review in the Journal of Linguistics.) It must be a lot of fun.

But also what might be a novel thought. Resistance to translation (and to paraphrase) is supposed to be typical of procedural meaning, exemplified by so-called discourse connectives like ‘so’, ‘then’ and ‘alors’. And it is easy to see how procedural meaning need not contribute to truth conditions, and it is clear that honorifics usually do not: I might have been wrong to tutoyer you, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t refer to you; and ‘o-kane’ and ‘kane’ surely have the same denotation. Perhaps then the semantics of honorifics is procedural. Surely someone must have said this. Relevance theory and the study of polite speech are both popular with people who study pragmatics in Japan. But I can’t find it on the obvious search terms: relevance theory, procedural meaning, honorifics, keigo.

In any case, I’m not convinced. Some questions of politeness and word choice obviously have nothing to do with word meaning in a narrow sense. That a taboo word is forbidden (and in which contexts, to whom, etc.) is a fact about the social status of that word, not something to explain in terms of its semantics. (Very much pace recently fashionable – but in my view daft – accounts of swear words in terms of ‘conventional implicature’, or ‘presupposition’.) Perhaps the same goes for honorifics. It seems to make sense not to postulate any word meaning for honorifics – given that politeness is not necessarily part of speaker meaning, as Mark Jary pointed out some years ago. I wrote in the entry on politeness in my Key Terms book,

“[It is not clear] whether politeness is communicated. Is a speaker who is being polite necessarily, or even usually expressing politeness as part of her speaker meaning? One view is that in being polite a speaker is mainly trying to avoid any implicatures to do with the speaker-hearer’s relationship, by staying within certain parameters of socially acceptable behaviour.”

Compare this with what Mark proposes: a “Relevance Theoretic account of polite verbal behaviour” which:

“distinguishes cases where politeness is communicated from those where it is not, [and] distinguishes the strategic manipulation of expectations of politeness from cases where politeness emerges from the speaker crafting her utterances in such a way as to avoid making manifest assumptions likely to have a detrimental effect on her long term social aims.”

(Last year when I wrote this I hadn’t read Mark’s paper. I should have known about it, though, and I would have put his paper in the list of further reading at the end of the book. It's a good deal more interesting, in my view, than the references on politeness that I did include.)

Back in business

2010-08-03T12:48:00.003+01:00

I thought it was time I let some air in around here, chased the dust and spiders' webs out, put the mothballs away and so on.

I see that the last time I posted before today was very nearly five years ago. I try to comfort myself by reminding myself that in that time I've finished my PhD, moved to a different university in a different country, written a book and -- oh yes -- got married.

Future posts will follow at intervals shorter than five years. I hope.

The meaning of 'most'

2010-08-03T11:42:00.003+01:00

There is a series of interesting posts on Language Log about the semantics and pragmatics of 'most':

Most and many - Geoff Nunberg

Most examples - Mark Liberman

Most bibliography - Mark Liberman

Does 'most' (in sentences of the form 'Most Xs are Y') have the same truth-conditions as '> 50%', and, if so, how can we explain:

a) the choice of 'many' instead of 'most' in some cases of numerical majority;

b) intuitions that some people have that use of 'most' requires a much larger majority, or some other extra condition?

In the most recent post, there are links to theoretical and experimental papers, most of which endorse the simple-majority semantics. Without being au fait with this literature it seems obvious:

i) that the intuitions reflect pragmatics as well as semantics (e.g in the comments to one of the posts a commentator claims that most means more than half but less than all -- but 'most' is surely compatible with 'all'),

ii) that people often say something a bit weaker than what they know to be the case (without thereby implicating anything, pace Neo-Gricean predictions),

and iii) that the null hypothesis (simple-majority semantics for 'most') looks to be correct. (But perhaps I'm a bit biased by my complete lack of any intuition that 'most' means more than 'more than 50%'.)

For me the most puzzling and interesting point is a kind of side-issue to the original questions. Among the examples found by Mark Liberman, there are some where 'most' is apparently used to pick out the largest of a number of groups, even where that group falls a bit short of being the majority:

Most independents, or 40 percent, said they would vote for Giuliani.

Most (44.5 percent) said that 25-49 percent of students will transfer to a 4-year college.

I find these examples weird. In each case, I'd just say that the sentence is (strictly and literally) false. The alternative, as the commentator Sarang points out, is to say that "Most people did X but most people did not do X" is true in these cases, and my intuition says that that sentence is very bad indeed. My guess is that the sentences in these examples are intended by their utterers as shorthand for this quite different kind of case (but which Liberman groups with these examples), where 'most' is functioning as a superlative morpheme:

There were 42,286 eye accidents reported in private industry in 2002, and the most prevalent (38 percent) type of event involved the eye or eyes being rubbed or abraded by foreign matter.

News, mothballs

2005-10-30T14:56:00.000Z

Regular readers - if there are any - will have been disappointed at the lack of updates and annoyed by the proliferation of spam comments. I have tightened things up so that spurious comments are harder to post and I'll gradually remove the ones that are already here.

As for new posts, I can't promise. I'm trying to get my PhD thesis written, so updates will be infrequent at best. If you use rss, please subscribe to my rss or atom feed so you will see when I do manage a new post without having to check back at the website.

Heuristics

2005-07-22T21:55:00.000+01:00

I've been wondering about how to explain and define heuristics lately. I really like this from an interview with programmer Wil Shipley on drunkenblog:

Shipley: One of the rules of writing algorithms that I've recently been sort of toying with is that we (as programmers) spend too much time trying to find provably correct solutions, when what we need to do is write really fast heuristics that fail incredibly gracefully.

This is almost always how nature works. You don't have to have every cell in your eye working perfectly to be able to see. We can put together images with an incredible amount of damage to the mechanism, because it fails so gracefully and organically.

This is, I am convinced, the next generation of programming, and it's something we're already starting to see: for instance, vision algorithms today are modeled much more closely after the workings of the eye, and are much more successful than they were twenty years ago.

Interviewer: Wait wait wait, can you elaborate on this heuristics bit being the next big thing, because you just bent some people's brains. When I normally think of heuristics in computer science, I think of either "an educated guess" or "good enough".

I.E., a game programmer doesn't have to run out Pi to the Nth degree to calculate the slope of a hill in a physics engine, because they can get something 'good enough' for the screen using a rougher calculation... but hasn't it always been like that out of necessity?

Shipley: Heuristics (the way I'm using them) are basically algorithms that are not guaranteed to get the right answer all the time. Sometimes you can have a heuristic that gets you something close to the answer, and you (as the programmer) say, "This is close enough for government work."

This is a very old trick of programming, and it's a very powerful one on its own. Trying to make algorithms that never fail, and proving that they can never fail, is an entire branch of computer science and frankly one that I think is a dead end. Because that's not the way the world works.

When you look at biological systems, they are usually perfect machines; they have all these heuristics to deal with a variety of situations (hey, our core temperature is too hot, let's release sweat, which should cool us off) but none of them are anywhere near provably correct in all circumstances (hey, we're actually submerged in hot water, so sweat isn't effective in cooling us off). But they're good enough, and they fail gracefully.

You don't die immediately if sweating fails to cool you; you just grow uncomfortable and have to make a conscious response (hey, I think I'll get out of this hot tub now).

Programs need to be written this way. In the case of reading bar codes, you don't care if you read garbage a thousand times a second. It doesn't hurt you. If you write an algorithm that looks for barcodes everywhere in the image, even in the sky or in a face or a cup of coffee, it's not going to hurt anything. Eventually the user will hold up a valid barcode, it'll read it, the checksum will verify, and you're in business.

And the barcode recognizer doesn't have to understand every conceivable way a barcode can be screwed up. If the lighting is totally wrong, or the barcode is moving, the user has to take conscious action and, like, tilt the book differently or hold it still. But this kind of feedback is immediately evident, and it's totally natural.

Because I can try 1,000 times a second, I can give immediate feedback on whether I have a good enough image or not, so the user doesn't, like, take a picture, hold her breath for four seconds, have the software go "WRONG," try adjusting the book, take another picture, hold her breath...

Humans are incredibly good at trying new and random things when they get instant feedback. It's the basis of all learning for us, and it's an absolutely fundamental rule of UI design. (This is also the basis of the movement away from having modal dialogs that pop up and say, "Hey, you pressed a bad key!" If you have to pause and read and dismiss the dialog, the lesson you get is, "Stop trying to learn this program," not, "Try a different key."

The Mac and NeXTstep were pioneers in getting this right -- just beep if the user hits a wrong key, so if she wants she can lean on the whole keyboard and see if ANY keys are valid, and there's no punishment phase for it.)

...

Read the complete interview

If it isn't clear what all this has to do with pragmatics, wait for my PhD thesis...

definition of grice

2005-05-11T11:29:00.000+01:00

In the post at logicandlanguage about Harman (see previous post here), I found a link to the Philosophical Lexicon, which defines grice thus:

grice, n. Conceptual intricacy.
"His examination of Hume is distinguished by
erudition and grice." Hence, griceful, adj.
and griceless, adj. "An obvious and griceless
polemic." pl. grouse: A multiplicity of
grice, fragmenting into great details, often in reply to
an original grice note.

Harman, inference and implication

2005-05-11T11:22:00.000+01:00

Apologies for the long pause. Normal service -- whatever that might be-- is hereby resumed.

The third term is here. No teaching, so I should be dealing with a huge pile of marking and working on my PhD.

Does reading blog posts about the difference between inference and implication count?

Gillian at logicandlanguage.net comments on a point that Gilbert Harman makes in the first chapter of Change in View -- and which has been in the back of my mind all through working on my PhD:

When I was a graduate student at Princeton (many days ago), we used to joke that Gilbert Harman had only three kinds of question for visiting speakers:

Aren't you ignoring < insert recent result in psychology >?

Aren't you assuming that there is an analytic/synthetic distincton?

So you say, < insert one of the speaker's claims >, but isn't that just conflating inference and implication?

...The following claims are ubiquitous and false:

Logic is the study of the principles of reasoning.

Logic tells you what you should infer from what you already believe.

Each overstates the responsibilities of logic, which is the study of what follows from what - implication relations between interpreted sentences; one can know the implication relations between sentences without knowing how to update one's beliefs.

Suppose, for example, that S believes the content of the sentences A and B, and comes to realise that they logically imply C. Does it follow that she should believe the content of C? No. Here are two counterexamples:

1. Suppose C is a contradiction. Then she should not accept it. What should she do instead? Perhaps give up belief in one of the premises, but which one? Logic does not answer the question - as we know from prolonged study of paradoxes - because logic only speaks of implication relations, not about belief revision.

2. Suppose she already believes not-C. Then she might make her beliefs consistent by giving up one of the premises, or by giving up not-C. Or she might suspend belief in all of the propositions and resolve to investigate the matter further at a later date.

Hence these questions about inference and belief revision - about what she should believe given i) what she already believes and ii) facts about implication - go beyond what logic will decide. That's not to say that logic is never relevant to reasoning or belief revision, but it isn't the science of reasoning and belief revision. It's the science of implication relations.

Convinced? Gil has a short and very clear discussion of this, and the pernicious consequences of ignoring it, in the second section of his new paper (co-authored with Sanjeev Kulkarni) for the Rutger's Epistemology conference.

Bush joke

2004-10-20T17:50:00.000+01:00

This post is not directly related to relevance theory, but it does contain a good joke. In a previous version of this post, I broke with scholarly neutrality for these reasons. It would have made a considerable difference, and it's difficult to keep quiet about these things and stick to academic work when you are wondering if war or the destruction of the environment will end human civilisation first.

From William Gibson's blog:

President Bush goes to an elementary school to talk about the war.
After his talk, he offers to answer questions. One little boy puts up his hand and the president asks him his name.
"I'm Billy, sir."
"And what's your question, Billy?"
"I have three questions, sir. Why did the US invade Iraq without the support of the UN? Why are you President when Al Gore got more votes? And whatever happened to Osama Bin Laden?"
Just then the bell rings for recess. Bush announces that they'll continue after recess.
When they return, Bush asks, "OK, where were we? Question time! Who has a question?"
Another little boy raises his hand. The president asks his name.
"I'm Steve, sir."
"And what's your question, Steve?"
"I have five questions, sir. Why did the US invade Iraq without the support of the UN? Why are you President when Al Gore got more votes? Whatever happened to Osama Bin Laden? Why did the recess bell go off twenty minutes early? And what the heck happened to Billy?"

If you want overtly political stuff, go to my other blog. I'll keep politics out of this one from now on.

New papers relevant to relevance

2004-10-06T19:27:00.000+01:00

Here are the latest additions to the online RT bibliography, courtesy of Franscisco Yus' posting to the relevance mailing list.

Andone, C. 2003) "Argumentative values of but in the discourse of economics." British and American Studies (Revista de Studii Britanice si Americane) 9: 211-218.

Escuder, A. (1996) "Relevance and translation in writing about environment." Georgica 4: 335-344.

Figueras Solanilla, C. (2002) "La jerarquia de la accesibilidad de las expresiones referenciales en español." Revista Española de Lingüística 32(1): 53-96.

Goerling, F. (1996) "Relevance and transculturation." Notes on Translation 10(3): 49-57.

Gutt, E.-A. (forthcoming) "Relevance-theoretic approaches to translation." In: Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (2nd edition). Ed. K. Brown. Amsterdam: Elsevier.

Kempf, S. (2000) "Who told the truth?" Notes on Translation 14(1): 34-46.

Meunier, J.-P. (1994) "Quelques aspects de l'evolution des theories de la communication: De la signification a la cognition." Degres 79-80: k1-k16.

Moeschler, J. (2004) "Intercultural pragmatics: A cognitive approach." Intercultural Pragmatics 1(1): 49-70.
http://www.degruyter.de/journals/intcultpragm/pdf/1_49.pdf

Murillo, S. (2004) "A relevance reassessment of reformulation markers." Journal of Pragmatics 36(11): 2059-2068.
(updated reference)

Pilkington, A. (2001) "Non-lexicalised concepts and degrees of effability: Poetic thoughts and the attraction of what is not in the dictionary." Belgian journal of Linguistics 15: 1-10.

Ram, A. (1990) "Knowledge goals: A theory of interestingness." In: Proceedings of the 12th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Cambridge, MA, August.
Available here

Recanati, F. (2003b) "Embedded implicatures." Philosophical Perspectives 17(1): 299-332.
Adobe Acrobat format:
http://www.bol.ucla.edu/~schlenke/Recanati-Embedded.pdf
Rich Text format:
Available here

Schank, R.C. (1979) "Interestingness: Controlling inferences." Artificial Intelligence 12: 273-297.

Silva, F.-A. (1996) "Lancando anzois: Uma analise cognitiva de processos mentais em traduçao." Revista de Estudos da Linguagem (RevEL) 4(2): 71-90.

Storto, L. (2004) "Review of F. Recanati's Literal Meaning." The Linguist List 15.2535, 11-9-2004.
http://linguistlist.org/issues/15/15-2535.html

Yus, F. (forthcoming) "Relevance theory." In: Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (2nd edition). Ed. K. Brown. Amsterdam: Elsevier.

Ziv, Y. (1996b) "Pronominal reference to inferred antecedents." Belgian Journal of Linguistics 10: 55-67..

Meany

2004-09-30T19:03:00.000+01:00

Arnold Zwicky, commenting on six inclusions in Richard Horsey's '101 Key Ideas in Linguistics', writes [see my item on this blog a few weeks ago, for a link to the original Zwicky post - Nick] :

"Ok, here's Horsey's list, in alphabetical order: Leonard Bloomfield, Noam Chomsky, Gottlob Frege, H. Paul Grice, Roman Jakobson, and Ferdinand de Saussure? Frege and Grice are the surprises, of course. Getting the other four is no great feat, but if you got both of these names, then you definitely have a Horsey take on things, and you get a dinner."

Well, I'm afraid I'm busy tonight, and I can think of better people to argue for the inclusion of Frege, but I do think Mr. Zwicky's being a bit of a meany begrudging a mention for Grice. Indeed, it seems to me that Grice's contributions to linguistics (via pragmatics)--not forgetting his contributions to the philosophy of language, and the influence this work has had on modern-day psychology and even cognitive science--make him pretty hard (not to say impossible) to leave out.

I wonder why Grice's importance is over-looked so often. I never met him, but he does seem to have been a fairly diffident chap. Perhaps that somehow lingers in his legacy. His ground-breaking paper 'Meaning', for example, was written in 1948, but Grice didn't deem it worthy of publication. Reliable reports (from Richards Grandy and Warner, two people who worked closely with Grice in his later years) have it that Peter Strawson had the article typed out (9 years later) and then submitted it without his knowledge, only informing him once it had been accepted.

Much of Grice's work was, quite simply, ahead of its time. Philosophers of language and pragmatists continue to build on the foundations he laid (still, perhaps, underestimating the extent of those foundations - more excavation required...). I recall psychologist Alan Leslie revealing at a workshop in Oxford a few years ago that it was 'Meaning' (1948, 1957) that sparked his interest in belief-desire psychology. Many of Grice's ideas on reason and rationality are reflected (not to say retrospectively endorsed) in recent work in cognitive science. Moreover, a forthcoming paper by Michael Tomasello and colleagues suggests that it was 'shared intentionality' and 'cooperation' that were the central factors in the evolution of human cognition. I must say that makes a nice change from cheating, deceiving and outmaneuvering (of which there's enough around at the moment).

Cooperative principle anyone?

(By Tim, despite what it says below.)

Update of RT bibliography

2004-07-30T20:03:00.000+01:00

Francisco Yus has emailed the relevance list with additions to his online RT bibliography. Some of the papers are available online, including an article on relevance and conspiracy theories, which I will read and report back on (unless mysterious forces intervene), a Sperber and Wilson, a Wilson, and a Wilson and Sperber.

Casacuberta, D. and C. Figueras (1999) "The R files: applying relevance model to conspiracy theory fallacies." Journal of English Studies 1: 45-55.
Available here

Sperber, D. and D. Wilson (1990b) "Rhetoric and relevance." In: The Ends of Rhetoric: History, Theory, Practice. Eds. J. Bender and D. Wellbery. Stanford, C.A.: Stanford University Press, 140-156.=20
Available here

Wilson, D. (1994) "Relevance and understanding." In: Language and Understanding. Eds. G. Brown, K. Malmkj=E6r, A. Pollit and J. Williams. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 35-58.
Available here

Wilson, D. and D. Sperber (1998b) "Mood and the analysis of non-declarative sentences." In Pragmatics: Critical Concepts Vol. II. Ed. A. Kasher. London: Routlesge, 262-289.
Available here

I'm also intrigued by Vlad ?egarac's paper "Relevance theory and the in second language acquisition" in the current issue of Second Language Research (20(3): 193-211) but UCL doesn't take this journal, so whether I get to look at it probably depends on whether I can muster the energy to walk across Bloomsbury to Birkbeck or the Institute of Education and meet a whole new set of librarians. It's a lot to ask for something that's very far from what I'm supposed to be working on.

Review of Pilkington's Poetic Effects; Livnat on irony

2004-07-28T20:20:00.000+01:00

The new issue of Pragmatics & Cognition (2004, Volume 12, Issue 1) has a paper by Zohar Livnat: On verbal irony, meta-linguistic knowledge and echoic interpretation and a review of Adrian Pilkington's Poetic Effects: A Relevance Theory Perspective by Motti Benari.

You can get the papers online if you have access to a university subscription to Athens or one of those services. UCL has, luckily.

I've read the review of Pilkington's book and I think it shows some serious misunderstandings of relevance theory or Adrian Pilkington's interpretation of it. The introduction is really good though. I'll post some of my thoughts if I have time later.

Quantification papers

2004-07-26T22:28:00.000+01:00

There's been a fantastic run of draft papers on quantification and (formal) semantics available via semantics etc.:

a review article covering generalised quantifiers from a philosophical perspective by Michael Glanzberg
the slides for a talk Angelika Kratzer gave this summer arguing for hidden situation variables where Stanley and Szabo want hidden variables - and elsewhere besides
Bart Geurts arguing that:
Conditional sentences with quantifying expressions are systematically ambiguous. In one reading, the if -clause restricts the domain of the overt quantifier; in the other, the if -clause restricts the domain of a covert quantifier, which defaults to epistemic necessity.
and Geurts again on why unary quantification is fine for most, often etc. if you use Belnap-style conditional assertion.

Very useful for me, since Hiroyuki Uchida and I are thinking of running our informal formal semantics course next year on quantification. Now all I have to do is understand it all...

test - posting with ecto

2004-07-23T17:52:00.000+01:00

this post was generated by ecto, a lovely piece of software for managing blogs.
If you post a lot it will save a lot of time - or at least allow you to generate more posts in the same ludicrously long time you already spend online. It's cheap shareware with fantastic support - the author emailed me back within minutes to answer some questions I had.
It's available for Mac OS X and now for Windows - you get the message... (I have no ulterior motive for this, shares in the company... I'm just really pleased with ecto and, particularly, the support.)

Chekhov's law of relevance

2004-07-19T23:46:00.000+01:00

This post is a response to an Emergency call for the pragmatics police by Mark Liberman on Language Log.

There's a story today in the New York Times about a planned "major expansion of the city's information hot line, 311, ... undertaken just in time to help thousands of visitors to the Republican National Convention next month navigate the city by simply picking up a phone". Terrific, but can somebody tell me why the picture that runs with the story -- at least in the online edition -- shows a sign on the wall in Yiddish?

There must be a journalistic variant of the famous Chekhovian law of relevance for suggestive details in literature, two versions of which are:
"One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it." ---Letter to A. S. Lazarev-Gruzinsky, Nov. 1, 1889.
"If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it must absolutely go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there." --- from the Memoirs of Shchukin (1911)
Let me propose a journalistic lemma: one must not put a foreign-language sign on the wall in a picture of an American municipal office, if the story is not going to comment on it. If it's not going to be mentioned, it shouldn't be hanging there.

What interested me about this is that it seems that Chekhov's law might be derivable from the communicative principle of relevance with some extra assumptions. All that communicative or pragmatic considerations as such say about the situation according to relevance theory (Liberman only mentions Grice) is that the details of a story should turn out to be relevant enough to have been worth attending to and processing.
It's not clear to me just what is the extra assumption that Chekhov needs to derive his law. Whatever it is, Chekhov's law presumably only applies to certain styles of writing, as contributors to the thread on Chekhov's law seem to discuss:

Of some note in this regard is the opera "The Abduction of Figaro" by P.D.Q. Bach, in which three separate characters, at various points in the action, wave guns around, but never fire them.

(On the other hand, one of them does toss a hand-grenade...)

Ok, I can't let this thread go by withoug mentioning that Gogol (who died before Chekhov was born) was a great writer because he violated this rule. I can't think off-hand of an example in his plays, but the first few paragraphs of "Dead Souls" is spent describing in detail the appearance of a youn man coming out of a tavern, down to the style of pin and type of embroidery in his clothes. This person is never seen again and has nothing to do with the story at all.

And the modern author, Vladimir Voinovich, in tribute to Gogol and thumbing his nose at Chekhov, made sure he pointed out a shotgun, foreshadowed it heavily, only to have it fail to fire at the critical moment in The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin.

On the other hand, all of these might be seen as examples of deilberate flouting of expectations to create comic infelicity, so there's perhaps no example here of literature entirely outside of Chekhov's law. Still, it seems to me that it can't be reasonable for journalists to remove real details that fail to conform with our (stereotypical) expectations: life is richer in details than we expect, perhaps, and I don't think we need to be protected from that.

Robert Quine was W. V. O. Quine's nephew!

2004-07-03T18:59:00.000+01:00

I found this out reading this Guardian obituary of Robert Quine, great punk guitarist, who died around May 31st.
Richard Hell's fierce, beautiful elegy in the New York Metro confirms it.

I've learned such different things from the Quines; it's really odd for me to find out that they were related, especially now, although I don't see that it makes any difference to anything.

I guess if you're reading this you'll know all about W.V.O., but maybe not about Robert Quine. As Richard Hell says:

His command of technique came from endless hours of studying the records that moved him — but it was the combination of rage and delicacy, and the pure monstrosity of invention, that set him apart.

I particularly recommend his playing on John Zorn's soundtrack for the film White and Lazy (on John Zorn Filmworks 1986-1990) as well as the Voidoids albums Blank Generation and Destiny Street. You can read about them on Robert Quine's homepage.

Relevance theorist mentioned on Language Log; priorities questioned

2004-07-03T17:37:00.000+01:00

Richard Horsey's book 101 Key Ideas in Linguistics. London: Hodder & Stoughton. 2001, is mentioned by Arnold Zwicky on Language Log blog.

...six of these 101 Key Ideas in Linguistics aren't ideas at all, but people. Men, in fact. None dead a hundred years now. So this part of the book is really a list of Six Key Men of Twentieth-Century Linguistics.

Now, take out a slip of paper and write down your six nominees for the Key Men of Twentieth-Century Linguistics. No cheating: no checking Horsey's book or peeking ahead in this posting. If anyone, absolutely anyone, playing fair, gets the same list as Horsey, I'll be astonished. In fact, if you manage this feat, e-mail me and I'll take you out to dinner at the next conference we're both at.

Ok, here's Horsey's list, in alphabetical order: Leonard Bloomfield, Noam Chomsky, Gottlob Frege, H. Paul Grice, Roman Jakobson, and Ferdinand de Saussure. "Sapir-Whorf hypothesis" gets an entry, but Horsey gives no biographical data on either man, nor any discussion of their intellectual contributions beyond the SWH, so they don't count.

Frege and Grice are the surprises, of course. Getting the other four is no great feat, but if you got both of these names, then you definitely have a Horsey take on things, and you get a dinner.

I got Grice, of course, just after Chomsky - it was the rest of the list I had trouble with. Frege and de Saussure seem to me more 19th than 20th century, since their major work was mostly done by 1900, I think. And what did Bloomfield and Jakobson do again?

I guess that Richard's 'take on things' is a relevance theory perspective, with Jakobson, Bloomfield and de Saussure thrown in to keep the publisher happy.

My list would keep Chomsky and Grice and add Richard Montague. I'm not sure who to add after that: Austin, perhaps, or Bertrand Russell. Or some current practitioners other than Chomsky (who has been canonized in his lifetime) - but then it's very hard to choose just a few.

Disclaimer - I wouldn't want anyone to take these comments too seriously; I'm hardly in a position to judge the importance of linguists outside pragmatics and semantics. In fact as as a pragmatist, I wouldn't claim to be a linguist at all, but that's a debate for another time. And anyway, assembling best of... lists is hardly a serious pursuit.

Death of Stuart Hampshire

2004-06-17T17:15:00.000+01:00

The philosopher Stuart Hampshire died on June 13th. According to this obituary he was highly regarded as a moral philosopher. I'm not qualified to comment, but he was clearly an important member of the loose group of philosophers at Oxford including Austin and, particularly, Grice, that a lot of pragmatics has its roots in. (Some other names are mentioned in this post in the Relevance list archives.)

In Grice's Aspects of Reason Hampshire makes a cameo appearance as "the hapless Shropshire in Chapter 1 who "reasons" in one quick step from the premiss that chickens run around after their heads are cut off to the conclusion that the human soul is immortal." as Richard Warner puts it in his introduction (available as a pdf here).

Grice was making a serious point: it's not good enough - if we aim to define reasoning (or good reasoning) to count all cases like Shropshire's "argument" where the conclusion follows from the stated premise plus a number of unstated premises. On the other hand, we want to count some such cases - there are plenty of good arguments in which the conclusion only follows from the stated (or mentally entertained) premise or premises when they are combined with unstated (or non-entertained) premises. Grice certainly didn't want to have a definition of reasoning which excluded these cases.

One important consequence of this for Grice's pragmatics is the way it bears on the debate about whether conversational implicatures are always calculated by explicit reasoning or, at least sometimes, via heuristics or shortcuts.
The discussion around the Shropshire example in Aspects of Reason suggests that Grice could choose both options simultaneously: the derivation of a conversational implicature need not be thought through on any particular occasion to count as having been produced by (sound) reasoning, since in general, sound reasoning does not involve consciously entertaining all of the steps in a logical derivation.
Therefore (and not coincidentally) the criterion in Aspects... for sound reasoning ends up being very similar to the idea that conversational implicatures have to be derivable from what is said plus other premises, so a rational reconstruction should always succeed. What the discussion of Shropshire adds to this is that not just any proposition is to be allowed as an unarticulated premise in this kind of reconstruction. It is one of the central problems of pragmatics to explain which extra premises are allowed in which cases.

Richard Breheny comes back to UCL

2004-06-17T16:27:00.000+01:00

My department has appointed Richard Breheny to a lectureship. He'll be here from January 2005, making it three relevance theory lecturers in the department (plus a post-doc). I would imagine he'll be teaching courses on language acquisition, psycholinguistics and semantics as well as pragmatics.
Richard did his PhD here, with Deirdre Wilson as his supervisor, then joined RCEAL at Cambridge.

Jackendoff talk: semantics must be generative

2004-06-06T14:54:00.000+01:00

On Friday (4th) I heard Ray Jackendoff give the keynote lecture at a conference organised by the UCL Centre for Human Communication which my department (UCL Phonetics and Linguistics) is part of (in some way I don't understand).

What he said may not be news to anyone else, but I hadn't heard it, not having read any of his recent stuff, except the bits about music.

Broadly, he thinks that mainstream - ie Chomskyan - linguistics is on the wrong track by supposing that syntax is the only generative component needed in the grammar, so that phonology and semantics need only interpret the output from syntax.

On the phonology side, he thinks that auto-segmental phonology is on the right track, since it is a separate generative system with a 'dirty connection' to syntax, in the sense that there is no one-to-one mapping between phonological and syntactic structure.

Jackendoff wants to treat semantics in the same way, as an independent generative component, linked with syntax, and - separately - with phonology, by constraints, not isomorphic mappings.

This has a number of interesting consequences, one of which is that words become constraints across components of the language faculty, which seems like a neat idea. Another is that in the evolution of language, syntax might have come last to mediate a previously direct link between rich conceptual structure and phonology, rather than first as Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch (2002) seem to propose.

I'm with Jackendoff on the last point - it doesn't make sense to me that recursion would develop first in syntax to link a conceptual system with a sound system, because a conceptual system without recursion wouldn't be worth linking with anything. If you couldn't think, you wouldn't have anything to say.

But I don't think agreeing with this commits anyone to Jackendoff's position. It seems to me that he assumes that anything (or, presumably, anything propositional) that you can think must be representable in linguistic semantics. But that doesn't seem right. All that you can really say is that anything (propositional) you can think must be representable in the Language of Thought (assuming there is such a thing). The semantics of sentences, on the other hand, are notoriously underspecified relative to the Language of Thought, and if Sperber and Wilson's recent work is right, the same goes for the semantics of lexical items. (Since the contribution a lexical item ends up making to the propostion expressed by an utterance will generally be an ad hoc concept reached by narrowing and/or broadening the concept encoded by the lexical item.)

So it's perfectly consistent to think that we need to have a richly structured conceptual system for propositional thought, and that some parts of this must predate a structurally rich linguistic syntax (or there would have been nothing for the syntax to express) - without thinking that linguistic semantics needs to be generative in its own right. It could just be read off LF, which seems the simplest assumption.

I'll give one example to try to make this clearer. Jackendoff mentioned Pustejofsky's work on lexical semantics. The basic idea is something like this: You interpret 'begin' differently in 'I began the book' and 'I began the beer' or, say, 'The goat began the book'.
It's clear (I think) that something like this is the case at the level of the thought formed in interpreting utterances of these sentences, but it's a huge (and apparently unjustified) step from there to say that those differences in the meaning of 'begin' should be encoded in the lexical semantics.

Testing

2004-06-06T13:43:00.000+01:00

testing testing
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