The cooperative listener?

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:

1. what expectations hearers have,
2. whether the Cooperative Principle is real/operative,
3. charity in interpretation (perhaps the hearer-side counterpart of cooperation), and
4. 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

Another xkcd about pragmatics.

Speech acts, modals and the first-person perspective

In today's XKCD:

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

New tense discovered by The China Post!

the singular tense!

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

Dromiceiomimus explains exclusive-we

... 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.