The pragmatics wastebasket

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 555.

For a long period in the study of language, there has been a very strong interest in formal systems of analysis, often derived from mathematics and logic. The emphasis has been on discovering some of the abstract principles that lie at the very core of lan­guage. By placing the investigation of the abstract, potentially universal, features of language in the center of their work tables, linguists and philosophers of language tended to push any notes they had on everyday language use to the edges. As the tables got crowded, many of those notes on ordinary language in use began to be knocked off and ended up in the wastebasket. That overflowing wastebasket has become the source of much of what will be discussed in the following pages. It is worth remembering that the contents of that wastebasket were not originally or­ganized under a single category. They were defined negatively, as the stuff that wasn't easily handled within the formal systems of analysis. Consequently, in order to understand some of the mater­ial that we're going to pull out of the wastebasket, we really have to look at how it got there.

The tables upon which many linguists and philosophers of lan­guage worked were devoted to the analysis of language structure. Consider the sentence in [4].

[4] The duck ran up to Mary and licked her.

A syntactic approach to this sentence would be concerned with the rules that determine the correct structure and exclude any incorrect orderings such as *'Up duck Mary to the ran'. Syntactic analysis would also be required to show that there is a missing ele­ment ('and _ licked her') before the verb 'licked' and to explicate

the rules that allow that empty slot, or accept the pronoun 'it' in that position. However, those working on syntax would have thought it totally irrelevant if you tried to say that ducks don't do that and maybe the speaker had meant to say 'dog'. Indeed, from a purely syntactic perspective, a sentence like 'The bottle of ketchup ran up to Mary' is just as well-formed as [4].

Over on the semantics side of the table, however, there would have been concern. An entity labelled 'duck' has a meaning feature (animate) whereas a 'bottle of ketchup' would be (non-animate). Since a verb like 'ran up to' requires something animate as its subject, the word 'duck' is okay, but not a 'bottle of ketchup'.

Semantics is also concerned with the truth-conditions of propositions expressed in sentences. These propositions generally correspond to the basic literal meaning of a simple clause and are conventionally represented by the letters p, q, and r. Let's say that the underlying meaning relationship being expressed in 'The duck ran up to Mary' is the proposition p, and in 'the duck licked Mary', it is the proposition q. These two propositions are joined by the logical connector symbol for conjunction, & (called 'ampersand'). Thus, the propositional representation of the sen­tence in [4] is as in [5].

[5] p&cq

If p is true and q is true, then p & q is true. If either p or q is not true (i.e. false), then the conjunction of p & q is necessarily false. This type of analysis is used extensively in formal semantics.

Unfortunately, in this type of analysis, whenever p & q is true, it logically follows that q & p is true. Notice that q & p, in this particular case, would have to be expressed as in [6].

[61 The duck licked Mary and ran up to her.

In the everyday world of language use, this state of affairs is not identical to the original situation described in [4]. There is a sequence of two events being described and we expect that sequence, in terms of occurrence, to be reflected in the order of mention.

If p involves some action and q involves another action, we have an overwhelming tendency to interpret the conjunction

6 survey

DEFINITIONS AND BACKGROUND J

'and', not as logical &, but as the sequential expression 'and then'. This is another example of more being communicated than is said. We might propose that there is a regular principle of lan­guage use which can be stated as in [7].

[7] Interpret order of mention as a reflection of order of occur-

rence.