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Chapter 1

Definitions and background

Georgia green: Pragmatics and Natural Language Understanding. Lawrence Erlbaum 1989, page 3

The broadest interpretation of pragmatics is that it is the study of understanding intentional human action. Thus, it involves the interpretation of acts assumed to be undertaken in order to accomplish some purpose. The central notions in pragmatics must then include belief, intention (or goal), plan, and act. Assuming that the means and/or the ends involve communica­tion, pragmatics still encompasses all sorts of means of communi­cation, including nonconventional, nonverbal, nonsymbolic ones as, for example, when a lifeguard throws a volleyball in the direc­tion of a swimmer struggling in the ocean. The lifeguard believes that the swimmer wants assistance, and that the swimmer will understand that the volleyball thrown in his direction is intended (by the lifeguard) to be assistance, and that the swimmer will know how to take advantage of the volleyball's property of being lighter than water. That makes at least three beliefs and one inten­tion on the part of the lifeguard, including two beliefs about the swimmer's beliefs, and one about the swimmer's desires.

\> From this description, it seems as if every act in life is part of pragmatics. Do you think that pragmatics is the study of all actions, or should it be limited to only certain actions? What kind of limitations would you propose?

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D> The final sentence in this brief extract mentions 'beliefs about ... beliefs'. Mow can we know about a person's beliefs when we are analyzing their actions and utterances?

[> If the swimmer doesn't want assistance (in the example), how does that affect the analysis?

Text 2

'Pragmatics: meaning and context.' File 70 in Language Files: Materials for an Introduction to Linguistics. (6th edn.) Ohio State University Press 1991, page 223

To fully understand the meaning of a sentence, we must also understand the context in which it was uttered. Consider the word ball. In a sentence such as, He kicked the ball into the net, we may visualize a round, black and white soccer ball about nine inches in diameter. In a sentence such as She dribbled the ball down the court and shot a basket, we would visualize a basket ball. Given yet another sentence, She putted the ball in from two feet away, we would visualize another ball, a golf ball. In these examples, the word ball is understood in different ways depend­ing on what type of action is associated with it. Whatever under­stood meaning is common to ball in all of these contexts will be part of the word's core meaning. If we think of enough types of balls, we can come up with an invariant core meaning of ball that will allow speakers to refer to any ball in any context. Nevertheless, even though we can discover a word's 'invariant core', we normally understand more than this. It is the context that fills in the details and allows full understanding—such as the usual color of a soccer ball, the size of a basketball, or the weight of a golf ball. The study of the contribution of context to meaning is often called pragmatics.

t> What do you think is the 'invariant core' meaning of the word 'ball', as proposed here? Can you think of any use of the word 'ball' that would not have that 'core' meaning? Can 'the con­text' cause a word not to have its 'core' meaning?

[> What does the term 'context' seem to refer to in this text? If you have a different concept of 'context', how would you revise this paragraph to illustrate it more clearly?

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In what ways is the view of pragmatics in this text similar to or different from the way pragmatics is defined in Text 1?

Chapter 2

Deixis and distance

charles fillmore: Santa Cruz Lectures on Deixis. Indiana University Linguistics Club 1975, pages 40-2

The most obvious place deictic terms in English are the adverbs 'here' and 'there' and the demonstratives 'this' and 'that', along vith their plural forms; the most obvious time deictic words are adverbs like 'now' or 'today'. There are important distinctions in the uses of these and other deictic words which I would like us to je clear about right away. I will frequently need to point out whether a word or expression that I am referring to can be used in one or more of three different ways, and these I will call gestural, symbolic, and anaphoric. By the gestural use of a deictic expres­sion I mean that use by which it can be properly interpreted only by somebody who is monitoring some physical aspect of the com­munication situation; by the symbolic use of a deictic expression I mean that use whose interpretation involves merely knowing cer­tain aspects of the speech communication situation, whether this knowledge comes by current perception or not; and by the anaphoric use of an expression I mean that use which can be cor­rectly interpreted by knowing what other portion of the same dis­course the expression is coreferential with.

I can illustrate the distinction I'm talking about by taking the word 'there'. It has all three uses. Its gestural use can be seen in a sentence like, 'I want you to put it there'. You have to know where the speaker is pointing in order to know what place he is indicat­ing. The symbolic use is exemplified in the telephoner's utterance, 'Is Johnny there?'. This time we understand the word 'there' as meaning 'in the place where you are'. An example of the anaphoric use of 'there' is a sentence like 'I drove the car to the parking lot and left it there'. In that case the word refers to a place which had been identified earlier in the discourse, namely the parking lot. Take another example, this time one showing just

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the distinction between the gestural and the symbolic use. If dur­ing my lecture you hear me use a phrase like 'this finger', the chances are fairly good that you will look up to see what it is that I want you to see; you will expect the word to be accompanied by a gesture or demonstration of some sort. On the other hand, if you hear me use the phrase 'this campus', you do not need to look up, because you know my meaning to be 'the campus in which I am now located', and you happen to know where I am. The for­mer is the gestural use, the latter the symbolic use.

I> Can you transfer this discussion to temporal deixis (as described in Chapter 2), considering 'then' (instead.of there') in gestural, symbolic, and anaphoric uses?

[> Given the three categories described here, which category seems to fit the typical uses of deictic expressions such as 'yes­terday' and 'tomorrow'?

Place indications take part in the deictic system of a language by virtue of the fact that for many locating expressions, the location of one, or another, or both, of the speech act participants can serve as a spatial reference point. Sometimes all that means is that for an expression which in a nondeictic use requires mention of a reference object, in its deictic use the reference object, taken to be the speaker's body at the time of the speech act, simply goes unmen-tioned. Take, for example, the expression 'upstairs'. If I say, 'Johnny lives upstairs', you will understand me as meaning upstairs of the place where I am at the time I say the sentence, unless the immediately preceding discourse has provided some other refer­ence point. If I say 'Harry lives nearby', the same can be said. You will understand that Harry lives near to the place where I am when I say the sentence, again, except for the case where a reference point has been identified in the immediately preceding discourse.

t> 7s the speaker's body always the unmentioned reference point, as Fillmore suggests here? Consider the uses of words like 'front', 'back', 'down (the street)', 'above', 'outside', and any others that seem to be similar to 'upstairs' and 'nearby' in the examples.

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Text 4

quentin smith: 'The multiple uses of indexicals' in Synthese 78, 1989, pages 182-3

'I am in last place' is often used to indicate that the speaker is in last place. But this sentence is also used on a number of occasions to indicate that somebody else is in last place. I am watching a race and the person upon whom I have bet, No. 10, drops to the last place. 'I am in last place!' I exclaim in anguish to my compan­ion. My companion knows perfectly well what I mean—that the person upon whom I have bet is in last place. Indeed, she replies in kind, disagreeing with my statement. 'No you aren't! Look!' she exclaims, pointing at No. 10,'You are passing No. 3!'

C> Can you think of any other contexts where T is not to be liter­ally interpreted as 'the person who is speaking'?

p> Do examples such as these mean that we need a new definition of the meaning of the word T in English? If yes, what would have to be in that definition? If no, how would you explain this type of'extra' usage?

Geoffrey nunberg: Tndexicality and deixis' in Linguistics and Philosophy 16,1993, page 41

... you might point at a picture of John Ashberry to identify his most recent book, using the demonstrative that, with no restric­tion on the things you could say about it:

(94) That is in all the bookstores (on the top shelf, temporarily out of stock).

But while John Ashberry might easily say of himself 'I am in all the bookstores,' it would be odd for him to say 'I am on the top shelf or 'I am temporarily out of stock,' unless it could be supposed that the fact that an author's book was on the top shelf or was temporarily out of stock carried some noteworthy implications for him.

E> Following on from these examples, could you point to an empty space on the bookshelf and and ask the owner of the bookstore, Is that out of stock?'? If yes, do we have to re­formulate the definition of deixis (i.e. 'pointing via language') when there's nothing being pointed to?

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[> Why do you think the idea of 'some noteworthy implications' is mentioned in this text? Does identifying the reference of deictic expressions depend on information about a person's thoughts and feelings? If yes, can you think of other examples (involving other deictic forms)?

\> How does the example with T in this text fit in with your analysis of T in Text 4?

Chapter 3

Reference and inference

keith donnellan: 'Reference and definite descriptions' in Philosophical Review 75,1966, pages 285-6

I will call the two uses of definite descriptions I have in mind the attributive use and the referential use. A speaker who uses a definite description attributively in an assertion states something about whoever or whatever is the so-and-so. A speaker who uses a definite description referentially in an assertion, on the other hand, uses the description to enable his audience to pick out whom or what he is talking about and states something about that person or thing. In the first case the definite description might be said to occur essentially, for the speaker wishes to assert some­thing about whatever or whoever fits that description; but in the referential use the definite description is merely one tool for doing a certain job—calling attention to a person or thing—and in gen­eral any other device for doing the same job, another description or a name, would do as well. In the attributive use, the attribute of being the so-and-so is all important, while it is not in the referen­tial use.

To illustrate this distinction, in the case of a single sentence, consider the sentence, 'Smith's murderer is insane.' Suppose first that we come upon poor Smith foully murdered. From the brutal manner of the killing and the fact that Smith was the most lovable person in the world, we might exclaim, 'Smith's murderer is insane.' I will assume, to make it a simpler case, that in a quite ordinary sense we do not know who murdered Smith (though this

is not in the end essential to the case). This, I shall say, is an attributive use of the definite description.

The contrast with such a use of the sentence is one of those situ­ations in which we expect and intend our audience to realize whom we have in mind when we speak of Smith's murderer and, most importantly, to know that it is this person about whom we are going to say something.

p> Before Donnellan's proposal, many philosophers argued that if a description does not fit anything, then it fails to refer. What is Donnellan's perspective on this?

p> Using Donnellan's distinction (plus any additional distinctions you think are needed), how would you account for the use of a definite description that does not accurately fit the person or thing?

[> Can the attributive versus referential distinction be related to Fillmore's distinction (Text 3) between gestural, symbolic, and anaphoric uses of deictic expressions?

m.a.k.halliday andRUQAiYA hasan: Cohesion in English. Longman 1976, page 31

There are certain items in every language which have the property of reference, in the specific sense in which we are using the term here; that is to say, instead of being interpreted semantically in their own right, they make reference to something else for their interpretation. In English these items are personals, demonstra­tives and comparatives.

We start with an example of each:

a. Three blind mice, three blind mice.
See how they run! See how they run!

b. Doctor Foster went to Gloucester in a shower of rain.

He stepped in a puddle right up to his middle and never went there again.

c. There were two wrens upon a tree.
Another came, and there were three.

In (a), they refers to three blind mice; in (b) there refers to Gloucester; in (c) another refers to wrens.

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These items are directives indicating that information is to be retrieved from elsewhere. So much they have in common with all cohesive elements. What characterizes this particular type of cohesion, that which we are calling reference, is the specific nature of the information that is signalled for retrieval. In the case of reference the information to be retrieved is the referential meaning, the identity of the particular thing or class of things that is being referred to; and the cohesion lies in the continuity of ref­erence, whereby the same thing enters into the discourse a second time.

I> In this analysis, the assumption is that certain words refer to other words. Do you think that this is a helpful or misleading assumption?

D> Do you agree with the final statement that 'the same thing enters into the discourse a second time'? How about example (c), where the analysis proposes that the word 'another' refers to 'wrens'?

t> If the word 'there' in (b) is an example of cohesion by refer­ence, is the word 'there' in the second line of (c) the same? How do you decide?

t> Is Donnellan's distinction in Text 6 relevant to what these authors are saying?

Chapter 4

Presupposition and entailment

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ROBERT c.stalnaker: 'Pragmatic presupposition' in Milton Munitz and Peter Unger (eds.): Semantics and Philosophy. New York University Press 1974, pages 199- 200

Although it is normally inappropriate because unnecessary for me to assert something that each of us assumes the other already believes, my assertions will of course always have consequences which are part of the common background. For example, in a context where we both know that my neighbor is an adult male,

I say 'My neighbor is a bachelor,' which, let us suppose, entails that he is adult and male. I might just as well have said 'my neigh­bor is unmarried.' The same information would have been con­veyed (although the nuances might not have been exactly the same). That is, the increment of information, or of content, con­veyed by the first statement is the same as that conveyed by the second. If the asserted proposition were accepted, and added to the common background, the resulting situation would be the same as if the second assertion were accepted and added to the background.

This notion of common background belief is the first approx­imation to the notion of pragmatic presupposition that I want to use. A proposition P is a pragmatic presupposition of a speaker in a given context just in case the speaker assumes or believes that P, assumes or believes that his addressee assumes or believes that P, and assumes or believes that his addressee recognizes that he is making these assumptions, or has these beliefs.

P> Do you agree that the two utterances quoted in the first para­graph would add exactly the same information to the com­mon background?

E> According to the definition presented in the second para­graph, would it be correct, or not, to say that a pragmatic pre­supposition is any belief of the speaker? (It may be helpful to look again at Chapter 4, pages 25-30.)

t> Can you think of circumstances where it is not inappropriate for someone 'to assert something that each of us assumes the other already believes'?

Gerald gazdar: Pragmatics. Implicature, Presupposition, and Logical Form. Academic Press 1979, page 106

(65) John got to safety before the boiler blew up.

(66) John got to the safety handle before the boiler blew up.

If we assume in (66) that John's getting to the safety handle pre­vented the boiler blowing up, then (66) does not, but (65) does, presuppose that the boiler blew up. If we treat before as being 'ambiguous', then we are again left with no principle for deciding

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whether or not the presupposition attaches to a particular sen­tence. Note also that, if all presupposing constructions are ambiguous, then the notion of 'infelicity' or 'unacceptability' i_s inapplicable, since we will always have an alternative reading with respect to which the sentence will be acceptable.

D> How do you account for the fact that 'before' creates a pre­supposition in example (65), but not in (66)? Can you think of other examples where the use of 'before' does, or does not, lead to a presupposition?

t> Does 'after' work the same way? Should we define 'before' and 'after', not only as opposites, but also as creating different presuppositions ?

Chapter 5

Cooperation and implicature

PAUL grice: 'Logic and conversation' in P. Cole and J. L. Morgan (eds.): Syntax and Semantics Volume 3: Speech Acts. Academic Press 1975, page 48

I would like to be able to think of the standard type of conversa­tional practice not merely as something that all or most do in fact follow but as something that it is reasonable for us to follow, that we should not abandon. For a time, I was attracted by the idea that observance of the CP [co-operative principle] and the maxims, in a talk exchange, could be thought of as a quasi-contractual matter, with parallels outside the realm of discourse. If you pass by when I am struggling with my stranded car, I no doubt have some degree of expectation that you will offer help, but once you join me in tinkering under the hood, my expectations become stronger and take more specific forms (in the absence of indications that you are merely an incompetent meddler); and talk exchanges seemed to me to exhibit, character­istically, certain features that jointly distinguish cooperative transactions:

1. The participants have some common immediate aim, like getting a car mended; their ultimate aims may, of course, be

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independent and even in conflict—each may want to get the car mended in order to drive off, leaving the other stranded. In characteristic talk exchanges, there is a common aim even if, as in an over-the-wall chat, it is a second order one, namely that each party should, for the time being, identify himself with the transitory conversational interests of the other.

2. The contributions of the participants should be dovetailed,
mutually dependent.

3. There is some sort of understanding (which may be explicit
but which is often tacit) that, other things being equal, the
transaction should continue in appropriate style unless both
parties are agreeable that it should terminate. You do not
just shove off or start doing something else.

But while some such quasi-contractual basis as this may apply to some cases, there are too many types of exchange, like quarreling and letter writing, that it fails to fit comfortably.

0 Can you spell out why 'quarreling and letter writing' do not fit comfortably with the conditions presented here?

t> What would you call the three 'features' listed here if you were to make them into maxims for cooperative transactions?

t> Grice emphasizes the word 'reasonable' as he describes his consideration of the cooperative principle and his maxims as a kind of contract. Would the cooperative principle, the maxims, and the three features listed here be treated as 'reasonable' in all societies and cultures?