topics: |  pragmatics | linguistics | semantics

a BIG book, but wherever the page falls open there is something to hold
interest.   (can be said of very very few reference texts - though i must
admit that i find flipping through the OED fascinating!!)

Implicature : Laurence R. Horn p.3

The contrast between the said and the meant, and derivatively between the
said and the implicated (the meant-but-unsaid), dates back to the
fourth-century rhetoricians Servius and Donatus, who characterized litotes
– pragmatic understatement – as a figure in which we say less but mean more
("minus dicimus et plus significamus"; see Hoffmann 1987 and Horn 1991a).

In the Gricean model, the bridge from what is said (the literal content of
the uttered sentence, determined by its grammatical structure with the
reference of indexicals resolved) to what is communicated is built through
implicature. As an aspect of speaker meaning, implicatures are distinct from
the non-logical inferences the hearer draws; it is a category mistake to
attribute implicatures either to hearers or to sentences.... But we can
systematically (at least for generalized implicatures; see below) correlate
the speaker's intention to implicate q (in uttering p in context C), the
expression p that carries the implicature in C, and the inference of q
induced by the speaker's utterance of p in C.

[AM: implicature is clearly related to indirect meaning; and must have been
debated in the ancient Sanskrit as well.
see, e.g. analysis of sentences such as gaMgAyam ghoShaH ("The village is
on the Ganga"); the true meaning can emerge only if we assume the speaker
is trying to say something relevant and not that the villagers live floating
on (or in) the water.

This leads to the analysis of lakShmaNa (indirect meaning) as opposed to
abhidhAna. See Matilal's Word and the World.

For similar themes in the Chinese tradition, one may consider Mencius's
comments re: reading the poet's intention; reference: Gu's
Chinese theories of reading.  ]

Subtypes of implicature are illustrated by (1a–c) (after Grice 1961: §3); the
primed member of each pair is (in certain contexts) deducible from its
unprimed counterpart:

(1) a.  Even KEN knows it's unethical.
    a'. Ken is the least likely [of a contextually invoked set] to know it's
	 unethical.
    b.  [in a recommendation letter for a philosophy position]
        Jones dresses well and writes grammatical English.
    b'. Jones is no good at philosophy.
    c.  The cat is in the hamper or under the bed.
    c'. I don’t know for a fact that the cat is under the bed.

in contrast with these non-truth-conditional components of an expression's
conventional lexical meaning (e.g. based on background knowledge) the
inferences induced by (1b, c) are NON-conventional, i.e. calculable from
the utterance of such sentences in a particular context, given the nature
of conversation as a shared goal-oriented enterprise.

The contrast between particularized and generalized implicature emerges
clearly in this scene from When Harry Met Sally (1989 screenplay by Nora
Ephron). Harry (Billy Crystal) is setting up a blind date between his buddy
Jess (Bruno Kirby) and his woman friend – but not (yet) girlfriend – Sally
(Meg Ryan):
    (2) Jess: If she's so great why aren’t YOU taking her out?
	Harry: How many times do I have to tell you, we’re just friends.
	Jess: So you’re saying she's not that attractive.
	Harry: No, I told you she IS attractive.
	Jess: But you also said she has a good personality.
	Harry: She HAS a good personality.
	Jess: [Stops walking, turns around, throws up hands, as if to say
		"Aha!"]
	Harry: What?
	Jess: When someone's not that attractive they’re ALWAYS described as
		having a good personality. [1]
	Harry: Look, if you were to ask me what does she look like and I said
		she has a good personality, that means she's not attractive.
		But just because I happen to mention that she has a good
		personality, she could be either. She could be attractive
		with a good personality or not attractive with a good
		personaity.
	Jess: So which one is she?
	Harry: Attractive.
	Jess: But not beautiful, right? [2]

Jess's observation [1] incorrectly reanalyzes a particularized implicature
(S, in describing X to H as having a good personality implicates that X is
not attractive) as generalized, to which Harry responds by patiently pointing
out the strongly context-dependent nature of the inference in question.

24 Historical Pragmatics : Elizabeth Closs Traugott

Historical pragmatics is a usage-based approach to language change which came
to be identified and institutionalized as a field of study largely owing to
the work represented in Jucker (1995) and in the Journal of Historical
Pragmatics.  Jacobs and Jucker (1995) characterize historical pragmatics as
being essentially of two types, which correspond roughly to the distinction
between "external" and "internal" language change. The first they call
"pragmaphilology." This is a primarily a "macro-approach" (Arnovick 1999),
and the focus is on the changing social conditions in which linguistic change
occurs, for example changes in the " motives, interests ... rituals" (Jacobs
and Jucker 1995: 5).  ... the second type of work on historical pragmatics,
"diachronic pragmatics", is typically a "microapproach."  The focus is on the
interface of linguistic structure and use, and on "what types of rules,
conditions, and functions of social acts were effective in earlier stages or
processes of language change" (1995: 5).  ... development of, for example,
honorifics, focus particles, discourse markers, or performative uses of
locutionary verbs.  Two types of diachronic pragmatics:

  * "form-to-function mapping" (semasiological) : What are the constraints on
    	ways in which a meaning can change while form remains constant
	(modulo independent phonological changes)? For example, what are the
	constraints on the ways in which may developed polysemies over time?
  * "function-to-form mapping" (onomasiological): What constraints are there
    	on recruitment of extant terms to express a semantic category? For
    	example, what constraints are there on development of lexical
    	resources for expressing epistemic possibility?

[OED:
ONOMASIOLOGY:
The study of language which deals with the identification of a preconceived
meaning or concept by name or names.
As opposed to SEMASIOLOGY, in which words are analysed for the meanings they
represent

< German Onomasiologie (A. Zauner Die Romanischen Namen der Körperteile
(1902) 4) < ancient Greek oνομασία name ( < oνομάζειν to name (see onomastic
n. and adj.) + -ία-ia suffix1) + German -ologie-ology comb. form, after
Semasiologie

SEMASIOLOGY:
That branch of philology which deals with the meanings of words,
sense-development, and the like.

Greek σημασία signification, meaning + -logy
]

Debate on Gricean Maxims

A central issue in the debate around Gricean pragmatics has been discussion
of the validity of his maxims. These were reconceptualized by Horn as "principles."
Levinson further reconceptualized them as design features of communication
or "heuristics," available to speakers and hearers when they
attempt to solve the problem of converting thought into speech ("heuristics"
is the term adopted here).

In neo-Gricean pragmatics, as exemplified by, for example, Atlas and Levinson
(1981), Horn (1984a) and later works, some kind of division of labor has been
maintained between what Grice initially identified as Quantity: "Make your
contribution as informative as is required (for the current purposes of the
exchange)" and Quantity ("Do not make your contribution more informative than
is required") (Grice 1989: 26).

Among reasons given in Horn (1984a) and Levinson (2000a) for retaining the
division of labor, despite objections from other research paradigms,
especially Relevance Theory (e.g. Sperber and Wilson 1986a), is semantic
change.

2.2 Horn's proposals
Invoking Zipf's (1949) recognition that much of language use can be accounted
for in terms of the competing forces of speaker economy vs. hearer economy,
Horn collapsed Grice's Maxims into two principles, Q(uantity) and R(elation):

(1) a. The Q Principle (hearer-based):
	MAKE YOUR CONTRIBUTION SUFFICIENT (cf. Quantity1).
	SAY AS MUCH AS YOU CAN (given R).
	Lower-bounding principle, inducing upper-bounding implicata.
    b. The R Principle (speaker-based):
	MAKE YOUR CONTRIBUTION NECESSARY (cf. Relation, Quantity2, Manner).
	SAY NO MORE THAN YOU MUST (given Q).
	Upper-bounding principle, inducing lower-bounded implicata (Horn 1984a: 13).

Q-based implicature is "typically negative in that its calculation [by the
hearer] refers crucially to what could have been said, but wasn’t,"
e.g. scalar implicatures such as . On the other hand, R-based
implicature "typically involves social rather than purely linguistic
motivation," e.g. indirect speech acts (Horn 1996a: 313).

Horn relates the Q- and R-based implicatures to two types of semantic
change that are well known from the work of Bréal and Ullmann: broadening
and narrowing. He suggests that broadening is always uniquely R-based, e.g.
xerox, kleenex (Horn 1984a: 35). In the case of xerox, a salient exemplar of a
wider class, e.g. copy-machines, is generalized to denote that wider
class. This is a case of form-to-function or semasiological change.

Where narrowing is concerned, the issues are more complex. Horn (1984a)
mentions various types of semasiological narrowing in which a superordinate
term comes to be interpreted as the complement of a hyponym, e.g. in certain
circumstances, finger is interpreted to exclude its hyponym thumb:
		      I hurt my finger,
or rectangle is interpreted to exclude square.  He calls this AUTOHYPONOMY.
As he argues in Horn (1984b: 117), contra Kempson (1980), such narrowings
tend to be highly irregular ("an ornery array of disparate cases"). The
examples appear to be motivated by euphemism (cf. stink – smell), restriction
of technical terms (e.g. rectangle), association with particular contexts
(e.g. drink = "alcoholic beverage"), and no generalization seems possible other
than: "Diachronically, implicated autohyponymy leads to systematic polysemy"
(Levinson 2000a: 103).

The second type of narrowing is not semasiological but onomasiological
since it involves alignments among the meanings of lexical resources given a
pre-existing set of "closely related meanings." Synchronically there is often a
"briefer and/or more lexicalized" form that coexists with a "linguistically complex
or more prolix" expression (Horn 1996a: 314). The pair will typically
reflect a pragmatic division of labor: "Given two co-extensive expressions, the
more specialized form – briefer and/or more lexicalized – will tend to become
R-associated with a particular unmarked, stereotypical meaning, use, or situation,
while the use of the periphrastic or less lexicalized expression, typically
(but not always) linguistically more complex or prolix, will tend to be Qrestricted
to those situations outside the stereotype, for which the unmarked
expression could not have been used appropriately" (Horn 1996a: 314). The
less complex term is synchronically narrowed by R-based inferencing that
crystallizes "unmarked" meanings such as kill, or will (future). By contrast, the
more complex term is Q-restricted: cause to die implicates that direct causation
does not obtain, or that the speaker does not have adequate information to
vouch for it (Horn 1984a, 1996a, citing McCawley 1978; see also e.g. Langacker
1987, vol. 2); be going to "blocks the indirect speech act function of promising"
conveyed by will (Horn 1996a: 314).

Horn's claim about the division of labor is understood as motivating the
principles variously referred to as blocking (Aronoff 1976) or the principle
of contrast (E. Clark 1993). It appears to be generally, perhaps universally,
true that there are no true synonyms4 (see Haiman 1980a on iconic isomorphism),
and that in general, given two or more semantically related lexemes,
the more complex form (morphologically derived or periphrastic) represents
the more specialized or less stereotypical meaning. From a historical point of
view, meaning change and the development of new lexical resources are clearly
constrained by "Avoid Synonymy" (Kiparsky 1982, Horn 1996a) and the principle
of the division of labor. We see this repeatedly in grammaticalization, the
stereotypic examples of which involved the recruitment of a prolix expression
(often a construction such as be going to) into an extant lexical field in certain
highly constrained contexts, followed by a realignment of the members of the
extant set, and often the replacement of the earlier by the later construction (see
Hopper and Traugott 1993). We also see it when synonymous lexemes appear
or are borrowed (even though semantically synonymous the latter will always
be pragmatically differentiated, precisely because they are borrowings).

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