Alessandro Capone

This book shows how pragmatics and philosophy are interconnected, and explores the consequences and ramifications of this innovative idea, especially in addressing and solving the problem of breaking Grice's circle. The author applies philosophy in order to get to a better understanding of pragmatics, and pragmatics in order to get a better understanding of philosophy. The book starts with a chapter on the non-cancellability of explicatures and the role that this idea plays in the resolution of Grice’s circle, and proceeds with the discussion of other topics in which explicatures or cancellability play an important and decisive role. While the reader proceeds in the reading of this book, they accumulate notions and pieces of knowledge which will be of invaluable use when arriving at the chapter on conversational presuppositions, where the author expresses his most radical views: namely that presuppositions are indeed cancellable, contrary to what many believe.

In this paper, I discuss expressions such as ‘Dad’, ‘Mum’, ‘Grandpa’, etc., which are called ‘quasi-proper names’. These expressions can be used both to refer to a thing or person in an assertion in which a predicate is assigned to the referent expressed by the quasi-proper-name and to call somebody in particular (John!). In so far as they are indexical expressions, they are even more directly referential than proper names and guarantee discourse continuity to a greater extent than proper names (even if this appears to some to be controversial). To understand the working of quasi-proper names, I introduce a semantic rule that transforms nouns or definite descriptions into proper names and quasi-proper names, making the conceptual elements present in those expressions inactive and introducing a direct route from the proper name to the referent. Such a rule is synchronic, although it has diachronic consequences. Quasi-proper names can stimulate a debate about the function and role of proper names across cultures. I consider a number of expressions similar to quasi-proper names and I add the class of quasi-quasi-proper names (cases in which a term similar to a quasi-proper name can be used in vocatives but not in a subject-predicate structure, or, vice-versa, it can be used in a subject-predicate structure but not for vocatives).

In this paper, after outlining the general problem of the pragmatics of indirect reports, we dwell on two notoriously thorny problems: a) how do we interpret the pronominals contained in that-clauses of indirect reports; b) how do we interpret the presuppositions of that-clauses of indirect reports?. Theoretical considerations lead us in the direction of the idea that if two pragmatic principles clash, one should give way, but since we do not know which one has to give way, we should be prepared to accept that the strongest or highest-ranking principle will defeat the other. Here we encounter a Principle, which Capone brought our attention to, that is not usually discussed in pragmatic theories, but which seems to play a crucial role, at least sometimes:Do not expect the hearers and the speakers to do what is not possible for them to do. In this paper, we recognize that the problem of opacity is connected with the problem of voices: who is responsible for a given section of the utterance. Given the presence of polyphony, this problem can be resolved either through contextual clues or through pragmatic principles. We prefer to see the interplay of principles and contextual clues as one in which the interpretation process is pretty orderly, with general principles providing the defaults, while contextual clues occasionally defeat the defaults in certain problematic cases. However, the issue of responsibility, which we try to regiment through the Paraphrasis/Form-style principle, does not only concern the issue of opacity but also the issue of how to find a referent for indexical expressions contained in the that-clause of a report and and how to satisfy the presuppositions of the that-clause. In this case the Paraphrasis/Form-style Principle makes wrong predictions, which have to be rectified thanks to a different principle. The pragmatic theory we apply certainly needs some flexibility, but a flexibility which is not injected into the theory by a mechanical ordering of the rules, but by explaining why a certain principle takes precedence over another in terms of considerations of rationality.

This monograph on indirect reports offers insights on the semantics/pragmatics interface and a refinement of the notion of explicature. The volume is written in an engaging style and guides the reader through the theoretical problems and their ramifications. The thorniest problem in the study of indirect reports is their polyphonic nature, and how the listener distinguishes between the reporter’s voice and the original speaker’s voice, either by contextual clues or, in the absence of such clues, by resorting to pragmatic principles. The introductory chapter discusses the main issues that will be addressed in the volume. The next chapters focus on the various aspects of indirect reports, covering both theory and practical applications.

This paper presents a purely pragmatic account of quotation which, it is argued, will be able to accommodate all relevant linguistic phenomena. Given that it is more parsimonious to explain the data by reference to pragmatic principles only than to explain them by reference to both pragmatic and semantic principles, as is common in the literature, I conclude that the account of quotation I present is to be preferred to the more standard accounts (including the alternative theories of quotation, discussed here)

In this paper, we take up an old issue that of pragmemes, broached by Mey and further explored by Capone. It is not easy to define pragmemes and distinguish them sufficiently from speech acts (units of language use broached by Austin and Searle) or from Wittgensteinian language games or from macro speech acts (see van Dijk on macrostructures) or from Goffman’s scripts. The best idea we could develop about pragmemes is that they instantiate the triple articulation of language, proposed by Jock Wong; being essentially composed of phonological-syntactic units, that have a certain content relative to a social situation and to a certain culture, pragmemes express a certain function (or illocutionary force), like, e.g., modifying society or some aspect of it. They are part of a chapter that can be called either “societal pragmatics” or “emancipatory pragmatics,” to use the words by Mey. In fact, knowledge of how language is used to diminish the rights of people and to propagate the “status quo” may be instrumental to give rights and power to ordinary human beings who are oppressed by political and economical structures.

The aim of this chapter is to reflect on the necessity of the pragmatic development of propositional forms and to reach a better understanding of the level of meaning that Sperber and Wilson and Carston famously call ‘explicatures’ (or ‘explicature’) and to support the claim that (the pragmatically conveyed elements of) explicatures are not cancellable – unlike conversational implicatures (Someone alleged that my claim is not original; however, I have to modestly assert that I put forward this claim in my 2003 paper, which was revised and reprinted in 2006.). While Capone (RASK: Int J Lang Commun 19:3–32, 2003) (A paper that antecedes Burton-Roberts claim that explicatures are non-cancellable.) addressed the issue of the cancellability of explicatures from the point of view of Grice’s circle, a number of important theoretical questions are raised and discussed here. In particular, I propose that the analysis of the notion of intentionality and of the nature of pragmatic intrusion will settle the question concerning the non-cancellability of explicatures. An explicature can be considered to be a two-level entity, in that it consists of a logical form and a pragmatic increment which this logical form gives rise to (in the context of utterance). However, both the initial logical form and the pragmatic increment are the target of pragmatic processes, in that we need a pragmatic process to promote the initial logical form to a serious intended interpretation and another pragmatic process to derive further increments starting from this initial logical form and being promoted to serious utterance interpretations.

This volume brings together a wide array of papers which explore, among other things, to what extent languages and cultures are variable with respect to the interactions around the event of death. Motivated by J. L. Mey's idea of the pragmeme, a situated speech act, the volume has both theoretical and practical implications for scholars working in different fields of enquiry. As the papers in this volume reveal, despite the terminological differences between various disciplines, the interactions around the event of death serve to provide solace, not only to the dying, but also to the family and friends of the deceased, thus helping them to "accommodate" to the new state of affairs.

In this chapter I deal with the attributive/referential distinction. After reviewing the literature on the issue, I adopt Jaszczolt’s view based on default semantics. I relate her view to Sperber & Wilson’s Principle of Relevance. I argue in favour of the modularity hypothesis in connection with pragmatic interpretations. I also discuss the issue of modularization à la Karmiloff-Smith in connection with default inferences and, in particular, the referential readings of NPs. I then reply to some considerations by Cummings and use data from the referential/attributive uses of NPs to show that the modularity hypothesis is defensible.

This book contains a comprehensive view of pragmalinguistic studies and their recent ramifications, boasting some of the most advanced recent research in pragmatics. Organised into three sections—pragmalinguistics, social pragmatics, and cognitive-inferential pragmatics, respectively—the chapters enable an understanding of the possible applications of linguistic and philosophical theories in practical fields. Covering topics such as polysemy across languages and lexical externalism, the role of literal meaning in the construction of metaphorical meaning, the pragmatics of truth, the roles of reflexivity in meaning negotiation, argumentation and discourse, the pragmatics of taboo, linguistic and cognitive aspects of formation of implicates, and reflections on neuropragmatics and clinical pragmatics in Autism Spectrum Disorder and Schizophrenia—to name but a few exciting areas of exploration—this book is of interest to scholars and postgraduate students in the fields of semantics, pragmatics and philosophy of language, cognitive science, and other areas of linguistics.

In this paper, I deal with socio-pragmatics and pragmemes, and propose that we need to take into account societal and cultural considerations in order to develop a persuasive theory about utterance meaning and language use. In particular, I deal with pragmemes and propose that they depart considerably from speech act theory, which is more or less a kind of armchair linguistics, as they can be combined with the notion of language games Philosophical investigations. Oxford: Blackwell) and with the notion of the triadic structure of language. In this view, culture plays a predominant role. As Wong says: To attain a more holistic picture of language, one would need to see beyond form and even meaning to consider the cultural context of the language under study. This is because, as numerous studies have argued persuasively, people use language to express not only meaning but, consciously or subconsciously, culture as well – values, attitudes, biases, etc. A pragmeme is, therefore, best viewed as a “culturally situated speech act” and when we study pragmemes, we should ideally study them with respect to the culture in which they are used. In this paper, I explain why culture plays a predominant role in the pragmeme and should be a component of the definition of this type of unit of language use. I provide certain examples of pragmemes which require the notion of pragmatic competence and clearly show that a certain cultural dimension is important in determining rules of use. Then I consider a special kind of pragmemes: pragmemes at the market place. Pragmemes at the market place can be seen in the light of Mey’s Pragmatics. An introduction. Oxford: Blackwell.) ideas on adaptability. Language users develop ways to adapt to reality by making use of pragmatic acts that exploit contextual considerations and, given that they are to be seen as responses to the changing circumstances of life, may establish a path of language use and norms that constitute precedents from which subsequent language users can inherit ways to adapt to the circumstances of life. Sellers at the market develop techniques for shouting, surprising their clients, attracting attention, advertising their products through imaginative and poetic ways. These clearly require techniques, social practices and rules of use that are very different from those involved in other forms of communication, in that they are to be seen as responses to specific circumstances, specific purposes, and specific needs to adapt to the new circumstances of life. I propose that the poetic function Closing statements. Linguistics and poetics. In T. Sebeok, Style in language. Cambridge: MIT) in these language games merges with other functions. Both the poetic and the phatic function are subordinated to the conative function. I consider cases of expansion, in which knowledge of the cultural background and the situational context can guide interpretation and, in particular, the calculation of syntactic relations, which is made particularly difficult because we are confronted with fragments. I then consider pragmemes and deontic modality, arguing that the cultural context ensures that the right interpretation is arrived at through cultural ethical norms. Next, I consider the pragmeme ‘selling fish at the market place’. We can see that a particular pragmeme has its own norms that are dedicated to it and determined by the situational needs of the seller. The seller specializes in selling this product and, thus, best knows how to advertise it. Why should there be these forms of specialization? Probably, the answer is that the seller knows which questions the client has for him and he is prepared to answer them in advance, having developed poetic techniques for this task. I finally provide a series of common features which pragmemes of selling things at the market place display. We may consider them the topoi of the specific pragmemes. I am aware that there is a lot more work to be done, but this is not always easy because this kind of language use is gradually being lost due to changes in the structure of society. The data collected by anthropologists do not suffice in any way because they are focused on folklore more than on language use. The attempt to focus on the core features of pragmemes or, in the case in point, the pragmemes of selling fish at the market place is thwarted by the scarcity of the data.

This contribution focuses attention on the lexical and syntactic features of the Latin version of the Letters to Cledonius: In the passages examined it highlights the differences between the translation and the Greek text, recreates the practices and the strategies of the translator, with particular reference to the two Letters and in some cases to other of Gregory of Nazianzen's texts as reported in Laur. San Marco 584. Lastly the article evaluates the genuineness of the Latin text that was handed down and the possible supply to the constitution of the Greek text.

In this paper, I start with the notion of reference as speaker’s meaning and then move on to consider García-Carpintero’s (2000) idea that a conceptual dimension of referential expressions can be captured through a notion of presupposition. I argue that we need to distinguish between reference and referential presupposition. The reference has a perceptual dimension and offers the speaker and the hearer an anchor to the present. Even when a speaker uses an NP that does not denote the object s/he intends to refer to (e.g., for a perceptual mistake), the context and environmental information can help the hearer find a route to the referent intended by the speaker. On the other hand, presuppositions seem to be of a conversational nature and involve a mode of presentation that is linguistically expressed.

In this book, I shall argue that there is a close relationship between pragmalinguistics and philosophy and that pragmalinguistics not only takes into account empirical investigations based on language use, but also takes advantage of a more philosophical approach to language, where a number of a priori considerations can be applied to the formation of a theory of language. While there is no reason to deny (and there is every reason to assume) that abstract structures of language are operative in selecting meanings, pragmatics usually provides additional theoretical baggage and allows language users to expand on their limited resources, thus allowing them to be open to new uses which then, eventually, become part of the semantic/syntactic heritage. These expansion processes can be seen both at the semantic and at the syntactic level (see Huang 1994, 2000, 2014; Levinson 2000; Ariel 2008 on the syntax/pragmatics debate). Surely there are a number of controversial points in pragmatics. Are the conversational maxims a priori principles? Are they innate or are they learned? Are they derived from innate predispositions, where, ultimately, they are propagated, transmitted and inherited at the level of language use? These are important theoretical questions, on which a philosophical approach has some bearing. However, in this book I will not concentrate on these questions, but I will broach more modest topics. One of the topics I will confront is whether explicatures (or at least the pragmatic components of explicatures) are cancellable or not. This topic is concatenated with the more heavily theoretical topic of Grice’s circle, a theoretical difficulty noted by Levinson (2000) which basically amounts to the claim that pragmatics takes input from semantics. However, the camp of contextualists has shown that (propositional) semantics cannot be independent of pragmatics, given that it is accepted that, in numerous cases, we must assume pragmatic intrusion into truth-conditional meaning. Thus, it follows that not only is it the case that pragmatics takes input from semantics, but that semantics takes input from pragmatics. There may be two ways of breaking out of this circle. One is to argue, as I have done so in the past, that the circle is not pernicious given that explicatures (that is, the engine of the semantics/pragmatics debate) are after all, in principle and de facto, not cancellable. Thus, the pragmatic contributions that intrude into semantics acquire some of the features of semantics (like entailments, they cannot be cancelled on pain of contradiction or logical absurdity). The other is to reduce the circle and to state that there are indeed (many) cases of pragmatic intrusion; however, we should not be so pessimistic as to claim that in all cases semantics needs to be augmented by pragmatics. There are sentences which can be fairly well understood even independently of pragmatics and, furthermore, there are sentences where limited amounts of pragmatic intrusion can occur and where such intrusions can be somehow ignored, since the truth-conditional content of the sentence can be grasped by making abstract substitutions such as X did Y (for example, in the sentence ‘He did this’). Such abstract substitutions are compatible with the spirit of semantics and capture a minimally augmented truth-conditional meaning, while one does not need to state that such cases cannot be understood without recourse to drastic pragmatic intrusion (Take as an example what happens during a grammar lesson. The teacher writes the sentence ‘Mary is clever’ on the blackboard. The students will not try to anchor ‘Mary’ to a referent, as they are well aware that this is an example).

Together with the volume “Inquiries in philosophical pragmatics: Linguistic and theoretical issues,” this book collects selected contributions to the conference Pragmasophia II held in Lisbon in 2018. This first volume intends to contribute to the dialogue between philosophers and linguists, trying to broaden the boundaries of this discipline defined by the crucial notions of context and verbal action. To this purpose, the contributions are collected in an order that reflects the core and the frontiers of pragmatics, the former constituted by the classical and more philosophical topics as quantifiers, semantic intentions and semantics, and common knowledge, and the latter exploring areas such as the relationship between pragmatics and other fields, such as argumentation and discourse analysis. Between these two poles of theoretical developments, we can find new theoretical challenges to some basic pragmatic problems, such as pure indexicals, deferred reference, polysemy, explicatures and indirect reports.

In this paper, I offer some considerations on the contextual dimension of reference and, then, I expatiate on the possibility that referential NPs refer to objects but at the same time they are linked with a conceptual presupposition, that explains why reference only does not work and is not an efficient way to represent certain NPs. I compare this issue of a conceptual presuppositions with the considerations on pragmatic or conversational presuppositions in papers by Capone or Macagno and Capone.

The problem of establishing the best interpretation of a speech act is of fundamental importance in argumentation and communication in general. A party in a dialogue can interpret another’s or his own speech acts in the most convenient ways to achieve his dialogical goals. In defamation law this phenomenon becomes particularly important, as the dialogical effects of a communicative move may result in legal consequences. The purpose of this paper is to combine the instruments provided by argumentation theory with the advances in pragmatics in order to propose an argumentative approach to meaning reconstruction. This theoretical proposal will be applied to and tested against defamation cases at common law. Interpretation is represented as based on a hierarchy of interpretative presumptions. On this view, the development of the logical form of an utterance is regarded as the result of an abductive pattern of reasoning in which various types of presumptions are confronted and the weakest ones are excluded. Conflicts of interpretations and equivocation become essentially interwoven with the dialectical problem of fulfilling the burden of defeating a presumption. The interpreter has a burden of explaining why a given presumption is subject to default, assuming that the speaker is reasonable and acting based on a set of shared expectations.

Together with the volume “Inquiries in philosophical pragmatics: Theoretical developments,” this book collects selected contributions to the conference Pragmasophia II held in Lisbon in 2018. The eleven essays of this volume focus on how a linguistic structure or expression manifests a pragmatic phenomenon, and are ordered considering their relationship with the specificity of the context. The first three papers, devoted to the topics of prototype-based generalizations, scalar implicatures, and temporal ordering, propose new insights into pragmatic phenomena considering linguistic behavior independent of the social activity in which it is placed. In the last papers, the analytical and empirical goal becomes predominant. Here, the theoretical advances are considered as instruments for analyzing specific texts, such as marketplace interactions, courtroom speech, schizophrenic discourse, narratives of literary texts for children or deception in movies. In between, three papers devoted to emotive or loaded words bridge the passage from more theoretical to more empirical and context-oriented works.

In this paper, I explore Bach’s idea (Bach, 2000) that null appositives, intended as expanded qua-clauses, can resolve the puzzles of belief reports. These puzzles are crucial in understanding the semantics and pragmatics of belief reports and are presented in a section. I propose that Bach’s strategy is not only a way of dealing with puzzles, but also an ideal way of dealing with belief reports. I argue that even simple unproblematic cases of belief reports are cases of pragmatic intrusion, involving null appositives, or to use the words of Bach, ‘qua-clauses’. The main difference between my pragmatic approach and the one by Salmon (1986) is that this author uses the notion of conversational implicature, whereas I use the notion of pragmatic intrusion and explicature. From my point of view, statements such as ‘‘John believes that Cicero is clever’’ and ‘‘John believes that Tully is clever’’ have got distinct truth-values. In other words, I claim that belief reports in the default case illuminate the hearer on the mental life of the believer, that includes specific modes of presentation of the referents talked about. Furthermore, while in the other pragmatic approaches, it is mysterious how a mode of presentation is assumed to be the main filter of the believer’s mental life, here I provide an explanatory account in terms of relevance, cognitive effects, and processing efforts. The most important part of the paper is devoted to showing that null appositives are required, in the case of belief reports, to explain certain anaphoric effects, which would otherwise be mysterious. My examples show that null appositives are not necessitated at logical form, but only at the level of the explicature, in line with the standard assumptions by Carston and Recanati on pragmatic intrusion. I develop a potentially useful analysis of belief reports by exploiting syntactic and semantic considerations on presuppositional clitics in Romance.