Robyn Anne Carston

A cognitive-scientific approach to the pragmatic interpretive ability is presented, according to which it is seen as a specific cognitive system dedicated to the interpretation of ostensive stimuli, that is, verbal utterances and other overtly communicative acts. This approach calls for a dual construal of semantics. The semantics which interfaces with the pragmatic interpretive system is not a matter of truth-conditional content, but of whatever components of meaning are encoded by the language system. This linguistically provided meaning functions as evidence that guides and constrains the addressee’s pragmatic inferential processes whose goal is the recovery of the speaker’s intended meaning. Speakers communicate thoughts —that is, fully propositional entities—and it is these that are the proper domain of a truth-conditional semantics.

Most substantive (content-bearing) words are polysemous, but polysemy is cross-categorial; for instance, the lexical forms ‘stone’ and ‘front’ are associated with families of interrelated senses and these senses are spread across their manifestations as three words, noun, verb and adjective. So, the ultimate unit underpinning polysemy is not a word but the categoryless root of the related words, which must, in some sense, track the interrelated families of senses. The main topic of this paper is the vexed question of the meaning of roots and the backdrop is a view of words as delineated syntactic domains which allow assignment of atomic content (non-compositional meaning), and whose actual meanings are, in the first instance, pragmatically inferred in the throes of communication, some of them subsequently becoming established, so stored in a lexicon and directly retrieved in comprehension. Three different positions on the meanings of roots are outlined, and their merits and shortcomings are discussed: (a) inherent underspecified meanings; (b) meanings conditioned by grammatical context (allosemy); (c) meaninglessness. I argue that, overall, the current state of the evidence favours the third position: roots are categoryless, meaningless (perhaps phonological) indices.

The general consensus emerging from decades of empirical investigation of metaphor processing is that, when appropriately contextualised, metaphorically used language is no more demanding of processing effort than literally used language. However, there is a small number of studies which contradict this position, notably Noveck, Bianco, and Castry (2001): they maintain that relevance-based pragmatic theory predicts increased cognitive costs incurred in deriving the extra effects that metaphors typically yield, and they provide experimental results that support this prediction. In our study, we first surveyed and assessed the tasks and stimulus materials of many experiments on metaphor processing from the 1970's to the present day. The most telling result was an apparent disparity between the processing of metaphorical language used predicatively versus referentially. We then ran two self-paced reading experiments to test our hypothesis that when used as a predicate, metaphorical language is no more costly than literal language, but when used referentially, it does incur extra costs, even given a preceding biasing context. In the first experiment, all metaphorical referring expressions were in subject position so occurred early in the sentence; in the second experiment, we controlled for any effect of sentence position by placing metaphorical referring expressions in object position, thus later in the sentence, similar to the predicate metaphors. In both cases, metaphorical referring incurred significantly greater costs relative to literal equivalents than did metaphorical predication, with no effect of sentence position. We end with a brief analysis of why the referential use of metaphor is special and effort-demanding.

Polysemy, understood as instances of a single linguistic expression having multiple related senses, is not a homogenous phenomenon. There are regular (apparently, rule‐based) cases and irregular (resemblance‐based) cases, which have different processing profiles. Although a primary source of polysemy is pragmatic inference, at least some cases become conventionalised and linguistically encoded. Three main issues are discussed: (a) the key differences between regular and irregular cases and the role, if any, of a “core meaning”; (b) the distinction between pragmatic polysemy and semantic polysemy; and (c) the role of syntactic meaning in both generating and constraining polysemy.

Bringing together work by leading scholars in relevance theory, this volume showcases cutting-edge research within the theory, and demonstrates its influence across a range of fields including linguistics, pragmatics, philosophy of language, literary studies, developmental psychology and cognitive science. Organised into broad thematic strands that represent the latest research and debates, the volume shows the depth of analysis now possible after nearly forty years of intensive work in developing and applying the principles of relevance theory. The breadth of influence of the framework is reflected in the chapters of the volume, in some cases moving beyond the traditional realms of semantics and pragmatics to include discourse analysis, language acquisition, media and education. The volume will be essential reading for researchers in these fields, as well as for those already working within relevance theory or with other pragmatic theories.

I propose that an account of metaphor understanding which covers the full range of cases has to allow for two routes or modes of processing. One is a process of rapid, local, on-line concept construction that applies quite generally to the recovery of word meaning in utterance comprehension. The other requires a greater focus on the literal meaning of sentences or texts, which is metarepresented as a whole and subjected to more global, reflective pragmatic inference. The questions whether metaphors convey a propositional content and what role imagistic representation plays receive somewhat different answers depending on the processing route.

A cognitive pragmatic approach is taken to some long-standing problem cases of negation, the so-called presupposition denial cases. It is argued that a full account of the processes and levels of representation involved in their interpretation typically requires the sequential pragmatic derivation of two different propositions expressed. The first is one in which the presupposition is preserved and, following the rejection of this, the second involves the echoic (metalinguistic) use of material falling in the scope of the negation. The semantic base for these processes is the standard anti-presuppositionalist wide-scope negation. A different view, developed by Burton-Roberts (1989a, 1989b), takes presupposition to be a semantic relation encoded in natural language and so argues for a negation operator that does not cancel presuppositions. This view is shown to be flawed, in that it makes the false prediction that presupposition denial cases are semantic contradictions and it is based on too narrow a view of the role of pragmatic inferencing.

It is widely accepted that there is a distinction to be made between the explicit content and the implicit import of an utterance. There is much less agreement about the precise nature of this distinction, how it is to be drawn, and whether any such two-way distinction can do justice to the levels and kinds of meaning involved in utterance interpretation. Grice’s distinction between what is said by an utterance and what is implicated is probably the best known instantiation of the explicit/implicit distinction. His distinction, along with many of its post-Gricean heirs, is closely entwined with another distinction: that between semantics and pragmatics. Indeed, on some construals they are seen as essentially one and the same; “what is said” is equated with the truthconditional content of the utterance which in turn is equated with (context-relative) sentence meaning, leaving implicatures (conventional and conversational) as the sole domain of pragmatics.

In (1), the talking event described in the matrix clause is elaborated on in the following adjunct: the arguing about the data and the theories makes up the content of the talking referred to in the matrix clause. In (2), on the other hand, the events (or sub-events of a single complex event) described are in a causeconsequence relation, a result of the action described in the matrix clause being that the porcelain vase breaks. These two examples illustrate a central issue for the interpretation of -ing adjuncts: the relation holding between the event described in the adjunct and the event described in the matrix clause is not always the same – in fact, as we’ll see, there is quite a range of possibilities. So the question is: how is the particular relation arrived at?