www.company.com michelle c. delos reyes. meaning of a word = concept it may appear as a constituent...
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www.company.com
Michelle C. Delos Reyes
www.company.com
meaning of a word = concept
• It may appear as a constituent of a logical form.
• It appears as an address in memory, a heading under which different types of information can be stored and retrieved
A psychological object consisting of a label or address, which performs 2
different complementary
functions
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Different entries of concepts
Consists of a set of deductive rules which apply to logical forms of which that concept is a constituent
Information is computational
Information about the extension and/or denotation of the concept
Information is representational
Contains information about the natural language counterpart of the concept: the word or phrase of natural language which expresses it… information about its syntactic category membership and co-occurrence possibilities, phonological structure and so on
LOGICAL
ENTRY
LEXICAL
ENTRY
ENCYCLOPAEDIC
ENTRY
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Provides access to logical information, understood as licensing inferences which will follow from propositions containing that concept.
Provides access to information about objects, events or properties which will fall under the concept, which comes from background knowledge and an individual’s own experience of the world
Provides access to linguistic information about the word
e.g. word class & pronunciation
LOGICAL
ENTRY
LEXICAL
ENTRY
ENCYCLOPAEDIC
ENTRY
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Examples of logical, encyclopaedic and lexical entries
BARE
Logical entry:
property of a certain kind
Encyclopaedic Entry:
wearing no clothes
with no accompaniments
simple
straightforward
Lexical Entry:
adjective
pronounced as /ber/
BEAR
Logical entry:
animal of a certain type
Encyclopaedic Entry:
no longer exist in the wild in Scotland
dangerous for humans
attracted by food scraps
a black bear once appeared in my aunt’s backyard
Lexical Entry:
noun; pronounced as /ber/
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II. 3 different possible views of what constitutes the content of concepts:
1. The logical and encyclopaedic entries of a concept constitutes the content of a concept.
2. Conceptual addresses are simple, unanalyzable concepts whose entries do not constitute their content.
3. The logical entry of a concept constitutes the content of that concept, while the information in the encyclopaedic entry does not contribute to the content of the concepts. The role of the encyclopaedic entry is to contribute to the context in which an utterance encoding the concept is interpreted.
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View 1: The logical and encyclopaedic entries of a concept constitutes the content of a concept.
The information in those entries must (be part of the proposition expressed by an utterance when the concept is part of the proposition expressed by the utterance.
Logical entry
(4) John saw an orchid.
(5) John saw A FLOWER OF A CERTAIN SPECIES.
Encyclopaedic entry
(6) JOHN SAW A RARE FLOWER.
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word meaning= DYNAMIC
X invariant
How we interpret a word in particular utterance depends on which bits of encyclopaedic information we recover.
Consequence: We seem to loose the distinction between what determines the content of an assumption wnad what determines the context, since on this view encyclopaedic information determines content as well as logical information.
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View 2: Conceptual addresses are simple, unanalyzable concepts whose entries do not
constitute their content.
Then both assumption (5) and (6) would come out as implicatures
Assumptions that I recover on the basis of the proposition expressed by John saw an orchid.
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2 kinds of implicatures-Sperber & Wilson
Implicated Premises
-recovered from the memory or constructed from an assumption schema held in memory, and are used in the derivation of implicated conclusions.
Implicated Conclusions
-deduced on the basis of the explicature(s) of an utterance together with the implicated premise(s)
John saw a rare flower. –implicated conclusion
Orchids are rare flowers. –implicated premise
Analytic implications: Implicatures (Carston)
These implications are derived by deductive
inference ‘the mechanism involved is
essentially the same as that for any
implicated conclusion’.
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Implicated conclusions vs. Analytic implication
Implicated conclusions are synthetic implications which are deduced from the explicatures of the utterance and the context and thereby contribute to the relevance of the utterance.
Analytic implications are deduced by the analytic rule only and therefore do not automatically contribute to the relevance of the utterance.
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• On this view, the contribution a lexical item makes to the proposition expressed by an utterance is invariant.
Q: What is the advantage in postulating that there are logical entries containing elimination rules representing necessary conditions?
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View 3: The logical entry of a concept constitutes the content of that concept, while the information in the encyclopaedic entry does not contribute to the
content of the concepts. The role of the encyclopaedic entry is to contribute to the context in which an utterance encoding the concept is interpreted.
• If the logical entry of a concept constitutes the content of that concept, while information from the encyclopaedic entry is added to the context, then information in the logical entry is added to the context.
(5) John saw a flower of a certain species. –part of the proposition expressed
(6) John saw a rare flower. – implicature
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On this view,
• The contribution a lexical item makes to the content of the proposition expressed by an utterance is invariant.
It consists of the analytic implications deduced via elimination rules in the logical entry associated concept
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Q: What is contributed by those lexical entries whose meanings are concepts that lack logical entries, or that have entries which do not
have necessary conditions which are sufficient to define the concept?
• One has to assume that these concepts have further content of some sort, but this further content cannot be supplied by the encyclopaedic entry of the concept (because encyclopaedic entry determines context, not content).
Those concepts whose logical entries do not exhaust their content is supplied by a perceptual representation.
e.g concept RED (color of a certain hue)
Content: logical entries
: logical entries + perceptual representations
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View 3 reduces either to View 2 or enriched version of View 1
• In other words, a lot of the properties that could be represented by a perceptual representation could also be represented as conceptual representation.
GIRAFFE (logical entries do not exhaust their meaning)
-it can be up to six meters tall and that at least a third of that height is made up by its neck, that it has four legs, large eyes, short tail, etc.
(Since the logical entry of this concept does not exhaust meaning, we could appeal to conceptual representations to compliment their logical entries)
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III. The current RT view
• On this view a distinction is made between lexically encoded concepts and ‘ad hoc’ concepts.
Result: narrowed or loosened lexical concept
AdjustmentBy a process of narrowing (strengthening) By a process of broadening (loosening)
Concepts that are constructed during the process of utterance interpretation by means of pragmatic adjustment of the lexically encoded concept
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Adjustment: narrowing
• involves selecting a subset of encyclopaedic entries, while the logical entry is retained
(8) I want to meet some bachelors.
When this is uttered by a woman about whom the addressee knows that she would like to get married, this context may lead the addressee construct the ad hoc concept BACHELORS, whose extension is a subset of the set of unmarried males.
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Adjustment: loosening
• involves selecting a subset of encyclopaedic entries while the logical entry is dropped
(9) Ken’s a (real) bachelor. [where Ken is legally married]
(10) Robert is a bulldozer.
(9) properties of a certain type of bachelor incompatible with a married lifestyle may be selected, while the logical property unmarried is dropped in the construction of ad hoc concept.
(10) the logical property piece of machinery of a certain type will be dropped, while the encyclopadeic properties will be selected.
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View 4 common with View 1
• It gives an account of the word meaning which is dynamic, rather than invariant: how we interpret a word in a particular utterance depends on which bit of information we recover.
Carston endorses the view
What makes up the meaning of a word in particular utterance is given ‘content-constitutive status’ in the construction of the ad hoc concept
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View 4 different from View 1
• Carston maintains that concepts are atomic (i.e simple, unanalyzable concept).
Although the subset of the logical and/or encyclopaedic entries selected may function as ‘content-constitutive’, they should not be viewed as actually being the content of the concept.
As a consequence, they are not part of the explicature which the concept occurs in, but rather should be viewed as implicated.
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• This conception of atomic concepts as ad hoc concepts overcomes the problem faced by View 2 regarding the status of implications derived from logical entries:
If logical entries do not become available automatically, then we assume that they will only be recovered as implicatures. This would make them implicated assumptions.
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2 possible views of concepts within Relevance Theory: View 1 or View 4 (a modified version of View 2, the view that concepts are atomic, even if they are created on-line rather than stored in memory)
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IV. Decision criteria
To make a distinction between explicit and implicit communication, Sperber and Wilson proposed the definition of explicitness:
An assumption communicated by an utterance U is explicit if and only if it is a development of a logical entry form encoded by U.
Any assumption which is communicated but not a development of a logical form encoded by the utterance, then is an implicature.
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Independent criteria to base a decision
Implicatures are cancellable without causing a contradiction in ‘what is said’ (Grice)
(4) John saw an orchid. (explicature)
(5) John saw a flower of a certain species. (part of the proposition)
(If this is cancelled, there’s contradiction)
(11) ? John saw an orchid, but he didn’t see a flower of a certain species. (contradiction)
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(6) John saw a rare flower. (part of the proposition)
(12) John saw an orchid, but he didn’t see a rare flower.(contradictory. If I believe than orchids are rare flowers, then I can’t believe that John has seen an orchid without believing that he has seen a rare flower.
(13) John saw an orchid, but I didn’t see a rare flower, because orchids aren’t rare. ( (12) does not constitute a
contradiction)
(accepting this would cause me to change the content of my concept ORCHID)
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Cancellability arguement
Wilson and Sperber and Carston argue that this property of cancellability without causing a contradiction can’t be sufficient criterion in distinguishing implicatures from explicatures because some explicit content is cancellable without causing contradiction.
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One way of rescuing cancellability as a criterion of the explicature/implicature distinction is by proposing that it is necessary, although not sufficient:
If an assumption is not cancellable without causing contradiction, then it must be part of the explicature, but if it is cancellable without causing contradiction that does not provide sufficient evidence that is an implicature.
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2nd property of implicatures
Implicatures should be calculable i.e they are derived by an inferential process.
Sperber and Wilson argue that this is not a valid way of distinguishing between explicit and implicit content.
Recanati proposes that we should take our intuitions as speakers seriously in deciding what is said.
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Availability Principle
In deciding whether a pragmatically determined aspect of utterance meaning is part of what is said, that is, in making a decision concerning what is said, we should always try to preserve our pre-theoretic intuitions on the matter.
On this proposal, many assumptions that previously have been analyzed as implicatures come out as being part of the proposition expressed.
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Assumption recovered from encyclopaedic information
(19) a. John: Have you read Susan’s book?
b: Mary: I don’t read autobiographies.
c: John: Yes, but have you read Susan’s book?
d: Mary: Well, I said I don’t read autobiographies, didn’t I?
e: Mar: What do you mean? Susan’s book is an autobiography, isn’t it?
Problem with Availability Principle: not everybody’s intuitions agree when confronted
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Carston proposes that the distinction of explicatures from implicatures lies in the fact that implicatures function independently of the explicature as the premise and conclusions of arguments.
He posits that functional independence in terms of distinguishing the explicature from the implicature:
‘the proposition expressed […] should have a role to play, distinct from and independent of its implicatures,… it should function independently as a premise in arguments’.
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However,
(20) Official: Girls may only enter the temple accompanied by their female parent.
Girl: But my mother is ill!
Here we see that contextual implications can only be derived on the basis of recovering that the girl’s female parent is ill.
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Scope Principle
Recanati proposes a further principle, the Scope Principle, which envisages operating in tandem with the Availability Principle to give us a clear distinction between what is said and what is implicated:
Scope Principle: A pragmatically determined aspect of meaning is part of what is said (and, therefore, not a conversational implicature) if- and perhaps, only if- it falls within the scope of logical operators such as negation and conditionals.
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Of all the different properties proposed to distinguish implicatures from explicatures, a case could be made for Grice’s proposal of cancellability, which may be taken as necessary, although it is not sufficient.
These criteria favour View 1, the view that encyclopaedic entries constitutes the content of a concept, over View 4, the view that concepts are atomic, even if they are created on-line, rather than stored in memory.