Semantic and pragmatic relations and their intended eVects

Human Cognitive Processing

Volumn 8, Issue , 2001, Pages 127-151

  Knott, Alistair ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF OTAGO   (New Zealand)

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EID: 85190655776     PISSN: 13876724     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book Series    
DOI: 10.1075/hcp.8.08kno     Document Type: Chapter

References (24)

1. Sweetser in fact adresses two early versions of the bipartite distinction formulated by Ross (1967) and Davison (1973). However, her criticisms apply to the more recent versions too.
2. In fact, Sweetser (1990, p. 92) is unwilling to commit to the view that explicit performative should be understood as contributing to the semantics of a sentence. But the rationale for this is mainly concern for a proper demarcation the domains of 'semantics'and 'pragmatics'; the only relevant implication for our purposes is that the performative glosses are to be understood as falling in the latter domain rather than the former.
3. Or perhaps more precisely, as stating that the proposition R(f (U1), f (U2)) is asserted by the speaker.
4. Note that the account works equally well if the conditional is interpreted as a habitual: there are none of the problems associated with conditional, future or repeated speech acts that would arise if we extended the SPEECH-ACT account. Note that the protasis has to be evaluated from the perspective of the hearer in this case. This reading certainly seems possible, but it might be thought that it could also be evaluated from the speaker's perspective (i.e. the hearer comes to the speaker for a loan if the hearer believes the speaker believes he has run out of money). If this is considered a problem, it could be borne in mind that the intended eVect of an indicative utterance with content p can also be taken to be that the hearer believes that the speaker believes that p. With this alternative interpretation, both of the required perspectives are available. 5. Spooren (1989) apparently suggests that a violated expectation does arise in a case such as (43), as the necessary additional premise (in this case, that there is food to be found) is an implicature of the utterance expressing the protagonist's goal (i.e. John was hungry). While we must certainly implicate the fact that John has a goal if this is not explicitly stated, there seems no good reason to suggest that the speaker's informing the hearer about this goal should lead to an implicature that the goal is satisWable. If anything, hearers are used to hearing about situations in which a protagonist's goals are not satisWed: this is certainly the predominant case in narratives.
5. Bateman, J., & Rondhuis, K. J. (1997). Coherence relations: Towards a general speciWcation. Discourse Processes, 24, 3-49.
6. Davison, A. (1973). Performative verbs, adverbs and felicity conditions: an inquiry into the nature of performative verbs. Ph.D. thesis, University of Chicago.
7. Elhadad, M., & McKeown, K. R. (1990). Generating connectives. In COLING-90, 97-101.
8. Halliday, M., & Hasan, R. (1976). Cohesion in English. London: Longman.
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16. Moore, J. D., & Paris, C. L. (1993). Planning text for advisory dialogues: Capturing intentional and rhetorical information. Computational Linguistics, 19, 651-694.
17. Oversteegen, L. (1997). On the pragmatic nature of causal and contrastive connectives. Discourse Processes, 24, 51-86.
18. Redeker, G. (1990). Ideational and pragmatic markers of discourse structure. Journal of Pragmatics, 14, 367-381.
19. Ross, J. R. (1967). Constraints on variables in syntax. Ph.D. thesis, MIT. Now reprinted as InWnite Syntax. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1986.
20. Sanders, T. (1997). Coherence relations in context; on the categorization of positive causal relations. Discourse Processes, 24, 119-147.
21. Sanders, T. J. M., Spooren, W. P. M., & Noordman, L. G. M. (1992). Towards a taxonomy of coherence relations. Discourse Processes, 15, 1-35.
22. Spooren, W. (1989). Some Aspects Qf the Form and Interpretation of Global Contrastive Coherence Relations. Ph.D. thesis, Catholic University of Nijinegen, the Netherlands.
23. Sweetser, E. (1990). From Etymology to Pragmatics: Metaphorical and Cultural Aspects of Semantic Structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
24. Van Dijk, T. A. (1979). Pragmatic connectives. Journal of Pragmatics, 3, 447-456.