Default Semantics WorkshopUniversity of Pisa, 8 May 2012

Kasia M. JaszczoltUniversity of Cambridge

http://people.pwf.cam.ac.uk/kmj21

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Part 1Default Semantics and Interactive Semantics: An introduction

Part 2Selected applications: Temporal reference in discourse

Part 3Selected applications: First-person reference in discourse and beliefs de se

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Part 1Default Semantics and Interactive Semantics: An introduction

Part 2Selected applications: Temporal reference in discourse

Part 3Selected applications: First-person reference in discourse and beliefs de se

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Outline

The Gricean legacy

Minimalism vs. contextualism debates

Interactive Semantics as a radical contextualist theory

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Paul Grice: Intentions

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‘A meantNN something by x’: A uttered x with the intention of inducing a belief by means of the recognition of this intention.

Grice 1957 in 1989, p. 219

Implicature (implicatum)

Inferences that are drawn from an utterance. They are seen by the hearer as being intended by the speaker.

Speakers implicate, hearers infer (Horn 2004).

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Implicature (implicatum)Inferences that are drawn from an utterance. They are seen by the hearer as being intended by the speaker.

Speakers implicate, hearers infer (Horn 2004).

Inference in implicature is cancellable:

‘Tom has three children.’ ‘Tom has three children, if not four.’

vs. deductive inference: ((p → q) ∧ p) → q)7

Modified Occam’s Razor:

‘Senses are not to be multiplied beyond necessity.’

Grice 1978 in 1989, p.47

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Post-Gricean pragmatics:

?Where is the boundary between

semantics and pragmatics?

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Contextualism (currently dominant view)

 

‘... what is said turns out to be, in a large measure, pragmatically determined. Besides the conversational implicatures, which are external to (and combine with) what is said, there are other nonconventional, pragmatic aspects of utterance meaning, which are constitutive of what is said.’

Recanati (1989: 98; see also Recanati 2005, 2010)

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Some British people like cricket.Some but not all British people like cricket.

Everybody read Frege.Every member of the research group read Frege.

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Semantic analysis takes us only part of the way towards the recovery of utterance meaning. Pragmatic enrichment completes the process.

Enrichment: some +> some but not alleverybody +> everybody in the room, every

acquaintance of the speaker, etc.

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Pragmatic enrichment of what is said is often automatic,

subconscious (Dafault/Interactive Semantics: ‘default’). 

 

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Truth-Conditional Pragmatics (Recanati 2004, 2010)

Truth conditions of an utterance are determined not only by the assignment of values to indexicals (saturation) but also by modulation (top-down pragmatic processes).

Recanati (2004: 90)

= contextualism

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Modulation (Recanati 2004, 2005):

The logical form becomes enriched/modulated as a result of pragmatic inference and the entire semantic/pragmatic product becomes subjected to the truth-conditional analysis.

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Modulation (Recanati 2004, 2005):

The logical form becomes ?enriched/modulated as a result of pragmatic inference and the entire semantic/pragmatic product becomes subjected to the truth-conditional analysis.

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Beyond contextualism

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How far can the logical form be extended? ‘How much pragmatics’ is allowed in the representation of the primary intended meaning of an utterance?

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Semantic Minimalism

Minimal Semantics, Emma Borg (e.g. 2004, 2007)

Semantic theory must remain unaffected by pragmatic considerations. Semantics is confined sentence meaning and to accounting for deductive, formal operations.

“The truth-conditional semantic theory is governed, not by rich (…) inferential processes, but rather by formally triggered, deductive operations.”

Borg (2004: 8)

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‘That is red’ is true iff the contextually salient object is red.

‘Steel isn’t strong enough’ is true iff steel isn’t strong enough for something or other, salient in the context.

 

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Semantic Minimalism?

Insensitive Semantics, Cappelen and Lepore (e. g. 2005)

A truth condition can be produced for a sentence even if we are not in a position to discern possible situations that would verify it. It is a mistake to assume that a semantic theory should account for speakers’ intuitions about the content of the utterance, i.e. about the speaker’s meaning.

 

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Semantic Minimalism ?Insensitive Semantics, Cappelen and Lepore (e. g. 2005)

A truth condition can be produced for a sentence even if we are not in a position to discern possible situations that would verify it. It is a mistake to assume that a semantic theory should account for speakers’ intuitions about the content of the utterance, i.e. about the speaker’s meaning.

Semantically context-sensitive expressions: personal pronouns (‘I’, ‘he’); demonstrative pronouns (‘this’, ‘that’); adverbs (‘here’, ‘there’, ‘now’, ‘today’, ‘yesterday’, ‘tomorrow’, ‘ago’, ‘henceforth’); adjectives (‘actual’ and ‘present’); tense.

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Radical Semantic Minimalism, Bach (e. g. 2004, 2007)

“The semantics-pragmatics distinction is not fit to be blurred.

What lies on either side of the distinction, the semantic and the

pragmatic, may each be messy in various ways, but that doesn’t

blur the distinction itself. Taken as properties of sentences,

semantic properties are on a par with syntactic and

phonological properties: they are linguistic properties.

Pragmatic properties, on the other hand, belong to acts of

uttering sentences in the course of communicating.”

Bach (2004: 27)

against propositionalism

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State of the Art:

 

There are several contextualist approaches to semantics and several minimalist ones and the debate is continuing.

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Towards radical contextualism

?

How far can the logical form be extended? ‘How much pragmatics’ is allowed in the representation of the primary intended meaning of an utterance?

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Default Semantics (Jaszczolt 2005, 2009, 2010)Interactive Semantics (Jaszczolt, in progress, OUP)

 

Parsimony of Levels Principle (POL):

Levels of senses are not to be multiplied beyond necessity. A: I’ve cut my finger.B: You are not going to die! Primary, main meaning: ‘There is nothing to worry

about.’

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Default Semantics abandons the syntactic constraint adopted on other post-Gricean contextualist accounts according to which the explicit content (explicature, what is said) has to be the development of the logical form (i.e. has to be added to the output of syntactic processing) of the sentence.

Primary meaning is defined as the most salient meaning intended by the speaker and recovered by the addressee and it may sometimes override the logical form of the sentence, as in B above.

 

 

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Primary Intention Principle (PI):

The primary role of intention in communication is to secure the referent of the speaker's utterance.

‘The winner of the Nobel Prize for literature 2010 is a good writer.’

referential (Mario Vargas Llosa) > attributive (whoever received the prize)

  

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 Degrees of Intentions Principle (DI):

Intentions come in various strength, i.e. they allow for degrees.

 ‘Ralph believes that the best architect designed Sagrada Família.’

de re (Antoni Gaudí) > de dicto1 (Simon Guggenheim) > de dicto2 (whoever designed that church)

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Merger representations

What is expressed in the lexicon in one language may be expressed by grammar in another.

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Merger representations

What is expressed in the lexicon in one language may be expressed by grammar in another.

What is expressed overtly in one language may be left to pragmatic inference or default interpretation in another.

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e.g. sentential connectives:

Wari’ (Chapacura-Wanham, the Amazon) Tzeltal (Mayan, Mexico) no ‘or’

Maricopa (Yuman, Arizona) no ‘and’ Guugu Yimithirr (Australian Aboriginal) no ‘if’

cf. Mauri & van der Auwera 2012.; Evans & Levinson 2009

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English ‘and’

Tom finished the chapter and closed the book.

and +> and then

Tom finished the chapter and then closed the book.Tom finished the chapter. He closed the book.

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rhetorical structure rules, Asher and Lascarides 2003

Narration:

Tom finished the chapter. He closed the book.

e1 e2

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No ‘or’ in Wari’?

Absence of a disjunctive marker presence of some irrealis marker

’am ’e’ ca ’am mi’ pin ca

perhaps live 3SG.M. Perhaps givecomplete 3SG.M.

‘Either he will live or he will die.’

from Mauri and van der Auwera (2012: 391)

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‘…while perhaps none of the logical connectives are universally lexically expressed, there is no evidence that languages differ in whether or not logical connectives are present in their logical forms’.

von Fintel & Matthewson (2008: 170)

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Composition of meaning

Ascribing generative capacity to syntax (Chomsky and followers)

Compositionality as a property of semantics Montague and followers, e.g. DRT, DPL,

representationalism Evans and Levinson (2009), generative power

of semantics/pragmatics (conceptual structure)

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Pragmatic, interactive compositionality (post-Gricean contextualists, e.g. Recanati’s Truth-Conditional Pragmatics; Jaszczolt’s Default Semantics)

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von Fintel and Matthewson (2008: 191):

‘We found that languages often express strikingly similar truth conditions, in spite of non-trivial differences in lexical semantics or syntax. We suggested that it may therefore be fruitful to investigate the validity of ‘purely semantic’ universals, as opposed to syntax-semantics universals’.

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What are they?

vF&M (2008):

(i) some universal semantic composition principles

(ii) Gricean principles of utterance interpretation

semantic/pragmatic processing principles39

‘For our generativist critics, generality is to be found at the level of structural representation; for us, at the level of process’

Evans and Levinson (2009: 475)

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Compositionality is a semantic universal

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Conceptual structure in Default Semantics

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?

How far can the logical form be extended? ‘How much pragmatics’ is allowed in the semantic representation?

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The logical form of the sentence can not only be extended but also replaced by a new semantic representation when the primary, intended meaning demands it. Such extensions or substitutions are primary meanings and their representations are merger representations in Default Semantics. There is no syntactic constraint on merger representations.

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Object of study of the theory of meaning:

Discourse meaning intended by Model Speaker and recovered by Model Addressee (primary meaning)

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Radical contextualism?

DS does not recognize the level of meaning at which the logical form is pragmatically developed/modulated as a real, interesting, and cognitively justified construct.

To do so would be to assume that syntax plays a privileged role among various carriers of information (contextualists’ mistake).

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Child to mother: Everybody has a bike.

(a) All of the child’s friends have bikes.

(b) Many/most of the child’s classmates have bikes.

(c) The mother should consider buying her son a bike.

(d) Cycling is a popular form of exercise among children.

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Child to mother: Everybody has a bike.

(a) All of the child’s friends have bikes.

(b) Many/most of the child’s classmates have bikes.

(c) The mother should consider buying her son a bike.

(d) Cycling is a popular form of exercise among children.

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Child: Can I climb the Leaning Tower?

Mother: You are too small.

(a) The child is too small to climb the Leaning Tower of Pisa.(b) The child can’t climb the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

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Child: Can I climb the Leaning Tower?

Mother: You are too small.

(a) The child is too small to climb the Leaning Tower of Pisa.(b) The child can’t climb the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

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Interlocutors frequently communicate their main intended content through a proposition which is not syntactically restricted.

Experimental evidence:

Nicolle and Clark 1999Pitts 2005Sysoeva and Jaszczolt 2007Schneider 2009

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Merger Representation Primary meanings are modelled as the so-called

merger representations.

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Merger Representation

Primary meanings are modelled as merger representations.

The outputs of sources of information about meaning merge and all the outputs are treated on an equal footing.

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Merger Representation Primary meanings are modelled as the so-called

merger representations.

The outputs of sources of information about meaning merge and all the outputs are treated on an equal footing. The syntactic constraint is abandoned.

Merger representations have the status of mental representations.

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Merger Representation

• Primary meanings are modelled as merger representations.

• The outputs of sources of information about meaning merge and all the outputs are treated on an equal footing. The syntactic constraint is abandoned.

• Merger representations have the status of mental representations.

• They have a compositional structure: they are proposition-like, truth-conditionally evaluable constructs.

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Sources of information for

(i) world knowledge (WK)(ii) word meaning and sentence structure (WS)(iii) situation of discourse (SD)(iv) properties of the human inferential system (IS)(v) stereotypes and presumptions about society and

culture (SC)

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SCA Botticelli was stolen from the Uffizi last week.

A painting by Botticelli was stolen from the Uffizi Gallery in Florence last week.

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ISThe author of Wolf Hall is visiting Cambridge this spring.

Hilary Mantel is visiting Cambridge this spring.

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world knowledge (WK)

word meaning and sentence structure (WS)

situation of discourse (SD)

stereotypes and presumptions properties of human inferential system (IS) about society and culture (SC)

Fig. 1: Sources of information contributing to a merger representation Σ

merger representation Σ

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The model of sources of information can be mapped onto types of processes that produce the merger representation of the primary meaning and the additional (secondary) meanings.

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Primary meaning:

combination of word meaning and sentence structure (WS)

conscious pragmatic inferencepm (from situation of discourse, social and

social, cultural and cognitive defaults (CD) cultural assumptions, and world world-knowledge defaultspm (SCWDpm) knowledge) (CPIpm) Secondary meanings:

Social, cultural and world-knowledge defaultssm (SCWDsm) conscious pragmatic inferencesm (CPIsm)

Fig. 2: Utterance interpretation according to the processing model of the revised version of Default Semantics

merger representation Σ

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Mapping between sources and processes

WK SCWD or CPISC SCWD or CPIWS WS (logical form)SD CPIIS CD

In building merger representations DS makes use of the processing model and it indexes the components of with a subscript standing for the type of processing.

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Merger representations are compositional.

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Compositionality is a methodological principle:

‘…it is always possible to satisfy compositionality by simply adjusting the syntactic and/or semantic tools one uses, unless that is, the latter are constrained on independent grounds.’

Groenendijk and Stokhof (1991: 93)

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or:

Compositionality should be an empirical assumption about the nature of possible human languages.

Szabó (2000)

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Fodor (2008)

compositionality on the level of referential properties (for Mentalese)

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Selected applications of DSOrigins: Jaszczolt 1992, 1999. Parsimony of Levels (POL)

Principle: Levels of senses are not to be multiplied beyond necessity.

First applications: definite descriptions, proper names, and belief reports (Jaszczolt 1997, 1999); negation and discourse connectives (Lee 2002); presupposition, sentential connectives, number terms (Jaszczolt 2005)

Recent applications: temporality, and modality (Jaszczolt 2009; Srioutai 2004, 2006; Jaszczolt and Srioutai 2012; Engemann 2008; Jaszczolt forthcoming a,b); syntactic constraint on primary meaning (Sysoeva and Jaszczolt 2007; Schneider 2009; Jaszczolt 2012); first-person reference and de se belief reports (Jaszczolt forthcoming c, d)

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Definite NPs in English

The author of Wolf Hall is coming to Cambridge.

The author of Wolf Hall (whoever he or she is) is coming to Cambridge.

Hilary Mantel is coming to Cambridge.

Michael Morpurgo is coming to Cambridge.

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Degrees of Intentions (DI) Principle: Intentions and intentionality allow for degrees.

Primary Intention (PI) Principle: The primary role of intention in communication is to secure the referent of the speaker’s utterance.

Jaszczolt (1999: xix)

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x

[Hilary Mantel]CD (x) [[x]CD is coming to Cambridge]]WS

Fig. 3: Partial merger representation for the default referential reading of ‘The author of Wolf Hall is coming to Cambridge’.

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x

[Michael Morpurgo]CPIpm (x) [[x]CPIpm is coming to Cambridge]]WS

Fig. 4: Partial merger representation for the referential mistake reading of ‘The author of Wolf Hall is coming to Cambridge’.

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x y

[Wolf Hall]CD (y) [the author of y]WS, CPIpm (x) [[x]CPIpmis coming to Cambridge]]WS

Fig. 5: Partial merger representation for the attributive reading of ‘The author of Wolf Hall is coming to Cambridge’.

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Cancellability and the syntactic constraint (Jaszczolt 2009b)

H1 Cancellability applies equally to explicit and implicit content.

H2 Primary meanings, be it explicit or implicit, are more difficult to cancel than secondary meanings.

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Cancellation of explicit meaning which functions as secondary meaning

A and B are talking about a family dinner, remarking on the fact that it consisted of five courses.

A: Was the food good?B: Some people liked mum’s cake.(+>PM The food at the family dinner was not particularly good.) (+>SM Some but not all people liked mum’s cake.)In fact, all of them did but this didn’t save the dinner.

= non-arising or promptly cancelled

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(ii) Primary meaning cancelled xA and B are talking about a family dinner.A: Was the food good?B: Some people liked mum’s cake. (+>PM The food at the family dinner was not particularly good.) But that is not to say that other courses were bad, I was late and arrived only for the dessert.

= pragmatically ill-formed

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Potential ‘implicatures’ functioning as primary meanings differ from potential ‘implicatures’ functioning as secondary meanings with respect to the property of cancellability. Potential main, intended meanings are considerably entrenched.

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Cancellation supports the DS primary/secondary meaning distinction and the rejection of the Syntactic Constraint

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SummaryRadical contextualism without the

syntactic constraint

Primary/secondary distinction as orthogonal to the explicit/implicit distinction

Pragmatic compositionality

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