Davidson on First-Person Authority

Davidson's explanation of first-person authority in utterance of sentences of the form 'I V that p ' derives first-person authority from the requirements of interpretation of speech. His account is committed to the view that utterance sentences are truth-bearers, that believing that p is a matter of holding true an utterance sentence, and that a speaker's knowledge of what he means gives him knowledge of what belief he expresses by his utterance. These claims are here faulted. His explanation of first-person authority by reference to the requirements of interpretability is committed to the view that all understanding involves interpretation. This is argued to be a misconception of understanding and of speaker's meaning. Davidson's account involves acceptance of the cognitive assumption that normally when a person V s that p , he knows that he does. This assumption is challenged. Throughout, Davidson's conception is compared and contrasted with Wittgenstein's.     

The Metasyntactic Interpretation of Two-Dimensionalism

Robert Stalnaker contrasts two interpretations, semantic and metasemantic, of the two-dimensionalist framework. On the semantic interpretation, the primary intension or diagonal proposition associated with an utterance is a semantic value that the utterance has in virtue of the actual linguistic meaning of the corresponding sentence, and that primary intension is both what a competent speaker grasps and what determines different secondary intensions or horizontal propositions relative to different possible worlds considered as actual. The metasemantic interpretation reverses the order of explanation: an utterance has the primary intension it has because it yields the secondary intensions it yields relative to different possible worlds considered as actual. In these possible worlds, the semantic facts can be different: the metasemantic interpretation is metasemantic in the sense that the secondary intensions are determined relative to possible worlds considered as actual given the meanings the expressions have there. Stalnaker holds a causal picture of the reference of names, according to which names have no meaning over and above their unique referent, and therefore maintains that the semantic interpretation is not an option. He thus endorses the metasemantic interpretation, while insisting that this interpretation does not, contrary to what he originally thought, yield any account of a priori truth and knowledge. My double aim in this paper is to show (i) that the metasemantic interpretation, as sketched by Stalnaker, is not compatible with one natural understanding of the causal picture of reference, on which names are rigid because they have their original bearers essentially, and (ii) that a third kind of interpretation of the framework is available, the metasyntactic interpretation, which grants that names have their bearers essentially and yields some account of a priori knowledge.     

The evolution of relevance

With human language, the same utterance can have different meanings in different contexts. Nevertheless, listeners almost invariably converge upon the correct intended meaning. The classic Gricean explanation of how this is achieved posits the existence of four maxims of conversation, which speakers are assumed to follow. Armed with this knowledge, listeners are able to interpret utterances in a contextually sensible way. This account enjoys wide acceptance, but it has not gone unchallenged. Specifically, Relevance Theory offers an explicitly cognitive account of utterance interpretation that presents a radical challenge to the neo-Gricean paradigm. Evolutionary considerations are one way in which we can choose between competing theories. A simple game-theoretic model of the evolution of communication is presented, and it is used to derive a number of basic qualities that will be satisfied by all evolved communication systems. These qualities are observed to precisely predict the foundational principles of Relevance Theory. The model thus provides biological support for that enterprise in general, and for the plausibility of the cognitive mechanisms that it describes in particular.     

How French Speaking Children Understand Promises: The Role of the Future Tense

The purpose of this study was to gain insight into one of the textual characteristics of promises: the future tense as a temporal marker of utterances. More specifically, our aim was to determine the role of the future tense in the comprehension of promises by native French-speaking children between the ages of 3 and 9. In line with speech act theory, a promise is defined here as a commitment on the part of a speaker to perform a future act. Promise comprehension is assumed to be dependent upon textual characteristics (the linguistic form of the utterance, temporal markers in the utterance, etc.) as well as contextual characteristics (listener's desire, social implications of the promise, etc.). Children performed a story-completion task from two-character stories presented in comic strip form. The stories varied in two ways: the verb tense (immediate future, simple future, or past) and the utterance production context (specific or neutral). The main results can be summarized as follows: (1) The 3- and 6-year-olds based their interpretation of the promises primarily on the contextual characteristics of the communication situation; (2) after the age of 6, the children began to rely on temporal markers in the utterances whenever the immediate future tense was used and promise-specific contextual information was lacking; and (3) the 9-year-olds always based their interpretation of the promises on temporal cues in the utterance. The results are discussed in the framework of interactionist theories of development and models of language functioning.     

Reconstructing Metaphorical Meaning

Metaphorical meaning can be analyzed as triggered by an apparent communicative breach, an incongruity that leads to a default of the presumptive interpretation of a vehicle. This breach can be solved through contextual renegotiations of meaning guided by the communicative intention, or rather the presumed purpose of the metaphorical utterance. This paper addresses the problem of analyzing the complex process of reasoning underlying the reconstruction of metaphorical meaning. This process will be described as a type of abductive argument, aimed at explaining how the vehicle can best contribute to the purpose of the utterance. This type of reasoning involves the analysis of the possible predicates that can be and usually are attributed to the vehicle, and the selection of the one (or ones) that can support the implicit conclusion constituting the communicative goal of the metaphorical utterance. Metaphorical meaning, in this perspective, becomes the outcome of a complex process of meaning reconstruction aimed at providing the best explanation of the function of the vehicle within a discourse move.     

Form and function in children's understanding of ironic utterances

Children's use of contextual discrepancy and stressed intonation to interpret literal form and illocutionary function in the use of ironic utterances was examined in two experiments. First and third grade children (6 and 8 years of age, respectively) and college adults were read short stories consisting of an utterance by a speaker and contextual information that was either neutral or that biased an ironic or literal interpretation of the utterance. The intonation of the utterance was either stressed or unstressed. Questions were asked about the literal form of the utterance, and the speaker's attitude in using the utterance. The results suggest that evaluation of the literal form and inference to the speaker's intended use of an utterance are independent components of irony comprehension in children: that contextual discrepancy and intonation function differently in cueing these processes; and that children and adults differ both in accomplishing these processes and in the use of these cues.     

Informal pragmatics and linguistic creativity

Examples of successful linguistic communication give rise to two important insights: (1) it should be understood most fundamentally in terms of the pragmatic success of each individual utterance, and (2) linguistic conventions need to be understood as on a par with the non-linguistic regularities that competent language users rely upon to refer. Syntax and semantics are part of what Barwise and Perry call the context of the utterance, contributing to the pragmatics of the utterance. This full and distributed multichannel context determines meaning if anything does. On the standard account of context, context disambiguates the meaning of language, but it is at least as apt in many situations to say that language disambiguates context. In practice, the two work together, sometimes with more emphasis on one than the other. Reference should be understood in pragmatic terms (it is an act) and, since success is often achieved in non-standard, creative ways, any formalisation of pragmatics can only be partial. The need for such an inventive approach to referring traces back to the need for language to be highly efficient, with expressions underdetermining their interpretation. Next, the shared semantic and syntactic regularities, which might seem to be independent of the context of an utterance, should be understood as also being part of that context. Past usage underdetermines how terms can be used since it allows for multiple projections. Successful reference with novel uses that are disambiguated by context can become the ground for new conventions.     

On the Alleged Ambiguity of ‘Now’ and ‘Here’

It is argued that, in order to account for examples where the indexicals `now' and `here' do not refer to the time and location of the utterance, we do not have to assume (pace Quentin Smith) that they have different characters (reference-fixing rules), governed by a single metarule or metacharacter. The traditional, the fixed character view is defended: `now' and `here' always refer to the time and location of the utterance. It is shown that when their referent does not correspond to the time and/or location of the utterance, `now' and `here' work in an anaphoric way, inheriting their reference from another noun phrase. The latter may be explicit or implicit in the discourse. It is also shown that `now' and `here' can inherit their reference from a presupposed or tacit reference. In that case, they are coreferential with what will be labeled a `tacit initiator'. This anaphoric interpretation has the merit of fitting within the Kaplanian distinction between pure indexicals (`now', `here', `today', etc.) and demonstratives (`this', `that', `she', etc.).     

Linguistic-pragmatic factors in interpreting disjunctions

' The connective or can be treated as an inclusive disjunction or else as an exclusive disjunction. Although researchers are aware of this distinction, few have examined the conditions under which each interpretation should be anticipated. Based on linguistic-pragmatic analyses, we assume that interpretations are initially inclusive before either (a) remaining so, or (b) becoming exclusive by way of an implicature (but not both). We point to a class of situations that ought to predispose disjunctions to inclusive interpretations and to situations that encourage exclusive interpretations. A disjunction's ultimate interpretation is based on its potential informativeness, where the interpretation of the disjunctive utterance having the smallest number of true conditions is considered most informative. Our investigation leads to five experiments employing arbitrary materials. Among the problems expected to encourage inclusive interpretations are those that present disjunctions in the antecedents of conditionals and in question forms. The best candidates to produce implicatures are those disjunctions that underdetermine an expected conjunctive conclusion, although other disjunctive utterances that are more informative as exclusive are discussed and tested.     

Experimental pragmatics and what is said: a response to Gibbs and Moise

Gibbs and Moise [Gibbs, R., Moise, J., 1997. Pragmatics in understanding what is said. Cognition 62, 51-74], present experimental results which, they claim, show that people recognize a distinction between what is said and what is implicated. They also claim that these results provide support for theories of utterance interpretation (such as Relevance Theory) which recognize that pragmatic processes are involved not only in understanding what is implicated but also in working out what is said (the 'explicature'). We attempted to replicate some of these experiments and also adapted them. Our results fail to confirm Gibbs and Moise's claims. Most significantly, they show that, under certain conditions, subjects select implicatures when asked to select the paraphrase that best reflects what a speaker has said. We suggest that our results can be explained within the framework of Relevance Theory (Sperber, D., Wilson, D., 1986. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Blackwell, Oxford) if we assume that subjects select the paraphrase that comes closest to achieving the same set of communicated contextual effects as the original utterance. When an utterance gives rise to a single strong implicature, subjects tend to select this as the paraphrase that best reflects what is said; in other cases (for example in Gibbs and Moise's stimuli) subjects tend to select the explicature.     

Gestalt compositionality and instruction-based meaning construction

We would like to propose a new model of meaning construction based on language comprehension considered as a dynamic process during which the meaning of each linguistic unit and the global meaning of the sentence are determined simultaneously. This model, which may be called “gestalt compositionality,” is radically opposed to the classic compositional mechanism advocated by linguistic formalism based on the primacy of syntax. The process considers the syntactic structure of an utterance as the product of meaning construction rather than its source. The comprehension of an utterance is consequently directly based on the interaction between the different basic components of this utterance: lexical units, grammatical markers, positional relations between units, and more generally, basic “constructions” in the sense of Construction Grammar. Thus, meaning is really the result of a gestalt compositional process insomuch as the contribution of each basic component depends on the contribution of the other components present in the utterance. We show a first attempt at modeling from French and English examples.     

Hesitation in communication: Does minority status delay responses?

Past studies indicated that people in a minority (vs. majority) position are slower to express their public/political opinion, and the larger the difference between the size of the two positions, the slower the response. Bassili termed this the minority‐slowness effect (MSE). In the current study, two experiments were conducted to demonstrate that MSE extends to people's understanding of utterances and explored the cognitive basis for this. Participants were asked to judge if an utterance is a ‘direct’ or an ‘indirect’ expression. The results show that participants in the minority (vs. majority) took longer to respond, and the larger the difference between the size of majority and minority, the longer the response latency (Study 1a). Furthermore, participants were aware of their own minority position (Study 1b). In Study 2, when participants were deprived of cognitive resources, MSE disappeared, presumably because participants lack the cognitive resources required to conform to utterance interpretation as favoured by the majority.     

Children's understanding that utterances emanate from minds: using speaker belief to aid interpretation.

Children interpreted an utterance made by a protagonist with a false belief, such as, 'I would like the car in the garage.' Calculating the speaker's belief in conjunction with the literal meaning of the utterance would lead to the correct interpretation that the intended referent is the car on the track, given that the car in the garage swapped places with the one on the track. In Experiments 1 and 2, many children aged around 4 and 5 years wrongly indicated the car in the garage. In contrast, many correctly indicated the car on the track when it was unnecessary to consider the speaker's belief because the utterance was, 'the car I put in the garage'. Six-year-olds found both kinds of utterance equally easy in Experiment 1, while 3-year-olds had equal difficulty with both. In Experiments 2 and 3, the speaker gave an ambiguous utterance and many children aged between 3 and 6 years successfully used information about the speaker's belief to identify which of several candidate referents was intended. We discuss the results in relation to characteristics of utterance comprehension and consider implications for developments in understanding the mind by children beyond 4 years.     

An fMRI investigation of analogical mapping in metaphor comprehension: the influence of context and individual cognitive capacities on processing demands

This study used fMRI to investigate the neural correlates of analogical mapping during metaphor comprehension, with a focus on dynamic configuration of neural networks with changing processing demands and individual abilities. Participants with varying vocabulary sizes and working memory capacities read 3-sentence passages ending in nominal critical utterances of the form "X is a Y." Processing demands were manipulated by varying preceding contexts. Three figurative conditions manipulated difficulty by varying the extent to which preceding contexts mentioned relevant semantic features for relating the vehicle and topic of the critical utterance to one another. In the easy condition, supporting information was mentioned. In the neutral condition, no relevant information was mentioned. In the most difficult condition, opposite features were mentioned, resulting in an ironic interpretation of the critical utterance. A fourth, literal condition included context that supported a literal interpretation of the critical utterance. Activation in lateral and medial frontal regions increased with increasing contextual difficulty. Lower vocabulary readers also had greater activation across conditions in the right inferior frontal gyrus. In addition, volumetric analyses showed increased right temporo-parietal junction and superior medial frontal activation for all figurative conditions over the literal condition. The results from this experiment imply that the cortical regions are dynamically recruited in language comprehension as a function of the processing demands of a task. Individual differences in cognitive capacities were also associated with differences in recruitment and modulation of working memory and executive function regions, highlighting the overlapping computations in metaphor comprehension and general thinking and reasoning.     

On the discovery of novel wordlike units from utterances: an artificial-language study with implications for native-language acquisition.

In 4 experiments, adults were familiarized with utterances from an artificial language. Short utterances occurred both in isolation and as part of a longer utterance, either at the edge or in the middle of the longer utterance. After familiarization, participants' recognition memory for fragments of the long utterance was tested. Recognition was greatest for the remainder of the longer utterance after extraction of the short utterance, but only when the short utterance was located at the edge of the long utterance. These results support the incremental distributional regularity optimization (INCDROP) model of speech segmentation and word discovery, which asserts that people segment utterances into familiar and new wordlike units in such a way as to minimize the burden of processing new units. INCDROP suggests that segmentation and word discovery during native-language acquisition may be driven by recognition of familiar units from the start, with no need for transient bootstrapping mechanisms.     

Appreciation of indirect requests by left- and right-brain-damaged patients: the effects of verbal context and conventionality of wording

Unilaterally right (RHD)- and left (LHD)-hemisphere-damaged patients were tested on their ability to discern the correct, nonliteral interpretation of indirect requests (e.g., "Can you open the door?") embedded in short vignettes and presented without any pictorial support. Each stimulus vignette incorporated two verbal cues--context and conventionality of form--designed to influence interpretations of a critical utterance located at the end of each vignette. Contexts were biased to encourage either the direct, literal reading of critical utterances as a question, or the indirect meaning of the utterance as a request for action. The critical utterances themselves were either high in conventionality (e.g., "Can you ...?") which encouraged an indirect interpretation, or low in conventionality (e.g., "Is it possible for you to ...?") which encouraged a direct interpretation. Results indicated that RHD patients were significantly impaired, relative to controls, in their ability to make judgments based on contextual information. RHD patients performed comparably to the aphasic, LHD group in the use of both context and conventionality. These results replicate earlier findings of disrupted indirect request comprehension by RHD patients tested in pictorially supported paradigms.     

A PRAGMATIC CRITIQUE OF PLURALISM IN TEXT INTERPRETATION

Abstract: I take a pragmatic approach to what interpreters do when they interpret and argue that critical pluralists have focused almost exclusively on one aspect of interpretation: the fact that it is an event taking place in a historical and cultural milieu that influences the many ways interpreters approach a given text. However, there is also in interpretation a pragmatic aspect: the fact that it is an act performed by individuals who, through the utterance of their statements, implicitly make claims, for example, regarding the truth of their interpretation. In the first part I explain what critical pluralists overlook and the consequences of such oversight. In the second part I indicate how the validity of interpretation can be assessed.     

Childhood stuttering and speech disfluencies in relation to children's mean length of utterance: a preliminary study

The purpose of this study was to examine the influence of utterance length and complexity relative to the children's mean length of utterance (MLU) on stuttering-like disfluencies (SLDs) for children who stutter (CWS) and nonstuttering-like disfluencies (nonSLDs) for children who do not stutter (CWNS). Participants were 12 (3;1-5;11, years;months) children: 6 CWS and 6 age-matched (+/-5 months) CWNS, with equal numbers in each talker group (CWS and CWNS) exhibiting MLU from the lower to the upper end of normal limits. Data were based on audio-video recordings of each child in two separate settings (i.e., home and laboratory) during loosely structured, 30-min parent-child conversational interactions and analyzed in terms of each participant's utterance length, MLU, frequency and type of speech disfluency. Results indicate that utterances above children's MLU are more apt to be stuttered or disfluent and that both stuttering-like as well as nonstuttering-like disfluencies are most apt to occur on utterances that are both long and complex. Findings were taken to support the hypothesis that the relative "match" or "mismatch" between linguistic components of an utterance (i.e., utterance length and complexity) and a child's language proficiency (i.e., MLU) influences the frequency of the child's stuttering/speech disfluency. EDUCATIONAL OBJECTIVES: The reader will learn about and be able to: (1) compare different procedures for assessing the relationship among stuttering, length and complexity of utterance, (2) describe the difference between relative and absolute measures of utterance length, (3) discuss the measurement and value of mean length of utterance and its possible contributions to childhood stuttering, and (4) describe how length and complexity influence nonstuttering-like disfluencies of children who stutter as well as the stuttering-like disfluencies of children who do not stutter.