Introduction to Pragmatics

Summer 2016

Tuesdays 2:30--4:00pm @ 2321.HS 3H

INSTRUCTOR

Todor Koev (Todor.Koev@uni-duesseldorf.de)

Implication relations

When a sentence is uttered in context, native speakers have sharp

intuitions about what inferences/implications can be drawn from it.

We have discussed three types of inferences:

o Entailments (inferences about the literal meaning of words)

o Presuppositions (inferences about what is assumed by the

speaker to already hold true)

o Conversational implicatures (inferences derived through

reasoning about the speaker’s communicative intentions)

We have introduced various empirical diagnostics (the Sentence

Family Test, the Defeasibility Test, etc.) to demonstrate that these

inferences indeed have different properties.

Entailment ()

Lexically triggered: about semantics, not pragmatically derived.

(1) I own a cat. I own an animal.

Because: cat = {x|x is a cat} {x|x is an animal} = animal

Non-defeasible: The speaker is committed to the entailments of the sentence. (2) # I own a cat but I don’t own an animal.

Can be blocked: are sensitive to negation and other operators.

(3) I don’t own a cat. I own an animal.

Presupposition ()

Triggered by particular words or constructions.

(4) The present queen of France hates Paris. (definite NP) France has a Queen.

(5) What Bill said was offensive. (wh-cleft) Bill said something.

Non-defeasible: The speaker is committed to the presuppositions of the sentence and assumes the same about the hearer.

(6) # The present queen of France hates Paris but France doesn’t have a queen.

Project to the position they are introduced.

(7) Jessica’s brother is bald. Jessica has a brother.

(8) If Jessica has a brother, her/Jessica’s brother is bald. (no pres.)

Conversational implicature ()

Arise through reasoning about the particular use of words.

(9) I bought a house. I didn’t buy more than one house.

Because: Maxim of Quantity.

Defeasible: the speaker can deny an implicature.

(10) I bought a house. In fact, I bought two of them.

Can be blocked by operators because partially derived from literal

meaning.

(11) A: How is the weather going to be today?

B: Take the umbrella. It’s going to rain.

B': Don’t take the umbrella. It’s not going to rain.

Questions

Is this “all there is” when it comes to inferences drawn in language?

Are there inferences that don’t fit the profile of either of those three

implication relations?

It seems that the inference patterns in language is even richer.

We will illustrate this on a particular English construction:

appositives.

Appositives

Appositive constructions: a special kind of modifiers that are separated from the rest of the sentence by intonation breaks (in speech) or commas (in print).

The variety of appositives:

(12) Appositive relative clause Lance, who was about to retire, admitted to doping.

(13) Nominal appositive Stefan Raab, my favorite comedian, was born in Cologne.

(14) Small clause appositive The representatives, most of them women, wore fancy attires.

(15) Adjectival appositive The guest, visibly angry at the host, left the studio.

On the syntax of appositives

Some terminology: (16)

Lance , who was about to retire, admitted to doping .anchor appositive rest of the sentence

A basic syntax for appositives:

Note: Appositives are not always attached to a noun phrase.

Appositive inferences

Appositives trigger inferences. (17) Lance, who was about to retire, admitted to doping.

Lance was about to retire.

(18) Stefan Raab, my favorite comedian, was born in Cologne. Stefan Raab is my favorite comedian.

Etc. Q: But what type of inferences? Is intuition enough to tell?

Strategy: Run some familiar tests and find out if appositive inferences are entailments, presuppositions, or conversational implicatures (or some new beast).

Conventionality

Appositive inferences are clearly conventionally/grammatically encoded.

The inference obtained roughly repeats the information contained in the anchor and the appositive.

More precisely: The inference is obtained by attributing the property stated in the appositive to the NP anchor.

(19) The guest, visibly angry at the host, left the studio.

The guest was visibly angry at the host.

(20) The representatives, most of them women, wore fancy attires. Most of the representatives were women.

Appositive inferences are like entailments and presuppositions in

this respect.

Non-defeasibility

Appositive inferences cannot be denied. The utterer of the sentence is committed to the appositive inference.

(21) The representatives, most of them women, wore fancy

attires. # They were mostly men.

(22) Stefan Raab, my favorite comedian, was born in Cologne. # He is not my favorite comedian.

Again, appositive inferences behave like entailments and

presuppositions.

Projection

Appositive inferences project.

They cannot be canceled when the main sentence is negated,

modalized, or turned into a question.

All of the sentences below imply that Lance was about to retire.

(23) Lance, who is about to retire, admitted to doping. a. Lance, who is about to retire, did not admit to doping. b. Lance, who is about to retire, might admit to doping. c. If Lance, who is about to retire, admits to doping, then he

is a good person. d. Did Lance, who is about to retire, admit to doping ?

So appositives behave like presuppositions and unlike entailments

in this respect.

Presuppositions?

Are appositive inferences presuppositions?

So far this is what we find.

Not so fast: Are appositive inferences similar to presuppositions in

all respects?

It does not seem so.

Two differences between appositives and presuppositions:

(i) Appositives project in a much stronger sense than

presuppositions.

(ii) Appositives share some discourse properties with entailments

and differ from presuppositions.

Appositive projection

Both presuppositions and appositives project.

However: Presupposition projection can be blocked while

appositive projection cannot.

(24) If Jessica has a brother, then Jessica’s brother is bald. (The presupposition of Jessica’s brother is blocked.)

(25) # If Lance took doping, then Lance, who took doping, will lose all of his titles. (The sentence is just infelicitous.)

Try the same with other presupposition-blocking environments (e.g. conjunction and disjunction, and you will get similar results.

So: Appositives project stronger than presuppositions!

Appositives in discourse

Presuppositions like to “repeat” discourse-old information.

(26) Bill moved to Hawaii. But now he regrets it / that he

moved to Hawaii.

In contrast, appositives introduce fresh information.

(27) Bill moved to Hawaii. #But now Bill, who moved to Hawaii,

wants to go to Indonesia.

Appositives behave like entailments/assertions in this respect.

(28) Bill moved to Hawaii. #He moved to Hawaii.

This also explains why (25) above is bad: the appositive repeats old

information.

Appositive inferences:

presuppositions or entailments?

Appositive inferences share properties with both presuppositions

and entailments:

o Like presuppositions, they project (although in a stronger

sense).

o Like entailments/assertions, they introduce fresh information.

We can think of appositive inferences as “projective entailments”.

Such projective entailments are called in the literature conventional

implicatures.

This term is very confusing and unfortunate, because appositives

have precious little to do with conversational implicatures. But

we’ll stick with it.

Conventional implicature

One analysis of conventional implicatures says that they are

secondary entailments with their own truth values.

Main idea: Sentences that trigger conventional implicatures have

multiple truth values.

Example:

(29) Mars, the fourth planet from the sun, is blue

, Mars is blue Mars is the fourth planet from the sun ,1 0

The logic behind

In classical logic, sentences have single truth values: one truth-value

per sentence.

Sentences with conventional implicatures have two (or in the

general case, multiple) truth values.

Two-dimensional logic:

,

1, 1

1, 0

0, 1

0, 0

main assertion conventional implicature

Explaining projection

Sentence operators (negation, modals, etc.) modify with the

first/main assertion dimension.

This is why conventional implicatures project.

Example:

(30) Mars, the fourth planet from the sun, is not blue.

Mars, the fourth planet from the sun, is not blue

, Mars is not blue Mars is the fourth planet from the sun , Mars is blue Mars is the fourth planet from the sun

0 , 1

1 , 1

Intuitions about 2D semantics

But is a particular sentence with appositives “true” or “false”?

For example, what about a 1 , 0 -sentence?

(31) Düsseldorf, the biggest city in Germany, has about 600,000

inhabitants.

Q: Is the sentence both true and false? Does it make sense to even

ask for a single truth value?

Q: If the sentence is just false, how could we explain our intuitions

if we want to preserve the two-dimensional logic?

For next time

Please read Chapter 4 from the Birner textbook.

Assignment #3 is now available and due next Tuesday

(June 7, 2016).