Abstract
This book is an innovative study of utterance interpretation, introducing a new utterance interpretation approach which challenges the earlier views of contextualists and minimalists about the nature of what is said. Even though contextualists and minimalists assume that the notion of what is said must be appealed to in modeling linguistic communication, this book argues for the assumption that ‘nothing is said’ in linguistic communication. To demonstrate this point, the author Mark Jary distinguishes between linguistic communication and behavioral communication, and draws on Situation Theory and Relevance Theory to develop a model of linguistic communication that makes no appeal of any notion of what is said.
The book consists of seven chapters plus introduction and conclusion. The introduction covers the origin of utterance interpretation. Following the introduction, Chapter 1 maps out competing notions of what is said from the minimalists’ and contextualists’ point of view, and their reasons for defending these. Cohen’s (1971) explanation of the linguistic logical form and Grice’s (1989) dilemma lead to more discussion of the contextualists’, minimalists’ and radical indexicalists’ views on the subject of what is said (pp. 12–16). Then, the author elaborates on Relevance Theory, Levinson’s (2000) neo-Gricean model and Recanati’s (2004) two-tier model. This chapter then argues that neither of these reasons posits what is said on a level of representation which will be more fully explained in Chapter 4.
Chapter 2 makes the distinction between linguistic communication and behavioral communication. In basic linguistic communication, there is a reasonable inference from what is said to the implicature of an utterance, which is sometimes referred to as ‘linguistic communication proper’ (p. 34). In contrast, in behavioral communication, an initial premise of the form ‘The speaker said that P’ is required in order to connect what is said and the implicature. This chapter provides examples to illustrate that not all Gricean communication requires the reflective ability and conceptual ability that behavioral communication relies on.
Chapter 3 develops a model of linguistic communication proper by adopting Situation Theory and Relevance Theory. At any stage of the model, there is no assumption that any level of representation is equivalent to what is said. According to this model, basic linguistic communication involves a relationship between two situational types: an utterance-situation in which a linguistic form is tokened (p. 32), and the other which characterizes the situation that is the object of the interlocutors’ joint attention, thereby constituting the interpretation of the utterance.
Chapter 4 proposes a reflective notion of what is said and suggests its employment for behavioral communication. This chapter reviews the literature on the development of children’s ability to characterize an utterance, and the results show that this ability is not fully developed until around the age of seven, and it is still a long time to reach basic linguistic communication competence. On this basis, a developmental model of implicature comprehension is put forward. This resulting two-tier communication model is compared with Recanati’s (2004) dual-system approach.
Chapter 5 examines methods and phenomena used in pragmatic theories in light of the proposals made in the previous chapters. From the perspective of pragmatics and lexical pragmatics, the author argues that the comprehension of scalar implicature and polysemy depend on the interpretation of what is said. The author proposes ‘an account according to which scalars rely on a metalinguistic capacity that is necessary but not sufficient for behavioral communication’ (p. 112).
Chapter 6 shows how to explain assertion in the current model. This chapter argues that assertion can be analyzed in terms of an undertaking of commitment to the proposition explicitly expressed in light of the four substantive claims about assertion. This chapter discusses the consequences of this approach on distinguishing lying from otherwise deceiving, as well as the difference between asserting and presupposing.
Chapter 7 serves as a supplementary part of this book. The current framework takes its cue from Brandom’s (1994) framework which means that ‘the act is primary in communication, sentence and word meaning must be explained in terms of the act of speaking’ (p. 170). Then, this chapter continues to consider the notions of word meaning and public language, emphasizing Brandom’s decomposition of the former approach and his deferential approach for the latter.
This book outlines utterance interpretation in a novel way. The underlying pragmatic and semantic theories of meaning mostly assign the status of representation to what is said, and what is said must be identified in interpreting an utterance so that implicature can be derived. Simultaneously, the author realizes that long-standing view on utterance interpretation is based on a number of idealized cases, and he puts forward a new model for utterance interpretation in which what is said is a reflective concept. What is said is defined as a reflective notion, and intuition is regarded as a reflective act in the utterance interpretation process, but the reflective capacity is not necessary for competence in basic linguistic communication, being required only for sophisticated kinds of language use, not basic linguistic communication. The novel framework of utterance interpretation is suitable for graduate students majoring in linguistics or researchers of pragmatics. It is emphasized that the current theory disagrees that some conception of what is said can be posited as a level of representation when modeling basic utterance interpretation. Rather, from the perspective of basic linguistic communication, there is nothing that is said.