Some remarks on non-conceptual word meaning and truth-conditional content in Robyn Carston’s pragmatics

• Authors: Mioduszewska Ewa
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

PL

Streszczenie Interpretacje konwencjonalnego znaczenia słów (rzeczowników, czasowników i przymiotników) zmieniały się wraz ze zmianami samej Teorii Relewancji (część opisowa). Jednakże, do czasu najnowszej propozycji Robyn Carston (2013, 2012), interpretacje te zakładały pojęciowy charakter omawianego znaczenia. Propozycja Carston, że skonwencjonalizowane, pozakontekstowe znaczenie leksykalne jest apojęciowe, asemantyczne, nieprawdofunkcjonalne i schematyczne wydaje się stać w sprzeczności z tą częścią relewancyjnej procedury opisującej proces rozumienia wypowiedzi, która dotyczy konstrukcji jej eksplikatury (część dyskursywna: krytyka propozycji Carston z perspektywy Teorii Relewancji).

The Relevance Theory interpretations of standing word meaning have changed during the evolution of the theory itself (the expository part of the paper). However, until Robyn Carston’s (2013, 2012) new proposal, a conceptual (at least partly) nature of open-class items content was assumed. The claim that stable, invariant word meaning is non-conceptual, non-semantic, non-truth-conditional and schematic seems to be incompatible with the subtask of the relevance-theoretic comprehension procedure concerning constructing an appropriate hypothesis about explicit content of an utterance (the discursive, critical evaluation of Carston’s proposal).

Keywords

EN

non-conceptual word meaning; Relevance Theory

• Publisher: Wydział Neofilologii, Uniwersytet Warszawski
• Journal: Acta Philologica
• Year: 2015
• Issue: 46
• Pages: 5-16

Contributors

author

Mioduszewska Ewa

• Wydział Neofilologii, Uniwesytet Warszawski

References

• Bach, K. (1994). Semantic slack: What is said and more. S. Tsohatzidis (Ed.), Foundations of speech act theory: Philosophical and linguistic perspectives (267–291). London: Routledge.
• Bach, K. (2010). Impliciture vs explicature: What’s the difference? B. Soria and E. Romero (Eds.), Explicit communication: Robyn Carston’s pragmatics (126–137). Basingstoke: Palgrave.
• Borg, E. (2012). Pursuing meaning. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Bosch, P. (2009). Predicate indexicality and context dependence. P. De Brabanter and M. Kissine (Eds.), Utterance Interpretation and Cognitive Models. Current Research in the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface (Vol. 20, 99–126). Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing Limited.
• Carston, R. (1991). Implicature, explicature and truth-theoretic semantics. S. Davis (Ed.), Pragmatics: A reader (33–51). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Carston, R. (2002a). Thoughts and utterances. The pragmatics of explicit communication. Oxford: Blackwell.
• Carston, R. (2002b). Linguistic meaning, communicated meaning and cognitive pragmatics. Mind and Language, 17, 127–148.
• Carston, R. (2004). Explicature and semantics. S. Davis and B. Gellon (Eds.), Semantics: A reader (817–845). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Originally published in 2000 in UCL Working Papers in Linguistics, 12, 1–44.
• Carston, R. (2009). The explicit/implicit distinction in pragmatics and the limits of explicit communication. International Review of Pragmatics, 1, 35–62.
• Carston, R. (2010). Lexical pragmatics, ad hoc concepts and metaphor: A Relevance Theory perspective. Italian Journal of Linguistics, 22(1), 157–180.
• Carston, R. (2012). Word meaning and concept expressed. The Linguistic Review, 29, 607–623.
• Carston, R. (2013). Word meaning, what is said and explicature. C. Penco and F. Domaneschi (Eds.), What is said and what is not (175–203). Stanford, California: CSLI publications.
• Carston, R. and A. Hall (2012). Implicature and Explicature. H-J. Schmid and D. Geeraerts (Eds.), Cognitive Pragmatics, Vol. 4 of Handbooks in Pragmatics (7–84). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
• Fodor, J. A. (1998). Concepts. Where cognitive science went wrong. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Frisson, S. (2009). Semantic underspecification in language processing. Language and Linguistics Compass, 3, 111–127.
• Mioduszewska, E. (in press). Ad hoc concepts, linguistically encoded meaning and explicit content. Some remarks on relevance-theoretic perspective. In press.
• Recanati, F. (1994). Contextualism and anti-contextualism in the philosophy of language. S. Tsohatzidis (Ed.), Foundations of speech act theory (156–166). London and New York: Routledge.
• Recanati, F. (2004). Literal meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Sperber, D. and D. Wilson (1986 [1995]) Relevance. communication and cognition. Oxford: Blackwell.
• Sperber, D. and D. Wilson (1998 [2012]). The mapping between the mental and the public lexicon. Wilson, D. and D. Sperber (Eds.), Meaning and relevance (31–47). Cambridge: Cambridge University.
• Sperber, D. and D. Wilson (2008). A deflationary account of metaphor. R. Gibbs (Ed.), The Cambridge handbook of metaphor and thought (84–106). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Sperber, D. and D. Wilson (2012). Meaning and relevance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Wilson, D. (2003). Relevance and lexical pragmatics. Italian Journal of Linguistics/Revista di Linguistica, 15, 273–291.
• Wilson, D. (2011). The conceptual-procedural distinction: Past, present and future. V. Escandell-Vidal, M. Leonetti and A. Ahern (Eds.), Procedural meaning: Problems and perspectives (3–31). UK: Emerald Group Publishing.
• Wilson, D. and R. Carston. (2007). A unitary approach to lexical pragmatics: Relevance, inference and ad hoc concepts. N. Burton-Roberts (Ed.), Pragmatics (230–260). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Wilson, D. and D. Sperber (2004). Relevance theory. L. Horn and G. Ward (Eds.), Handbook of pragmatics (607–632). Oxford: Blackwell.