ETD

Archivio digitale delle tesi discusse presso l'Università di Pisa

Tesi etd-04042012-004857


Tipo di tesi
Tesi di laurea specialistica
Autore
SBORDONE, LUCA
URN
etd-04042012-004857
Titolo
Default Meanings and the Semantics/Pragmatics Distinction
Dipartimento
LETTERE E FILOSOFIA
Corso di studi
FILOSOFIA E FORME DEL SAPERE
Relatori
relatore Prof. Marletti, Carlo
Parole chiave
  • Contesto
  • Contestualismo
  • Relevance Theory
  • Semantica
  • Pragmatica
  • default
  • significato
  • Grice
  • Jaszczolt
  • Default Semantics
Data inizio appello
23/04/2012
Consultabilità
Completa
Riassunto
My thesis is in the area of the Pragmatics of language and communication, i.e. the area of philosophy of language and linguistics which is concerned with the use and understanding of language.
In the last decades, and particularly spurred by the works of the so-called ordinary language philosophers (especially Paul Grice), a widespread debate arose about how to treat cases of so called semantic underdetermined meanings. Roughly, these correspond to everyday situations in which the intended meaning of a particular utterance in conversation is richer than the conventional one. In this area of study, the specific topic of my thesis is the one of default meanings, i.e. those enriched interpretations which are arrived at immediately and without any apparent inferential effort. My main research question is: is it in principle possible to treat (also in a formally accurate way) the phenomenon of default meanings?

The first chapter of my thesis is a detailed outline concerning Grice’s theory of meaning and communication. The received view about Grice’s picture is exposed and several objections and counter-examples to this view are presented in order to introduce contemporary developments in the semantics/pragmatics debate. In particular, Grice’s theory of conversational implicature is questioned, starting from the acknowledgment of a kind of circularity in the way Grice shapes the distinctions between the layers of meaning: namely, sentence meaning, what is said and what is implicated.

From a theoretical perspective, the debate about the semantics/pragmatics distinction and about semantic underdeterminacy in the contemporary post-Gricean Pragmatics is very broad and articulated: a number of general paradigms are available, the most influential being Relevance Theory, truth-conditional pragmatics, hidden indexicalism, semantic minimalism, Discourse Representation Theory. Within these theories, many scholars developed their own proposals, each by focusing on a specific side of the theoretical prism: be that cognitive concerns, linguistic or philosophical topics. In the second chapter of the thesis I analyse in depth these paradigms and tried to put them to the test of a wide case study.
The topic of default is introduced in this chapter with respect to Levinson’s influential theory of generalized conversational implicature (GCI). It is explained how, in Levinson’s view, Gricean GCIs represent a kind of automatic inferences, which are induced by some peculiar heuristics. Specific objections undermining such approach are presented and Levinson’s view is eventually rejected.

In the third chapter, I put to test the idea of default interpretations and the modelling that has been proposed, with the help of the formal apparatus of dynamic logic in the framework of so-called Default Semantics.
It is shown how a radically different approach to the problem of semantic underdeterminacy is possible when some of the standardly accepted (and rarely questioned) presuppositions of semantic theory are put into question and finally rejected in favour of a more fine-grained and dynamic approach to natural language semantics.
Default Semantics starts from the acknowledgment of so-called merger representations as the basic units of compositional meaning of acts of communication. Merger representations are illustrated by DRT-Style Diagrams, with the proviso that each component of such single-level semantic representation can stem from different sources (including word meaning and sentence structure as well as pragmatic inference, and various types of default interpretations), none of which enjoy a compositional privilege over the others.

It is argued that the variety of ‘defaults’ in Default Semantics are of the deepest theoretical interest. That is why they are especially intended to preserve the undeniable advantages of a principle of compositionality in semantic analysis and at the same time to take seriously into account the linguistic underspecification of utterance meaning. Such task is pursued by resorting to a solid formalism, which is claimed to be able to cope with the various kinds of pragmatic contribution to utterance meaning.

My conclusion is that a large case study in Pragmatics is susceptible to treatment of the basis of such merger representations and defaults, and that this approach of this kind can help to get a more fine-grained position about the Semantics/Pragmatics boundary, while saving what good has been proposed from the opposite fronts of the debate.
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