Abstract
Linguists and philosophers commonly distinguish between semantics and pragmatics, where the former concerns the truth or falsity of linguistic items and the latter concerns aspects of the use of such items that may make them unassertable even when true. Common though the distinction is, there is an ongoing controversy about where exactly the line between semantics and pragmatics is to drawn. We report two experiments meant to investigate empirically whether there is any pre-theoretic distinction that might help settle the debate. The same experiments are meant to shed light on a related question, namely, whether pragmatic aspects of language use pertain only at the level of assertability and not at that of believability. Our results suggest that ordinary people do not reliably distinguish among truth, assertability, or believability. We argue that this has consequences for the methodology of experimental semantics and pragmatics.
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Notes
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- 2.
Grice (1989, p. 37 ff) also distinguishes between generalised conversational implicatures and particularised conversational implicatures, where the former are supposed to be generated by default while the latter require special contextual assumptions. The present paper is concerned only with generalised conversational implicatures.
- 3.
As explained in Field et al. (2010, Ch. 14), for analyzing numerical data from a mixed design study one has a choice between performing a traditional ANOVA and using a mixed effects model, though they strongly recommend the latter type of analysis. We follow their recommendation here, also because it makes the outcomes more easily comparable to those from Experiment 1.
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The first author would like to thank Alessandro Capone for his encouragement over many years to probe more deeply into the pragmatics of belief.
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Douven, I., Krżyzanowska, K. (2019). The Semantics–Pragmatics Interface: An Empirical Investigation. In: Capone, A., Carapezza, M., Lo Piparo, F. (eds) Further Advances in Pragmatics and Philosophy: Part 2 Theories and Applications. Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, vol 20. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00973-1_5
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