Abstract
This paper investigates the discourse status and psychological reality of three pragmatic levels of interpretation: explicature, strong implicature, and weak implicature. We test the potential of each of these levels to constitute the Privileged Interactional Interpretation, i.e., the most relevant message of an utterance as intended by the speaker and understood by the addressee (Ariel M. J Prag 34(8): 1003–1044, 200; Pragmatics and grammar. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2008). But our hypothesis takes the concept of the Privileged Interactional Interpretation a step further. We propose a scale of pragmatic interpretation strength: Explicature > Implicature[strong] > Implicature[weak]. We argue that the stronger (i.e., left) the representation on the scale, the more likely it is to count as the Privileged Interactional Interpretation.
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Notes
- 1.
This agreement does not mean, however, that researchers would necessarily classify the same interpretations in the same way, but at least, these meaning concepts are universally recognized as distinct.
- 2.
Following Recanati’s (2004) terminology.
- 3.
- 4.
This study does not address the difference between Recanati’s contextualism and Relevance theory’s pragmaticism, as presented in Carston (2009).
- 5.
Partial experimental support for this hierarchy (of different types of GCIs) can be found in Doran et al. (2012).
- 6.
Our position is that explicated inferences are cancelable. We believe that Burton-Roberts treats cancelability (a semantically defined concept) as if it were deniability (a discourse-based concept). Indeed, as we see below, explicatures are quite hard for speakers to deny.
- 7.
- 8.
Ariel and Jaszczolt’s concepts are not identical, however. For Jaszczolt, the primary meaning is one intended by a model speaker and derived by a model addressee. Ariel defines the Privileged Interactional Interpretation per each utterance/context pairing, and can accommodate different construals of it by the speaker and her addressee(s) (see ex. 4 below).
- 9.
Over half (15/27, 55.5 %) of Ariel’s (2008) participants agreed with H.D.’s judgment (11/27, 40.7 % said H.D.’s utterance is not a lie).
- 10.
We believe that our interpretation is the correct one here, although we are aware of the possible difference between ‘lying’ and ‘misleading’, as well as of interlocutors’ tendency to sometimes use words loosely in ordinary speech. This reservation should be taken into account in other cases, where the implicature is not so interactionally strong. In such cases, we believe, the speaker would not use the verb ‘lie’.
- 11.
- 12.
Necessary Contextual Elements are deictics, ellipses, indexicals, and pronoun resolutions.
- 13.
Note that the report must be made by a different speaker. The original speaker can preface a that is (to say) to implicatures as well. Another speaker is held to a higher degree of faithfulness.
- 14.
One way in which some explicatures are stronger than others correlates with the relevance-theoretic distinction between higher and lower explicitness. We expect explicatures containing less explicated inferences to count as stronger. See Sternau (2014) and Sternau et al. (in preparation), where we propose that certain types of explicated inferences may be stronger than others (and hence, less easily deniable).
- 15.
On bare Linguistic Meaning, see below.
- 16.
It should also be noted that by no means are we suggesting that the different degrees of strength of these various pragmatic contributions attest to the order in which they are inferred. The issue of processing was not addressed. We, like Relevance theoreticians, e.g. Carston (2002), believe that interpretive assumptions are retrieved in parallel, rather than sequentially.
- 17.
It should be noted that all the materials used in our experiments were taken from?? Based on??? natural discourse from the internet and from Maschler (2011).
- 18.
Target sentences were used only in the experiments where criteria b-d were examined.
- 19.
It should also be noted that an additional measure, response times to the confidence question, yielded a single significant difference – the difference between RTs concerning confidence judgments in considering explicatures and strong implicatures as the intended meanings: F1(1,71) = 5.11, p < 0.05; F2(1,23) = 5.84, p < 0.05. This supports distinct statuses of Explicatures and (strong) implicatures. Since explicated inferences are part of what is said, they are responded to faster.
- 20.
And see Camp’s (2013) interesting distinction between the speaker’s deniability and the hearer’s pedantry.
- 21.
It should be noted that some researchers have argued against taking into consideration what is understood by the addressee as a criterion to grade the speaker’s commitment to what was said. For example, Bach (2001) claims that “it is a mystery to me why facts about what the hearer does in order to understand what the speaker says should be relevant to what the speaker says in the first place” (p. 156). However, we believe that under normal circumstances, when interaction is smooth, examining addressees’ responses can best testify to speakers’ intentions.
- 22.
On these criteria enabling to highlight more fine-tuned differences in interpretation strength such as those between different explicatures, see Sternau et al. (in preparation).
- 23.
Except for the sub-criterion testing the degree of strength of the confidence an interlocutor has with regard to her/his decision to confirm a certain level of interpretation as the PII.
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Sternau, M., Ariel, M., Giora, R., Fein, O. (2016). A Graded Strength for Privileged Interactional Interpretations. In: Allan, K., Capone, A., Kecskes, I. (eds) Pragmemes and Theories of Language Use. Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, vol 9. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-43491-9_35
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