Representing knowledge

A speaker's use of a declarative sentence in a context has two effects: it expresses a proposition and represents the speaker as knowing that proposition. This essay is about how to explain the second effect. The standard explanation is act-based. A speaker is represented as knowing because their use of the declarative in a context tokens the act-type of assertion and assertions represent knowledge in what's asserted. I propose a semantic explanation on which declaratives covertly host a "know"-parenthetical. A speaker is thereby represented as knowing the proposition expressed because that is the semantic contribution of the parenthetical. I call this view parentheticalism and defend that it better explains knowledge representation than alternatives. As a consequence of outperforming assertoric explanations, parentheticalism opens the door to eliminating the act-type of assertion from linguistic theorizing

Parenthetical 'I say (you)' in Late Medieval Greek vernacular: a message structuring discourse marker rather than a message conveying verb

In this paper, I argue that the first-person singular of the "ordinary" verb lambda epsilon gamma omega/lambda alpha lambda(omega) over tilde ('I say') in the thirteenth-to fourteenth-century political verse narratives Chronicle of Morea and War of Troy does not always carry its "normal", representational content ('I inform/assure [you]'). Frequently, lambda epsilon gamma omega/lambda alpha lambda(omega) over tilde structures the discourse rather than conveying conceptual meaning and, thus, has procedural meaning. In this respect, the verb can be compared to modern discourse markers (i.e., semantically reduced items which abound in spoken language). An important-yet not decisive-criterion to distinguish the conceptual from the procedural use is the position of lambda epsilon gamma omega/lambda alpha lambda(omega) over tilde: all "DM-like" examples are parenthetical. As for their precise pragmatic function, these forms are used, in particular, to signal a clarification towards the listener ("I mean") or, more generally, to grab the attention of the audience. Applied to the modern binary distinction between interpersonal and textual discourse markers, they thus belong to the former category. Finally, I tentatively relate the observation that the procedural parenthetical examples show a marked preference for pre-caesural position to the concept of "filled pauses", which makes sense given the adopted oral style of the Late Medieval Greek political verse narratives

A CONCEPT OF GENERAL MEANING: SELECTED THEORIES IN COMPARISON TO SELECTED SEMANTIC AND PRAGMATIC THEORIES

The paper discusses a concept of general meaning with reference to various relevant semantic and pragmatic theories. It includes references to Slavic axiological semantics (e.g. Krzeszowski (1997); Puzynina (1992)), Wierzbicka’s (e.g. 1980, 1987) atomic expressions and classical pragmatics theories, such as speech acts, Gricean theory of conversational implicature, politeness theory and and relevance theory

Reports in Discourse

Attitude or speech reports in English with a non-parenthetical syntax sometimes give rise to interpretations in which the embedded clause, e.g., "John was out of town" in the report "Jill said that John was out of town", seems to convey the main point of the utterance while the attribution predicate, e.g., "Jillsaid that", merely plays an evidential or source-providing role (Urmson, 1952). Simons (2007) posits that parenthetical readings arise from the interaction between the report and the preceding discourse context, rather than from the syntax or semantics of the reports involved. However, no account of these discourse interactions has been developed in formal semantics. Research on parenthetical reports within frameworks of rhetorical structure has yielded hypotheses about the discourse interactions of parenthetical reports, but these hypotheses are not semantically sound. The goal of this paper is to unify and extend work in semantics and discourse structure to develop a formal, discourse-based account of parenthetical reports that does not suffer the pitfalls faced by current proposals in rhetorical frameworks

Reassessing the conceptual–procedural distinction

My aim in this paper is to reassess the conceptual–procedural distinction as drawn in relevance theory in the light of almost thirty years of research. In Section 1, I make some comparisons between approaches to semantics based on a conceptual–procedural distinction and those based on a distinction between truth conditions and conditions for appropriate use. In Section 2, I present a brief history of the conceptual–procedural distinction as drawn in relevance theory. In Section 3, I consider the nature of procedural encoding and discuss whether it is best seen as semantic or pragmatic. In Section 4, I outline some parallels and differences between procedural and use-conditional accounts of interjections. In Section 5, I discuss the implications of the conceptual–procedural distinction for lexical pragmatics and consider some recent proposals about how it might be extended. In Section 6, I reassess the conceptual–procedural distinction in the light of current evolutionary approaches to cognition and point out some future directions for research

Non-relational Embedding Verbs: Quotes and Reports

Some verbs cannot have their clausal complements replaced by referential expressions salva congruitate and/or veritate . This makes it difficult to analyse them as denoting relations of the type expressed by run-of-the-mill transitive verbs. The main goal in this work is to find an explanation for why some English embedding verbs are relational while others fail to be so. The question is, why can the latter, but not the former verbs have their embedded clauses replaced by direct speech complements? A comparison in the relevant contexts of the related categories of direct and indirect quotation reveals an important degree of coincidence that calls for (a) an overlapping semantic treatment, and (b) an interpretation of their often invoked differences as due to the contrasting semantic requirements of the class of verbs that fails to express a relation, non-relational ones. For us, the key distinguishing factor is utterance denotation, the differences between the two main classes of verbs identified in the work deriving from reliance on either the form or the content of the utterances involved. In order to account for these facts, we propose a substantial revision of the Davidsonian approach to clausal complementatio

A relevance-theoretic account of some constraints on syntactic parentheticals : evidence from English and Polish

Artykuł omawia ograniczenia, którym podlegają parentetyczne ciągi komentujące (tj. parentetyki stanowiące zdania, w których orzeczenie jest wyrażone czasownikiem opisującym postawę epistemiczną mówiącego względem propozycji zawartej w zdaniu głównym, w którego obrębie parentetyk się znajduje) i argumentuje (na podstawie danych z języka angielskiego i polskiego), iż analizowane ograniczenia wynikają z postulowanych w teorii relewancji mechanizmów poznawczych, z których korzystają uczestnicy procesu komunikacji, gdy zachodzi potrzeba oceny siły illokucyjnej wypowiedzi, postawy epistemicznej mówiącego i stopnia gotowości mówiącego do zaspokojenia oczekiwań stosowności przez odbiorcę danego komunikatu. Celem artykułu jest wykazanie, że: (a) parentetyk wchodzący w skład wypowiedzi epistemicznej może zawierać tylko funktor epistemiczny implikujący przekonanie mówiącego, że zachodzi stan rzeczy, o jakim mówi, (b) propozycja wyrażona w zdaniu głównym musi się przyczyniać do uaktualnienia wspólnego dla mówiącego i odbiorcy danego komunikatu kontekstu interpretacyjnego wypowiedzi i (c) postawa epistemiczna mówiącego względem propozycji zawartej w zdaniu głównym musi być przedstawiana za pomocą zdań z czasownikiem w formie osobowej, gdyż tylko taka forma gramatyczna pozwala na tworzenie trybu czasownika, dzięki któremu jest wyrażany stosunek mówiącego do treści wypowiedzenia. Artykuł dowodzi, że rolą parentetycznych ciągów komentujących zarówno w języku angielskim, jak i polskim jest sygnalizowanie odbiorcy komunikatu wiarygodnej postawy mówcy względem wypowiadanych treści.The present article has two main goals. First, it attempts to contribute to the linguistic research on parentheticals by drawing attention to some constraints on syntactic parentheticals, i.e. parenthetical comment clauses including a predicate (verb or adjective) expressing the propositional attitude and/or source of the information presented in the host clause into which the parenthetical comment is interpolated or which it follows. Second, it offers an analysis illustrated with data from English and Polish which derives the observed constraints from the cognitive mechanisms independently argued for in Relevance Theory, thus offering support for the approach to syntactic parentheticals taken in this pragmatic framework. The constraints focused on here include: (a) the requirement that the parenthetical comment be upward entailing on the epistemic scale of the strength of speaker commitment; (b) the requirement that the host proposition update the common ground and (c) the requirement that the propositional attitude of the speaker to the host clause proposition be indicated with mood markers. All of the constraints are argued here to stem from the nature of the cognitive inferencing mechanisms that guide verbal communication and in particular, from the necessity - in certain communicative contexts - of accessing the illocutionary force, the propositional attitude of the speaker's utterances, and the strength of the speaker's commitment for the purposes of meeting the hearer's expectations of relevance. Building on Wilson (2011), evidential parenthetical comments are argued here to communicate that the speaker's information is well-evidenced and demonstrate the speaker's reliability

Uncertainty as a disambiguating factor for conditional, temporal, and habitual constructions: evidence from Spanish

The present work analyzes conditional constructions in Spanish that are polysemous between different conditional and non-conditional readings and whose meaning arises pragmatically. This article shows that the feature of uncertainty can help us identify potential conditional constructions, and distinguish constructions that are disguised as conditional, but that do not behave as such. Thus, factual protases are not considered “true” conditionals as their behavior is more akin to causal clauses. I argue that including uncertainty as a determining factor of conditionality can allow us to disambiguate between causal, temporal, and habitual clauses that can also yield a conditional meaning and vice versa. I also provide four tests that can allow us to disambiguate between conditionality, temporality, and habituality.Peer Reviewe