Negation 'presupposition' and metarepresentation: a response to Noel Burton-Roberts

Metalinguistic negation (MN) is interesting for at least the following two reasons: (a) it is one instance of the much broader, very widespread and various phenomenon of metarepresentational use in linguistic communication, whose semantic and pragmatic properties are currently being extensively explored by both linguists and philosophers of language; (b) it plays a central role in recent accounts of presupposition-denial cases, such as ‘The king of France is not bald; there is no king of France’. It is this latter employment that discussion of metalinguistic negation has focused on since Horn (1985)'s key article on the subject. While Burton-Roberts (1989a, 1989b) saw the MN account of presupposition-denials as providing strong support for his semantic theory of presupposition, I have offered a multi-layered pragmatic account of these cases, which also involves MN, but maintains the view that the phenomenon of presupposition is pragmatic (Carston 1994, 1996, 1998a)

Negation, 'presupposition' and the semantics/pragmatics distinction

A cognitive pragmatic approach is taken to some long-standing problem cases of negation, the so-called presupposition denial cases. It is argued that a full account of the processes and levels of representation involved in their interpretation typically requires the sequential pragmatic derivation of two different propositions expressed. The first is one in which the presupposition is preserved and, following the rejection of this, the second involves the echoic (metalinguistic) use of material falling in the scope of the negation. The semantic base for these processes is the standard anti-presuppositionalist wide-scope negation. A different view, developed by Burton-Roberts (1989a, b), takes presupposition to be a semantic relation encoded in natural language and so argues for a negation operator that does not cancel presuppositions. This view is shown to be flawed, in that it makes the false prediction that presupposition denial cases are semantic contradictions and it is based on too narrow a view of the role of pragmatic inferencing

Word meaning and concept expressed

The concept expressed by the use of a word in a context often diverges from its lexically encoded context-independent meaning: it may be more specific or more general (or a combination of both) than the lexical meaning. Grasping the intended concept involves a pragmatic process of relevance-driven adjustment or modulation of the lexical meaning in interaction with the rest of the utterance and with contextual information. The issue addressed here is the nature of the input to the pragmatic process of meaning adjustment, that is, the nature of the standing (encoded) meaning of the word type. The widespread assumption that lexical meaning is conceptual, hence directly expressible, is challenged and a case made for the merits of an account of word type meaning in non-conceptual terms

The heterogeneity of procedural meaning

The distinction in relevance theory between two kinds of encoded meaning, conceptual and procedural, has evolved so that more and more components of encoded meaning, both linguistic and non-linguistic, are now taken to be procedural (non-conceptual). I trace these developments and assess the extent to which these diverse elements share properties that distinguish them from concept-expressing words. While the notion of procedural encoding has lost some of its original distinctiveness, it may make sense to think of all encoded meaning as procedural (including the meaning of concept-expressing words), but this necessitates the drawing of new clarifying distinctions among kinds of procedural meaning

Metaphor and the \u27Emergent Property\u27 Problem: A Relevance-Theoretic Approach

The interpretation of metaphorical utterances often results in the attribution of emergent properties; these are properties which are neither standardly associated with the individual constituents of the utterance in isolation nor derivable by standard rules of semantic composition. For example, an utterance of ‘Robert is a bulldozer’ may be understood as attributing to Robert such properties as single-mindedness, insistence on having things done in his way, and insensitivity to the opinions/feelings of others, although none of these is included in the encyclopaedic information associated with bulldozers (earth-clearing machines). An adequate pragmatic account of metaphor interpretation must provide an explanation of the processes through which emergent properties are derived. In this paper, we attempt to develop an explicit account of the derivation process couched within the framework of relevance theory. The key features of our account are: (a) metaphorical language use is taken to lie on a continuum with other cases of loose use, including hyperbole; (b) metaphor interpretation is a wholly inferential process, which does not require associative mappings from one domain (e.g. machines) to another (e.g. human beings); (c) the derivation of emergent properties involves no special interpretive mechanisms not required for the interpretation of ordinary, literal utterances

LIKE IN SIMILES – A RELEVANCE-THEORETIC VIEW

The paper examines the meaning of like as used in similes in the light of relevance theory. Similes, even though superficially indistinguishable from literal comparisons, are found to be closer to metaphors. Therefore, it is proposed that like in similes is different from like employed in literal comparisons. In particular, it is claimed that, contrary to the current relevance-theoretic position on this issue, like in similes introduces an ad hoc concept. This like is seen as both conceptual and procedural and, as such, it is distinct from both the conceptual like used in literal comparisons and the procedural like functioning as a pragmatic marker. Such a solution accounts for the similarities and differences between similes, metaphors and literal comparisons