Theoretical Issues In Pragmatics And Discourse Analysis

Theoretical issues in pragmatics and discourse analysis

Louis de SaussureUniversity of Neuchâtel

CADAAD, Norwich, June 30th, 2006

A day at the IPrA conference

Gricean people

(Semanticists, philosophers of meaning, formalists, cogniticians, computationalists…)

Austinian people

(social psychologists, discourse analysts, interactionists …)

Reasons for mutual ignorance: The epistemological fence Shall we address discourse as shaped by (and

shaping) social activities? > discourses are a reliable document for behaviour

and social studies. Shall we address discourse as a by-product of

human cognitive abilities to exchange information dynamically? Therefore with an epistemology more inspired by

hard science The problem is that both viewpoints are true in

their own domain, but that they oppose methodologically and epistemologically

Views of discourses

Discourse analysts generally consider discourses as ‘wholes’, as static and finished entities For example: CDA to some extent, RST,

Argumentation theory (pragma-dialectics), Modular approaches and other theories inspired by Goffman

(exceptions: formal discourse analysis)

Cognitive pragmaticists will consider discourses as dynamic ‘processes’ For example: relevance theory (cognitive pragmatics),

semantic defaults, Récanati’s t-c pragmatics, psycholinguistics…

Reasons for mutual ignorance (if not dogmatic hate): A different object of study Discourses as documents for psychosocial

human activity input of the analysis: interpreted (=meaningful) sets

of utterances output / result of the analysis: spelling out the

underlying articulations and structuration of the given discourse, its persuasive structure etc.

Discourses as communicative and informative processes input of the analysis: single semantic (or syntactic)

structures output of the analysis: meanings (utterance

meaning / discourse meaning)

Problems

For discourse analysts: Accounting for how meaning is achieved, while

meaning is central (even though some think differently or

some have other definitions of ‘meaning’) and how non-intended information is eventually recovered by the hearer.

For pragmatics Accounting for what a discourse is and works,

while discourses obviously exist and must be accounted for (even though some think differently)

Disclaimer: Of course not that simple Meaning construction, in particular implicit

meaning, such as indirect speech acts, or implicatures, are integrated in many discourse analysis approaches. However, generally, no clear explanation of how

these meanings arise (besides conventional linkeages between types of utterances)

Discourses as units are also considered in many formal / semantic / cognitivist approaches However, the outputs are structures that do not

inform much about the meaning of the whole discourse

An aspect of the debate : D-wholes vs D-processes

Structures of actions, rituals and arguments

Existence of laws of coherence

a form of social determinism

A goal: free individuals from their dependency towards discourses

The task of the analyst is tackled

Discourses produce sequential changes of the hearer’s mental state

Parts of discourse are unfolding sequentially, the former discourse being available and salient context for the next utterance

Discourse (and communication) is a question of individual cognitions exchanging information

The task of the interpret is tackled

What dogmas do they have?What do they think?

Cognitive approaches, are a regression (because of

Fodorian solipsism)! Meaning simply doesn’t exist! Does even reality

exist? Syntax is dictatorial!  Logical formalization won’t

take us anywhere

Discourse is not a scientific category!Discourses do not

exist, only utterances do! They don’t

explain meaning. And coherence,

what’s that??

Discourse-as-a-process unfolding through time

Principles stating that: Discourse understanding is reductible to

utterances understanding ‘online’ The discourse is interpreted when the last utterance

is interpreted. (mental state changes)

The understanding of utterances is a process going through various stages: (transduction), logical (syntactic) form, propositional form / explicit meaning, implicit meaning.

The (to be abandoned) idealised model (‘morrissian’) A typical architecture of linguistic models

First, build-up the LF (syntactic form) Second, build-up the propositional form

(referential assignments etc.) and other explicatures (pragmatic enrichment)

Third, when necessary, derivate implicatures (deduction device):

Explicit premiss (an explicature) Implicit premiss (a contextual assumption) Inferential result

In short: the relevance-theoretic schema

LF

Utterance(stimulus)

PF andOther

ExplicaturesImplicatures

Contextual information(referents, elliptic

contents recovery…)

Contextual information(implicit premisses)

What drives the process of understanding for RT

A set of principles, the central one being:

Principle of relevance: search for the interpretation for which the effect obtained (in particular the amount of information) compensates best the effort being spent in the calculation. a path of least effort

Is there a morrissian timeline?

YES: Récanati: “In order to retrieve the implicature, the interpreter must first understand what is stated — the input to the inferential process responsible for implicature generation”

NO or NOT EXACTLY: Carston and others: pragma-semantic processing « needs parallel adjustment ».

A dynamic process

Dynamicity is not only a question of utterance-by-utterance processing but also a question of dynamic building-up of several levels of representations together Logical linguistic form, Propositional explicit

contents, Implicatures (implicit meanings)

There is a need for a parallel and linear model: it happens that the hearer needs to conjecture the implicit meaning in order to license the propositional explicit content.

What solution for a Discourse as a process account? If discourse (NL stream) is a process, then

there is a (unconscious and automated) procedure that handles understanding, from the most basic element to the most complex one.

Information processing throughout a NL-stream is both LINEAR (it unfolds through time) and PARALLEL (it achieves parallel adjustment of syntactic, semantic and pragmatic representations). A typical case is implicit causality

What about Coherence

Coherence is not a linguistic / discursive property

It’s a property of thoughts / representations (‘discourse’ in a Foucauld-like sense) A policy, a set of actions can be (in)coherent A set of assumptions can be coherent Any set of assumptions determined on the basis

of an utterance can be coherent: Consistent Logically organised (as premisses and conclusion)

etc.

Utterance understanding A syntactic form is coherent with regard to the explicit

and implicit contents it allows An explicature is coherent with regard to the syntactic

form that triggers it and to the implicatures it allows to deduce

An implicature is coherent with regard to the explicature it comes from or triggers

>> Any representation can co-determine representations of other levels for the satisfaction of coherence and the whole obtained is then evaluated in terms of relevance.

Meaning is all but given a priori Max is too small (for what?) Paracetamol is better (than what?) It’s raining (here and now) Everybody likes pasta carbonara (in the family) Max and Bill climbed the mountain (together) Ann has 4 children (exactly) I don’t eat frog legs (never). Mary took the knife and stabbed her husband (and then) Holland is flat (relatively) Federer is the new Sampras Bush is Bush / A boy is a boy

(some of the examples are from the literature: Carston; Sperber & Wilson)

Some pragmatic problems Non-informative statements

I don’t need to tell you why we invaded Irak. You know this already.

I (don’t) vote Bush because Bush is Bush. Presuppositional assertion

Which teddy bear do you want to bring at Aunt Mary’s? X failed to provide the proofs of his innocence (> he tried to

provide, he had to provide…) Iraki WoMD are a danger for us (> WoMD exist in irak)

Metaphorical simplification A parasite must be killed; a cancer must be cured…

Fallacious devices How do we pragmatically enrich meaning there? What How do we pragmatically enrich meaning there? What

does it imply for does it imply for discoursesdiscourses??

Is there a discursive level of representations?

Implicatures

Explicatures b (unarticulated explicit.)

explicatures 1 (referents)

Logical / syntactic form

Inter-pretation

Discursive representations / Global intention… ?

Discourses and higher-level intentional meaning Are we speculating, during online interpretation,

higher-level communicative intentions? What does the speaker intends to communicate

through the ordered set of representations (utterances) made manifest to me (the discourse?)

Certainly (Reboul & Moeschler 1998). We do a lot of other things: speculate hidden

intentions, speculate about the speaker’s personality, speculate about his/her skills… all this through online processing.

Why not global discursive meanings?

The import from the structural and speech-act traditions

Here comes the need for interdisciplinarity Linguistic productions (discourses) are

organised according to non-arbitrary and hierarchical schemes. Psychosocial approaches: discourse is a

conventional activity Cognitive approaches: discourse is a stream

of representations providing context for the next ones

We need a wider set of tools for the analyst

Towards an interface of pragma-semantics with DA?

UTTERANCE MEANING

Syntactic-semantic processing

Inferential pragmatic processing

LinguisticAnd

ContextualData

Meaningfuldiscursiveelements

RHETORICAL ORGANISATIONPSYCHO-SOCIAL ASPECTS ETC.

Discursive analysis

Conclusive remarks

Thank you for your attention