In recent years, quantity implicatures - a type of pragmatic inference - have been widely debated in linguistics, philosophy, and psychology, and have been subject to an enormous variety of analyses, ...ranging from lexical, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic, to various hybrid accounts. In this first book-length discussion of the topic, Bart Geurts presents a theory of quantity implicatures that is resolutely pragmatic, arguing that the orthodox Gricean approach to conversational implicature is capable of accounting for all the standard cases of quantity implicature, and more. He shows how the theory deals with free-choice inferences as merely a garden variety of quantity implicatures, and gives an in-depth treatment of so-called 'embedded implicatures'. Moreover, as well as offering a comprehensive theory of quantity implicatures, he also takes into account experimental data and processing issues. Original and pioneering, and avoiding technical terminology, this insightful study will be invaluable to linguists, philosophers, and experimental psychologists alike.
: The Gricean theory of conversational implicature has always been plagued by data suggesting that what would seem to be conversational inferences may occur within the scope of operators like ...believe, for example; which for bona fide implicatures should be an impossibility. Concentrating my attention on scalar implicatures, I argue that, for the most part, such observations can be accounted for within a Gricean framework, and without resorting to local pragmatic inferences of any kind. However, there remains a small class of marked cases that cannot be treated as conversational implicatures, and they do require a local mode of pragmatic interpretation.
The experimental record of the last three decades shows that children under 4 years old fail all sorts of variations on the standard false-belief task, whereas more recent studies have revealed that ...infants are able to pass nonverbal versions of the task. We argue that these paradoxical results are an artifact of the type of false-belief tasks that have been used to test infants and children: Nonverbal designs allow infants to keep track of a protagonist's perspective over a course of events, whereas verbal designs tend to disrupt the perspective-tracking process in various ways, which makes it too hard for younger children to demonstrate their capacity for perspective tracking. We report three experiments that confirm this hypothesis by showing that 3-year-olds can pass a suitably streamlined version of the verbal false-belief task. We conclude that young children can pass the verbal false-belief task provided that they are allowed to keep track of the protagonist's perspective without too much disruption.
One of the main distinctive features of social interaction in our species is that we use language to coordinate our future activities, and in many cases far ahead. Non-human primates don't do this, ...as a consequence of which their interactions remain comparatively simple and short-range. This paper offers the first in-depth discussion of this key distinctive feature of human communication. It is argued that its evolution was conditional on two developments: an increase of responsiveness during the communicative exchange and the emergence of normative behaviours in the follow-up. Responsiveness was required to coordinate future interactions, but wasn't enough for coordinating interactions beyond the immediate future, which required normativity, to boot.
•Normativity is essential for discourse and cooperation.•First study of normativity in evolutionary pragmatics.•Future coordination is a key explanandum for evolutionary pragmatics.•A detailed account of the early stages of human communication.
Linguistic research has revealed several pathways of language change that may guide our understanding of the evolution of mental‐state attribution. In particular, it turns out that, in many ...languages, quotative verbs have been exapted for attributing a variety of mental states, including beliefs and intentions. In such languages, the literal translation of, “Betty said: ‘There will be war’”, may be used not only to quote Betty's words, but also to convey that she thought or intended there to be war. This paper presents a model of the pragmatic shifts underlying this pathway, and proposes an evolutionary trajectory from quotation to the public practice of attributing beliefs and intentions, and thence to implicit belief/intention attribution.
Several studies have demonstrated that people with ASD and intact language skills still have problems processing linguistic information in context. Given this evidence for reduced sensitivity to ...linguistic context, the question arises how contextual information is actually processed by people with ASD. In this study, we used event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to examine context sensitivity in high-functioning adults with autistic disorder (HFA) and Asperger syndrome at two levels: at the level of sentence processing and at the level of solving reasoning problems. We found that sentence context as well as reasoning context had an immediate ERP effect in adults with Asperger syndrome, as in matched controls. Both groups showed a typical N400 effect and a late positive component for the sentence conditions, and a sustained negativity for the reasoning conditions. In contrast, the HFA group demonstrated neither an N400 effect nor a sustained negativity. However, the HFA group showed a late positive component which was larger for semantically anomalous sentences than congruent sentences. Because sentence context had a modulating effect in a later phase, semantic integration is perhaps less automatic in HFA, and presumably more elaborate processes are needed to arrive at a sentence interpretation.
Making Sense of Self Talk Geurts, Bart
Review of philosophy and psychology,
06/2018, Letnik:
9, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
People talk not only to others but also to themselves. The self talk we engage in may be overt or covert, and is associated with a variety of higher mental functions, including reasoning, problem ...solving, planning and plan execution, attention, and motivation. When talking to herself, a speaker takes devices from her mother tongue, originally designed for interpersonal communication, and employs them to communicate with herself. But what could it even mean to communicate with oneself? To answer that question, we need a theory of communication that explains how the same linguistic devices may be used to communicate with others and oneself. On the received view, which defines communication as information exchange, self talk appears to be an anomaly, for it is hard to see the point of exchanging information with oneself. However, if communication is analysed as a way of negotiating commitments between speaker and hearer, then communication may be useful even when speaker and hearer coincide. Thus a commitment-based approach allows us to make sense of self talk as well as social talk.
Convention and common ground Geurts, Bart
Mind & language,
April 2018, 2018-04-00, 20180401, Letnik:
33, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Conventions are regularities in social behaviour of the past that enable us to coordinate our actions. Some conventions are lawlike: they are expected to be observed always or nearly always. However, ...in order to coordinate our actions, it may suffice that a precedent has occurred often enough, and sometimes even a single precedent will do. So, in general, conventions merely enable us to solve our coordination problems; lawlike conventions are a special case. Grammatical conventions are often lawlike; sense conventions are typically enabling. In order to resolve the indeterminacies that sense conventions give rise to, interlocutors must rely on the common ground. In this and other ways, common ground is a prerequisite for convention‐based communication.
Over the last decade, various proposals have been made for supplanting the classical Gricean theory of scalar implicature with conventionalist (i.e. lexicalist or syntax-based) treatments. In ...contradistinction to the classical view, conventionalist theories predict that scalar inferences occur systematically and freely in embedded positions. We present experimental evidence that disproves this prediction, arguing along the way that there are rather good reasons to suspect that introspection isn't always a reliable tool for gathering data on pragmatic inferences. doi:10.3765/sp.2.4 BibTeX info Background Materials
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