Do discourse connectives encode concepts or procedures?

Lingua 117 (2007) 149–174 www.elsevier.com/locate/lingua

Do discourse connectives encode concepts or procedures? Alison Hall Department of Phonetics and Linguistics, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, United Kingdom Received 13 October 2005; received in revised form 21 October 2005; accepted 21 October 2005 Available online 29 November 2005

Abstract Discourse connectives such as but and moreover, while obviously meaningful, are widely seen as not affecting the truth conditions of the utterances they occur in; instead, they indicate how the truth-conditional content is to be understood. One way of explaining this is to analyse them as encoding procedural meaning, whose function is to guide pragmatic inference rather than to form part of the communicated message (cf. Blakemore, 2002). In this paper, I defend the idea of procedural meaning and reply to the main objections that have been raised against it. I focus on discourse connectives, showing how a procedural analysis explains their non-truth-conditional contribution, and compare this approach with that of Bach (1999), on which some discourse connectives are seen as contributing to ‘what is said’ by an utterance. I also discuss cases of discourse connectives embedded in attitude contexts, where their behaviour has been seen as a major obstacle to a procedural account, and suggest how such examples can be accommodated. # 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: Procedural meaning; Discourse connectives; Conventional implicature; Relevance theory

1. Introduction The starting-point for discussions of discourse connectives – words like but, although, even, yet, too, nevertheless – tends to be the brief remarks on but, along with moreover and on the other hand, in Grice (1989:46, 120–122, 361–362). While some of these expressions are conjunctions and thus make the same truth-conditional contribution as and, they obviously have some meaning beyond this, and Grice pointed out that this ‘extra’ meaning doesn’t seem to affect the intuitive truth-conditional content of the utterance (the basis on which communicators would judge the utterance true or false). For him, therefore, they were not part of ‘what is said’ by the utterance, E-mail address: [email protected]. 0024-3841/$ – see front matter # 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2005.10.003

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nor could what they communicate – the suggestion of contrast conveyed by but, for example – be a conversational implicature, as it depends on their conventional meanings. Instead, but and some other expressions generate ‘conventional implicatures’. Comments in his Retrospective Epilogue (Grice 1989:361–362) suggest that what he meant by this is that they are non-central speech-act indicators: for instance, abstracting away from reference assignment, an utterance of (1a) communicates the ground-floor speech act (1b), and but contributes a higher-level comment like (1c): 1.

a. b. c.

She is poor but she is honest. She is poor and she is honest. There is a contrast between honesty and poverty.

The truth of the overall utterance (1a) seems just to depend on the truth of the ground-floor speech act, (1b): as Grice points out, if no contrast obtained between the two conjuncts, that would not be sufficient reason to judge the utterance false. Parenthetical expressions such as I think, frankly, and in contrast, have also been analysed along these lines by Grice and others. According to Bach and Harnish (1979:219–221), for instance, in an utterance of (2a), frankly indicates that the speaker is performing the higher-order speech act (2c): 2.

a. b. c.

Frankly, I’m bored. The speaker is bored. The speaker is saying frankly that she is bored.

The utterance’s truth-conditional content is just (2b), and the contribution of frankly, like that of but, has no effect on truth-value judgements. However, there are some important differences between the two sets of cases. First, as most authors would agree, but and other connectives don’t have clearly truth-conditional uses,1 while expressions like frankly, I suppose, and so on, when used non-parenthetically, do, as illustrated in (3): 3.

He told her frankly and honestly about his criminal past.

This casts some doubt on the idea that the devices analysed as non-central speech-act indicators form a homogeneous class, and further factors confirm this. The parentheticals just contribute the concepts they encode to the propositions communicated: parenthetical frankly, as in (2a), maps onto the concept FRANKLY, which, given the fact that the utterance has taken place, can be enriched into the second-order speech-act description The speaker is saying frankly that . . . . So the concepts encoded by these parentheticals form constituents of a logical form of the utterance, which is developed by pragmatic inference into either the proposition expressed or a non-central speech act. This is evidently not the same as the relationship between but and the proposition that there is a contrast between P and Q: there is no atomic concept BUT that appears in any communicated propositions.2 1

Complications arising in the case of speech and thought reports will be discussed in section 4. Similarly for other discourse connectives: moreover, rather than mapping onto a concept MOREOVER, would contribute something like in addition to this; yet in He isn’t here yet would communicate that his arrival is expected. 2

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This suggests that but, moreover, etc. need a separate analysis from parentheticals. One way of accounting for the difference, developed in a series of publications by Blakemore,3 is to analyse discourse connectives not as mapping directly onto concepts, or conceptual representations, but instead as encoding ‘procedural’ meaning, which doesn’t function as part of the interpretation of the utterance. Instead, its role is to guide the hearer to the intended interpretation by constraining the type of inferences to be drawn. In this paper, I aim to give some more substance to the idea of procedural meaning and answer some of the main criticisms that have been levelled at it. As a case study, I concentrate on the connective but: because it both makes some non-truth-conditional contribution and has a range of different uses, its meaning has proved notoriously difficult to capture. I therefore discuss in some detail what but encodes and how it works, in order to provide a test case for procedural meaning and compare competing approaches to discourse connectives. The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 introduces a range of different uses of but that have been discussed in the literature—this is the core data that a proposal for the semantics and pragmatics of but will have to explain. In section 3, I outline the distinction between two types of linguistic meaning that play different roles in utterance interpretation: conceptual meaning serves as input to pragmatic inference but provides minimal constraints on it; expressions that encode procedural meaning guide the hearer in inferring particular aspects of speaker’s meaning. I argue that the idea of procedural meaning provides a natural analysis of the non-truth-conditional contribution of but and other connectives. After that, I address several issues relating to the embedding of discourse connectives under propositional attitude verbs (section 4). The behaviour of these expressions in such contexts has been seen as a major threat to the procedural account, partly because they affect truth-value judgements in some of these cases, and partly because of the question of what it means to say that they are constraining the hearer’s inference in reporting contexts, where they appear to be attributing speech or thought contents. I compare the procedural approach with that of Kent Bach, on which utterances with but and some other connectives express multiple propositions (Bach, 1999). Despite being motivated, at least in part, by problems arising in the case of speech reports, I argue that a multiple-proposition account hasn’t solved those problems, and show how the idea of procedural meaning enables a more successful account of this data. Having made a case for a procedural account of but, I turn in the last section of the paper to the question of what procedure it encodes. I examine an existing procedural analysis, that of Blakemore (1987, 2002), on which its basic meaning is denial of expectation, in the sense of contradiction and elimination of an assumption that the hearer could be expected to have recovered in the context. I argue that this is overly restrictive as, in many cases, no particular assumption that is manifest to the hearer can be plausibly said to be contradicted, so that neither ‘denial’ nor ‘expectation’ are necessarily involved, and suggest a slight modification to avoid these problems. 2. Interpretations of but Expressions of the form P but Q can be given a range of interpretations, and the only immediately apparent feature that but has on all of these uses is that it makes some non-truth-

3

For example Blakemore (1987, 1989, 1992, 2000, 2002).

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conditional contribution. A unitary account of the meaning of but needs both to explain its nontruth-conditional import, and to show how these different interpretations are derived pragmatically from the encoded meaning. In this section, the core data that I’ll be considering is roughly characterized. 2.1. Denial of expectation Most of the literature on but recognizes at least the denial of expectation use, exemplified by G. Lakoff’s (1971:67) famous example in (4): 4.

John is a Republican but he is honest.

The idea is that the first clause (here, John is a Republican) implies (i.e. is expected to lead the hearer to draw) some conclusion (John is dishonest) which is then denied by the clause introduced by but. 2.2. Contrast On the face of it, (5) doesn’t appear to have anything to do with denial of expectation; it seems to be used just to draw attention to the fact that there is a contrast with respect to height: 5.

John is tall but Bill is short.

(5) could, of course, be uttered in a context where it does deny an expectation, but R. Lakoff (1971:133) claims that it doesn’t need to be—it can just be used to signal ‘semantic opposition’, which I think just means contrast. 2.3. Correction In (6B) and (7), the first clause contradicts an utterance or thought attributed to the hearer, and the segment introduced by but functions as a correction of the negated assumption. What is corrected can be the conceptual content of that assumption, and/or some aspect of the linguistic form used to express it: 6.

7.

A: B:

She looks like you. Is she your sister? She’s not my sister but my mother.

(from Iten, 2000)

He’s not happy but ecstatic.

The fact that several languages have separate words for denial/contrast but and for correction but (e.g. aber and sondern, respectively in German; pero and sino in Spanish) has been the basis for claims that English but is ambiguous. However, given that there are many other languages like English that don’t have a different word for the correction use of but, this would be a pretty unusual case of ambiguity, and it seems worth at least investigating the possibility of a unitary account.

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2.4. Objection Compare (4), where both clauses are uttered by the same speaker, with the dialogue in (8): 4.

John is a Republican but he’s honest.

8.

A: B:

John is a Republican. But he’s honest.

In (4), what is denied by the but-clause is an implicature that could have been derived from the first clause. In (8), it’s the proposition expressed by the first clause, John is a Republican, that is indirectly contradicted (unless B is understood as continuing A’s utterance)—a reading that is unavailable for (4). Bach (1999), for one, seems to conclude from these different interpretations that but is ambiguous between its utterance-initial use as a rebuttal, and its other use where it generally seems to indicate some sort of contrast. I don’t agree that this should be treated as an ambiguity, and will show in section 5 that there’s a simple explanation for how the two interpretations are derived pragmatically from the single encoded meaning that I propose for but. A further issue raised by (4) and (8) (and another reason for Bach’s conclusion that but is ambiguous) is that, in (4) and all the other examples listed so far, but appears to be a conjunction, whereas in (8), it doesn’t. There are, as far as I can see, two possible ways to maintain a unitary account. Blakemore’s (1987, 2002) solution is to deny that but is a conjunction in any of its uses: if that’s right, then, when but appears in P but Q, the truth conditions just fall out from the truth conditions of the conjuncts, in the same way that they do in P.Q. Whether the two clauses are linked by and, but or a full-stop, the truth conditions depend on the truth of P and Q. If, on the other hand, but is a conjunction, a possible explanation might go like this: and can also be used utterance- and discourse-initially, and I’ll assume we want to say it’s still a conjunction. Blakemore and Carston (2005), suggest that, in such cases, the first conjunct is recovered by pragmatic enrichment,4 so that the proposition expressed is ‘P and Q’. Roughly the same process could occur with utterance-/discourse-initial but. In (8) above, ‘P and Q’ obviously can’t be the proposition expressed, since B doesn’t want to communicate P. Instead, what is recovered as the first conjunct could be the speech-act or propositional-attitude description, resulting in ‘[A is saying that P] and Q’ as the conjoined proposition. The uses that an analysis of but has to account for, then, are denial, contrast, correction, and objection. It might seem, at first sight, that all these uses involve a contrast of some kind between the but-clause and the previous clause, hence that but encodes the concept CONTRAST, and that there’s little more to be said about its meaning. However, there are a number of reasons why such a conclusion is unappealing. First, Blakemore (1987:134–137; 1989) gives several variations on an argument for why the basic meaning of but can’t be contrast. Her main point is that, if but encodes contrast, it should be acceptable in any utterance where a contrast is being drawn between two things. (9) shows that this isn’t always the case, despite other indicators of contrast being fine here:

4

This might more appropriately be called a case of the recovery of ellipsed material, since the syntax of a conjunction presumably requires a first conjunct. Still, since the only guide given by the grammar amounts to ‘supply a conjunct’, most of the work in deciding the intended content of that conjunct will be pragmatic, rather than the mechanical, grammatical recovery of material that occurs in many cases of ellipsis.

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9.

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A: B: B0 : B00 :

What’s the capital of Germany – Bonn or Berlin? It’s Berlin now, whereas Bonn was only capital of West Germany. It’s Berlin now; Bonn, in contrast, was only capital of West Germany. ?? It’s Berlin now, but Bonn was only capital of West Germany.

Also, on closer examination, correction but, in particular (as in (10)), doesn’t look amenable to an analysis in terms of contrast. This is clear when it’s compared with (11), which doesn’t involve conjunction reduction, and which is interpreted as denial of expectation: 10.

She’s not my sister but my mother.

11.

She’s not my sister but she is my mother.

In (11), the first clause (She’s not my sister) could imply She’s not related, with a further implication like You were wrong. The second clause contradicts these implications, giving She is related; you weren’t completely on the wrong track. But in (10), such a reading is impossible: there’s no contrast or contradiction between implicatures of the two clauses. Nor could any such relation be said to hold between the propositions expressed by the two conjuncts—there’s no contrast between being someone’s mother and not being their sister. On the assumption that but is not ambiguous, this data offers further evidence that it does not simply mean ‘contrast’. In section 5, I’ll consider what exactly it does mean. First, though, I turn to the broader issue of the type of meaning encoded by but and various other connectives, given the general consensus that they make some conventional, non-truth-conditional contribution. 3. Conceptual and procedural meaning In section 1, I mentioned some reasons why but and other connectives can’t be analysed as speech-act indicators in the same way as parenthetical verbs and adverbials: but etc. don’t have clearly truth-conditional uses, while the parentheticals do, and the two sets of devices display very different relations between the lexical items that encode them and the contribution they make to interpretation. The problem, then, is to explain what it is about these discourse connectives, which clearly do have an impact on the meaning of utterances, that accounts for their not mapping on to a constituent of either the proposition expressed or a speech-act/prepositional-attitude description, along with the rest of the expressions used. The solution, I claim, is provided by a distinction between two types of meaning that linguistic expressions can encode, which I outline in this section. Lying behind many current approaches to inferential pragmatics is a modular view of the mind like that developed by Fodor (e.g. 1980, 1983), on which the ‘central’ systems, including the system responsible for ostensive-inferential communication, receive input in the form of conceptual representations from the modular input systems of perception and language. The language module decodes linguistic stimuli into logical forms, but these generally fall far short of what the speaker intended to communicate with her utterance, and pragmatic inference is necessary to bridge the gap. Not only implicatures are calculated inferentially; it has also been convincingly argued by a number of authors that linguistic meaning greatly underdetermines

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‘what is said’ by the utterance (its ‘proposition expressed’).5 Inference is required for saturating indexicals, resolving ambiguities, fixing the scope of quantifiers, plus various enrichments and adjustments to the concepts encoded by lexical items—all processes that contribute to the proposition expressed. On this view, linguistic meaning alone doesn’t determine any of the propositions communicated, and inference necessarily has a pervasive role in utterance interpretation. Since linguistic meaning is the input to pragmatic inference, it’s probable, as Blakemore (1987, 2002) has argued, that this meaning comes in two varieties: one type of information – ‘conceptual’ meaning – that itself can form part of the conceptual representations that inferences are performed on, and a second type – ‘procedural’ meaning – that triggers certain types of inference that the pragmatics system is to perform on these representations. The two types of meaning are specialized for different roles in the interpretation process: conceptual meaning can form part of the communicated message; procedural meaning can’t—its function, instead, is to guide the hearer in recovering some aspect of that message. On this picture, most words encode concepts which may act as constituents of the conceptual representations that are the output of semantic decoding (Republican, for example, just encodes the concept REPUBLICAN; honest encodes HONEST), but there are a variety of linguistic devices for which a procedural analysis looks more promising. Before moving on to defend and develop the idea of procedural meaning further, I’ll look at a few examples of classes of expressions which are plausible candidates for encoding this purely ‘pragmatic’ kind of meaning. First are the discourse connectives which have already been introduced—some examples are given in (12)–(15): 12.

He’s good-looking but not very rich.

13.

Although he’s good-looking, he’s not very rich.

14.

Peter hasn’t arrived yet.

15.

Even Claire passed the exam.

Roughly, but and although communicate that some aspect of the interpretation of the second clause is contradicting an implication derivable from the first clause (concerning eligibility for marriage, in (12) and (13), for instance); yet communicates that Peter’s arrival was expected; even could imply a range of things—that Claire was the least likely person to pass, or not expected to do so, or that the exam was easy to pass. None of this information conveyed by the use of discourse connectives is generally considered part of truth-conditional content. Moreover, it doesn’t involve direct mapping of words onto constituents of any of the communicated propositions. Instead, the function of these expressions seems to be to encourage the hearer to process the truth-conditional content in certain ways: but and although trigger an inference that results in the hearer processing the second clause as contradicting some aspect of the interpretation of the first, for example. So the idea is that they encode procedures, which activate certain types of inferences. The encoded meaning of the connectives in (12)–(15) doesn’t feature as part of the communicated message—instead, it is the results of the inferences they trigger that are communicated. This explains the fact that there can be considerable variation in the 5

See Wilson and Sperber (1981), Sperber and Wilson (1986/1995), Carston (1988, 2002), Bach (1994), Recanati (1993), Levinson (2000), Neale (forthcoming), Stainton (1994).

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contribution of these expressions across contexts of use (see the range of uses of but illustrated in section 2, and the discussion of even in (15) above): they have the effect of constraining the type of inferences the hearer will perform, but don’t determine the exact interpretation—this will depend on the accessibility of the contextual assumptions available to those inferences.6 Given that hearers often have a substantial amount of inferential work to do in recovering speaker meaning, it’s not surprising that languages have developed expressions such as these, dedicated to guiding hearers towards the intended interpretation of their utterances. Most pragmatic theories take into account the interplay of effort and effects in verbal communication—the tendency to minimize production and interpretive effort while ensuring that the intended message is conveyed, and if this approach is right, then procedural devices are to be expected: they require little en-/decoding effort compared to ‘conceptual’ paraphrases (e.g. but versus contrary to what you would expect from that), and reduce the hearer’s processing effort by limiting the range of interpretive hypotheses he has to consider, leading to effects that wouldn’t reliably be derived in the absence of any linguistic indication that they were intended. Discourse connectives seem mainly to constrain the recovery of implicatures, but, since the function of procedural information is to constrain pragmatic inference, it could be expected to play a role in other pragmatic processes too—for instance, given that linguistic decoding doesn’t produce fully propositional forms, it’s likely that procedural meaning could also constrain the development of logical form into the proposition expressed. Indexicals are good candidates for encoding procedural constraints on this phase of interpretation, as they don’t map directly onto concepts: he doesn’t encode a concept that determines its referent but rather guides the hearer in retrieving the intended concept.7 It works more like a constraint on inference which restricts the class of possible referents to be considered, and this is quite close to how Bach (1987:176–187; 2001:31–33), for example, treats non-pure indexicals. Bach’s position is that what is said (in the sense of semantic information available to the hearer) by an utterance of (16) is (17): 16.

He is ready.

17.

[a certain male] is ready.

18.

A certain male is ready.

He uses ‘[a certain male]’ as a way of indicating that what he contributes is to be seen as a constraint on the pragmatic process of reference assignment: it is the referent that contributes to truth-conditional content, not the meaning encoded by he. All that he encodes is a referential constraint that it be used to refer to some male, with the referent being determined in context by the speaker’s referential intention. If he encoded the conceptual representation A CERTAIN MALE, then (16) and (18) would be synonymous. But, as Bach recognizes, they aren’t, so even if he does encode some conceptual content, it must also encode a constraint that determines how this is used 6 Several authors have used the idea of a constraint on inference to give accounts of various discourse connectives. This was the strategy taken by the argumentation theorists Anscombre and Ducrot, for example, whose analysis of denial-ofexpectation but was as follows: ‘In P but Q, P implies not-R; Q implies R; Q has more weight’ (1977:28) (see also Dascal and Katriel, 1977 on but in Hebrew). Within relevance theory, Blakemore (1987, 1989, 1992, 2000, 2002) has given detailed analyses of a number of connectives and other devices under the label of procedural meaning. 7 See Kaplan (1989), who argues that indexicals do not encode concepts—e.g. the pronoun I does not encode the concept THE SPEAKER, but a rule for determining its content in a particular context: indexicals encode rules, which ‘‘tell us what is referred to. Thus they determine the content for a particular occurrence of an indexical. But they are not part of that content’’ (Kaplan, 1989:523).

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in identifying the referent, and that prevents this conceptual meaning from entering into the proposition expressed. Similarly, Recanati (1993:291–293) talks of pronouns encoding ‘contextual conditions’ – conditions which must be contextually satisfied for the sentence to express a complete proposition – as opposed to truth conditions. Both Bach’s and Recanati’s accounts can be seen as procedural-type analyses: these indexicals do not encode the kind of meaning that can function as a conceptual constituent of the proposition expressed by the utterance, but constrain pragmatic inference by indicating the kind of element being referred to. Once the hearer has identified the referent, that is what enters into the proposition expressed, and the procedural constraint drops out of the picture. Some recent formal semantic analyses of pronouns also treat them as encoding procedural meaning rather than anything conceptual (though they don’t use this terminology). On such accounts, the meaning of he would be something like this (Chris Potts, p.c., based on Heim and Kratzer, 1998:241): a. b.

he gets it meaning from the variable assignment; it translates as an expression of the form xi and [[xi]]g, the interpretation of xi relative to the assignment g, is g(xi). Felicity condition: A use of he is felicitous only if the speaker and hearer are both interpreting expressions relative to assignment functions that agree on the translation of he (and that value is male).

(a) is what he is decoded into in logical form, and doesn’t appear to have any conceptual content: it’s just a placeholder, and doesn’t include any descriptive features (i.e. ‘male’) that help the hearer in recovering the referent. What enables the recovery of the referent is the felicity condition in (b). This is not represented at the level of logical form, but must be encoded somehow, in order to distinguish he from other pronouns, and, since felicity is a pragmatic rather than a grammatical notion, (b) could be construed as a kind of encoded ‘instruction’ to pragmatic inference. Heim and Kratzer say little about the pragmatic processes by which reference assignment is achieved: they talk vaguely of assigning as referent ‘the most salient individual that allows [the hearer] to make sense of the utterance’ (1998:240). Integrated with a cognitive pragmatic theory which can give an account of how the encoded meaning is processed, the meaning in (b) could easily be recast as a procedural constraint, for example, ‘find a concept of an individual with the information ‘‘x is male’’ attached’. Other clear examples of expressions that do not encode conceptual representations that can appear as elements of communicated propositions are yes and no. Consider B’s reply in the following exchange: 19.

A: B:

Are you going on holiday this summer? No, I’m not.

The elliptical phrase I’m not expresses the proposition B is not going on holiday this summer, but the preceding no doesn’t contribute some constituent of a proposition in addition to this (it will, of course, generally have some at least slightly different/extra effects—maybe intensifying the negative response). The same propositional content would be recovered from just the word no alone, or from I’m not alone, yet when both occur together, as in (19B), there’s no feeling of repetition or redundancy. So, if no encodes a conceptual representation, where does this meaning show up in the proposition expressed or developments of it (non-central speech acts, propositional-attitude descriptions)? As a rule, encoded conceptual content appears at one of these

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levels. It seems better to treat no as encoding procedural meaning—approximately, encouraging the construction of a proposition that negates something: this proposition can be recovered entirely pragmatically when no occurs alone, or by a combination of further decoding and inference, as in the above example. What these various types of expression have in common is that the meaning they encode doesn’t show up as an element of any of the communicated propositions. The function of linguistic meaning is to provide evidence for the thoughts that a speaker wants to convey, but, as already mentioned, it falls a long way short of encoding these thoughts: it is merely part of the evidence available to pragmatic inference. The distinction between conceptual and procedural meaning is a distinction between two types of cognitive information that linguistic expressions can encode, which contribute in different ways to pragmatic inference. Regular conceptual words like cat and contrast are decoded into conceptual representations, which form a skeletal part of the speaker’s message; procedural expressions guide the process of recovering various aspects of that message. It’s worth clarifying this idea in some detail, as it’s been misunderstood in some previous discussions of Blakemore’s 1989 paper: Bach, for instance, dismisses the conceptualprocedural distinction on the grounds that, ‘‘in some way or another anything one says ‘constrains the inferential phase of comprehension’ and ‘provides an instruction for performing computations’ ’’ (1999:361). Of course, the inferences that a hearer draws from an utterance depend on the conceptual content of the linguistic expressions used, as this is what interacts with context to produce the intended interpretation. The function of conceptual expressions is to activate the concepts they encode, which are elements of the language of thought and can feature in explicitly communicated propositions. As most pragmatists would agree, though, recovering the intended interpretation of an utterance depends to a great extent on accessing the intended context and performing the intended inferences, and the conceptual content of the linguistic expression used – the decoded logical form – may provide only a very rough clue to what these intended inferences and contexts are. In this regard, consider (20) and (21): 20.

Peter insulted Mary and Mary resigned.

21.

She is happy.

Most advocates of linguistic underdeterminacy maintain that the proposition expressed by an utterance of (20) would normally include a causal connection between the two conjuncts. Yet the linguistic meaning of (20) doesn’t provide an instruction or constraint to the effect that any such interpretation needs to be recovered. Instead, the enrichment is entirely pragmatically motivated: for example, drawing further implications from (20) would depend on the insult being the cause of the resignation. (21) is an example of how a conceptual expression can communicate a distinct concept from the concept it encodes.8 The idea is that the word happy encodes a very vague or abstract concept, but, when used, communicates a more specific concept: on one occasion of use, it might denote a long-lasting state of contentment; on another, a temporary state of elation, for instance, and it is the ‘modulated’ concept, rather than the encoded one, that appears in the proposition expressed. Again, the inference is governed by

8

See Carston (1997, 2002, chapter 5), Recanati (1995, 2004), Sperber and Wilson (1998), Wilson and Sperber (2002).

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pragmatic considerations—a more specific concept than the encoded, vague HAPPY concept would be required to warrant any conclusions that the hearer is meant to draw. As in the case of enrichment in (20), the encoded meaning doesn’t give any indication of the direction that the modulation should take. ‘Conceptual’ encoding, then, constrains interpretation only to the extent that the encoded concepts, or related (modulated) forms of them, must appear in the proposition expressed or developments of it (e.g. speech-act descriptions). The schematic, sub-propositional logical form that is the result of decoding conceptual expressions provides a starting point for inference, and gives access to information that may be used in inference, but, pace Bach, falls a long way short of providing instructions for performing inference. Procedural meaning, on the other hand, can provide quite precise guidance as to the type of inferences to be performed. In developing the idea that discourse connectives encode procedural meaning, Blakemore (1987:106–108; 2002:78–79) uses the following example to illustrate this: 22.

John can open Bill’s safe. He knows the combination.

23.

a.

John can open Bill’s safe. After all, he knows the combination.

b.

John can open Bill’s safe. He knows the combination, then.

It may not be immediately obvious to the hearer of (22) how the speaker intends the second sentence to be interpreted. The encoded meaning doesn’t require that there’s any relation between the two sentences, much less indicate what that relation is: pragmatic considerations (of coherence, relevance, etc.) lead the hearer to infer a connection. In (23a), after all ensures that the clause it introduces is interpreted as a premise; then in (23b) marks the preceding clause as a conclusion. These expressions don’t contribute to the utterance’s truth-conditional content; their role is, instead, to trigger an inference leading to a particular kind of interpretation—an interpretation that wouldn’t be reliably recovered otherwise (given only the conceptual content in (22)). So it’s true that anything one says may well constrain inference, but not by virtue of encoding this constraint: that’s the difference between conceptual and procedural information. Relatedly, Bach (p.c.) has pointed out that most expressions constrain inference in a way predictable from their encoded conceptual meaning—for example, the word cat constrains the hearer to infer that anything described as a cat is an animal. There are, though, two key differences between this type of constraint and procedural meaning. First, the former type isn’t a constraint on speaker meaning,9 while the latter is. One can communicate successfully about one’s cat without the hearer recovering (or being intended to recover), a proposition containing the concept ANIMAL. Second, following Fodor’s (1981, 1998) compelling arguments against lexical decomposition, it’s generally accepted that the concepts encoded by monomorphemic words are atomic. What constrains the ‘cat’ to ‘animal’ inference, therefore, isn’t encoded in the meaning of cat. One popular view of analytic implications, such as that from ‘cat’ to ‘animal’, is that they are derived from meaning postulates attached to concepts: these inference rules don’t form part of the concept itself, or of the meaning of the lexical item that encodes the 9

i.

This isn’t to say that it can’t be used as such; take implicated entailments, as in B’s reply: A: Is it an animal or a human making that noise? B: It’s a cat.

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concept (proponents of this view include Fodor et al., 1980, and Sperber and Wilson, 1986/ 1995). Other authors (e.g. Fodor, 1998) reject even meaning postulates, and claim that these implications are derived by applying rules of inference to conceptual representations. Either way, the constraint or rule isn’t encoded in the meaning of the word and doesn’t have to be applied in interpreting the utterance. The point about procedural expressions, on the other hand, is that the constraints they impose on interpretation are encoded, and automatically activate certain inferential routes that are intended to constrain some part of the message that the hearer will recover. Returning now to but, one problem in giving an account of it is the variety of interpretations that it can have, illustrated in section 2. ‘Conceptual’ accounts of but, such as those of Bach (1999), Grice (1989), and Rieber (1997), assume that it encodes a conceptual representation (e.g. P contrasts with Q), which needs to be represented as some intermediate stage in retrieving the intended interpretation. To account for its range of uses, though, it would have to be a very vague concept of contrast or contradiction (or be treated as ambiguous between a contrast meaning and some other, non-contrast, meaning). One approach is to treat the meaning as underspecified, as encoding something like There is a certain contrast, as Bach (1999) does, and this kind of propositional schema would be fleshed out into a proposition describing a more specific type of contrast. I argue against Bach’s approach in the next section. In fact, it doesn’t seem that even encoding a vague type of contrast could account for the data in (9), where but is unacceptable but other indicators of contrast are fine, nor the correction cases in (6) and (7), where there isn’t in fact any kind of contrast or contradiction between the conjuncts. A procedural account, on the other hand, can deal with this much more easily, thanks to the fact that it dispenses with this intermediate contrast-proposition altogether: a constraint on inference doesn’t specify any particular interpretation, but instead filters out interpretations that are incompatible with the constraint. Of those that are compatible, their accessibility in the context of any given utterance will determine which the hearer actually recovers—I illustrate this in section 5 by showing how a single constraint together with considerations of accessibility can account for the range of interpretations of but. A second advantage of this lack of an encoded conceptual representation is that it automatically explains why but seems (almost) always to be non-truth-conditional. Conceptual words can feature in the proposition expressed, so can contribute to the truth-conditional content of utterances. Among procedural expressions, the referents of indexicals obviously affect truth conditions, as their recovery is necessary to achieve a truth-evaluable entity. Discourse connectives, on the other hand, are attached to propositions which are in themselves truthevaluable, so the contributions of but, even, and so on isn’t necessary for the utterance to express a complete proposition—instead, they indicate inferential relations between propositions. Inferences can go through or fail, but neither they, nor constraints on them, can be true or false. The results of these inferences may affect the utterance’s truth conditions, but this will depend on which phase of inference the expression constrains, and so it can be expected that many procedural devices are non-truth-conditional. Finally, as Wilson and Sperber (1993) have pointed out, another feature of but and other connectives that is accommodated better by a procedural account than a conceptual one is that they don’t interact with other words so that their meanings modify each other. Concepts combine systematically with other concepts to form larger conceptual representations. Expressions that encode not concepts but constraints on inference shouldn’t be able to combine in the usual way with conceptual expressions to produce complex representations. And, as expected, the meaning of but does not modify the meanings of other words in this way: it

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instead affects how the conjoined propositions as a whole are interpreted. While but and in contrast can, in some cases, have a similar effect on interpretation, in contrast can combine with other concepts (e.g. in complete contrast), whereas but can’t combine with anything to form a complex connective.10 So if an expression is non-truth-conditional, can’t feature as a conceptual constituent of the communicated message, and doesn’t combine with other expressions in the regular way, there is a good case for it encoding procedural meaning, and many discourse connectives seem to meet these requirements. However, their behaviour in attitude predicates and other embedded contexts raises some interesting questions about procedural meaning, which I’ll address in the next section. 4. Indirect reporting In most contexts, but and other discourse connectives don’t contribute to the intuitive truthconditional content of an utterance. However, when they occur in speech and thought reports, it seems that they often do affect truth conditions. As a report of (24), (25) would probably be judged false11: 24.

Anne is rich and unhappy.

25.

He said that Anne is rich but unhappy12.

This is potentially problematic for two reasons. First, some authors, including Bach (1999) and Potts (2005), have concluded from data such as this that the contribution of but is always part of the utterance’s truth-conditional content, and Bach argues that utterances with but or certain other discourse connectives (even, too, although on some uses, still) express multiple propositions, with the connective contributing an extra proposition expressed that is often not salient enough to affect truth-value judgments.13 If Bach’s approach were feasible, it would undermine the need for a procedural analysis of these expressions, so it’s worth discussing in some detail. The first part of this section, then, is devoted to arguing that Bach’s multiple-proposition account, despite being motivated partly by problems relating to attitude predicates, doesn’t have a convincing solution to those same problems. Second, several authors have expressed scepticism about the ability of a procedural account to accommodate uses of discourse connectives in indirect reports, so I aim to explain how they work in such environments. To conclude the section, I’ll examine some examples of but in embedded contexts which are handled easily on a procedural approach, and where the multiple-proposition account makes the wrong predictions.

10

This isn’t, of course, to say that anything whose meaning doesn’t interact in this way is procedural: it’s generally accepted that and and or, for example, encode conceptual meaning. Their meanings don’t modify those of other expressions, but this is expected on the assumption that their semantics is captured by the truth tables for the logical operators: it’s difficult to see how these could interact with the meanings of other expressions to produce a more complex conceptual constituent. 11 At least, this is the case on a reading where but is part of whatever is being attributed, rather than being added by the speaker of (25). 12 I’ll concentrate mainly on speech reports for the time being. Similar arguments apply to thought reports, though intuitions here are less clear: if (24) is a thought, then She thinks that Anne is rich but unhappy might be a false report. 13 See Neale (1999) for a similar proposal.

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According to Bach, ‘‘the ‘that’-clause in an indirect quotation [such as (25) above] specifies what is said in the utterance being reported’’ (1999:339). So, as some discourse connectives can appear in indirect quotations, they must be part of what is said, and therefore must form part of the utterance’s truth-conditional content. To explain why they don’t appear to affect truth conditions in non-embedded cases, Bach proposes that utterances containing these words express multiple propositions, all of which are part of the utterance’s truth-conditional content. He uses but as a case study for his suggestion: the key points are that ‘‘ ‘but’ does not encode a unique contrastive relation’’ (1999:343), and functions as a preservative propositional operator, generating a new proposition while preserving the old ones—the details still to be worked out include how ‘binary’ operators like but (i.e. ones that connect two propositions) pick up the first of their operands; what property these operators ascribe to their operands (i.e. what their encoded meaning is); and how the precise character of this relation is determined by context (ibid:352). Although Bach says very little about what but or any of the other expressions encode, or how they work, the idea seems to be that but encodes a schematic conceptual representation like ‘a certain contrast’, which is inferentially developed into a fully-fledged proposition.14 An utterance of (26) expresses the propositions S1 and S2 that are being contrasted, plus the proposition that they are being contrasted; these are listed in (27): 26.

Anne is rich but unhappy.

27.

S1: Anne is rich. S2: Anne is unhappy. There is a certain contrast between being rich and being unhappy.

So Bach’s proposal is that the propositional (therefore truth-conditional) content of an utterance of (26) consists in the three propositions in (27), and the question is, why doesn’t the contribution of but affect truth-value judgments here? His answer is that there’s no reason why all the propositions expressed by an utterance need to be equally important, and that the contrastproposition is usually backgrounded compared to the propositions expressed by the conjuncts. It would be common ground, for example, that there is a contrast between being rich and being unhappy, whereas S1 and S2 are what’s asserted, and are therefore more salient for truthconditional assessment. However, while it may be true that the fact of a contrast would often be common ground, Bach’s suggestion doesn’t accommodate the fact that we still judge an utterance of P but Q to be true when there’s no contrast or contradiction between P and Q, and the but-proposition isn’t being taken for granted. Take the following example, where the contribution of but should be highly salient: 28.

It’s raining but the ground is wet.

In a situation where it is indeed raining, and of course the ground is wet, (28) is judged true, despite the lack of any contrast. The use of but to indicate a contrast when there isn’t one is

14 On Bach’s view (see, e.g., Bach, 2001), what is said forms a (possibly skeletal) part of the proposition expressed, so the encoded meaning of but would be enriched to specify the kind of contrast at issue (e.g. ‘P tends to preclude Q’), and this enriched proposition would be what is communicated. Since it doesn’t matter to the argument here, I’ll treat the contribution of but as, roughly, ‘There is a certain contrast between P and Q’, since this should in all cases be entailed by the more specific proposition.

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infelicitous, but doesn’t make the utterance false, and analysing but as contributing an extra proposition expressed doesn’t explain why it doesn’t affect truth-value judgements in (28) and most other cases. Nor do Bach’s suggestions about its contribution generally being backgrounded explain why it happens to be foregrounded in speech and thought reports: that there’s a contrast, or that the speaker of the original utterance thinks there’s a contrast, may well still be common ground. So an explanation is still required for why but affects truth-value judgments in reports, and not anywhere else. Rather than generalizing from the less frequent indirect quotation cases, it seems to me that a more promising approach would be to treat those cases as exceptions, to be explained away. The contexts in which but appears to be truth-conditional are just a subset of those associated with reporting, not even including many propositional-attitude contexts: when embedded under doubt, wonder, assert, bet, and numerous other verbs, for example, the contribution of but is irrelevant to truth-value judgements. Particularly interesting here is assert. (24) and (25) above demonstrated that, when using said that to report an utterance, substituting but in place of and results in the report being judged false. However, as a report of (29), (30) is judged true by my informants: 29.

John is rich and successful.

30.

He asserted that John is rich but successful.

That there is a contrast between being rich and being successful is not common ground. A multiple-proposition account on which but contributes a proposition expressed predicts, therefore, that the speaker of (30) is attributing to the speaker of (29) the assertion that there is a contrast, hence that the report should be judged false. This prediction appears to be wrong, which suggests that the suggestion of contrast communicated by but isn’t part of propositional content, and that we should account for the speech-report cases in some other way. This will involve rejecting Bach’s claim, quoted above, that the that-clause in accurate indirect reports specifies what is said by the reported utterance, and I suggest instead that the source of the effect on truthvalue judgments in reports is precisely that this indirect quotation criterion fails to distinguish what is said from other aspects of the reported utterance. Few authors would agree with Bach that speech reports can isolate ‘what is said’ (the elements of the original utterance that contribute to the proposition(s) expressed). Cappelen and Lepore (1997), Carston (2002:176–177), Larson and Segal (1995:453–454), and Recanati (2004:15), for instance, all suggest that when we are judging the truth or falsity of an indirect speech report, we don’t necessarily take it as a report of the propositional content of the original utterance: it is perfectly appropriate to use says that to report other aspects of an utterance as well— implicatures, linguistic form, or various non-central speech acts. Bach does try to adduce some evidence for his contention that such reports can isolate the elements that contribute to propositional content. Consider (31): 31.

?He said that, frankly, he didn’t care.

According to Bach, this is unacceptable as an indirect speech report, and the reason for its unacceptability is that frankly is not part of the proposition expressed, but a second-order speech-act indicator. Bach claims that this kind of expression is only acceptable after He said that if it is either a comment of the reporter’s, or implicitly directly quoted (1999:340). But what he doesn’t explain is how we are to distinguish indirect quotation from implicit direct quotation. If

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there’s an element of direct quotation when frankly occurs in speech reports, surely the same can be said of but in (25), repeated here: 25.

He said that Anne is rich but unhappy.

If we compare the non-attributive interpretation – i.e., where but is added by the reporter – it becomes more apparent that, on the attributive reading, there may well be (and probably always is) some degree of direct quotation.15 So, why distinguish this case from that of frankly in (31) above? That but can appear in indirect quotation is predicted, according to Bach, by the fact that it’s part of what is said. But he uses this ‘indirect quotation’ test to establish what is said. Without a clear criterion for deciding when something is indirectly quoted, this is circular, and doesn’t prove that intuitions about the truth or falsity of speech reports such as (25) are intuitions just about the truthconditional content of the reported utterance. To reinforce the point, consider the case of ‘expressive attributive adjectives’ such as damn, which, as probably everyone would agree, doesn’t contribute to an utterance’s truth-conditional content. According to Potts (2005:7), ‘‘removing ‘damn’ has no effect on the at-issue proposition expressed’’ (i.e. on what is said). Potts argues that it contributes a conventional implicature—so the truth-conditional content of (32) would be unchanged by the addition of damn. These expressions, though, turn out to have an interesting effect on the truth of indirect speech reports. The following examples are parallel to (24) and (25) above with but: 32.

I have to mow the lawn.

33.

He said that he had to mow the damn lawn.

As a report of (32), (33) is false, just as with (24) and (25): the reports in each case can only be considered true if but and damn are interpreted as comments by the reporter (in which case, they’re obviously not indirectly quoted). So if (25) proves that but is generally part of an utterance’s propositional content, then we are forced to the same conclusion about damn. Most people would reject this result, and attribute the apparent truth-conditionality of damn in speech reports to unclear intuitions about the meaning of say. I see no reason for treating but and other discourse connectives any differently, and conclude that the varying effects of these expressions on truth-conditional content provide no support for Bach’s multiple-proposition idea, and no threat to the procedural approach. A more serious question, raised by a number of authors, is whether it makes any sense to say that but is constraining the hearer’s inference when it occurs in a report. The problem was noted by Rieber (1997) with regard to speech-act accounts of connectives: when embedded under, for example, He thinks that. . ., but is neither performing nor reporting a speech act. Bach (1999) thinks that this also applies to the idea of a procedural account: in attitude reports, according to Bach, the speaker is not necessarily using these allegedly procedural expressions to constrain the hearer’s inference; instead, he’s attributing thought contents. This objection is based on the assumption that constraining a hearer’s inference and attributing thought contents are mutually exclusive, together with the belief that, because but can be used to express thought contents, it must be encoding some constituent of them (e.g. the concept 15

Rieber (1997:57) makes essentially the same point about even: he suggests that, when embedded in reports, and attributed to the original speaker, it ‘‘is being used quotationally or metalinguistically’’.

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CONTRAST,

or P CONTRASTS WITH Q): as Bach (p.c.) has put it, ‘‘when I think to myself something that I might express with ‘Shaq is huge but agile’, the element of my thought to which but corresponds is not an audience-directed procedure’’. The implication here seems to be that if some element of a thought corresponds to the word but in the utterance used to express or report the thought, then that element must be encoded in some way by but. It’s true, of course, that elements of thoughts aren’t audience-directed procedures. Instead, it’s the linguistic expression that is audience-directed, encoding a procedure that is to help the audience recover elements of thoughts (in this case, perhaps a thought of the form From P, usually not-Q). This audience-directedness is not restricted to but and other discourse connectives: as discussed in the last section, pronouns and yes and no seem like good candidates for encoding procedural information rather than the kind of information that forms part of the speaker’s meaning. Consider also intonation, which is solely for the hearer’s benefit. When I think to myself a thought that I might express with an ironic utterance of (34), the element of my thought which I’m using the intonation to get across isn’t an audience-directed device: 34.

That was a great presentation.

In certain contexts, (34) may communicate something like That was a dire presentation, or It would be absurd to think that was a great presentation. Though intonation is likely to play an important role in enabling the hearer to recover the ironic interpretation, we aren’t tempted to say that it encodes a conceptual constituent of a proposition communicated by (34). Likewise, there’s no good reason to say that, because but is used to convey thought contents, it must encode some part of them. So, how does but constrain inference when being used to attribute thought contents? Compare hearing an unembedded use of P but Q and a report of the same utterance: 26.

Anne is rich but unhappy.

35.

John said that Anne is rich but unhappy.

On the procedural account of but that I develop in the next section, but indicates that what follows is cutting off a line of inference opened up by the preceding clause. Although, in the report, it’s not the speaker who is communicating that the two conjuncts are to be interpreted in this way, the hearer follows a very similar inferential process to that involved in interpreting the unembedded utterance, recovering the same assumptions about normal relations between wealth and happiness, about Anne’s unusualness, and so on, which depend on the use of but. Imagine that (35) is uttered in a context where it has just been established that John believes that wealth usually leads to happiness. Then, on hearing the first clause, John said that Anne is rich, the hearer is likely to infer that John thinks Anne is happy; the but-clause contradicts this, indicating that this inference wasn’t to be drawn. In both cases, the hearer performs similar inferences: the difference is that, with the report, these inferences and assumptions are attributed to the subject of the report, John, whereas with simple P but Q conjunctions, as in (26), they’re attributed to the speaker. In the latter case, the input to pragmatic inference will anyway be embedded under The speaker says that. . .; with the report, there is simply an extra layer of metarepresentation.

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While this kind of example doesn’t pose any particular problem for the procedural idea, it seems that many cases would work just as well on a multiple-proposition account like Bach’s. So, to finish this defence of procedural meaning and try to provide some more positive evidence in favour of it, I’ll look at some cases of but in embedded contexts which are handled much more naturally in procedural terms. Consider the following pair of examples (based on Tsohatzidis, 1997):

36.

Context: The (infallible) weather forecast has predicted that tomorrow will be cold. The speaker doesn’t care if it’s cold or not. I hope it will be sunny and cold.

37.

?? I hope it will be sunny but cold.

(36), uttered with stress on the word sunny, is acceptable in this context; (37) is at least strange, maybe false. It’s difficult to see how the multiple-proposition account could predict this difference in acceptability. Unlike says and thinks, hope doesn’t scope over but (the speaker of (37) isn’t hoping that there is a contrast), so, on Bach’s account, the propositions expressed by (37) would be: 38.

a. b. c.

I hope it will be sunny. I hope it will be cold. There is a contrast between it being sunny and it being cold.

Given that assertion distributes over conjunction, (38a) and (38b) are propositions expressed by both the and-conjunction in (36), and the but-conjunction in (37). It would have to be, then, something about the contrast-proposition, (38c), that is affecting the acceptability of (37). But there is indeed a contrast between the weather being sunny and it being cold, so (37) should be acceptable. It is, of course, the proposition (38b) that is causing the problem, as this alone is false. In the and-conjunction in (36), this doesn’t matter, because the speaker can indicate, using stress on the word sunny, that the main point of her utterance is that she hopes it will be sunny—that it will be cold having already been established. With (37), this won’t work because but focuses what follows it. This is something that the multiple-proposition account, at least as it has been developed so far, looks unable to deal with: it treats the various propositions expressed, or at least the two conjuncts, as equals, and so fails to explain why the speaker of (37) can’t use some other device like intonation to emphasize the first conjunct, as she can with (36). The difference is predicted on a procedural account on which but is seen as cutting off a line of inference, so that what the but-clause communicates replaces some conclusion that could have been drawn from the first clause (see the next section for a more detailed analysis of but). In (37), given the context that tomorrow will be cold and that the speaker doesn’t care about that, the main point that she’s making, as in (36), is that she hopes it will be sunny. To then use but to indicate that processing of this is being overridden by an assertion about it being cold will inevitably produce an odd result. Finally, here’s another embedded occurrence of but. Though not involving attitude predicates, which have been the topic of most of this section, this follows a similar pattern to, and reinforces the conclusions drawn from the previous example:

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Context: You need to be both intelligent and hard-working to pass the course in question. a. b. c.

So if she’s clever but lazy, she’ll fail. ?? So if she’s lazy but clever, she’ll fail. So if she’s lazy and clever, she’ll fail.

According to Bach’s analysis, the propositions communicated by (39a) and (39b) would be, respectively, (40a) and (40b): 40.

a. b.

If she is clever and lazy, she’ll fail. There is a contrast between being clever and being lazy. If she is lazy and clever, she’ll fail. There is a contrast between being lazy and being clever.

Again, there’s nothing here that would predict the difference in acceptability. (39c) shows that it can’t just be put down to the order of the conjuncts—if it could, this should sound as bad as (39b). So there has to be something encoded in the meaning of but, which the multiple-proposition account doesn’t capture, that explains it. Here’s how it works on the procedural account. But indicates that what follows cuts off a potential line of inference from what went before. So, taking (39a) (the acceptable one) first: being clever is compatible with failing or passing, given the context, so from the first conjunct of the antecedent, if she’s clever, the hearer is probably tending towards inferring she’ll pass, or at least maybe she’ll pass. The rest of the antecedent, but lazy, suppresses this line of inference, since being lazy means failing. The evidence now points towards her failing, and this is affirmed by the consequent. In (39b), from if she’s lazy, the hearer should be disposed to infer she’ll fail. But indicates that a line of inference is suppressed, so the but-segment should lead to a different line of inference. However, since she’s still going to fail by virtue of laziness, irrespective of intelligence, it doesn’t: but is diverting the hearer from a line of inference, the salient line of inference in the context described is to the conclusion that she will fail, and yet but is indicating that this conclusion was not to be drawn. Following this up with she’ll fail, is, therefore, predicted to sound marked. I hope to have made a general case for the existence of procedural meaning, and in particular for a procedural account of ‘non-truth-conditional’ connectives. In the rest of the paper, I develop more fully the procedural analysis of but that I have just introduced and apply it to the data in section 2. 5. A procedural account of but At the end of section 2, I showed that, despite intuitions that but generally indicates some sort of contrast, this can’t be what it encodes. Blakemore (1987, 2002) instead analysed it as meaning denial of expectation, with contrast and other interpretations derived pragmatically. In this section, I first sketch the main features of her account, pointing out some difficulties with it. I then suggest a different semantics for but that avoids these problems, and compare how this new account fares with the data described earlier. Blakemore’s suggestion for the constraint encoded by but is that it activates an inference which results in the contradiction and elimination of an assumption (2002:100). She sees

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discourse connectives as effort-saving devices, reducing the hearer’s search space for the intended interpretation, and therefore helping to avoid misunderstanding. On her account, then, the point of using but lies in ensuring the contradiction and elimination of an assumption that the hearer might otherwise have inferred and accepted as true: as she says, ‘‘for an utterance to achieve relevance as a contradiction, it must communicate an assumption which is contradictory to an assumption which the hearer believes to be true’’ (2002:111). This works fine for some examples: 41.

A: B:

Shall we go and see a film tonight? I’ve got work to do, but that can wait.

On the basis of the first clause of B’s response, the hearer is likely to infer that B won’t go to see a film tonight; the second clause, introduced by but, contradicts and eliminates this. Blakemore’s account of but as encoding contradiction and elimination is, then, clearly on the right track. However, as will be seen when a broader range of utterances with but is considered, it seems overly restrictive. The first problem is that, in many, perhaps most, cases, the assumption contradicted by the butclause is not something that the hearer was likely to believe anyway. (42) is a typical ‘denial of expectation’ use of but: 42.

a. b. c.

It’s raining but I’m going out. The speaker is not going out. People don’t usually go out when it’s raining.

The idea is that the but-clause in (a) contradicts and eliminates (b), which the speaker assumes has been inferred by the hearer on combining the first clause of (a), It’s raining, with the contextual premise in (c). However, this description of what’s going on doesn’t seem very accurate: rather than but being necessary to deny (b), it’s the use of but that makes (b) and (c) salient in the first place. Blakemore’s account runs into more difficulties with ‘contrast’ uses of but, as in (5): 5.

John is tall but Bill is short.

It doesn’t immediately look like any expectation of the hearer’s gets denied here, or that any assumption supported by the first clause is contradicted, yet Blakemore claims that this sort of case involves a denial of the expectation that there’s no contrast. This attempt to force all uses of but to conform to a contradiction-and-elimination analysis doesn’t quite seem to succeed, and suggests that a different account of the semantics of but is needed which allows a more flexible interaction between the encoded meaning and context. My proposal is that, rather than activating the contradiction and elimination of an assumption, but indicates that what follows is cutting off a line of inference opened up by the previous clause.16 What gives rise to the different interpretations of but is the salience of some particular conclusion that is undermined, and this depends on the relation between the two conjuncts. This 16 This is adequate for my purposes here, since all the examples to be discussed are of the form P but Q (or P. But Q). If but is discourse-initial, then what is cut off by the but-clause will be an inference from some contextual assumption salient to speaker and hearer.

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works straightforwardly for so-called denial-of-expectation uses of but, some examples of which are given in (26) and (44): 26.

Anne is rich but unhappy.

43.

Anne is happy.

44.

It’s raining but I’m going out.

In these cases, it’s obvious what is denied by the clause introduced by but: in (26), for example, the but-clause is cutting off the inference to (43), which was supported by the first clause of (26) plus background knowledge. In some cases (such as (42) above), the contradicted assumption may have been an expectation of the hearer’s, inferred from previous discourse; in others, like those above, it doesn’t seem that such an assumption is inferred based on the first clause and context alone. It is, though, made more accessible by the first clause, because it is among the information activated when the first clause is uttered. This occurs because, as is widely accepted, related information is stored together in memory, as cognitive ‘scripts’ (or ‘schemas’ or ‘frames’). These include scripts of stereotypical or frequently encountered situations, and when some of the information in the script is activated and represented in the central conceptual system(s), the related information is activated along with it. Though not represented unless it needs to be processed, it is thus made more available, and easier to infer if necessary. The first clause of (26) activates a script to do with wealth, so all the information in this script gains extra activation—this will include stereotypical assumptions about the relationship between wealth and happiness, which supports the inference to (43). (And similarly for (44), the first clause activates a script containing assumptions about what people tend to do when it’s raining). Being easily accessible in the context anyway, (43) is made more salient still when the but-clause contradicts it, and is therefore represented and entertained by the hearer as false. Analysing but as just cutting off this line of inference has an advantage over Blakemore’s account in that it allows for the conclusion being easily accessible but doesn’t rely on it having been expected, or having been recovered, on the basis of the first clause and context alone, since the inference doesn’t need to have gone through. Returning to (4), this works slightly differently as it forces on the hearer an implicated premise, or pragmatic presupposition, which he wouldn’t have held: 4.

John is a Republican but he’s honest.

The normative assumption would be that people, including Republicans, are honest. However, the but-clause indicates that what follows, he’s honest, isn’t in fact the line of inference that would follow from the assertion that John is a Republican. This results in a clash between the procedure encoded by but and what the hearer is disposed to infer based on his background knowledge. To make sense of the use of but, the hearer is forced to entertain a presupposition that he didn’t hold – that most Republicans are dishonest – hence the marked feel. In all of these ‘denial’-type cases, there is a highly accessible, if not previously accessed, assumption that is denied. In ‘contrast’ uses of but, as in (5), this doesn’t seem to be the case: 5.

John is tall but Bill is short.

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So what needs explaining about ‘contrast but’ is why it isn’t clear what line of inference is suppressed. In the ‘denial’ examples above, the two clauses tend to have the same subject or be about the same situation, and so, if the but-clause contradicts an assumption that was easily accessible on the basis of the first clause, as in (26) and (44), it makes this assumption more salient, and the utterance has a denial-of-expectation reading. A feature of ‘contrast’ examples, on the other hand, is that the two clauses have different subjects. There are, of course, numerous inferences that the first clause might support, and, because, the second clause has a different subject, it is unlikely to contradict any of the information activated by the first clause. It’s therefore not clear what line of inference is being cut off: there may be a range of weakly salient potential implications of the first clause that are in some way inconsistent with implications of the but-clause, and any one of these would satisfy the constraint encoded by but. (For example, the first clause of (5) may license a conclusion like we don’t have a candidate for our basketball team; or the hearer might have asked a question that assumes that John and Bill will be alike in some relevant respect—whether they are alike or not is left open by the first clause.) This indeterminacy would explain why there doesn’t appear to be any specific assumption that is denied in these ‘contrast’ uses of but, and this can be captured better on this modified account than on Blakemore’s, which seems to require that there is some particular conclusion that the hearer is likely to have recovered that needs to be contradicted and eliminated. Next, although it doesn’t reflect any further difference between Blakemore’s account and mine, I said in section 2 that I’d explain the difference between (4) and (8): 4.

John is a Republican but he’s honest.

8.

A: B:

John is a Republican. But he’s honest!

When but is utterance-initial, as in (8), it can be used to object to a prior utterance, rather than just, as in (4), to suppress a potential implicature. Assuming a univocal semantics for but, this difference can be explained straightforwardly by general pragmatic principles. Utterances, by virtue of the fact that the speaker is making a demand on the hearer’s attention and processing effort, raise expectations in the hearer of a certain level of informativeness and relevance. In Sperber and Wilson’s terms, utterances convey a guarantee of their own relevance. These expectations are, of course, not necessarily met—for example, when an assertion is recognized as false. But indicates that a line of inference is being cut off, and a good explanation for rejecting something as a starting point for inference is its falsity. In (8), there’s no problem with B implicating the falsity of A’s assertion, thus rejecting the guarantee of relevance that comes with it, since it was uttered by a different speaker. In (4), in contrast, the two clauses are uttered by the same speaker, so she’s obviously not rejecting the guarantee of relevance of the first clause that she herself uttered, so the ‘objection’ or ‘rebuttal’ reading is excluded: rather than cutting off all lines of inference that depend on the truth of the first clause, the explanation for the use of but here is that there is some particular conclusion that is being contradicted. There is, therefore, a straightforward alternative to the conclusion, which Bach (1999) seems to draw from this sort of example, that but is ambiguous.

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Some final examples that pose difficulties for Blakemore, and which are dealt with more naturally on the account that I’m proposing, are given in (45)–(47): 45.

He speaks French or German, but I don’t know which.

46.

Some of the students passed, but not all of them.

47.

Tom was meant to be here but he missed the train.

Or and some, as in the first clauses of (45) and (46), are typical examples of terms that give rise to standard quantity implicatures: use of a disjunction often implies that the speaker doesn’t know which of the disjuncts is true, because if he did, considerations of cooperativeness and informativeness mean that he would have asserted one of them, rather than putting the hearer to the gratuitous effort of processing both disjuncts for a less informative result. Similarly, some often implicates not all, as in (46). So the proposition expressed by the but-clause in each case is just confirming what would have been the most likely interpretation anyway. Though Blakemore doesn’t discuss this type of example, her account appears to predict that but should be unacceptable in these cases. She does, however, consider (47), and seems to admit that it is a counterexample to her account. She claims (2002:113) that the point of using but here is to get the hearer to consider a possible world in which the proposition Tom is here is true. This seems partially right, but it’s not clear where the contradiction and elimination is supposed to come in, since that proposition wasn’t likely to be believed by the hearer in the context (indeed, it was probably manifestly false), and, in the possible world, it doesn’t get contradicted—it needs to remain true in that world for the contrast to be entertained. I’d suggest that these are analysed as follows. In (45) and (46), because but indicates that a line of inference is suppressed, it makes more salient that such a line of inference was available—so here, it makes more salient the interpretations which were possible on the basis of the first clause, and which are contradicted by the but-clause: ‘the speaker does know’ in (45), which is not excluded by the use of the disjunction; and ‘maybe all’ in (46), which is compatible with the semantics of some. The effect is, therefore, one of emphasizing that these interpretations, though still possible based on the first clause, are now excluded. Turning to (47), the interpretation does, as Blakemore suggests, seem to involve the contrast between what was meant to happen and what did happen. Here’s how this might work: but is cutting off a potential line of inference, and, since there’s no other particularly salient line of inference that’s suppressed by the but-clause, one candidate is the opposite of what follows (i.e. of he missed the train). Though this doesn’t contradict a conclusion likely to be drawn from the first clause, it does, given the context (in particular, the preceding clause) make more salient the conditional If he hadn’t missed the train, he would be here, so encourages the hearer to entertain this and speculate on the proposition that he is, or would be, here. It’s not clear what the mechanism would be for producing this result on Blakemore’s account, where but is seen as necessary to stop the hearer drawing some conclusion that the speaker doesn’t want him to draw, and the semantics I’ve proposed for but looks capable of accounting for this as well as the ‘denial’ or ‘contrast’ interpretations. Finally, I’ll come back to the correction use of but, illustrated in (10): 10.

She’s not my sister but my mother.

11.

She’s not my sister but she is my mother

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Recall from section 2 that (10), unlike (11), does not have a denial-of-expectation reading. In (10), the but-clause isn’t contradicting the first clause or anything inferred from it: instead, it’s indirectly contradicting She is the speaker’s sister, which has already been negated by the first clause. To preserve a unitary analysis of but, an explanation (which won’t be supplied here) is going to have to say that there’s something about the not X but Y construction that allows this, and Blakemore (2002:111–113) suggests that the solution will lie partly in the formal properties of the utterance. In (11), the two clauses play very different roles—P opens up an interpretation that Q denies. The conjunction reduction in (10), in contrast, exploits the parallelism between the two clauses (their shared linguistic material), so encourages a reading on which both clauses are, to some extent at least, doing the same thing—both contradict the same assumption, giving the correction reading. This can’t be the entire explanation, though, as it doesn’t account for the unacceptability of (48): 48.

*She’s not happy but she’s ecstatic.

7.

She’s not happy but ecstatic.

If the conjunction reduction has a pragmatic function, ‘encouraging’ a correction reading, this seems to allow that, where no other reading is possible, conjunction reduction shouldn’t be necessary, but (48) shows that this isn’t the case. A further factor that probably needs to be considered is that this use of but seems to be related to metalinguistic negation, as in (7). What all these correction cases – including (7) and (10) – have in common is that what is contradicted is clearly being attributed to the hearer (compare (11), where what is contradicted is a conclusion that the hearer could draw, but wouldn’t access without the use of but). So I’d suggest that the correction reading always involves metarepresentational negation—this is supported by the fact that (7) shares with (10) the ‘contradiction’ intonation contour characteristic of metalinguistic negation, and that languages like German and Spanish that have a separate word for correction but use it to translate both the properly metalinguistic examples like (7) and cases like (10). A full account of correction but, then, is likely to involve the interaction of the conjunction reduction which encourages the correction reading, plus metalinguistic negation, and contextual factors which determine whether the correction or denial reading is preferred.

6. Conclusion This paper set out to make a case that linguistic expressions are divided into those that encode conceptual meaning, which can form part of the communicated message, and those that encode procedures to constrain pragmatic inference. Using but for purposes of illustration, I’ve argued that a procedural analysis offers a better explanation of the meaning and interpretation of discourse connectives than accounts on which they map directly onto conceptual representations. One advantage of a procedural analysis in the specific case of but is that it can cope better with the variety of uses that it can have, and this is because it doesn’t map invariably onto a particular concept: instead, it encodes a constraint that has the effect of filtering out certain types of interpretation. More generally, it also explains some facts about but and other discourse connectives—why they are non-truth-conditional and don’t combine in the normal way with conceptual expressions.

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The notion of procedural meaning does need more development, having been applied to an apparently quite disparate range of phenomena—discourse connectives and particles, pronouns and demonstratives, mood indicators, intonation, interjections, inherently communicative facial expressions.17 What all these have in common is that they don’t map onto atomic concepts in the language of thought like most lexical items; instead, whatever they encode functions as guiding the hearer to the intended interpretation, but can’t appear as a constituent of that interpretation. If these various devices do all share the property of encoding constraints on inference, then the conceptual-procedural distinction could potentially illuminate the interaction of lexical meaning with intonation and paralinguistic devices in utterance interpretation. These, after all, occur together in verbal communication, and with the recognition of the wide gap between linguistic meaning and (both explicit and implicit) speaker’s meaning, the contribution of these other factors to interpretation becomes more important. The procedural idea is a natural result of the Fodorian representational-computational view of the mind, which is assumed by many pragmatic frameworks, and could be integrated easily into any approach which takes seriously considerations of effort versus effect combined with an appreciation of the pervasive role of pragmatic inference in communication. Acknowledgements Many thanks to Robyn Carston and Deirdre Wilson for numerous discussions on the subject of this paper and their comments on several drafts. I’m also grateful to Eliza Kitis, Chris Potts, Su Olmos, an anonymous referee, and, especially, Kent Bach for feedback on earlier versions of the paper. This work was supported by an AHRC studentship. References Anscombre, J.C., Ducrot, O., 1977. Deux ‘mais’ en franc¸ais? Lingua 43, 23–40. Bach, K., 1987. Thought and Reference. Clarendon Press, Oxford. Bach, K., 1994. Conversational impliciture. Mind and Language 9, 124–162. Bach, K., 1999. The myth of conventional implicature. Linguistics and Philosophy 22, 327–366. Bach, K., 2001. You don’t say? Synthese 128, 15–44. Bach, K., Harnish, R., 1979. Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Blakemore, D., 1987. Semantic Constraints on Relevance. Blackwell, Oxford. Blakemore, D., 1989. Denial and contrast: a relevance theoretic account of but. Linguistics and Philosophy 12, 15–37. Blakemore, D., 1992. Understanding Utterances: An Introduction to Pragmatics. Blackwell, Oxford. Blakemore, D., 2000. Indicators and procedures: nevertheless and but. Journal of Linguistics 36, 463–486. Blakemore, D., 2002. Relevance and Linguistic Meaning: The Semantics and Pragmatics of Discourse Markers. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Blakemore, D., Carston, R., 2005. The pragmatics of sentential coordination with ‘and’. Lingua 115 (4), 569–589. Cappelen, H., Lepore, E., 1997. On an alleged connection between indirect speech and the theory of meaning. Mind and Language 12, 278–296. Carston, R., 1988. Implicature, explicature and truth-theoretic semantics. In: Kempson, R. (Ed.), Mental Representations: The Interface between Language and Reality. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 155–181. Carston, R., 1997. Enrichment and loosening: complementary processes in deriving the proposition expressed? Linguistische Berichte 8, 103–127 Special Issue on Pragmatics. Carston, R., 2002. Thoughts and Utterances: The Pragmatics of Explicit Communication. Blackwell, Oxford. Dascal, M., Katriel, T., 1977. Between semantics and pragmatics: the two types of ‘but’—Hebrew ‘aval’ and ‘ela’. Theoretical Linguistics 4, 143–172.

17

See Wilson and Sperber (1993) and Wharton (2003).

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