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Representing Time: An Essay on Temporality as Modality
Available online at www.sciencedirect.com
Journal of Pragmatics 41 (2009) 1859–1861 www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma
Book review Representing Time: An Essay on Temporality as Modality Katarzyna Jaszczolt, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2009, xi + 187 This book has been written by an eminent Cambridge linguist, who has been busy studying linguistics and philosophy of language for a couple of decades and who is exceptionally devoted to her studies. The choice of combining philosophy and linguistics has eminent precedents, such as Noam Chomsky. Linguists look at philosophy for inspiration and derive from it certain guiding ideas. In this volume as well, the idea of intermingling linguistic considerations with some important philosophical ideas has been very fruitful. The central idea of the book is that assigning truth-conditions is a process that pertains to utterance interpretation and that truth-conditional semantics is the result of merging semantic and pragmatic information, including semantic default readings and socio-cultural information. Interpreting utterances with temporal specifications is a matter of merging semantic and pragmatic information. Jaszczolt, using data from many languages, shows that specifications of temporality in utterances are often based on the usage of modal expressions. For example, expressing the future is often a matter of specifying the intentions of the person engaged in the future action, actions being based (in general) on plans and intentional activities. Expressing past events is also a matter of exhibiting evidence in favor of the fact described, of providing some kind of evidential support for a certain claim. (The discussion of modality in connection with modal adverbs, though, makes not mention of my doctoral dissertation (Capone, 1998) nor Capone (2001).) The present facts, thus, contrast strikingly both with future and past facts, because we need no special evidence (except for sense impressions) for what is before our eyes and also because the facts are there and are not merely potential. In those cases where there appear to be ambiguities, as for the case of English ‘will’, Jaszczolt proposes to utilize Modified Occam’s razor. She goes for underspecified semantics, which, at the level of the merger representation, is integrated with pragmatic information to yield a truth-conditional propositional form. The idea of a merger representation is that semantics does not have a privileged position; in other words, we do not compute semantics first and then add pragmatics, etc. To use an expression by Jaszczolt, we kick semantics up to the level of the merger representation (which has psychological reality in that it is the level where truth-conditions are assigned). In my previous articles, I always claimed that we do semantics and pragmatics in an orderly way, under the assumption that semantics is a central plank in a theory of interpretation—my tacit reason for this being that I wanted to be orderly. Now I am more inclined to accept Jaszcolt’s ideas as important. Consider, in fact, the following example. John writes to Mary: Dear Mary, I paste below my password for a parental control program I have installed in my pc. Please keep this password in your files; even if I were to ask you insistently to send it to me, DO not send it to me before a month. I am doing this to prevent myself from using my pc for longer than an hour per day, as that badly damages my eyes. John asks Mary, and not some other person, because he knows that Mary will understand his situation, and will comply with him. Now suppose John asks Mary, after a week, to send him his password, giving the reason that he needs to reset his hard disk, as he had various technical problems, what should Mary do? Should she discard his professed intentions and obey the intentions expressed in his previous letter or discard the previous letter and obey his intentions professed in the second letter? 0378-2166/$ – see front matter # 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2009.05.003
1860
Book review
If the intentions professed semantically were enough, there would be no problem and the second message would be seen as annulling the previous message; if the intentions expressed pragmatically are more important, the second message will not be heeded, in the context of the previous one. So, I am inclined to follow Jaszczolt on her chosen path. Jaszczolt, unlike relevance theorists, believes that implicatures may constitute the primary meanings of an utterance; thus, she distinguishes between explicatures and the primary intention of the speaker (primary meanings). On this point, I need to make up my mind still. Those who find it useful to use the term ‘primary intention’ will follow Jaszczolt. Presumably intentionality is an important factor in pragmatic inference, so this proposal should be given some thought. The strength of the book is the fact that the author culls her data from many exotic languages. Of course, she runs the risk of imposing the world view of those languages to western languages like English. So I suppose it should be said, as clearly as possible, that some languages, unlike English, rely more systematically on modality as the semantic resources for expressing temporality. Another point that should be made is that, once we abandon the view that languages directly encode the time flow, the past and the future seem to merge in an undifferentiated area. So, it is probably useful to remark that the past seems to be more certain than the future (with the exception of dictatorships like Orwell’s 1984, where there are things like the Department of Falsification of History). Another point worth noting is that there are events both of the past and of the future that are even more certain than present events. Should it be doubted that tomorrow the sun will rise? Should it be doubted that some centuries ago the sun used to rise? (I am making an ordinary use of these words, not a scientific one). However, in general it will be granted that past and future events are less certain that the ones we have before our eyes. So Jaszczolt’s view is solid, on general grounds. Jaszczolt’s remarks on ‘now’ are very useful. If we consider the expression ‘now’ from a modal point of view, the answering machine paradox is dissolved. I quite agree with Jaszczolt that Predelli’s (2006) considerations on ‘now’ are dubious. The speaker who leaves the following message on the answering machine: (1)
You know the whole truth now.
contrary to Predelli, does not intend to mean ‘You know the truth now (that you have finished to listen to my recorded message), but refers to a more extended period of time, which probably includes the speaker’s utterance and the hearer’s time. Jaszcxolt calls this the ‘focal point’. But why not push her modal theory a bit further and say that ‘now’ has a modal meaning and refers to the dimension of facts that have a greater dimension of certainty and factivity? In this sense ‘now’ is not a temporal expression, but a modal expression as it includes the facts narrated in the sphere of facts that have a great degree of certainty. Thus (1) should mean (2)
You know the truth and you are in the world of facts that are certain.
The book competently reflects on the interconnections between linguistics and scientific theories. Einstein’s relativity theory is briefly exposed. The author also discusses Richard Feynman’s theory of quantum mechanics according to which particles have got ‘multiple histories’. She also discusses Lukasiewicz’s idea according to which bivalence must be rejected in connection with the past and the future. Summing up, while I should say (perhaps as a warning to students) that the stream of the current research on temporal representation is quite fluid, there are many ideas in this book that can be safely adopted. It is clear that the interconnection between modality and temporality must be explored, albeit it must be conceded that cultures can be different and that western cultures are more rooted in the Kantian tradition (according to which time and space are the a priori forms of knowledge. Perhaps Jaszczolt should have written more on Kant, who still remains an excellent guide in philosophy). Jaszczolt’s merit, however, has been to let us reflect on pragmatic inference, which seems to be paramount in the realm of temporal representation. Even in those cases where there is no explicit semantic representation of time, pragmatics provides one:
Book review
(3)
1861
Jean got a ticket. He was driving too fast (p. 105).
I suppose there are many more details that need to be focused on, but there is no other choice for the reader but to read this book by herself and to form her own impressions. In this way, she will come to reflect on the mystery of expressions such as: (4)
I have no time.
Since Strawson and Wittgenstein’s work, the mystery of ordinary language exercises its appeal on us and Dr. Jaszczolt also follows in the footsteps of these eminent precedents to illuminate ordinary usage. She says that ‘I have no time’ means that the event x has not occurred (or will not occur). The joke that Jaszczolt is writing that time does not exist and that she does not have time for anything else (see preface) is perhaps one of the motivations for letting readers read this book, but is surely in the footsteps of Wittgenstein’s best (enigmatic) tradition. Taken in the right way, this book is a firm leap into knowledge of the world languages and an authoritative introduction to the pragmatics of language. My advice is to read this book and to discern its many important considerations. References Capone, Alessandro, 1998. Modality and discourse. Oxford University doctoral dissertation. Capone, Alessandro, 2001. Modal Adverbs and Discourse. ETS, Pisa. Predelli, Stefano, 2006. The problem with token-reflexivity. Synthese 148, 5–29. Dr. Alessandro Capone has a doctorate in linguistics obtained at the University of Oxford (examiners: James Higginbotham and Sally McConnellGinet). He has published various volumes, papers and reviews, among which ‘Belief reports and pragmatic intrusion: the case of null appositives’ (Journal of Pragmatics, 2008). He carries out research in pragmatics at the Department of Philosophy, University of Palermo.
Alessandro Capone University of Palermo, Viale delle Scienze, Department of Philosophy, Via San Francesco P. 105, 98051 Palermo, Italy E-mail address: [email protected].
Journal of Pragmatics 41 (2009) 1859–1861 www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma
Book review Representing Time: An Essay on Temporality as Modality Katarzyna Jaszczolt, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2009, xi + 187 This book has been written by an eminent Cambridge linguist, who has been busy studying linguistics and philosophy of language for a couple of decades and who is exceptionally devoted to her studies. The choice of combining philosophy and linguistics has eminent precedents, such as Noam Chomsky. Linguists look at philosophy for inspiration and derive from it certain guiding ideas. In this volume as well, the idea of intermingling linguistic considerations with some important philosophical ideas has been very fruitful. The central idea of the book is that assigning truth-conditions is a process that pertains to utterance interpretation and that truth-conditional semantics is the result of merging semantic and pragmatic information, including semantic default readings and socio-cultural information. Interpreting utterances with temporal specifications is a matter of merging semantic and pragmatic information. Jaszczolt, using data from many languages, shows that specifications of temporality in utterances are often based on the usage of modal expressions. For example, expressing the future is often a matter of specifying the intentions of the person engaged in the future action, actions being based (in general) on plans and intentional activities. Expressing past events is also a matter of exhibiting evidence in favor of the fact described, of providing some kind of evidential support for a certain claim. (The discussion of modality in connection with modal adverbs, though, makes not mention of my doctoral dissertation (Capone, 1998) nor Capone (2001).) The present facts, thus, contrast strikingly both with future and past facts, because we need no special evidence (except for sense impressions) for what is before our eyes and also because the facts are there and are not merely potential. In those cases where there appear to be ambiguities, as for the case of English ‘will’, Jaszczolt proposes to utilize Modified Occam’s razor. She goes for underspecified semantics, which, at the level of the merger representation, is integrated with pragmatic information to yield a truth-conditional propositional form. The idea of a merger representation is that semantics does not have a privileged position; in other words, we do not compute semantics first and then add pragmatics, etc. To use an expression by Jaszczolt, we kick semantics up to the level of the merger representation (which has psychological reality in that it is the level where truth-conditions are assigned). In my previous articles, I always claimed that we do semantics and pragmatics in an orderly way, under the assumption that semantics is a central plank in a theory of interpretation—my tacit reason for this being that I wanted to be orderly. Now I am more inclined to accept Jaszcolt’s ideas as important. Consider, in fact, the following example. John writes to Mary: Dear Mary, I paste below my password for a parental control program I have installed in my pc. Please keep this password in your files; even if I were to ask you insistently to send it to me, DO not send it to me before a month. I am doing this to prevent myself from using my pc for longer than an hour per day, as that badly damages my eyes. John asks Mary, and not some other person, because he knows that Mary will understand his situation, and will comply with him. Now suppose John asks Mary, after a week, to send him his password, giving the reason that he needs to reset his hard disk, as he had various technical problems, what should Mary do? Should she discard his professed intentions and obey the intentions expressed in his previous letter or discard the previous letter and obey his intentions professed in the second letter? 0378-2166/$ – see front matter # 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2009.05.003
1860
Book review
If the intentions professed semantically were enough, there would be no problem and the second message would be seen as annulling the previous message; if the intentions expressed pragmatically are more important, the second message will not be heeded, in the context of the previous one. So, I am inclined to follow Jaszczolt on her chosen path. Jaszczolt, unlike relevance theorists, believes that implicatures may constitute the primary meanings of an utterance; thus, she distinguishes between explicatures and the primary intention of the speaker (primary meanings). On this point, I need to make up my mind still. Those who find it useful to use the term ‘primary intention’ will follow Jaszczolt. Presumably intentionality is an important factor in pragmatic inference, so this proposal should be given some thought. The strength of the book is the fact that the author culls her data from many exotic languages. Of course, she runs the risk of imposing the world view of those languages to western languages like English. So I suppose it should be said, as clearly as possible, that some languages, unlike English, rely more systematically on modality as the semantic resources for expressing temporality. Another point that should be made is that, once we abandon the view that languages directly encode the time flow, the past and the future seem to merge in an undifferentiated area. So, it is probably useful to remark that the past seems to be more certain than the future (with the exception of dictatorships like Orwell’s 1984, where there are things like the Department of Falsification of History). Another point worth noting is that there are events both of the past and of the future that are even more certain than present events. Should it be doubted that tomorrow the sun will rise? Should it be doubted that some centuries ago the sun used to rise? (I am making an ordinary use of these words, not a scientific one). However, in general it will be granted that past and future events are less certain that the ones we have before our eyes. So Jaszczolt’s view is solid, on general grounds. Jaszczolt’s remarks on ‘now’ are very useful. If we consider the expression ‘now’ from a modal point of view, the answering machine paradox is dissolved. I quite agree with Jaszczolt that Predelli’s (2006) considerations on ‘now’ are dubious. The speaker who leaves the following message on the answering machine: (1)
You know the whole truth now.
contrary to Predelli, does not intend to mean ‘You know the truth now (that you have finished to listen to my recorded message), but refers to a more extended period of time, which probably includes the speaker’s utterance and the hearer’s time. Jaszcxolt calls this the ‘focal point’. But why not push her modal theory a bit further and say that ‘now’ has a modal meaning and refers to the dimension of facts that have a greater dimension of certainty and factivity? In this sense ‘now’ is not a temporal expression, but a modal expression as it includes the facts narrated in the sphere of facts that have a great degree of certainty. Thus (1) should mean (2)
You know the truth and you are in the world of facts that are certain.
The book competently reflects on the interconnections between linguistics and scientific theories. Einstein’s relativity theory is briefly exposed. The author also discusses Richard Feynman’s theory of quantum mechanics according to which particles have got ‘multiple histories’. She also discusses Lukasiewicz’s idea according to which bivalence must be rejected in connection with the past and the future. Summing up, while I should say (perhaps as a warning to students) that the stream of the current research on temporal representation is quite fluid, there are many ideas in this book that can be safely adopted. It is clear that the interconnection between modality and temporality must be explored, albeit it must be conceded that cultures can be different and that western cultures are more rooted in the Kantian tradition (according to which time and space are the a priori forms of knowledge. Perhaps Jaszczolt should have written more on Kant, who still remains an excellent guide in philosophy). Jaszczolt’s merit, however, has been to let us reflect on pragmatic inference, which seems to be paramount in the realm of temporal representation. Even in those cases where there is no explicit semantic representation of time, pragmatics provides one:
Book review
(3)
1861
Jean got a ticket. He was driving too fast (p. 105).
I suppose there are many more details that need to be focused on, but there is no other choice for the reader but to read this book by herself and to form her own impressions. In this way, she will come to reflect on the mystery of expressions such as: (4)
I have no time.
Since Strawson and Wittgenstein’s work, the mystery of ordinary language exercises its appeal on us and Dr. Jaszczolt also follows in the footsteps of these eminent precedents to illuminate ordinary usage. She says that ‘I have no time’ means that the event x has not occurred (or will not occur). The joke that Jaszczolt is writing that time does not exist and that she does not have time for anything else (see preface) is perhaps one of the motivations for letting readers read this book, but is surely in the footsteps of Wittgenstein’s best (enigmatic) tradition. Taken in the right way, this book is a firm leap into knowledge of the world languages and an authoritative introduction to the pragmatics of language. My advice is to read this book and to discern its many important considerations. References Capone, Alessandro, 1998. Modality and discourse. Oxford University doctoral dissertation. Capone, Alessandro, 2001. Modal Adverbs and Discourse. ETS, Pisa. Predelli, Stefano, 2006. The problem with token-reflexivity. Synthese 148, 5–29. Dr. Alessandro Capone has a doctorate in linguistics obtained at the University of Oxford (examiners: James Higginbotham and Sally McConnellGinet). He has published various volumes, papers and reviews, among which ‘Belief reports and pragmatic intrusion: the case of null appositives’ (Journal of Pragmatics, 2008). He carries out research in pragmatics at the Department of Philosophy, University of Palermo.
Alessandro Capone University of Palermo, Viale delle Scienze, Department of Philosophy, Via San Francesco P. 105, 98051 Palermo, Italy E-mail address: [email protected].