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Semantics–Pragmatics Boundary 183 Semantics: Overview; Phonetics: Field Methods; Spatiality and Language.

Bibliography Berlin B (1968). Tzeltal numeral classifiers: a study in ethnographic semantics. The Hague and Paris: Mouton. Berlin B & Kay P (1969). Basic color terms: their universality and evolution. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Berman R A & Slobin D I (eds.) (1994). Relating events in narrative: a crosslinguistic developmental study. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Bowerman M & Levinson S C (eds.) Language acquisition and conceptual development. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Chafe W L (ed.) (1980). The pear stories: cognitive, cultural, and linguistic aspects of narrative production. Norwood, NJ: ABLEX. Eisenbeiss S, Bartke S, Weyerts H et al. (1994). Elizitationsverfahren in der Spracherwerbsforschung: Nominalphrasen, Kasus, Plural, Partizipien. Du¨sseldorf: Seminar fu¨r Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft. Frawley W (1992). Linguistic semantics. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Givo´n T (1991). ‘Serial verbs and the mental reality of ‘‘event’’: grammatical vs. cognitive packaging.’ In Traugott E C & Heine B (eds.) Approaches to grammaticalization 1: focus on theoretical and methodological issues. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 81–127. Goddard C (1998). Semantic analysis: a practical introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hardin C L & Maffi L (eds.) (1997). Color categories in thought and language. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Hellwig B (in review). ‘Field semantics and grammarwriting: stimuli-based techniques and the study of locative verbs.’ In Ameka F, Dench A & Evans N (eds.)

Catching language: issues in grammar-writing. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Himmelmann N P (1998). ‘Documentary and descriptive linguistics.’ Linguistics 36, 161–195. Kay P & McDaniel C K (1978). ‘The linguistic significance of the meaning of basic color terms.’ Language 54(3), 610–646. Language and Cognition Group (1993–2003). Field manuals. Nijmegen: Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. Lehrer A (1983). Wine and conversation. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Levinson S C (1992). ‘Primer for the field investigation of spatial description and conception.’ Pragmatics 2(1), 5–47. Levinson S C (2000a). ‘H. P. Grice on location on Rossel Island.’ Berkeley Linguistics Society 25, 210–224. Levinson S C (2000b). ‘Yeli Dnye and the theory of basic color terms.’ Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 10(1), 3–55. Levinson S C & Meira S (2003). ‘‘‘Natural concepts’’ in the spatial topological domain – adpositional meanings in crosslinguistic perspective: an exercise in semantic typology.’ Language 79(3), 485–516. Lucy J A (1992). Grammatical categories and cognition: a case study of the linguistic relativity hypothesis. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. MacLaury R E (1997). Color and cognition in Mesoamerica: constructing categories as vantages. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Pederson E, Danziger E, Wilkins D P et al. (1998). ‘Semantic typology and spatial conceptualization.’ Language 74(3), 557–589. Stro¨mquist S & Verhoeven L (eds.) (2004). Relating events in narrative: typological and contextual perspectives. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Turnbull W (2001). ‘An appraisal of pragmatic elicitation techniques for the social psychological study of talk: the case of request refusals.’ Pragmatics 11(1), 31–61.

Semantics–Pragmatics Boundary A Bezuidenhout, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA ß 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The Philosophical Debate Texts in the philosophy of language frequently cite the tripartite distinction between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics made by Morris (1938). According to Morris, syntax is concerned with the structural properties of signs (i.e., with word-word relations), semantics with the relations between signs and the things they signify (i.e., with word-world relations),

and pragmatics with the uses of signs by speakers and hearers to perform communicative acts (i.e., with word-user relations). Philosophers generally follow Frege in rejecting any form of mentalist semantics. They think of languages as ‘‘abstract semantic systems whereby symbols are associated with aspects of the world’’ (Lewis, 1972: 170). There is a potential infinity of both syntactically well-formed (grammatical) and semantically well-formed (meaningful) sentences in any language, and it is the job of semantics to identify rules that generate this potential infinity. On the other hand, since we are interested in the semantics of

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natural languages, these rules must be ones that are learnable by humans with finite minds. Semanticists are interested in what a competent speaker knows when she knows a language (i.e., her syntactic and semantic competence). Hence they assume that what a speaker knows is a finite set of rules that can compositionally generate the potential infinity of syntactically well-formed sentences and that can deliver a semantic interpretation for every meaningful sentence of the language. Philosophers generally assume that there is a sharp division between syntax/semantics and pragmatics. While semantics studies the rules that a competent speaker knows when she knows the meanings of sentences, pragmatics studies how sentences are used in conversational contexts to communicate a speaker’s messages. Pragmatics is thus concerned with linguistic performance rather than competence. It is by using sentences with certain syntactic and semantic properties that speakers succeed in communicating certain things. So, the central question of pragmatics is how we succeed in our communicative tasks. Many philosophers are convinced that Grice (1975, 1989) made an important start in answering this question by articulating his Cooperative Principle and maxims of conversation. Grice sees conversations as rational cooperative activities where hearers use their linguistic knowledge, together with mutually available nonlinguistic contextual knowledge, to infer what the speaker means to communicate. The principles that guide conversations are analogous to the principles that guide any sort of rational cooperative activity, such as the joint activity of building a house or sailing a ship. Pragmatic principles on this view are not tied essentially to any language mechanism and are certainly not language-specific rules, unlike the syntactic and semantic rules that define a language. An alternative view, argued for by Prince (1988, 1997), assumes that there are rules of use associating certain linguistic forms with certain functions. Moreover, these rules are language-specific, in the sense that the same pragmatic function could be served in different languages by different forms; so any competent speaker of the language must learn these rules. Knowledge of these rules constitutes the speaker’s pragmatic competence. Hence it is incorrect to put the study of pragmatics on the performance side of the competence/performance divide. Related to Prince’s ideas are those of Kasher (1991), who argues for a modular conception of pragmatics. Just as linguists have postulated a grammar module, so Kasher argues there is a module governing pragmatic processes, with its own proprietary rules and representations. Since it is Grice’s conception of pragmatics that has

set the agenda for debate in the philosophy of language, these alternative views will be set aside here. Gricean pragmatics introduces the idea that it is by saying certain things in certain contexts that speakers are able indirectly to communicate (to implicate) certain further things. In working out what a speaker has implicated, a hearer will use his knowledge of the conversational maxims, together with contextually available knowledge, to infer what the speaker communicated. For example, after a terrible ordeal in which a man is rescued from a remote mountainside after a plane crash, a TV reporter interviews him. The reporter asks: ‘Were you ever afraid?’ and the man replies: ‘I felt a twinge or two.’ By his understatement he has implicated that things were pretty bad. The understatement is a violation of Grice’s first Maxim of Quantity, which enjoins speakers to say as much as is required by the purposes of the talk exchange. The hearer, having recognized the violation, but assuming that the speaker is still bound by the Cooperative Principle, will search the context for further information that the speaker might have intended to convey. It is his background knowledge – of human psychology, of the probable consequences of plane wrecks, and of the low probability of survivors being found in remote, sparsely populated places – that allows the reporter to infer the speaker’s intended meaning. The currently dominant view in philosophy of language is that a theory of meaning for a language specifies the truth-conditions for each of the sentences of a language. It does this by specifying a finite set of rules that compositionally generates these truth-conditions. This truth-conditional approach to semantics has been grafted onto a Gricean view of pragmatics. It is generally accepted that saying and implicating are neatly separated. Saying is tied to sentence meaning and the expression of truth-conditional content. What a speaker says when she utters a sentence (i.e., the locutionary content of her utterance) corresponds to the truth-conditional content of the sentence. (Note that the notion of saying is not to be conflated with the notion of stating. The former is a locutionary act, namely the act of expressing some content. The latter is an illocutionary act. It is the expressing of some content with a particular illocutionary force.) Implicating is tied to (indirectly or implicitly) communicated content that can be inferred once the hearer has figured out what the speaker has (directly or explicitly) said. Since truth-conditional content is the province of semantics and implicature is the province of pragmatics, the saying/implicating divide goes along with a neat divide between semantics and pragmatics. Consequently, many believe that truthconditions can be specified in a way that is essentially free from pragmatic considerations.

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But there are problems with this Gricean view. One of the first indications of trouble for this view came from some observations by Cohen (1971). Others, such as Carston (1988, 2002), Levinson (1995, 2000) and Recanati (1989, 2004) have used examples similar to Cohen’s to challenge the Gricean picture. Consider examples such as the following: (1) Mary fell pregnant and she got married. (2) Mary got married and she fell pregnant.

Grice would say that (1) and (2) have the same truthconditional content, but that they implicate different things. (1) implicates (in a generalized way) that the pregnancy occurred before the marriage, whereas (2) implicates the opposite. (1) also implicates that the reason for Mary’s marriage was her pregnancy. However consider examples such as the following: (3) If Mary fell pregnant and she got married, her grandma will be shocked. (4) If Mary got married and she fell pregnant, her grandma will be shocked.

According to Grice, the antecedents of the two conditionals have the same truth-conditional content. Therefore, (3) and (4) should themselves have the same truth-conditional content, yet intuitively they do not. (3) could be true while (4) is false. It looks as though the implicated content of (1) and (2) has become incorporated into the truth-conditional content of (3) and (4). In other words, (3) and (4) in effect express the following: (30 ) If Mary fell pregnant and then for that reason she got married, her grandma will be shocked. (40 ) If Mary got married and then she fell pregnant, her grandma will be shocked.

Clearly, (30 ) and (40 ) differ in content, so it is not a problem if one is true and the other is false. These appear to be cases of pragmatic intrusion into truth-conditional content. Such pragmatic intrusion creates a problem for Grice that Levinson (2000) calls ‘Grice’s Circle.’ The trouble is that to figure out what is conversationally implicated, the hearer must first determine what is said (since it is by saying suchand-such that a speaker succeeds in implicating something else). However, in figuring out what was said by (3) or (4), it looks as though one must first determine their implicated contents. Levinson (1995, 2000) argues that pragmatic intrusion is not problematic, since it is limited to the intrusion of generalized conversational implicatures (GCIs), and these, he argues, are default meanings that will be automatically triggered by the use of certain kinds of expressions. The derivation of GCIs

is governed by various heuristic principles. For example, the I-Principle can be summarized in the slogan ‘What is simply described is stereotypically and specifically exemplified.’ It applies only to ‘unmarked, minimal expressions’ (Levinson, 1995: 97). It enjoins speakers to minimize what they say when their hearers are able to use contextually accessible information to enrich the informational content of their utterances. Conversely, it enjoins hearers to amplify or enrich the informational content of the speaker’s utterance up to the point that they judge is the speaker’s intended meaning. Since ‘and’ is the sort of minimal, unmarked expression that calls for a stereotypical interpretation, conjunctions such as (1) and (2) will be given an interpretation according to which the events described by the two conjuncts are temporally ordered. The net effect is that (3) and (4) will be understood to express (30 ) and (40 ) respectively. Not everyone would agree that in (3) and (4) we have pragmatic intrusion into truth-conditional content. Cohen (1971) appeals to examples of embedded conjunctions that seem to affect the truth-conditions of the larger sentences in which they are embedded to argue for a semantic ambiguity account of ‘and.’ If the suggestion of temporal ordering associated with (1) affects the truth-conditions of (3), Cohen concludes that this feature must be part of the semantically encoded meaning of ‘and.’ Since relations other than temporal ordering can be suggested by a conjunction, this view is committed to a multiple ambiguity account of ‘and.’ In addition to conjunctions such as (1) and (2), consider examples such as: (5) It is summer in Europe and winter in Australia. (6) The fan turned on and {as a result} a cool breeze blew through the room. (7) Peter took a shower and {while in the shower} he practiced his singing.

In some cases, as in example (5), ‘and’ expresses simple truth-functional ‘and,’ and the conjuncts can be reversed without changing the meaning. In others, such as (6), it expresses a causal relation ‘and as a result,’ or, as in (7), a temporal containment relation ‘and while.’ In these last two cases, the relations are asymmetric, and reversing the conjuncts changes the meaning. For instance, reversing (6) suggests a different causal scenario, where the breeze somehow turns on the fan. Examples could be multiplied, and for each case where a different relation is suggested, Cohen would have to posit yet another meaning for ‘and.’ Carston (1988) and Recanati (1989) argue against positing a semantic ambiguity for ‘and,’ maintaining instead that the contents represented between

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brackets in the above examples are pragmatically determined aspects of what is said. (See entry on Pragmatic Determinants of What Is Said.) Rather than being semantically ambiguous, ‘and’ is semantically underspecified. It will be pragmatically enriched in different ways, depending on the assumptions that are operative in the conversational context. Carston and Recanati agree with Levinson that there is pragmatic intrusion. However, they point to embedded contexts, like the conditionals (3) and (4), to argue that the pragmatic content associated with (1) and (2) belongs to what is said, rather than being conversationally implicated. (Carston (2002) prefers to use Sperber and Wilson’s (1986) technical term ‘explicature’ instead of the term ‘what is said,’ since the latter has a commonsense usage that interferes with attempts at terminological regimentation.) If the pragmatic content of a simple sentence has an effect on the truth-conditional content of the compound sentences in which it is embedded, then that pragmatic content is part of what is said by the simple sentence, not something that is merely implicated. Recanati calls this the Scope Test. Other tests have been proposed for determining whether some pragmatically determined content is part of what is said. Recanati (1989) proposes his Availability Principle, according to which any content that intuitively seems to affect truth-conditions should be regarded as a part of what is said. Carston (1988) proposes her Functional Independence Principle, which requires both explicatures and implicatures to occupy independent roles in inferential interactions with other assumptions. Take example (8) discussed below. The simple encoded content that Mary engaged in an act of swallowing is not functionally independent of the enriched content that Mary swallowed a bug. The latter entails the former, and it is from the latter that further contextual effects can be derived. This suggests that it is the enriched content that corresponds to what is said, not the more minimal encoded content, which has no autonomous role to play. Explicatures are pragmatic developments of semantically encoded content and can be either enrichments or loosenings of encoded content. Carston argues that the processes involved in the recovery of explicatures are inferential processes and, hence, no different from the sorts of inferential processes involved in the derivation of conversational implicatures. What distinguish explicatures from implicatures are not the sorts of processes involved in their derivation but the starting points of these inferential processes. Derivations of explicatures begin with the semantically underspecified representations of logical form (LF) that are the output of processes of

grammatical decoding. Implicatures, on the other hand, as Grice insisted, are contextual implications that follow from contexts including assumptions about what was said (i.e., including explicatures). This is not a commitment to the claim that explicatures are processed before implicatures. In fact, Carston thinks that the processing of explicatures and implicatures happens in parallel, and that the overall interpretation of a speaker’s utterance is something arrived at via a process of mutual adjustment. Recanati, on the other hand, distinguishes local from global pragmatic processes. The sorts of processes involved in the derivation of pragmatic determinants of what is said are of the local sort and are noninferential. For instance, such local processes might involve spreading activation within an associative conceptual network, or the accessing of stereotypical information from conceptual frames or scripts. Such processing happens at a subconscious level, and only the output of such processes is consciously available. In contrast, global pragmatic processes are inferential processes of the sort that Grice claimed are involved in the derivation of conversational implicatures. Such inferential processing is in principle consciously available, in the sense that language users can become aware not just of the conclusions of such reasoning but also of the inputs to such reasoning, as well as to the (putative) fact that premises and conclusions are inferentially connected. Bach (1994) provides yet another perspective on these matters. Bach wishes to maintain a more minimalist conception of semantics and of what is said. Yet he acknowledges that there are pragmatically determined contents that are not Gricean implicatures. He introduces a third category of contents, intermediate between what is said and what is implicated, that he labels ‘implicitures.’ He regards these as contents that are implicit in what is said and that require pragmatic processes of either completion or expansion to be made explicit. Consider the following, where the content in brackets is supplied from contextually available information: (8) Mary swallowed {the bug that flew into her mouth}. (9) Mary invited everyone {in her department} to her wedding.

The sentence ‘Mary swallowed’ is syntactically and semantically complete. (Compare it to ‘Mary ate,’ which is syntactically but not semantically complete, since ‘eat’ is a two-place relation. Or to ‘Mary devoured,’ which is neither syntactically nor semantically complete, since ‘to devour’ subcategorizes for an obligatory second NP, and ‘devour’ has two semantic arguments). Bach regards (8) as an example of

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conceptual incompleteness, and hence a pragmatic process of completion must operate, resulting in the derivation of the impliciture that Mary swallowed the bug that flew into her mouth. On the other hand, ‘Mary invited everyone to her wedding’ expresses a complete proposition. Bach calls this a minimal proposition, since the domain of the quantifier is not restricted in any way (beyond the restriction to persons that is encoded by ‘one’ in ‘everyone’). However, this minimal proposition is not the one that the speaker intends to communicate. A pragmatic process of expansion is required, yielding the impliciture that Mary invited everyone in her department to her wedding. Bach calls examples such as (9) cases of sentence nonliterality. No expression in the sentence is used nonliterally, yet the minimal proposition expressed by the sentence is not what the speaker intends to convey. Bach denies that there are pragmatically determined aspects of what is said. What is said for Bach is a more minimal notion, which is tied to explicitly encoded semantic content. Bach in effect accepts what Carston (1988) calls the Linguistic Direction Principle. The only contextually determined content that belongs to what is said by the utterance of a sentence is content that corresponds to some element that is syntactically realized in that sentence. Thus the contextual values of the indexicals in ‘She is swallowing now’ will be part of what is said by an utterance of this sentence, but the implicit content that specifies what was swallowed (if anything) will not be a part of what is said, since that content corresponds to no element in the sentence. Bach’s minimalism requires him to admit that on some occasions what a speaker says does not correspond to a complete proposition. Such is the case in example (8) above. In such cases Bach argues that what is said corresponds to a ‘propositional radical,’ a gappy object whose missing conceptual elements must be supplied by the context. Each of the authors discussed above posits a different view of the boundary between semantics and pragmatics. According to Grice, sentence meaning, truth-conditional content, and what is said are all aligned and fall on the side of semantics, whereas implicatures fall on the side of pragmatics. Cohen basically preserves Grice’s dichotomy. Cases that may seem to be pragmatic intrusions into truth-conditional content are instead incorporated into semantics. If there is a challenge to Grice it is simply that some phenomena that Grice would label as conversational implicatures are reanalyzed by Cohen as part of semantically encoded content, so that the domain of pragmatics shrinks. Subsequent views can all in one way or another be seen to challenge Grice’s neat dichotomy. Bach

remains the most faithful to Grice, since on the whole he preserves the alignment of sentence meaning, truth-conditional content, and what is said on the side of semantics. Truth-conditional content may sometimes come apart from what is said, in those cases in which what is said is conceptually incomplete and hence does not correspond to a complete, truth-evaluable proposition. But when we have truth-conditional content, it is something that is delivered purely by semantics. However, Bach argues that Grice’s view of what lies on the side of pragmatics is inadequate. The phenomena of semantic underspecification and sentence nonliterality require us to recognize a category of pragmatic content intermediate between what is said and what is implicated – the category of implicitures. Levinson’s (1995, 2000) views are also quite close to Grice’s. He accepts that sentence meaning and what is said line up, and that these are semantic phenomena. However, he allows that there can be pragmatic intrusion into truth-conditional content, so this notion is not a purely semantic notion. On the other hand, Levinson’s conception of pragmatics is conservative. He does not challenge the adequacy of the Gricean conception of pragmatics as the domain of conversational implicatures. He does, however, develop Grice’s notion of a generalized conversational implicature (GCI) to a substantial degree. GCIs are said to be default meanings, which belong to a third level of meaning that Levinson calls utterance-level meaning, different from either sentence meaning or speaker meaning. It is only GCIs that are involved in pragmatic intrusion. Carston’s and Recanati’s challenges to Grice are more radical. For them, the only purely semantic notion is sentence or expression meaning. What is said (which is equated with truth-conditional content) falls on the side of pragmatics, since there is pragmatic intrusion into truth-conditional content. (Remember, Carston prefers the term ‘explicature.’) Carston (2002) suggests that we make a distinction between lexical and truth-conditional semantics. Lexical semantics studies those aspects of meaning that have some sort of syntactic reflex in the language and hence that are a part of the mental lexicon. The lexicon is a store of words in long-term memory. An entry in the mental lexicon is in effect a rule correlating the phonological, syntactic, and semantic information associated with a word. Lexical semantics on this conception is a mentalist enterprise. We can continue to talk of truth-conditional semantics, so long as we realize that the project is very different from the traditional one. Truth-conditions are not assigned directly to the sentences of a language, since sentences by themselves do not have truth-conditions. It is

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only sentences as used by speakers in particular conversational contexts that have truth-conditions. For a defense of a similar claim, see Stainton (2000). Moreover, both Carston and Recanati reject Gricean pragmatics as inadequate, since for them pragmatics is not confined to the study of conversational implicatures. Recanati’s rejection of Gricean pragmatics may be the most thoroughgoing, since for him, the pragmatic processes involved in the recovery of what is said are not even of the same type as the global pragmatic processes involved in the recovery of implicatures. They are noninferential processes. Many other voices have been added to this debate. For example, Stainton (1995) argues for the view that semantic underspecification and pragmatic intrusion is rife. He points to the fact that many utterances are of sentence fragments, rather than of complete sentences. Consider: (10) Top shelf.

Suppose Mary is making herself a sandwich and is rooting around in the kitchen cupboard looking for jam to spread on her toast, and that this is mutually manifest to Mary and her husband Peter. Peter could utter sentence fragment (10), meaning to convey the proposition that the jam that Mary is looking for is on the top shelf of the cupboard she is searching in. Stainton argues that cases such as these are not to be treated as cases of ellipsis. The missing content in (10) need not correspond to any well-defined syntactic element, as happens in standard cases of syntactic ellipsis, such as the VP-ellipsis in ‘Mary donated blood and so did Peter.’ (Ellipsis is a very vexed subject. Whether it is something that can be handled in the syntax is not at all clear. See Jackendoff, 1997: 75–78, for a discussion of some problematic cases.) We should accept that language understanding is able to proceed on the basis of fragmentary clues from semantically decoded content. A large burden is placed on the inferential capacities of hearers, who must elaborate these clues on the basis of contextually available information. Stanley (2002) argues for a diametrically opposed view. According to Stanley, there is much more syntactic and semantic structure than meets the eye, and many of the alleged cases of semantic underdetermination calling for pragmatic enrichment can be reanalyzed as cases where some hidden element in the underlying sentential structure is directing the process of content retrieval. In other words, we preserve the idea of the linguistic direction of content, although the elements doing the directing are often hidden elements (ones that are not phonetically realized, although they are a part of underlying logical form).

Stanley’s views have been especially influential in accounting for cases of quantifier domain restriction, such as (9) above or (11) below: (11) Every child has been vaccinated against polio. (12) In every country, every child has been vaccinated against polio.

It is possible to use (11) in an appropriate context to convey the proposition that every child in the United States has been vaccinated against polio. Stanley’s view is that there must be a hidden free variable in (11) whose value is specified in that context as the United States. This variable is present in the underlying logical form of (11) but is not phonetically realized. (Strictly speaking, what is implicit is a free function variable, and what must be specified in context is both the function and the values of the arguments of this function. In (11) the function is something like ‘resident-in(x).’) The evidence that there is a hidden free variable in (11) is that this variable can sometimes be bound by a quantifier. For example, when (11) is embedded in a sentence with a quantifier that has wide scope over the embedded quantifier, as is the case in (12), what is said is that in every country x, every child in x has been vaccinated. For more detailed arguments, both pro and con, see Stanley and Szabo´ (2000), Bach (2000) and Neale (2000). This hidden indexical view has consequences for the quantificational analysis of definite descriptions and has led to some controversy as to the correct analysis of so-called incomplete descriptions. See the chapters in Part I of Reimer & Bezuidenhout (2004).

The Mentalist Picture of the SemanticsPragmatics Boundary It was noted above that many philosophers follow Frege in rejecting mentalist semantics. Many linguists on the other hand embrace mentalism, and in fact regard it as the only sensible perspective from which to study language. See Chomsky (2000), Jackendoff (1997, 2002). From the point of view of mentalism, the dispute about the semantics-pragmatics boundary is not one about how to delineate the notions of explicature, impliciture, implicature, etc. Rather, it is concerned with the question as to how semantic and pragmatic knowledge are represented and organized in the human mind/brain and how this information is combined in the course of on-line production and comprehension of language. Several of the authors discussed above straddle the divide between philosophy and linguistics. Carston, for instance, works in the mentalist tradition. She is concerned to offer a mentalist theory of language performance. (So the

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suggestion made at the outset that semantics is concerned with competence and pragmatics with performance is one that Carston would reject.) On the other hand, although she is interested in articulating a cognitive theory of performance, she has also been an active contributor to the philosophical debate about how to delineate what is said from what is conversationally implied. Within the mentalist framework, the dominant picture of the semantics-pragmatics interface has been that it is the interface between the language system proper and what Chomsky (1995) calls the conceptual-intentional system. From the comprehension perspective, this interface is where the output from the hearer’s language system, namely a representation of the logical form (LF) of the speaker’s utterance, is interpreted by processing it in the context of currently active pragmatic information, including information about the speaker’s likely communicative intentions. From the production perspective, this interface is where the process of giving expression to a speaker’s communicative intentions is initiated. Appropriate lexical-conceptual entries in the speaker’s mental lexicon are accessed, thus initiating a process that will ultimately result in the output of an appropriate phonetic form (PF) at the interface between the language system and the articulatory system. Jackendoff (1997, 2002) challenges this Chomskyan view while remaining within the mentalist camp. He argues that the language system has a tripartite parallel architecture. There are three independent generative systems or modules, the phonological system, the syntactic system, and the conceptual system. Each contains its own compositional rules and proprietary set of representations, of, respectively, phonological structure (PS), syntactic structure (SS), and conceptual structure (CS). However, it is necessary for these systems to communicate with one another, and they do this via various interface modules, whose job it is to map representations from one system into the representations of another. There is a PS-SS interface, an SS-CS interface (which Jackendoff calls the syntaxsemantics interface), and a PS-CS interface. The lexicon is also an interface module, and the interfaces already mentioned are in effect parts of this larger interface system. The lexicon is a long-term memory store whose entries are triples of the three sorts of structures mentioned, namely of PS, SS, and CS. The lexical entry for expression a, , is in essence a correspondence rule mapping representations from the three systems into each other. (Lexical entries may be for words, for phrases, such as idioms, or for expressions below the word level, such as agreement markers.)

What Jackendoff calls the syntax-semantics interface (namely the SS-CS interface) is of relevance to the current discussion, since he justifies his claim that CS is the level of semantics, and that it is a level separate from syntax, by appeal to phenomena of the sort that Carston, Recanati, and others appeal to in arguing for pragmatic intrusion into what is said (i.e., into the proposition expressed by an utterance). Jackendoff (1997) argues for what he calls enriched semantic composition. At the level of CS, the compositional principles that form propositions (or thoughts) are sensitive to information that comes from the pragmatic context. But not all this conceptual structure is reflected in the corresponding syntactic structures. Consider the following: (13) Peter kept crossing the street. (14) Mary finished the book. (15) The ham sandwich wants his check.

(13) illustrates the process of aspectual coercion, (14) of co-composition, and (15) of pragmatic transfer. See Pustejovsky (1995) for an account of the first two processes and Nunberg (1979) for an account of the third. A single act of crossing the street is not a repetitive and (potentially) open-ended action like clapping one’s hands or bouncing or spinning a ball. But ‘kept’ requires such repetitiveness and/or open-endedness. Thus, in the case of (13), ‘kept’ coerces an interpretation of ‘crossing the street’ according to which there is either a repeated or an extended action. That is, either we understand Peter to have crossed the street multiple times, perhaps in his effort to lose the detective tailing him. Alternatively, we zoom in on Peter’s action of crossing the street and see it as one whose end point is still in Peter’s future. Perhaps the street is a very broad one, with a median strip, where Peter pauses briefly before continuing with his crossing. In the case of (14), finishing is something that can be predicated of an event, but ‘the book’ refers to an object, not an event. Pustejovsky (1995) argues that the lexical-conceptual entry for ‘book’ contains information about the typical features of books, namely that they have authors, are read by readers, etc. This conceptual information, presumably along with other contextual information, can be used to arrive at an enriched interpretation of (14) according to which Mary finished reading (or writing, or binding, or illustrating, etc.) the book. In the case of (15), contextual knowledge about restaurants and what goes on in them is used to arrive at an interpretation according to which the ham sandwich orderer wants his check. In all these cases Jackendoff argues that there is more conceptual (semantic) structure than is

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represented syntactically. Some will be inclined to argue that there must be covert syntactic structure to match the semantic structure – structure that is there but is not phonetically realized. But Jackendoff argues that this is a mistake. Those who argue for covert structure are in the grip of an assumption that he calls syntactocentricism, namely the view that the only source of compositional structure is syntax. This is an assumption he attributes to Chomsky, since it is built into all the theories of the organization of the language system that Chomsky has proposed, from the Standard Theory of the 1960s, through the extended and revised versions of the Standard Theory in the 1970s, to the Government and Binding (GB) approach of the early 1980s and the minimalist approach of the 1990s. But Jackendoff’s account of the tripartite parallel architecture of the language system rejects this assumption. Moreover, Jackendoff goes further and argues that it is a mistake to talk of any semantic structure being directly encoded in the syntax, as Chomsky seems to suggest when he introduces the level of logical form (LF) and talks of it as the level in syntax that directly represents meaning (Chomsky, 1986: 68). It is unnecessary and perhaps even incoherent to talk in this way. First, it is unnecessary, since the correspondence rules belonging to the syntax-semantics interface (the SS-CS interface) will do the work of correlating syntactic and semantic structures. Note also that the correspondence doesn’t have to be perfect. There may be only a partial homology between these two systems. If the communicative system as a whole works in such a way that semantic structure is recoverable from readily available contextual knowledge, then the fact that some of this structure is invisible to the syntactic system is no bad thing. Second, talk of semantic structure being encoded in syntax may be incoherent if that is allowed to mean that semantic distinctions are directly represented in the syntactic system. The syntactic system is a module whose internal operations are defined over representations in its own proprietary code. So the syntactic system knows about nouns and verbs, case markings, active and passive constructions, WH-movement, etc., not about objects and events, predicate-argument structure, the telic/atelic distinction, thematic roles, etc. Thus it could not represent the sort of pragmatic knowledge needed to interpret examples such as (13)–(15). As already mentioned, Carston accepts Chomsky’s picture, including the assumption of syntactocentricism. She holds that the output from the language system is a representation of LF, which includes those semantic features that are directly syntactically encoded. Earlier we saw her acceptance of the idea

that lexical semantics is the study of such encoded aspects of meaning. So, for her, the SS-CS interface would be better called the semantics-pragmatics interface, not the syntax-semantics interface. This makes it seem that her views are very far from those of Jackendoff. Yet Carston’s notion of pragmatic enrichment and Jackendoff’s notion of enriched composition are very similar. Jackendoff (2002: 273) does briefly allude to what he might call the semantics-pragmatics interface. It turns out to be an interface level between two sublevels within the conceptual system. It is the level that integrates thoughts that are conveyed by means of language with one’s previous knowledge, including knowledge of the communicative context and the speaker’s intentions. Such integration may lead one to inferentially derive further thoughts (i.e., Gricean implicatures). In other words, Jackendoff’s conception is basically the Gricean conception that is rejected by Carston, since it confines pragmatics to the derivation of implicatures, whereas Carston thinks pragmatic processes are also involved in the enrichment of lexical concepts (encoded meanings) to arrive at ad hoc concepts (contextualized meanings). Of course, Jackendoff can use terminology in the way he pleases. However, to make it clearer that his views are in fact very close to those of Carston, it might be more appropriate to relabel Jackendoff’s SS-CS interface the syntax-pragmatics interface. This does of course still leave some disagreements unsettled. In particular, it leaves unsettled the issue of syntactocentricism and the debate as to whether there is a specifically linguistic part of semantics, separate from nonlinguistic knowledge, thought, and contextualized meaning. (See Jackendoff, 2002: 281–293, for reasons to deny that there is any such level of semantics.) See also: Character versus Content; Context Principle; Intention and Semantics; Metaphor: Philosophical Theories; Pragmatic Determinants of What Is Said; Sense and Reference: Philosophical Aspects; Speech Acts; Truth Conditional Semantics and Meaning.

Bibliography Bach K (1994). ‘Conversational impliciture.’ Mind & Language 9, 124–162. Bach K (2000). ‘Quantification, qualification, and context: a reply to Stanley and Szabo´ .’ Mind & Language 15, 262–283. Carston R (1988). ‘Implicature, explicature and truththeoretic semantics.’ In Kempson R (ed.) Mental representations: the interface between language and reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 155–181.

Semiology and the Focus on Language 191 Carston R (2002). Thoughts and utterances. Oxford: Blackwell. Chomsky N (1986). Knowledge of language. New York: Praeger. Chomsky N (1995). ‘Language and nature.’ Mind 104, 1–61. Chomsky N (2000). New horizons in the study of language and mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cohen L J (1971). ‘Some remarks on Grice’s views about the logical particles of natural language.’ In Bar-Hillel Y (ed.) Pragmatics of natural languages. Dordrecht: Reidel. 50–68. Grice P (1975). ‘Logic and conversation.’ In Cole P & Morgan J (eds.) Syntax and semantics 3. New York: Academic Press. 41–58. Grice P (1989). Studies in the way of words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jackendoff R (1997). The architecture of the language faculty. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Jackendoff R (2002). Foundations of language: brain, meaning, grammar, evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kasher A (1991). ‘On the pragmatic modules: a lecture.’ Journal of Pragmatics 16, 381–397. Levinson S (1995). ‘Three levels of meaning.’ In Palmer F R (ed.) Grammar and meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 90–115. Levinson S (2000). Presumptive meanings: the theory of generalized conversational implicature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lewis D (1972). ‘General semantics.’ In Davidson D & Harman G (eds.) Semantics for natural language. Dordrecht: Reidel. 169–218.

Seminole

Morris C (1938). Foundations of the theory of signs. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Neale S (2000). ‘On being explicit: comments on Stanley and Szabo´ , and on Bach.’ Mind & Language 15, 284–294. Nunberg G (1979). ‘The non-uniqueness of semantic solutions: polysemy.’ Linguistics and Philosophy 3, 143–184. Prince E (1988). ‘Discourse analysis: a part of the study of linguistic competence.’ In Newmeyer F J (ed.) Linguistics: the Cambridge survey 2: Linguistic theory: extensions and implications. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 164–182. Prince E (1997). ‘On the functions of left dislocation in English discourse.’ In Kamio A (ed.) Directions in functional linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 117–143. Pustejovsky J (1995). The generative lexicon. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Recanati F (1989). ‘The pragmatics of what is said.’ Mind and Language 4, 295–329. Recanati F (2004). Literal meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reimer M & Bezuidenhout A (eds.) (2004). Descriptions and beyond. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sperber D & Wilson D (1986). Relevance: communication and cognition. Oxford: Blackwell. Stainton R (1995). ‘Non-sentential assertions and semantic ellipsis.’ Linguistics and Philosophy 18, 281–296. Stainton R (2000). ‘The meaning of ‘‘sentences.’’’ Nouˆs 34, 441–454. Stanley J (2002). ‘Making it articulated.’ Mind and Language 17, 149–168. Stanley J & Szabo´ Z G (2000). ‘On quantifier domain restriction.’ Mind & Language 15, 219–261.

See: Muskogean Languages.

Semiology and the Focus on Language M Danesi, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada ß 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Introduction The science of ‘semiotics’ – the name adopted by the International Association of Semiotic Studies in 1969 – has been listed under various names (Deely, 2004) by dictionaries and encyclopedias. But it is the term ‘semiology’ that has always been its primary competitor over the last century. It was Ferdinand

de Saussure (1857–1913) who coined the term in the Cours de linguistique ge´ne´rale (1916/1969: 68), designating it as the study of ‘‘the whole group of systems grounded on the arbitrariness of the sign,’’ which includes ‘‘symbolic rites, polite formulas, military signals’’ (1969: 16). Although ‘semiotics’ is now the preferred designator of the discipline, ‘semiology’ has had, and continues to have, a role within it (Clarke, 1987), boasting such users of its paradigm as Valentin Volosinov (1895–1936), Louis Hjelmslev (1899–1965) Roland Barthes (1915–1980), Claude