pragmatics

[Laurence Horn]

At 12:32 AM -0500 2/2/01, D. Ezra Johnson wrote:
>>>>Does anyone know where Pinker teaches these days?
>
>>>Still MIT, in the Dept. of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
>>>
>>>larry
>
>>What is "Neo-Gricean Pragmatic Theory" ... ?
>
>Doesn't it involve the Principle of Relevance?
>_________________________________________________________________

Au contraire, at least as I've seen the term applied (unless Dan
means that it involves being skeptical about the over-reliance on the
Principle of Relevance).  In our joint pragmatics seminar at the 1987
Linguistic Institute at Stanford U., Steve Levinson and I introduced
a distinction (actually, the terminology was Steve's but I willingly
jumped in) between NEO-GRICEAN and POST-GRICEAN pragmatic theory.  As
with other neo- vs. post- dichotomies, the former was meant to allude
to work that essentially follows the original tradition, in this case
the Gricean framework [cf. Studies in the Way of Words, Harvard U.
Press, 1989 for a grand posthumous compilation] in which
pragmatically determined components of meaning are (as much as
possible) "read off" semantically interpreted structure:  first you
figure out what is said, then--by applying the assumption that
speaker and hearer are rational, cooperative, etc.--you figure out
what is meant (additionally or in some cases instead).  The latter
process invokes conversational (and other) implicatures, although
there are some significant differences from the model first advanced
by H. P. Grice, particularly as regards the number, character, and
interaction of the maxims of conversation used to calculate implicata
and on the question of the relation of pragmatic inference to logical
form.  A good place to look for a fairly full account of contemporary
neo-Gricean theory is Levinson's _Presumptive Meanings_ (MIT Press,
2000), but I've published a book and a number of papers in this area
as well.  Post-Gricean theory departs much more radically from the
Gricean ur-text and is  closely identified with Relevance theory,
which employs (various versions) of the Principle of Relevance and
the Guarantee of Optimal Relevance, and was developed by Dan Sperber
and Deirdre Wilson and their colleagues and students, esp. at
University College London, e.g. Robyn Carston and Diane Blakemore.
RT assumes that only one general pragmatic principle is needed, that
of Relevance (as they define it), and forcefully argues that it's
impossible to determine what is said (i.e. the truth-conditionally
relevant level of propositional content) without extensive
applications of pragmatic inference (driven by the principle of
relevance).  Much less work remains to be done by implicature on this
approach.  The first and most detailed presentation of this theory is
still Sperber & Wilson's Relevance (Harvard U. Press, 1986, second
edition 1995), but there are many other more recent innovations and
applications by the writers named above (especially Carston) and
their colleagues (see, for instance, François Récanati).  A useful
RT-oriented intro text is Understanding Utterances by Blakemore.  If
you want to get a sense of how lively the disputes between neo- and
post-Griceans can get, check out the blood on the floor after the
exchange in last year's Journal of Linguistics between V. Zegarac &
B. Clark on the one (RT) hand and G. Ward & L. Horn on the
(neo-Gricean) other.  It might also be claimed, with some justice,
that the two approaches are not quite as distinct as it is often
claimed or assumed.   (Because post-Gricean theory for all intents IS
Relevance theory, "RT" has pretty much pushed "post-Gricean pragmatic
theory" off the plank, but "neo-Gricean pragmatics" is still used for
what many of us non-RT types do.)

More could be said, but probably not on this list.  And remember I
wasn't the one who started this thread.   ;-)

larry
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