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<div>At 12:32 AM -0500 2/2/01, D. Ezra Johnson wrote:</div>
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<blockquote type="cite" cite>Does anyone know where Pinker teaches
these days?</blockquote>
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<blockquote type="cite" cite>Still MIT, in the Dept. of Brain and
Cognitive Sciences<br>
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larry</blockquote>
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<blockquote type="cite" cite>What is "Neo-Gricean Pragmatic
Theory" ... ?</blockquote>
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Doesn't it involve the Principle of Relevance?</blockquote>
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cite>_________________________________________<span
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<div>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.<i> Studies in the
Way of Words,</i> 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<i> Relevance</i> (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<i> Understanding Utterances</i> 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.)</div>
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<div>More could be said, but probably not on this list. And
remember I wasn't the one who started this thread.
;-)</div>
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<div>larry</div>
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