16.3584, Review: Semantics/Pragmatics: Wedgwood (2005)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-16-3584. Sun Dec 18 2005. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 16.3584, Review: Semantics/Pragmatics: Wedgwood (2005)

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1)
Date: 14-Dec-2005
From: Tatiana Sazonova < sazon at kursknet.ru >
Subject: Shifting the Focus 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Sun, 18 Dec 2005 04:44:48
From: Tatiana Sazonova < sazon at kursknet.ru >
Subject: Shifting the Focus 
 

AUTHOR: Wedgwood, Daniel
TITLE: Shifting the Focus
SUBTITLE: From Static Structures to the Dynamics of Interpretation
PUBLISHER: Elsevier Ltd.
YEAR: 2005
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-2234.html 

Tatiana Yu. Sazonova, Kursk State University, Russia

OVERVIEW

Two key questions open a fascinating discussion introduced by Daniel 
Wedgwood's ''Shifting the Focus: From Static Structures to the 
Dynamics of Interpretation''. The first is how are we to delimit the 
object of study of semantic and syntactic competence and produce 
realistic models if not taking into account extra-linguistic cognitive 
capacities? The second is what kind of theory is required to give the 
analyst the access to all potentially significant extra-linguistic factors? 
Stating that pragmatics is typically not given nearly its due as a source 
of explanation of linguistic phenomena Daniel Wedgwood suggests a 
very elegant and profound theoretical model to explain meaning 
construction during parsing which involves significant pragmatic 
enrichment. By pragmatics the author means general inferential 
processes which participate in meaning construction and 
interpretation. The book opens with two chapters of theoretical 
discussion while chapters 3-8 provide illustration to thorough linguistic 
analysis of what is called ''focus position'' of Hungarian.

CHAPTER-BY-CHAPTER SUMMARY

Chapter 1 ''Language and Meaning'': This chapter challenges some 
fundamental assumptions of conventional analytical approaches that 
attempt to explain the relationship between natural languages and 
meanings they convey. Frameworks maintaining a traditional notion of 
syntax-semantics interface are argued to be incoherent. Throughout 
the chapter the author discusses the approaches to pragmatics and 
its place in the study of grammar; semantics and its role in the 
interpretation of natural language; and argues that the assumption (as 
conventionally construed) of compositionality is conceptually 
inappropriate to the study of natural languages. The author provides 
the theoretical and empirical considerations to show that approaches 
which explain grammar mechanisms of translating word-strings into 
compositional derivations of propositional meanings lead to 
unnecessary and undesirable over-complication of the grammar itself. 
By introducing the considerable evidence for the widespread 
existence of ''pragmatic intrusion'' the author suggests abandoning of 
conventional conception of the syntax-semantics interface as a direct 
mapping from one set of static structures to another. The approach 
logically presumes to revise and more precisely define the 
term ''semantics''.

Chapter 2 ''Relevance Theory and Implications for Linguistic Structure'' 
gives a brief overview of Relevance Theory (RT) as the most well-
grounded of available inferential pragmatic approaches to account for 
inferential side of the construction of meaning. RT recognizes that 
interpreting a linguistic act practically always involves a mixture of 
decoding and inference, it provides a way of reasoning about what the 
scope of encoding within a generative framework should be. The 
author emphasizes the fact, that owing a considerable historical debt 
to Grice's work, the actual mechanisms of RT and the drawing of the 
semantic-pragmatic distinction are significantly different to those of 
Grice and his followers. Stating that little work in RT has addressed 
the question of inference during parsing an utterance, the author 
suggests a 'dynamic' approach which views the surface structures of 
natural language as consisting of incrementally 
processed 'instructions' to the interpreter to build certain kinds of 
structured propositional form. From the 'dynamic' perspective, the 
construction of propositional meaning should be modelled in terms of 
building partial representations during the incremental parse of a 
string of words which makes hierarchical syntactic representations not 
logically necessary on the assumption that linguistic objects encode 
significant amounts of procedural information.

Chapter 3 ''The Hungarian Data'' gives a brief overview of the main 
trends in the analysis of PV phenomena under mainstream syntactic 
approaches. Introducing the basic data the author characterizes the 
basic positions of the Hungarian sentence, immediately pre-verbal 
position, verbal modifiers, and other PV elements.  The syntactic 
accounts of the data discussed do not provide relevant explanation 
between VMs, syntactic foci, etc., because they rely on a considerable 
number of highly abstract elements, many of which encode semantic 
effects. By analyzing the notion of focus itself the author proves that 
introducing pragmatic theory to explain syntactic effects should 
undoubtedly help the researchers to overcome the limitations set by 
compositional semantics and static representations of syntactic 
structure.

Chapter 4 ''Focus and Grammar'' begins with some comments 
regarding the notion of focus and brief reviews of existing approaches 
to focus. It shows that the common analysis of the Hungarian 'focus 
position' based on compositional semantic view leads to incorrect 
empirical predictions. Introducing Szabolcsi's arguments for the 
exhaustivity operator approach the author shows that the supposedly 
encoded exhaustive reading arise as the unmarked reading of narrow 
foci in both Hungarian and English, despite their different ways of 
expressing focus. Non-exhaustive narrow foci require special forms of 
signaling in both languages. Another important contribution of this 
chapter is to show that standard forms of pragmatic reasoning -- 
specifically, 'quantity implicature' -- straightforwardly predict the 
unmarked exhaustive reading to narrow foci. The relevant notion 
of 'narrow focus' is considered briefly in this chapter and suggestions 
are made for a more adequate definition with reference to the 
existence of a particular presupposed eventuality in accordance with 
pragmatic reasoning about the derivation of exhaustive readings.

Chapter 5 ''Focus and Quantifier Distribution'' aims at resolving one 
further important issue that revolves around the use of the PV position 
for the expression of narrow focus. This is the question of how 
quantified noun phrases are distributed across PV and the other 
linearly pre-verbal positions of the Hungarian sentence. This chapter 
investigates quantificational data to provide further illustration of the 
negative consequences of conventional assumptions about the syntax-
semantics interface and the concomitant under-use of inferential 
pragmatics. Adding to the arguments of the previous chapter, the 
analysis of QNP's provides a further illustration of how compositional 
encoding accounts for the exhaustive reading associated with PV 
leads to an unsustainable analysis. The author suggests the analysis 
which follows from re-interpreting Szabolcsi's insight that 
different 'semantic assessment procedures' are encoded in the 
different pre-verbal positions, such that these procedures are taken to 
be reflections of the cognitive perspective taken on different pieces of 
information conveyed by parts of the sentence.

Chapter 6 ''Dynamic Structured meaning: Predication and Information 
Structure'' develops the idea that a 'syntactically focused' expression 
is in fact a predicate over a logical subject that is formed out of the 
rest of the sentence and it forms the basis for a formal analysis of the 
PV position In the current chapter the basis of the analysis is put 
through the continued investigation of the information-structure 
significance of PV. The emphasis is on the connection between the 
narrow focus and the creation of ''topic : comment'' readings, in which 
the tensed verb is not preceded by a PV expression and its denotation 
is understood to be part of the (broad) focused part of the utterance, 
that is the analysis is centered around the role of the verb in the 
relation to the discourse. The resulting account brings together 
narrow foci and the 'comment-initial' verbs of topic : comment 
sentences via the notion of 'main predication', a term coined by the 
author for the act of predication that creates  a propositional form out 
of a non-truth-conditional representation. The procedure is 
represented using a flat, neo-Davidsonian semantics, in combination 
with the epsilon calculus.

Chapter 7 ''Verbal Modifiers and Main Prediction''. In this chapter it is 
shown that that VMs share with VM-less verbs the property of 
introducing certain key elements of structure into the eventuality and 
that this is the basis of the ability to be an unmarked main predicate. 
Such structure must be introduced at the point of main predication or it 
can not be introduced at all, other than by presupposition. The 
behavior of VNs both in the presence of narrow foci and in 'neutral' 
sentences is shown to follow from the dynamics of the main 
predication analysis, being fundamentally a matter of the order in 
which different expressions are processed, relative to each other and 
to crucial point of procedural encoding. This proves once again that a 
processing-based, inferentially informed approach gives an 
explanatory analysis and as such introduces great clarity into a model 
of linguistic competence.

Chapter 8 ''Aspectual Constructions' and Negation''. At issue of this 
chapter are two 'aspectual' constructions that are often claimed to 
encode aspectual semantics. These are the so-called 'progressive 
construction' (PC) and 'existential' or 'evidential' construction (EC). 
The last major issue is the distribution of the Hungarian negative 
particle nem. PC is shown to be a simple case of main prediction by 
the main verb, under which the analysis the necessarily inferential 
interpretation of a post-verbal VN is predicted without further 
stipulation/ EC on the other hand involves tense itself acting as main 
predicate. The negation particle nem is given a new analysis as a 
consistently local operator, converting an act of predication into one of 
negative predication. Thus, once again, this phenomenon 
demonstrates how the dynamic, pragmatically informed approach to 
linguistic analysis produces an explanatory theory of natural language 
processing phenomena.

Chapter 9 ''Summary and Conclusions'' encompasses the most 
important theoretical implications of the book and outlines the 
perspective on further research.

EVALUATION

This book brings together a variety of approaches, theoretical as well 
as practical, for dealing with focus position in Hungarian. Rejecting the 
idea of direct mapping between linguistic structures and their 
interpretations Daniel Wedgwood extends current ideas from 
frameworks such as Relevance theory and Dynamic Syntax to 
introduce a new approach to modeling linguistic competence. As the 
author remarks in his book the ideas of his theory stem from some 
very basic observations about the nature of human language.

Most of such observations found their explanation in research on 
natural language processing. The last decades suggested different 
approaches to explain the mechanisms of natural language 
processing.  The current debate on natural language processing is 
not restricted to Linguistics, but also takes place in Psychology, 
philosophy, Neurosciences, and related disciplines.  The present book 
is another contribution to this domain, as it brings evidence from the 
language of a very rich morphology, Hungarian.

The author's approach corresponds to interactive models which treat 
the mental lexicon as a dynamic functional system and an integral part 
of human cognitive abilities. Under interactive approach the items in 
the mental lexicon are viewed as the products of a complex interaction 
of perceptual, cognitive, emotional and verbal experience stored in 
one's memory and simultaneously utilized at different levels of 
consciousness when a word provides access to interconnected 
fragments of the personal knowledge and world image. In his book 
Daniel Wedgwood presents a very impressive and broad linguistic 
analysis and very convincing explanation of a complex set of 
syntactico-semantic analysis of predication, quantification, negation, 
etc. however, what might be even more important, he sets a new 
perspective for modeling linguistic competence. The attempt to model 
the processes involved in this complex activity may present quite a 
challenge to other researchers. The book cools the heat existing in 
debate on natural language processing existing between linguists and 
psycholinguists who approach linguistic phenomena from a language 
user's perspective, and is a valuable reading for the specialists in the 
field of linguistics, psycholinguistics, artificial intelligence, and 
language philosophy. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Tatiana Sazonova (PhD in General Linguistics, Academy of Science, 
Moscow, Russia, 2000) holds the Chair of General Linguistics at 
Kursk State University in Kursk, Russia. Her current research focuses 
on modeling the processes of word identification in communication to 
account how words are used to access the interconnected fragments 
of knowledge stored in one's memory. The theory of word 
identification is a part of the cognitive theory of language 
understanding. The strategic model was suggested to account for 
multiple effect of the interaction of semantic, syntactic, 
phonetic/phonemic graphemic, and morphological representations in 
the natural language processing. Her work has appeared in a variety 
of edited volumes and journals.





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