12.305, Review: Levinson, Presumptive Meanings

[The LINGUIST Network]

LINGUIST List:  Vol-12-305. Mon Feb 5 2001. ISSN: 1068-4875.

Subject: 12.305, Review: Levinson, Presumptive Meanings

Moderators: Anthony Aristar, Wayne State U.<aristar at linguistlist.org>
            Helen Dry, Eastern Michigan U. <hdry at linguistlist.org>
            Andrew Carnie, U. of Arizona <carnie at linguistlist.org>

Reviews (reviews at linguistlist.org):
	Simin Karimi, U. of Arizona
	Terence Langendoen, U. of Arizona

Editors (linguist at linguistlist.org):
	Karen Milligan, WSU 		Naomi Ogasawara, EMU
	Lydia Grebenyova, EMU		Jody Huellmantel, WSU
	James Yuells, WSU		Michael Appleby, EMU
	Marie Klopfenstein, WSU		Ljuba Veselinova, Stockholm U.

Software: John Remmers, E. Michigan U. <remmers at emunix.emich.edu>
          Gayathri Sriram, E. Michigan U. <gayatri at linguistlist.org>

Home Page:  http://linguistlist.org/

The LINGUIST List is funded by Eastern Michigan University, Wayne
State University, and donations from subscribers and publishers.

Editor for this issue: Terence Langendoen <terry at linguistlist.org>
 ==========================================================================
What follows is another discussion note contributed to our Book Discussion
Forum.  We expect these discussions to be informal and interactive; and
the author of the book discussed is cordially invited to join in.

If you are interested in leading a book discussion, look for books
announced on LINGUIST as "available for discussion."  (This means that
the publisher has sent us a review copy.)  Then contact Simin Karimi at
     simin at linguistlist.org or Terry Langendoen at terry at linguistlist.org.


=================================Directory=================================

1)
Date:  Mon, 5 Feb 2001 15:15:49 +0100
From:  Bert Bultinck <bultinck at uia.ua.ac.be>
Subject:  Review of Levinson, Presumptive Meanings

-------------------------------- Message 1 -------------------------------

Date:  Mon, 5 Feb 2001 15:15:49 +0100
From:  Bert Bultinck <bultinck at uia.ua.ac.be>
Subject:  Review of Levinson, Presumptive Meanings

Stephen C. Levinson (2000) Presumptive meanings: The theory of
generalized conversational implicature, MIT Press, Cambridge,
Massachusetts & London, England, 480p.

Reviewed by: Bert Bultinck

Seventeen years after his ground-breaking introduction to pragmatics
(Levinson 1983), Stephen Levinson presents another voluminous book on the
subject, this time limiting himself to only one of the central topics in
pragmatics: the so-called "Gricean implicatures". More precisely, Levinson
addresses the problem of "generalized conversational implicatures" (as
opposed to "particularized conversational implicatures"). According to
Levinson, only the former are truly linguistic in that only they do not
rely on "specific contextual assumptions" (p. 16): "the point being
emphasized is that a theory of GCIs has to be supplemented with a theory
of PCIs that will have at least as much, and possibly considerably more,
importance to a general theory of communication. It is just to a
linguistic theory that GCIs have an unparalleled import" (p. 22,
Levinson's emphasis).

Presumptive meanings contains four major chapters, a succinct introduction
and a short epilogue. For the background that students might need in order
to comprehend the issues discussed in this book, Levinson refers back to
his 1983 introduction. It is clear that Levinson addresses himself mainly
to people who are at least familiar with the Gricean canon, even though he
includes a fairly extensive "note to students". I will first summarize the
four essential components, before embarking on a critical evaluation of
his analyses.

In the introduction and in the first chapter, Levinson claims that the
existence of "preferred interpretations" is self-evident. In what follows
he will concentrate on an analysis of how these preferred interpretations
remain relatively, and structurally, invariant over changes in context.
Levinson's insights rest on the acceptance of a general human capacity of
"inference", but he also refers to two more specific ideas. The first is
"an argument from design": due to our anatomic make-up, there seems to be
a bottle-neck in our information system: the "transmission rate of human
speech" (the actual time we need in order to form phonologically discrete
sounds) is about four times slower than other aspects of human speech
production (prearticulation processes, parsing and comprehension
procedures). This loss of speed, Levinson assumes, has to be made up by
inferencing processes: if we can express more by using less words, we gain
in speed. Another, related basic intuition concerns "games of pure
coordination", referring back to game-theoretic experiments from the
sixties, in which people appeared to be able to coordinate their actions,
solely on the basis of default inferences and assumptions about what the
other would be doing. These two ideas (Levinson mentions them in passing,
but he keeps referring back to them throughout the rest of the book) and
the corresponding domain of information theory constitute the background
for his discussion of the three "heuristics" that guide generalized
conversational implicatures. He exemplifies his principles with one
example sentence: "There's a blue pyramid on the red cube". The first
heuristic can be summed up in the formula "what isn't said, isn't"
(labeled Q) and crucially relies on salient lexical contrasts to rule out
a whole number of states-of-affairs. In his example, this principle
licenses, e.g., the inference that "there is not a cone on the red cube".
The second heuristic says that "what is simply described is
stereotypically exemplified" (I). This principle licenses the inference
that, e.g., there is direct contact between the pyramid and the cube - if
the contact was indirect, the speaker should have said so, because the
stereotypical situation described by an "on"-relationship is one involving
direct contact. The third principle is the counterpart of the second:
"What's said in an abnormal way, isn't normal; or Marked message indicates
marked situation" (M). If, for instance, one should say: "The blue cuboid
block is supported by the red cube", one can infer that the block in
question is not a stereotypical one. The marked form "cuboid" licenses the
inference that the block is not a canonical cube. Levinson also discusses
how his three new principles correspond to the Gricean maxims and other,
neo-Gricean proposals, distinguishing them by means of diagnostic
principles, as well as relating them to more general "reasoning systems"
(e.g., "default logics"). Also, the so-called projection problem is
treated by introducing "Gazdar's bucket". First entailments, then clausal
Q GCIs, then scalar ones, then M GCIs and finally I GCIs (with I and M
implicatures the distinction between clausal and scalar ones is
irrelevant) are added to the context (the bucket), provided the later
additions are compatible with the previous ones and with the general
context. At this point, Levinson launches his first extensive attack on
Relevance Theory, the framework that will remain his sparring-partner
throughout the rest of the book. His main critique resides in the
observation that Sperber and Wilson and their followers do not allow for
an intermediate level of generalized conversational implicatures, in
between "literal meaning" (semantics) and once-off ("nonce") inferences.
Finally, Levinson tackles another rivaling account (which works with the
concept of "accommodation") and demonstrates how GCIs can account for
lexicalization patterns.

The second chapter surveys "the phenomena'": Levinson lists and discusses
famous and lesser-known applications of each of his communicative
heuristics. For each heuristic, the author delves into the history of the
concept (loyally turning to Grice's views at the beginning of each
discussion), reiterates the criticism that has been voiced against the
concept and the subsequent analyses and finishes by enumerating a fairly
extensive list of examples. Obviously, the highly productive
Q-implicatures receive the most attention: various views on scalar and
clausal implicatures are discussed (with an interesting elaboration on
negative scalar items, and Levinson's claim that "negation reverses
scales" (p. 80; cf. also Atlas and Levinson (1981)).

The somewhat longer third chapter tries to compute the consequences of the
theory of GCIs for the semantics-pragmatics interface, in what Levinson
calls "the architecture [of an overall theory of meaning]" (p.166). He
explicitly attacks the Chomskyan modular perspective with its well-known
consequences in terms of the alleged autonomy of the different modules and
the hierarchies based on "logical priorities". Because GCIs have
truth-conditional implications, semantics (traditionally defined as
truth-conditional meaning) can no longer be thought of as an independent
level. With the aid of a number of examples, Levinson proceeds to show how
semantics and implicatures interpenetrate. What he calls "semantics" seems
to encompass the traditional semantic representations (even though
Levinson advocates a much more abstract "meaning representation", and as
such embraces the trend toward "underdetermined" meanings, cf. Atlas 1989,
Carston 1998, Pustejovsky 1995, Sperber and Wilson 1986) and a second,
truth-conditional level that enriches the semantic structure of the first
component (taking into account implicatures, presuppositions and other
pragmatic meaning contributions). The domains that Levinson refers to in
order to demonstrate his claim of "pragmatic intrusion" are deictic and
other classic semantico-pragmatic problems: reference resolution,
generality narrowing, scope assignments, ellipses. I will give only two
examples, as I will come back to this discussion in the critical
evaluation. Consider the utterances Take these three drinks to the three
people over there and take these four to the four people over there, in
the situation in which there are two sets of glasses (one with three, one
with four). Levinson argues that the numerals in question have an 'at
least'-semantics, and hence the expression these three drinks is ambiguous
- it may refer to the set with three or to the set with four glasses.
Because of the well-known scalar implicatures (resulting in
'exact'-readings of the numerals) the expression is disambiguated. The
second example concerns the ellipsis in an answer like John (the question
being for example Who came?). The semantics of the answer can be enriched
to 'John came' by means of an I-inference and thus acquires a
truth-conditional content. After an extensive counter-screening procedure,
in which Levinson investigates various "architectures" that would seem to
be able to save the integrity of semantics and pragmatics, he concludes
that semantics and pragmatics must indeed interleave. In passing, he draws
up a very handy table of most of the terminologies that have been used to
refer to the domain in between "what is said" and "what is implicated".
The chapter closes with more evidence for the bi-directional informational
relation between semantics and pragmatics.

In the final chapter Levinson confronts the generative paradigm head-on by
developing an alternative account of so-called binding phenomena, in this
case the binding of anaphora. He starts this chapter, which relies heavily
on two of his earlier articles (Levinson 1987, 1991), by emphasizing the
importance of implicatures for grammaticalization processes and then
summarizes the generative approaches of the problem of anaphora, relying
on binding conditions and (technically defined) domains. Levinson works
with the assumption that semantic generality is the essential property for
an anaphoric expression: "Anaphoric potential is, on the whole, a property
not of expressions but of uses of expressions" (p. 270), since "just about
any semantically general expression can function anaphorically" (p.268).
He lists a few examples with so-called "discourse anaphora" to demonstrate
this and then focuses on intrasentential phenomena.

The generative account of anaphora is based on three Binding Conditions.
The first Binding Condition states (loosely paraphrased) that an Anaphor
(e.g., a reflexive pronoun) is bound in its governing category. The second
Binding Condition holds that nonreflexive pronouns must be free in their
governing category. The third states that a lexical NP must be free
everywhere. In the first version of his analysis Levinson reduces the
second and the third of the three Binding Conditions to a pragmatic rule.
Levinson claims that the latter two Conditions are superfluous: the
phenomena they are meant to cover can more generally be explained by the
concept of scalar implicatures. The pronoun in John likes himself receives
a coreferential interpretation (by grammatical stipulation), but the
pronoun in John likes him usually does not get a coreferential reading,
not because of a grammatical rule but as a default implicature. The choice
for him in the scale <himself, him> Q-implicates that the coreferential
reading was not intended (if it was, the speaker should have said so). The
default coreferential reading of nonreflexive pronouns in subordinate
clauses (not accounted for in the generative account) is explained by the
fact that the speaker does not have the same choice as in the former
examples: in John told her that he gave her a valentine, he is most
naturally taken to refer to John because himself is ungrammatical (a
simple I-inference takes care of the coreference). Along similar lines,
also the third Binding Condition ("lexical NPs must be free everywhere")
is reduced to a pragmatic inference: if a reflexive pronoun might have
been used, but instead a lexical NP is used, a Q-inference will induce a
noncoreferential interpretation. If a reflexive could not have been used,
however (in which case a pronoun would be the default option), the use of
a lexical NP M-implicates disjoint reference.

Levinson also proposes a second version, in which only the second Binding
Condition is accepted as a grammatical rule (or even only as a pragmatic
rule called the "Disjoint Reference Presumption") and the other two are
reduced to pragmatic inferences. Eventually, each account is associated
with different languages and a synthesis between the two accounts is
formulated, with a diachronic progression from so-called B-first languages
(languages that are compatible with the second account) to A-first
languages (languages compatible with the first account) is presented.


Criticism

Levinson's book is an insightful survey of the various issues, problems
and puzzles that are connected with one of the most famous concepts in
linguistic pragmatics, the Gricean implicatures. The author not only
critically evaluates different perspectives on the theory of implicatures,
but also emphasizes one important aspect of Grice's original theory that
has never been discussed so extensively: the generalized conversational
implicatures. In constant, often implicit, but sometimes vehement
discussion with rivaling accounts (mostly Relevance Theory), which deny
the existence of an intermediate level between "once-off" inferences and
"literal" or "conventional" meaning, he offers data that suggest the
existence of such a level, thereby crucially relying on the difference
between entailment and defeasible inference. The book is a bit repetitive
at times, but at the same time it is an almost encyclopedic source of
information for researchers of Gricean implicatures and the structure of
linguistic communication in general. Also, it stimulates the discussion on
the semantics-pragmatics interface, is cognizant of new evolutions in
generative theories of meaning and formal semantics, and offers a few
interesting suggestions as to how the Gricean tradition could be
associated with recent work in information theory. Even though it relies
heavily on the work of (especially) Larry Horn and others (including some
earlier articles by the author himself), the book is original and
thought-provoking for anyone interested in the theory of implicatures and
the principles of linguistic communication in general.

Nevertheless, there are a number of problems with his perspective on
generalized conversational implicatures . I will focus on what seems to me
the most important one. In broad terms, the main problem with Levinson's
account is that it relies too much on a compartmentalized view of meaning.
Levinson criticizes rigidly modular approaches (Fodor 1983) a number of
times in his book, but as far as the semantics/pragmatics interface is
concerned, he still holds on to a rather rigid division between the two:
"the distinction between semantics and pragmatics is one of a number of
essential distinctions in the study of meaning [...] nothing is gained by
lumping in our attempt to understand human communication" (p.7). Even
though part of his book is an explicit account of how truth conditions of
some utterances depend partly on conversational implicatures, Levinson
contends that semantics and pragmatics are distinct domains, which operate
on specific, domain-exclusive principles, even though they are
"interleaved" (p.187). The problem with this view is that the status of
these "semantic" meanings is unclear; moreover, the relationship between
semantics and pragmatics rests on a few specific, but on the whole rather
marginal linguistic phenomena.

In the third chapter, Levinson argues that implicatures contribute
essentially to truth-conditions. If that is so, then "semantics" can no
longer be equivalent with "truth-conditional meaning", or, at the very
least, the domain of semantics will no longer be sufficient to determine
the truth conditions. In his discussion of the position of "semantic
retreat" (which consists of leaving all sorts of interpretation to
pragmatics, except for the computation of so-called logical forms on the
basis of the lexicon and the syntax), Levinson argues for "a new, strange
level populated by semantic wraiths - a level of fragmentary structures,
underspecification and half-information, even archi-sememes" (p.241). For
the domain of truth conditions Levinson claims that "we need to find
another level at which these insights hold, and it will be a level to
which pragmatic information has contributed" (p.241), but although a
number of schematic proposals figure in the book, it is not clear which
model Levinson wants to defend. "Another level", seems to imply the
existence of a third level, next to the semantic and the pragmatic level.
But this statement amounts to no more than a suggestion, and the
architecture is never fully worked out. This is very unfortunate, because
in a certain respect it is the central question of the book.

On the other hand, in his critique of "pragmantics" (a position held by a
number of Cognitive Linguists) he programmatically claims: "Pragmantics
can be avoided if we can find a way of accounting for pragmatic intrusion
into truth conditions while maintaining the modularity of a distinct
pragmatics (built on nonmonotonic principles) and semantics (built on
monotonic principles)" (p.243). Reasoning systems based on non-monotonic
principles are defeasible, reasoning systems based on monotonic principles
(as, e.g., deductive systems) are not. Here, the hypothetical third level
seems be absent again, and instead the term "semantics" seems to receive
yet another meaning. Semantics "might continue to operate on the basis of
logical principles" (p.244). What could these principles be, if they
cannot be relations like entailment and the traditional sense-relations
(because these hold at a different, yet to be discovered level)? In other
words, if semantics interleaves with pragmatic principles so that
truth-conditions cannot be established without pragmatic intrusion, how
can the semantic level "continue to operate on the basis of logical
principles"? Or, alternatively, if the semantic level consists of
underspecified half-information, how can it at the same time be based on
truth-conditional principles? In a work that addresses a problem like the
semantics/pragmatics interface, a clearer picture of what is meant by the
terms semantics and pragmatics would be welcome.

But more important than these potentially confusing if not contradictory
statements is the question why monotonicity should be so central that it
necessitates the postulation of two distinct domains in the first place?
More specifically, why should the defeasibility of so-called cancellation
phrases be more relevant than the meanings of lexical items (e.g.,
quantifiers and other scalars) as they are actually used in contexts? The
linguistic phenomenon that hides behind the term "non-monotonicity" is the
possibility of nuancing or correcting statements that were made earlier by
means of a number of specific phrases, among which the famous cancellation
phrases (The man has three, and even four children) and suspension phrases
(some, if not all people left the building). True, these corrections seem
to involve specific lexical items (often characterized by their so-called
"scalar" nature) and are only applicable under some special conditions
(the suspension phrase is normally only used when the correction is in
terms of an item higher up the scale - the utterance the man has three, if
not two children is odd). But does the existence of these phenomena really
justify a division of meaning into two separate parts, with all the
confusion that this distinction brings along? Especially in a book that is
partly devoted to showing how pragmatic principles, in this case Gricean
implicatures, contribute to truth conditions, it is decidedly odd that
semantics and pragmatics are still viewed as distinct levels.

>>From an empirical point of view, meanings can be more or less
conventional, or more or less context-independent, not semantic or
pragmatic. The so-called defeasibility of the alleged Gricean implicatures
merely amounts to a specific way of nuancing the meaning of scalar items.
The special conditions associated with these nuancing phrases are indeed
caused by the relationship between certain items (scalarity), but there is
no reason to assume that this relationship is more basic in any possible
sense than the meanings that can be found in corpora. The fact that there
is an understanding with the speakers of English that anything that is hot
is also 'warm' gives rise to these if not-phrases. But that does not mean
that the meaning of warm is 'at least warm, if not hot': meanings are not
constructs that are retroactively devised on the basis of special
properties that can be isolated in truth-conditional tests. Meanings, in
any meaningful sense of the word (Putnam 1975) can be found in the usage
of words. These empirical phenomena have to be the starting-point of any
semantic theory: look at one thousand instances of three and interpret
their meaning. In a second phase, the special properties (those that can
be revealed in special constructions and tests) must then be integrated in
a unified account. In fact, semantic theories that postulate the inverted
hierarchy and start with these "special properties" can not even start a
semantic analysis, due to lack of data. 'At least'-meanings of numerals
can only be found in logical systems, hardly ever in ordinary language.

The cardinal numerals are actually the best example to demonstrate the
terminological and conceptual-architectural confusion that is unavoidable
if empirical data are disregarded to the advantage of a largely
theoretical and highly debatable distinction between truth-conditional
semantics and Gricean pragmatics. Larry Horn has actually admitted that
his classical Gricean treatment of the cardinal numbers (Horn 1972, 1989)
runs into trouble, and subsequently restricted his neo-Gricean approach to
other scalar items (Horn 1992). Also Levinson argues that "the number
words [are] not the correct testbed for the whole theory of scalar
implicature" (p.90). Nevertheless, the numerals figure prominently in the
evidence that Levinson presents for a number of claims. In his discussion
of indexical resolution (p.178), ellipsis unpacking (p.183), the
conditional (p.206), metalinguistic negation (p.213), negation in general
(p.255), and Sag's model for pragmatic intrusion (p.247) the numerals are
called upon to demonstrate certain allegedly Gricean phenomena. In this
line of thinking, numerals like three have 'at least three' as literal,
"semantic" meaning and the 'exactly three' interpretation is the result of
a Gricean Q1-implicature.

This concrete example makes the question that was posed in general terms
above even more acute: where does this 'at least'-meaning come from?
Corpus data reveal that "bare numerals" (as in John has three children)
always have 'exactly'-interpretations. It is not economical to explain
this meaning via a scalar implicature that transforms the "actual" 'at
least'-meaning into an 'exactly'-meaning, if this supposedly happens every
time. If generalized conversational implicatures are so general that they
occur every time, it is simpler to accept the 'exactly'-reading simply as
the meaning of numerals. The data are overwhelmingly against 'at
least'-meanings, to the extent that this 'at least'-meaning can only be
expressed when the language user explicitly modifies the numeral by using
the phrases at least three, three if not more etc. The monotonicity
phenomena that are deemed so central can easily be explained as nuancing
or correction phrases (Bultinck forthcoming).

Presumptive meanings is, I repeat, an excellent survey of (neo-)Gricean
phenomena, analyses and theoretical assumptions. As a general hypothesis
of how human communication works, it provides at the very least a
plausible picture. Grice's conversational principles and maxims offer an
intuitively appealing, if hardly falsifiable, account of how language
users interpret and produce non- or less conventional utterances. But the
distinction between semantics and pragmatics as two distinct levels of
meaning is confusing and leads Griceans to postulate meanings that are not
empirically verifiable, or only very marginally so. The postulation of
these logic-inspired meanings leads to an uneconomical analysis. A unified
perspective on meaning should replace the modular distinction between
semantics and pragmatics: a meaning can be more or less conventionalized,
but not semantic or pragmatic.


References

Atlas, J. (1989) Philosophy without ambiguity. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Atlas, J. and S.C. Levinson (1981) "It-clefts, informativeness, and
logical form: Radical pragmatics (revised standard version)", in P. Cole
(ed) Radical Pragmatics. New York: Academic Press, 1-61.

Bultinck, B. (forthcoming) Numerous meanings. Ph.D. dissertation,
University of Antwerp.

Carston, R. (1998) "Informativeness, relevance and scalar implicature", in
R. Carston and S. Uchida (eds), Relevance Theory: applications and
implications, Amsterdam: Benjamins, 179-236.

Fodor, J. (1983) The modularity of the mind. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Horn, L. (1972) On the semantic properties of logical operators in
English. Ph. D. dissertation, UCLA.

Horn, L. (1989) A natural history of negation. Chicago: Chicago University
Press.

Horn, L. (1992) "The said and the unsaid", Salt II: Proceedings of the
second Conference on Semantics and Linguistic Theory. Columbus: Ohio State
University Linguistics Department, 163-192.

Levinson, S. C. (1983) Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Levinson, S. C. (1987) "Pragmatics and the grammar of anaphora", Journal
of Linguistics 23:379-434.

Levinson, S. C. (1991) "Pragmatic reduction of the binding conditions
revisited", Journal of Linguistics 27:107-161.

Pustejovsky, J. (1995) The generative lexicon. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Putnam, H. (1975) "The meaning of 'meaning'", in Mind, language and
reality. Philosophical papers. Vol. 2., Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 215-271.

Sperber, D., and D. Wilson (1986) Relevance. Oxford: Blackwell.


Bio:

Bert Bultinck, PhD-candidate in linguistics, working with the Belgian Fund
For Scientific Research (Flanders) and affiliated to the University of
Antwerp, working on the concept of literal meaning in semantics and
pragmatics, Grice's legacy, and the semantics and pragmatics of numerals.


---------------------------------------------------------------------------

If you buy this book please tell the publisher or author
that you saw it reviewed on the LINGUIST list.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-12-305