Discuss the Gricean account of the mantics and pragmatics of conjunctive utterances
Introduction
Semantics studies the meaning and it is concerned with the literal meaning of words and ntences. Semantics focus on the relationship between signifiers, such as words, phras, symbols and signs, and what they stand for. While the transmission of meaning doesn’t only depend on the linguistic knowledge (e.g. lexicon, grammar etc.) of the listener and speaker but also depend 巴不得on the context of the utterance, the inferred intent of the speaker,ibus knowledge about the status of tho involved, and so on. (Shaozhong, Liu, 2009) Pragmatics is the study of the contributions of context to meaning, and it encompass conversational implicature, speech act theory,2012全国卷语文 talk in interaction and other approaches to language behavior in sociology, philosophy, and linguistics. (Mey, Jacob L, 1993)
The mantics and pragmatics of conjunctive utterances
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Generally many mantic theories (Rusll 1905,msg Frege 1892, Davidson 1967, Kaplan 1977/89, Segal and Larson 1995) concern truth conditions (Carston, 1999). Grice’s (1967) influential concepts showed in addition to what a speaker says, 匍匐that is both largely conventional and the content on the basis of which her utterance will be judged true or fal, and a speaker may also convey implicatures which don’t affect the truth-value of what she says; so the conversational implicatures are calculated by assuming speakers are being cooperative and adhering to the certain expected standards of informativeness, truthfulness, relevance, and manner of expression (Grice, 1975). That suggests a natural way of drawing the mantics-pragmatics distinction that is mantics will correspond to the truth-conditional content of the utterance, and the pragmatics to doubt是什么意思the conveyed meaning which falls outside the truth-conditional content.
So mantic content could be equated with Grice’s what is said, and it has neea ieltstwo features. Firstly it is the truth-conditional content of the utterance, and condly it is determined almost entirely by the encoded, conventional meaning of the linguistic expressions ud. And as Grice acknowledged, the truth-conditional content isn’t completely free of context
ual input, and in some brief comments on the utterance of “He is in the grip of a vice”, one says, “for a full identification of what the speaker has said, one will need to know (a) the time of utterance, (b) the identity of x, and (c) the meaning, on the particular occasion of utterance, of the phra in the grip of a vice” (1975/89: 25). But he emed not to e the process of reference assignment and disambiguation as requiring appeal to the conversational maxims; instead, the concept ems to be that they are resolved more automatically, and the requisite values being something like objective features of the utterance’s context (Carston, 2002).
A particular division of labor between mantics佛系是什么意思 and pragmatics of Grice (1967) has prevailed in the account of what is communicated by utterances of and-conjunctions. For instance:
a. It’s autumn in New Zealand it is spring in England and.
b. He handed her the scalpel and she made the incision.
c. We spent the day in town and I went to Harrods.
d. She fed him poisoned stew and he died.
e. I left the door open and the cat got in.
“And” is taken to be pretty well mantically empty and it’s taken to be the natural language equivalent of the truth-functional logical conjunction operator. The pragmatics focus on variety of cau-conquence, temporal and other sorts of relationships understood to hold between the states of affairs which are described, some of that come through in the asymmetrical examples in (1b)-(1e). For example, we all understand the making of the scalpel and the interval of a few conds to have intervened; and a quite different temporal relation is understood to hold between the states of affairs which are described in (1c), and the event of going to Harrods interpreted as contained within the period of time that is spent in town. The different sorts of conquence relationships are understood in (1d) and (1e): and the feeding of poisoned stew is the sufficient cau for death the leaving open of the door is just one of the range of factors contributing to the cat’s getting in.
The relationships are taken to be derived inferentially via the interaction of the decoded-mantic content with the general knowledge assumptions about the way things connect up and relate in the world, the interaction constrained by some general criterion and criteria of rational communicative behavior.
An interpretation has the two properties as following:
An utterance, on a given interpretation, is optimally relevant:
(a) it achieves enough effects to be worth the hearer’s attention;
(b) it puts the hearer to no gratuitous effort in achieving tho effects.combination
(Wilson and Sperber, forthcoming)
Once the listener has accesd an interpretation consistent with the expectation he looks no further but takes this to be the interpretation the speaker intended. The utterance, on a given interpretation is consistent with the presumption of optimal relevance if the speaker
can rationally have expected it to be optimally relevant to the listener on that interpretation. The implications of the definition are fully discusd elwhere.
