part 2 - 9. Context in Dynamic ...

part 2 - 9. Context in Dynamic Interpretation, Materiały naukowe, The Hanbook of Pragmatics

[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
9. Context in Dynamic Interpretation : The Handbook of Pragmatics : Blackwell Refer...
Page 1 of 16
9. Context in Dynamic Interpretation
CRAIGE ROBERTS
Subject
Theoretical Linguistics
Ç
Pragmatics
DOI:
10.1111/b.9780631225485.2005.00011.x
1 Context,
1 Context, Semantics, and Pragmatics
Semantics, and Pragmatics
The linguistic subfields of semantics and pragmatics are both concerned with the study of meaning.
Semantics studies what Grice (1967) called the
TIMELESS
MEANING
of a linguistic expression ÌŠ- the basic
meanings of the words in ÌŠ composed as a function of the syntactic structure of ÌŠ. Formal semantics,
especially since Montague (1973), attempts to develop an empirically adequate theory of semantics
for a given language by developing rules that are clear and unambiguous in their application and
effect, thereby making clear predictions about the possible meanings for a given expression.
Semanticists assume that words do have basic meanings, and that a given syntactic structure
corresponds with a determinate way of composing the meanings of its subparts.
1
Pragmatics, on the
other hand, studies utterances of expressions like ÌŠ, attempting to explain what someone meant by
saying ÌŠ on a particular occasion. The timeless meaning of ÌŠ often differs from what someone means
by uttering ÌŠ on a given occasion. This difference arises because of the way that the context of
utterance influences interpretation. We complain if someone quotes what we say out of context
because this may distort our intended meaning. But what is a context of utterance, and how does it
influence interpretation?
The problem of understanding contextual influences on interpretation is often stated in terms of the
role of discourse context in interpretation. There are three general senses in which the notion of
context is understood. The first is as the actual discourse event, a verbal exchange (or a monologue).
This is associated with a very concrete situation including the speaker and addressee(s), the actual
sound waves, a physical locale, and things pointed out (cf. Barwise and Perry 1983). The second sense
is as the linguistic content of the verbal exchange - what's actually said. This may be characterized as
a linguistic string under a syntactic analysis, with associated syntactic and prosodic structures, but
more often it is represented as simple text (L. Carlson 1983, van Dijk 1985). The third sense is as a
more abstract semantic notion - the structure of the information that is presupposed and/or
conveyed by the interlocutors in an exchange. These three ways of characterizing discourse context -
as an event of verbal exchange, the linguistic content of that exchange, or the structure of the
information involved - are not mutually exclusive; there is no verbal exchange without linguistic
content, and the linguistic content itself is one aspect of the abstract information structure of the
exchange. Researchers approaching the problem from different directions, however, tend to focus on
one of these to the exclusion of the others. Those interested in semantics from a truth-conditional
perspective tend to regard the meaning of an utterance as the information it conveys about the world.
In this case, it is convenient to characterize the context in which an utterance is made in terms of
information structured in conventionally given ways and to study how that information structure
interacts with the information contributed by the utterance itself to efficiently convey the intended
meaning.
For example, Lewis (1979) uses the metaphor of a baseball scoreboard to characterize how context
interacts with the content of an utterance in Ña language game.Ò There are different facets of the
28.12.2007
9. Context in Dynamic Interpretation : The Handbook of Pragmatics : Blackwell Refer...
Page 2 of 16
conversational score, and the different kinds of information shared by interlocutors have different
functions in the game. Lewis differentiates, for example, among the set of presupposed propositions
at a point in the conversation, the current ranking of relative degrees of salience of entities under
discussion, and the current plans of the interlocutors. While the propositional information would play
a clear role in satisfying, say, factive presuppositions, the ranked salient entities might serve to
resolve anaphoric reference, and an interlocutor's global plans might reveal her local intention to
perform a certain type of speech act. Organizing information in this rather abstract way makes it
possible to say more clearly exactly what kind of information plays a particular role in interpretation.
If we include in the score information about the actual situation of utterance and (at least temporarily)
the form and sequence of the utterances, then context so conceived includes information about the
two other notions of context. With this in mind, we will focus here on context as an abstract,
structured object.
But what kinds of information does a context include, and how are these organized? In addressing
this question I will adopt the strategy suggested for semantics by Lewis (1972): In order to say what a
context of utterance IS, we will first ask what a context
DOES
in the course of semantic interpretation,
and then find something that does that in a way that comports with our semantic theory. A pragmatic
theory that approaches the rigor and predictive power of formal semantics would presuppose a theory
of the linguistic structures (syntactic, morphological, prosodic) of an utterance. And it would include
both a well-defined notion of linguistic context and a specification of how structure and context
interact with semantic rules to yield the felicity of and interpretations for particular utterances. Such a
theory would be capable of making clear predictions about the meanings conveyed by utterances in
particular contexts.
In the following section, we will consider how context interacts with semantic interpretation. In
section 3, we will consider the influential development within formal semantics of theories of dynamic
interpretation, which involve a more sophisticated view of context and its role in interpretation than
that found in earlier work. In section 4, we will consider the extension of such theories to account for
a wider range of pragmatic phenomena. Section 5 presents some general conclusions.
2 What Context Does: Felicity and Context Update
What Context Does: Felicity and Context Update
Context interacts with the semantic content of an utterance in two fundamental ways: It is crucial in
determining the proposition (or question, command, etc.) that a speaker intended to express by a
particular utterance, and it is in turn updated with the information conveyed by each successive
utterance. The first role - the context-dependence of interpretation - is most obvious when
phenomena like anaphora, ellipsis, and deixis are involved. When these occur in an utterance, its
semantic interpretation is essentially incomplete, and the intended truth conditions can only be
determined on the basis of contextual clues.
The phenomenon of context dependence can be conceived more broadly in terms of felicity. The
aptness of an utterance depends on its expressing a proposition that one could take to be reasonable
and relevant given the context. We thus have to look at the context to determine what was expressed,
either because the utterance was incomplete, as with anaphora or ellipsis, or because its prima facie
interpretation would appear to be irrelevant or otherwise infelicitous. For example, knowledge of the
context of utterance is crucial in figuring out which speech act a speaker intends to perform by the
utterance of an imperative like Hand me the rope. Only by considering the relative status of the
interlocutors and the information they share about where the rope is, whether the speaker needs or
wants it, and what's to be done with it, can we form a hypothesis about whether this constitutes a
request, a command, permission, or advice to the hearer. Otherwise, we cannot say what type of
obligation the speaker urges the hearer to undertake, and, hence, we cannot understand the sense of
the imperative.
Another reflex of felicity is the determination of intended reference, including anaphora resolution
and deixis. Reference problems tied to context are often subtler than these paradigmatic reference
problems, however, and may be encountered in non-pronominals as well.
(1). Please hand me some lilacs.
28.12.2007
9. Context in Dynamic Interpretation : The Handbook of Pragmatics : Blackwell Refer...
Page 3 of 16
If (1) is uttered in a florist shop, some lilacs will likely refer to the reproductive organs of plants cut
for decorative use. But if the addressee is standing near some silk flowers with no organic flowers in
view, the reference will generally be extended to include artificial lilacs. These two kinds of referential
problems - anaphora and contextual suitability of reference - are often combined in definite
descriptions, as pointed out by Nunberg (1977, this volume). We see this in the following discourse
inspired by his examples:
(2). A: Where's the ham sandwich?
B: He's sitting at table 20.
A definite description generally presupposes existence of some entity that is unique in satisfying the
NP's descriptive content, and it has been argued that this entity is presupposed to be familiar to the
interlocutors.
2
Carrying a presupposition puts a requirement on the context in which the relevant NP
can be felicitously uttered. As in other cases involving definite descriptions, (2A) will only express a
felicitous question when the context entails that there is a unique ham sandwich in the situation
under discussion, which is familiar to the interlocutors.
3
If A is uttered in a kitchen, five minutes after
one of the interlocutors has prepared an actual ham sandwich in full view of the other, the ham
sandwich will be taken to refer to the one recently prepared. When uttered by a waitress standing at
the kitchen door holding a ham sandwich and scanning the house, the ham sandwich will more likely
be shifted to refer to the (unique) person who ordered the sandwich she's holding. In this context,
someone might answer A with B. Since ham sandwiches don't generally take masculine pronouns, the
familiarity presupposition associated with he will fail unless the meaning of the definite description
has been shifted from the more literal denotation to the associated male customer. This leads the
cooperative hearer to make the shift, guaranteeing the felicity of the utterance.
Beyond reference and anaphora, interlocutors look to the context for the resolution of any
presuppositions conventionally triggered by lexical items or constructions in an utterance.
4
Like
pronominal anaphora, other sorts of presuppositions are often radically indeterminate, as we see with
too:
(3). [
Foc
I] ordered a ham sandwich, too.
The presupposition associated with too is the adjoined proposition with a variable substituted for the
focus of too that must be satisfied in the context. (3) presupposes x ordered a ham sandwich, where
x is someone other than the speaker of (3). In the restaurant context, this could be satisfied if the
fellow at table 20 ordered a ham sandwich, an eventuality implied by the discourse in (2). Other types
of presuppositions, e.g. factives, are more like definite descriptions in having a fairly rich descriptive
content. That is, they are explicit enough that if they initially fail in the context of utterance, what is
presupposed can often be reconstructed and hence, if the interlocutor is cooperative, accommodated
(Lewis 1979, Atlas this volume). But when interlocutors cannot resolve such context-dependent
elements of an utterance, as an out-of-the-blue utterance of (3), it is impossible to determine the
proposition that the speaker intended to express.
5
Thus in the general case, presupposition failure -
the inability to resolve the speaker's intended presupposition - results in a lack of truth value for the
utterance.
Besides felicity, the other way that an utterance interacts with its context during interpretation is by
inducing an update of that context. The fact of each utterance in a discourse and the content of the
utterance itself is added to the information contextually available to the interlocutors. Cooperative
interlocutors generally attempt to address current utterances. After the utterance of (1), unless the
addressee rejects the speaker's implicit claim on her cooperation, she will be committed to handing
him some of the relevant lilacs. Similarly, unless (2A) is rejected, saying something that doesn't
address it would generally be taken as infelicitous or rude until the question has been answered. And
in (2B) or (3), if the identity of the intended presupposition is contextually resolved, and the
addressees (implicitly) accept its truth, then that proposition is added to their common information. In
this way, requests or commands, questions, and assertions can contribute toward satisfying the
presuppositions of subsequent utterances, hence making them felicitous.
28.12.2007
9. Context in Dynamic Interpretation : The Handbook of Pragmatics : Blackwell Refer...
Page 4 of 16
I conjecture that all pragmatic phenomena pertain to these two ways of interacting with context:
contextual felicity or context update. If so, any phenomena that hinge on felicity would place
requirements on the types of information that context should provide to determine felicity. For
example, deixis involves resolving the presuppositions of the deictic linguistic element; checking for
felicitous use requires that the context provide information about the perceived environment of
utterance, in particular, about what is being indicated by the speaker at the time of utterance. If we
assume that resolution of deixis is one aspect of contextual felicity, then we must assume that the
context of interpretation contains not only information conveyed by the linguistic text of the
discourse, but also information about the physical situation of utterance (Roberts 2002). Another
central problem in pragmatic analysis is Gricean conversational implicature. Several authors have
argued that such implicatures may be explained as contextual entailments (McCafferty 1987,
Thomason 1990, Welker 1994, Roberts 1996b). For example, if an utterance is prima facie irrelevant,
then a metapresupposition of relevance and reasonable assumptions about the speaker's goals and
intentions would lead us to infer that she meant more than she said. Felicity then drives the update of
the context with the intended meaning beyond the proposition literally expressed. For this type of
account to work, context must reflect that the interlocutors are committed to something like the
Gricean maxims as well as containing information about the interlocutorsÔ goals and intentions.
Grice's maxims can be seen as instances of a larger set of conventions - or metapresuppositions -
governing the flow of information exchange in discourse. Just as one's utterances should be clear,
unambiguous, and relevant to the topic under discussion and should contain the appropriate amount
of information for the purposes of the interlocutorsÔ current goals, in the interests of an orderly
exchange we observe various conversational turn-taking conventions.
These can also be regarded as metapresuppositions about the well-formedness of the unfolding
discourse. If someone fails to yield the floor at the appropriate point or overlaps with the current
speaker, their contribution is as much in violation of the rules of discourse as a failed presupposition.
The motivations for these different types of conventions and the consequences of their violation are
different in character. The failure to resolve a presupposition leaves the interlocutors without an
understanding of the proposition expressed, whereas overlapping with the speaker is more likely to
irritate than to confuse. In both cases, however, the problem lies in a failure to make one's
contributions accord with the evolving structure of the discourse context in a maximally cooperative
way, as defined by the various conventions governing linguistic discourse. To capture these
constraints on felicity, context must encode the rules of conversational turn-taking.
Another set of issues in pragmatics concerns matters of prominence and salience in discourse. Topic
and Focus are argued to revolve around presuppositions about what was under discussion in the
previous discourse, so the same notion of felicity can be argued to underlie the acceptability of, say,
focus placement in the standard question/answer paradigm
6
or topicalization.
7
We would expect,
then, that context would tell us what was under discussion in the relevant respects so that we could
use that knowledge to determine whether a particular Focus or Topic is felicitous. Similarly, Centering
Theory attempts to capture what makes certain potential pronominal antecedents more salient than
others in a given discourse; again, it might be said that pronouns carry a presupposition of the
salience of their antecedents, with salience taken to be a property of the context of utterance (Walker
et al. 1998.) It seems clear, then, that the context must contain information about what is salient at
any given point in the discourse.
Summarizing, a context stores various kinds of information shared in discourse. This information is
used to determine discourse felicity, and is updated with the contributions of succeeding utterances.
Several types of information have been mentioned here: propositional information, relevant for factive
presuppositions and the like, information about the issues or questions under discussion, the entities
under discussion, and the relative salience of these questions and entities all relevant for
presupposition, Focus, Topic, and anaphora resolution. The context also encodes in some form
various metaprinciples governing cooperative interchange, including Gricean maxims and the
principles of conversational turn-taking. But there is one more constraint on context that has been
the subject of considerable interest among semanticists over the past two decades: The information
in the discourse context should be encoded so as to capture all the logical constraints on
interpretation that have been explored in formal semantics, including entailments, the scope of
28.12.2007
9. Context in Dynamic Interpretation : The Handbook of Pragmatics : Blackwell Refer...
Page 5 of 16
operators and their potential for binding free pronominals and other variable-like elements, and a
requirement on overall logical consistency. It is from the wedding of these logical constraints with the
types of pragmatic factors just discussed that theories of dynamic interpretation were born.
3 Dynamic Theories of
3 Dynamic Theories of Interpretation
Interpretation
Context in the theories of Montague semanticists was captured as a set of indices, or contextual
parameters, attached to the interpretive apparatus for a given sentence. These were pointers to
specified sorts of contextual information, used to feed the relevant information into the process of
compositional interpretation that yielded the proposition expressed by the sentence in the specified
context. This limited set of indices typically included the world and time of utterance (for capturing
facts about utterance situation and for interpreting tenses and utterances of words like now), the
speaker and sometimes the addressee (for I, we, you, etc.), the location of the utterance (for here,
local, etc.), and a function assigning values to free variables (the logical form counterparts of pro-
forms). Additional indices were sometimes posited for elements like indicated objects (for deixis
accompanying this, that), or even the relative status of the interlocutors (for Japanese honorifics,
French tu vs. vous, etc.) and the level of formality of the discourse. However, it isn't clear that one
could in principle specify a finite set of indices of this type that would be adequate for all the types of
information relevant for capturing pragmatic influences on interpretation. Moreover, in the
interpretation of a given utterance the values given by these indices were arbitrarily selected, without
any mechanism for keeping track across the larger discourse of what was being talked about and how
this might bear on the interpretation of utterances in that discourse. Finally, the notion of context in
such theories was static, leaving no provision for capturing how interpretation of the first part of an
utterance might influence interpretation of the rest.
Particular problems in anaphora resolution and the interpretation of tenses inspired the early work on
what is now called
DYNAMIC
INTERPRETATION
. Heim (1982) and Kamp (1981) focused on the so-called
donkey sentences of Geach (1967), illustrated by the following:
(4). If a farmer owns a donkey, he always uses it to plow his fields.
(5). Most farmers that own a donkey use it to plow their fields.
Deceptively simple, these examples are semantically interesting because they show that the way we
keep track of information across discourse, including possible anaphoric referents, must be sensitive
to the presence of quantificational operators, here always and most, and that context must be
updated sentence-internally. To see this, first note that the indefinite NP antecedent of it in both
sentences occurs within a subordinate clause that restricts the domain of the quantificational
operator. For example, in (4) we are not making a claim about just any kind of situation, but only
those in which there is a farmer and a donkey he owns, and in (5), we're making a claim about the
proportion of individuals involved in plowing their fields, but the class of individuals involved doesn't
include all farmers, only those who own a donkey. But if we replace a donkey with a clearly
quantificational NP like every donkey, the pronoun it becomes infelicitous, showing that the anaphoric
relation in question isn't binding, and must instead be anaphora to some salient entity in prior
discourse. But the antecedent in these examples, the indefinite a donkey, occurs in the same
sentence, showing that if pronouns presuppose a familiar entity from prior discourse context as
antecedent, discourse context must be updated even in the course of interpreting a single utterance.
Moreover, although these examples show that the indefinite can serve as antecedent of a pronoun
under the scope of the operator, it ceases to be accessible to pronouns in subsequent discourse. So,
neither (4) nor (5) can be felicitously followed by (6):
(6). It had to be fed extra grain during plowing season last spring.
The central feature of the theories proposed to account for such examples is that utterances are not
interpreted in isolation. Instead, the meaning of an utterance is treated as a function from contexts
(possible contexts of utterance) to contexts (those resulting from updating the context of utterance
with the content of the utterance). Heim called this the utterance's
CONTEXT
CHANGE
POTENTIAL
. This
notion of meaning is dynamic in that it changes continuously during interpretation. For example, the
28.12.2007
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

zanotowane.pl

doc.pisz.pl

pdf.pisz.pl

anio102.xlx.pl