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part 2 - 12. The Pragmatics of Non-sentences, Materiały naukowe, The Hanbook of Pragmatics

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12. The Pragmatics of Non
-sentences
sentences
ROBERT J. STAINTON
Theoretical Linguistics
Ç
Pragmatics
Subject
DOI:
10.1111/b.9780631225485.2005.00014.x
1 The
1 The Appearances
Appearances
I want to begin by describing some appearances. The word ÑappearancesÒ is important - as will emerge
at length below, these appearances might be misleading. That warning being issued, it appears that
ordinary speakers routinely utter non-sentences, and in so doing perform full-blown speech acts.
In saying this, I don't mean that they appear to produce non-linguistic gestures and such, thereby
performing speech acts. (How could something be a speech act, and be non-linguistic?) Nor do I mean
that they utter ungrammatical sentences and yet succeed in asserting, or asking, or ordering. It seems
plausible that speakers do the latter, but that isn't the issue I will be discussing. Instead, what I mean is
that speakers appear to utter, consciously and by design, fully grammatical expressions which happen
to be less-than-sentential: nouns and NPs, adjectives and AdjPs, as well as PPs, VPs, and so on. That
is, speakers routinely utter bare words and phrases not syntactically embedded in any sentence, and
they thereby perform speech acts like asserting, asking, commanding, and so on. Again, so it appears.
That bare words/phrases can be so used might seem obvious. Many would grant, for example, that a
hearer may answer a question with a mere word or a phrase. For instance, Tracy says, ÑWhere do you
live?Ò, and Isaac replies, ÑLondon.Ò There are also examples of correction (repairs): Tracy says, ÑI think
we met in London,Ò and Isaac responds, ÑParis, actually.Ò Not everyone would grant that such cases are,
in fact, subsentential; some will insist that in such cases the answers are actually elliptical sentences.
But, even if these are subsentential, they aren't the sort of cases I want to emphasize here.
1
Rather, I
want to focus on examples in which it is not prior linguistic context but non-linguistic context that
somehow ÑcompletesÒ what is asserted, asked, commanded, etc.
Here are some examples of the kind of thing I want to discuss. A woman could enter a room, and Leah
could say to Anita, looking at the woman in the doorway: ÑSam's mom.Ò Here, Leah says about the
woman entering the room that she is Sam's mom, but what she utters is not a sentence. Instead, she
utters an NP.
2
What' s more, it's not an NP that answers an interrogative, nor is it an NP that corrects a
previously spoken sentence. Similarly, Anita and Sheryl could be looking at a tote board, watching the
progress of shares in Acme Internet. As the stock rises, Anita could say, ÑMoving pretty fast!Ò In this
example, Anita appears to utter a bare VP, not a sentence. And, here again, it' s not a VP that answers
an interrogative, nor is it a VP that corrects a previously spoken sentence (I'll exclude this qualification
in what follows), yet Anita still succeeds in making a statement. Other examples abound: pick up any
magazine, leaf through the ads, and you will find carefully edited (and hence, surely grammatical) copy
of the following sort:
(1) America's most frequent service to Asia
(2) Fast relief for arthritic pain
(3) From the sun-soaked mountains of Colombia
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Let me describe the appearances a bit more formally. In doing so, I'll make use of some non-obvious
theoretical machinery, so in that sense what follows goes beyond Ñobvious appearances.Ò But it will, I
hope, clarify the phenomenon being discussed. The generalization at the level of syntax, first
formulated by Barton (1990 and elsewhere), seems to be that speakers can utter not just sentences,
but any
MAXIMAL
PROJECTION
. This emphatically does include maximal projections whose
GRAMMATICAL
HEAD
is a lexical item: a noun, an adjective, a preposition, etc. It is uses of these
LEXICAL
PROJECTIONS
that
are precisely the cases of interest here.
3
As for the semantics of the things used in such cases, it does
not seem to matter what content is assigned to the expression in the language. It can stand for an
object, a property, or even a function from a property to a truth value, and yet still be used to make a
statement, or ask a question, or issue an order. In the notation of Montague grammar, the point can be
put this way: an expression need not be of
SEMANTIC
TYPE
t
to be used to perform a speech act; it can
be of type
e
, or
e, t
, or
e, t,
,t
etc.
4
Thus, returning to an earlier example, the phrase
moving pretty fast does not express a proposition. It doesn't even do so after reference is assigned to
indexicals and such, there being none. Put differently, the phrase type moving pretty fast is not
synonymous with the sentence type That is moving pretty fast, as it would have to be if the
contextualized meaning of the former were to be a proposition - and this lack of synonymy of the
types obtains even if one can make an assertion by tokening either type. (Notational aside: the word
ÑtypeÒ unfortunately refers to two quite different things in semantic theorizing. There is the
TYPE
versus
TOKEN
distinction, which is in play in the preceding sentence, and there is the distinction between
various semantic categories in Montague grammar: semantic types
e
,
e, t
,
t
, etc. Where there
is a risk of confusion, I will use Ñexpression type/phrase type/sentence typeÒ for the former, and
ÑMontagovian semantic typeÒ for the latter.) The complete sentence That is moving pretty fast, despite
containing context-sensitive elements, is indeed of Montagovian semantic type
t
. But the phrase
moving pretty fast is not of type
t
: its semantic type is
e, t
. This becomes evident when the
phrasal expression is embedded. What moving pretty fast contributes to the complete sentence That
stock is moving pretty fast, once reference has been assigned to indexicals and such, is not a
proposition, but a property: that property shared by things which are moving pretty fast. Thus, when a
speaker utters Moving pretty fast on its own, it appears that she utters an expression that, even after it
is contextualized, means a property, not a proposition. Similarly, the phrase Sam's mom, even
contextualized, does not express a proposition. The same can be said of the expressions in (1)-(3).
And yet, it appears that these expression types, which purportedly have both the syntax and the
semantics of ordinary phrases, can be used to make statements. Indeed, it appears that they can be
used to perform speech acts of many kinds. For instance, one could ask about a displayed letter, ÑFrom
Colombia?Ò Or one could issue a command to one's child by saying, ÑTo your bedroom. Right now.Ò
Notice too that, whereas it's sometimes supposed that complete sentence meanings contain
FORCE
INDICATORS
that account for the kind of act the sentences are typically used to perform, bare word and
phrase meanings are assumed not to contain such things. This is still another (apparent) difference in
content. Let me explain. One view of the difference in meaning between the sentences (4a-c) is that,
though they share the same propositional content, viz. that-John-is-running, (4a-c) exhibit distinct
force indicators.
(4) a. John is running
b. Is John running?
c. Run, John!
That is, their content is bipartite: part of it is a proposition, the other part is a force indicator. The first
sentence, the syntactic type, has as its non-propositional content an assertoric force indicator; the
second sentence type has an inter-rogatival force indicator as part of its context-insensitive content;
and the third has an imperatival force indicator. Notice that force indicators are considered here to be
part of content of the expression type: they are (at least in English) syntactically carried by the
MOOD
of
the sentence. Mood is a constant feature of syntax, and thus force indication is a matter of context-
invariant content. It is the presence of force indicators, encoded by mood, that helps explain why one
makes an assertion by uttering (4a) but one asks a question by uttering (4b).
Under these assumptions, then, the phrase type moving pretty fast surely does not contain a force
indicator as part of its context-invariant content. Clearly it has no mood as part of its syntax, neither
declarative nor any other. Its constant content, then, is just a property of things, not a property/force
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pair. We thus have another apparent difference between the sentence type That is moving pretty fast
and the phrase type moving pretty fast - a difference that extends beyond the fact that they are of
distinct Montagovian semantic types.
To clarify this difference, it will help to say a word about expression types, speech acts, and force. I
don't deny that speech acts performed using subsentences exhibit force; indeed, it's part of my
description of the appearances that they do so. It may even be true that there are sound pattern types
-consisting of the sound of a lexical phrase, though modulated by a special intonation pattern - that
have illocutionary force. For instance, the type From Colombia? said with rising intonation might be
claimed to have interrogatival force. Be that as it may, the point I'm making here is that the force of
such things - the speech acts or the phrase-intonation pairs - is not inherited from the syntax and
semantics of the phrase type itself, since that phrase type does not syntactically encode a force
indicator. Suffice it, then, to say that the syntax of complete sentences apparently (often) encodes a
force indicator, via mood, but the syntax of lexical projections does not appear to encode this. That is
another apparent difference.
There is then - or at least, there appears to be - a significant mismatch in non-sentential speech
between what the expression type means in the language and what the speaker of it means. Now,
cases of speaker meaning that outpace (contextualized) expression meaning are very familiar in
pragmatics. For instance, in
CONVERSATIONAL
IMPLICATURE
(see horn, this volume), the speaker means
something different than (or in addition to) what his words mean, even once reference has been
assigned to context-sensitive elements. as grice would say, Ñwhat is saidÒ in such cases does not
(wholly) capture what is meant. recall, for instance, the delightful sort of case imagined by grice (1989:
chap. 2). professor koorb writes a letter of reference for a student that says only:
(5) Mr. Tonstain has neat handwriting, and he usually arrives on time for class. yours, J. A.
Koorb.
Here what the speaker means goes well beyond what his words mean. what he means is something
like: this student is appallingly bad; don't even dream of hiring him. but that is not what his words,
even in context, mean. similarly in non-sentence cases, it appears that what the speaker means, which
is a proposition, is quite different from what her words mean, which is not a proposition but an object,
or property, or something along those lines.
Interestingly, however, though there is this mismatch between what the expression uttered means in
the context (i.e. an object, or property, etc.), and what the speaker of it meant (i.e. a complete
proposition), this does not appear similar to cases of non-literal communication. of course, there are
special cases in which one can speak metaphorically or ironically while using a subsentence: richard
could utter Ñthe next nobel laureateÒ while pointing at a notoriously brainless politician, thereby saying
that the politico is the next nobel laureate - but meaning that he is a buffoon.
5
but not all uses of
subsentences are non-literal. for instance, recalling leah and anita, if leah knew perfectly well that the
person coming through the doorway was not sam's mother, but she wanted to convince anita
otherwise, she would have lied in uttering Ñsam's mother.Ò leah could not later say, Ñoh i didn't tell
anita that she was sam's mother. in fact, i made no literal statement at all about the woman. anita just
drew her own conclusions.Ã’ to the contrary, leah did make a statement: she strictly and literally said,
about the woman at the door, that she was sam's mother. unlike in the gricean case of professor koorb
described above, in speaking non-sententially it doesn't look like leah merely suggested, or implicated,
a proposition: what leah does looks very much like assertion, and very much unlike non-literal speech
- despite the mismatch between expression meaning and speaker meaning.
To sum up so far: speakers utter ordinary words and phrases, with the syntax and semantics of
ordinary words and phrases, and thereby perform speech acts. more formally put, they produce
projections of lexical items -which, seen semantically, are not of semantic type
t
and contain no
force indicator - and yet they thereby make assertions, ask questions, etc. since there is an assertion
of something of semantic type
t
), what the speaker means in these cases extends beyond what her
words mean. and yet, this mismatch is not strikingly similar to metaphor, or conversational implic-
ature, or speaker's reference, or other clearly non-literal speech acts. rather, one seems to have
perfectly literal communication in these cases. as i stressed at the outset, this is how things appear. (or
anyway, how they appear to me.)
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There are, of course, two possible responses to such appearances. one is to say that what i've just
described are only appearances. that is, one possibility is to deny that there are genuine cases of non-
sentential speech acts of the sort just introduced. one must then go on to explain away the
appearances. the other possibility is to say that the reason people appear to use subsentential things
to perform speech acts is because that' s what they really do. (compare: Ñthe reason the car over there
looks purple is because it is purple.Ã’ this certainly accounts for the appearances.) taking this second
route, the burden is not to Ñexplain away,Ò but to Ñexplain how.Ò specifically, to explain how speakers
manage to do this - a non-trivial task since, as just noted, if the phenomenon is genuine there is an
important gap between the meaning of the things used and the nature and content of the act itself.
much of this chapter will be dedicated to exploring these two responses to the just-described
appearances.
6
2 rejecting the appearances: introducing
2 rejecting the appearances: introducing the options
the options
In this section, i consider a number of attempts to explain away the appearances.
2.1 not a genuine
2.1 not a genuine speech act
speech act
Notice that what appears to be the case is a conjunction: it appears that, in some cases anyway,
speakers produce non-sentences and in so doing they perform a speech act. one obvious maneuver in
resisting the appearances is to go after the second conjunct: to deny that a genuine speech act is ever
performed when something less-than-sentential is produced. let's explore this option. (doing so will
also help clarify what the second conjunct actually commits one to.)
It would be difficult to maintain that speakers and writers only utter complete sentences, even allowing
for performance errors, slips of the tongue, and outright grammatical mistakes. to give just a few
obvious examples, book titles are often single words or phrases: symbolic logic, language, etc. and, of
course, there are signs that simply say exit and fire extinguisher. in addition, borrowing an example
from shopen (1973), we affix phrasal labels to objects, e.g. strawberry jam. there are spoken cases too:
if someone really wanted to, she surely could stand on a street corner and just repeat the word
cymbidium. (according to my dictionary, this word refers to some kind of orchid.) it' s hopeless to
insist that in all these cases there is a sentence employed: people surely can, and they surely do,
produce plain old words and phrases. the conjunction above requires more than this, however. it
requires not only that words and phrases be uttered, but also that such utterances sometimes result in
the speaker having performed a speech act: a conventional linguistic act like naming a ship or making
a promise, a request, or an assertion, etc. but notice that when the exit sign is posted there is no
assertion made. no question is asked by the person who constantly repeats the word cymbidium. no
promise is issued by the book title. it seems reasonable to say that in these cases there is simply no
illocutionary act at all: there might be language use, but there is no speech act properly so called.
having noticed cases of non-sentential speech in which no speech act is made, the next step would be
to argue that whenever a mere word or phrase is uttered, no speech act results (putting aside, as noted
at the outset, answers to questions, repairs, and the like). true enough, goes this line of thought,
people utter mere words in isolation - but they do not thereby Ñmake a move in the language game,Ò to
use wittgenstein's famous phrase. put otherwise, the path of less resistance for the theorist who
wishes to reject the appearances is to simply deny that a speech act is performed in subsentential
speech of the kind here under consideration.
Unfortunately for those who want to explain away the appearances in this way, this line of argument
seems unlikely to succeed. there may be cases that initially look like speech acts but in which one can
make the case that appearances mislead. stanley (2000) gives the example of a thirsty man, emerging
parched and sunburned from the desert, who scratchily utters, Ñwater.Ò stanley says that this isn't
determinately a request, or an assertion, or an order; as such, it might be written off as subsentential
but not genuinely a speech act. maybe that's right. on the other hand, there are lots of cases, like
leah's utterance to anita, that are lie-prone, and hence really are assertions. and there are lots of non-
sentential utterances that are clearly questions. and others which are promises. and so on.
7
so, while
this strategy might allow one to explain away some apparent cases of non-sentential speech acts - e.g.
an utterance of water by the thirsty man - it cannot on its own explain away the appearances described
in section 1.
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2.2 Three senses of
Ñellipsis
Ã’
ellipsis
The next obvious means of explaining away the appearances is to suppose that whenever a genuine
speech act is performed, the speaker actually uses a sentence. to account for the appearances,
specifically the sound produced by the speaker, one would then have to claim that the thing used was
an
ELLIPTICAL
SENTENCE
. This despite the fact that the utterance is not an answer to an explicit question,
or a repair. This questions not the second conjunct, but the first: there are genuine speech acts being
performed, in the cases at hand, but they aren't in fact performed using non-sentences - because
elliptical sentences are a kind of sentence. So, if this maneuver works, what appears to be non-
sentential speech is really sentential after all.
Now, there are lots of things that might be meant by the word Ñellipsis.Ò It's not possible to canvass
them exhaustively here (but see Huang, this volume). Instead, I'll introduce two promising
possibilities.
8
Before I do so, however, I want to issue a warning. One might say ÑThat' s ellipsisÒ about
an apparently non-sentential speech act, and simply mean: The speaker produced words that mean
less than the complete thought that she communicated. Thus, put pre-theoretically, she Ñspoke
elliptically.Ã’ To anticipate: I think that this is true, but that it doesn't help to reject the appearances. To
explain why, consider a comparison. If I say ÑPostal, Ross, Lakoff, et al.,Ò one might describe me as
Ñspeaking ellipticallyÒ about early Generative Semanticists. Or, I if say, ÑJohn has finished,Ò meaning
that he has finished eating dinner, I do not explicitly say what it is that he has finished - hence one
might again describe this, pre-theoretically, as Ñspeaking elliptically.Ò But in neither of these cases is it
imagined that somehow, under my breath as it were, I really uttered more linguistic material than what
one hears on the surface. I did not utter the phrase early Generative Semanticists, nor did I utter the
phrase eating dinner. The only sense in which I spoke elliptically is that I let the hearer fill in
contextually available information for herself - I did not produce a special ÑellipticalÒ expression.
But now, if this sort of thing is all that is meant by the term ellipsis, then one cannot explain away the
appearances described in section 1 by appealing to ellipsis. Instead, in saying ÑThat' s ellipsis,Ò one is
at best redescribing those appearances, using alternative vocabulary. No doubt the agent Ñspoke
elliptic-allyÃ’ in this extremely weak sense: the very description of the appearances highlights (1) the
content ÑmismatchÒ between the expression used and the complete thought that the speaker of that
expression meant; and (2) the key role of non-linguistic context in filling the resulting gap between
expression-meaning and speaker-meaning. But to capture this fact by saying that the agent Ñspoke
ellipticallyÃ’ is not to grant that the appearances are mere appearances. In particular, saying this is not
to deny that the agent really did produce a word/phrase and really did not produce a sentence; on the
contrary, it' s to presuppose that the appearances reflect what is genuinely going on, in that a
word/phrase was produced. Here is the warning, then: In what follows I will never use the term ellipsis
in the extremely weak sense of a speaker meaning more than her words mean.
9
Thus, both varieties of
ellipsis described below are designed to explain away non-sentential speech acts by not granting the
existence of genuinely non-sentential speech acts.
Having issued my warning, now consider what I'll call Ñthe fundamental feature of ellipsis.Ò In ellipsis,
the sound produced by the speaker is abbreviated vis--vis the message encoded, but the hearer can
recover the complete message because the abbreviated sound somehow linguistically encodes that
message. Thus, when a speaker means more than what his words mean that isn't a case of ellipsis, as
intended here - essentially because the ÑmoreÒ that he meant is not linguistically encoded; instead, it is
supplied by other means. Given the fundamental feature - i.e. abbreviated sound produced with
complete meaning encoded - an issue that immediately arises is: how can this occur? There are at least
two ways, as I'll now explain. (Readers already familiar with linguistic theories of ellipsis may wish to
merely skim what follows.)
It is a truism of linguistic theory that sound patterns don't directly correspond to meanings. Rather,
there is an intermediate level, syntax, the level at which words combine to make phrases, and phrases
combine to make sentences.
10
What a sound pattern immediately corresponds to, on this view, is a
syntactic structure; that syntactic structure, in its turn, corresponds to a semantic content. That is:
(6) Sound pattern Ò„ Syntactic structure Ò„ Semantic content
Given this tri-level picture, it's easy to see the two ways that a sound pattern can end up seeming
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