topics: |  cognitive | semantics | language | vision

Deals with the pragmatic penumbra surrounding utterance-meaning - about
utterance-type meaning, not the utterance-token meaning that is usually the
focus of pragmatics.

Grice's central idea: "every artificial or non-iconic system is founded upon
an antecedent iconic system." [Grice 1989, Studies in the way of Words p.358]

Both drawings [Rafael sketch] and language is underspecified. 2-3

ready: Supper's   / motorway is   /  flight is _
       cooked /      surfaced	    /  refuelled

soon:  dinner will be served  / my dissertation will be over 

Constitutes a renaissance of information-theoretic ideas:

   These notions went out of fashion in theoretical linguistics -- and I
   think this is the right way to put it -- when Chomsky (1956, 59)
   criticized (correctly) their association with radical, tabula rasa,
   behaviourism and finite-state models of language acquisition and
   grammaticality.  Their rehabilitation with in the framework of more
   satisfactory models of the structure and use of language is very much to
   be welcomed. [Lyons 95: Ling Sem - an Intro]

Human speech articulation is very slow ... bottleneck without which the
system can run about 4x faster ==> pressure on frequent words to be shortened
[Zipf 49: Human behaviour and the principle of least effort: An introduction
to human ecology] ==>

Language: balance between
 - speaker's need for economy
 - hearer's need for more info

Solution: not only the content, but also the metalinguistic properties of the
utterance (e.g. its form) - carries meaning.

Believes that:

- Semantics / Pragmatics distinction is an essential distinction in the study
  of meaning; it may be that in the long run, the distinction will dissolve
  into a larger set of distinctions but nothing is gained by lumping...

- Semantics is not to be confused with "conceptual structure" or the
  "language of thought", a nontrivial relation between nonisomprphic
  structures [Levinson 97]

- Aspects of semantic content (enriched by pragmatics) can be specified by
  the apparatus of recursive truth-definition - but this is unlikely to have
  a direct cognitive counterpart.  The brain does something like Realism -
  how it actually does it is a separate matter.

- pragmatic resolution is crucial before semantic interpretation - hence no
  algorithm can crank out a logical form from a syntactic string.

Chapter 1 Generalized Conversational Implicature GCI

QUOTE:  "immense regularity" - certain kinds of GCI systematically block
lexicalization of certain concepts [Horn's obsvn]

Grice's (1957) meaning_nn: non-natural meaning - total signification of an
utterance
  S means_nn p by "uttering" U to A iff S intends
	a) A to think P
	b) A to recognize that S intends (a)
	c) A's recogn of S's intending (a) to be the prime reason for A
		thinking p

See Avramides 89 for revisions of this formula.

   Total Signification
     /              \
    /		     \
what is SAID     what is IMPLICATED
                 /                \
                /                  \
	  CONVENTIONALLY	CONVERSATIONALLY
	                        /                \
			       /		  \
			GENERALIZED		PARTICULARIZED

there may be other types of signification also - e.g. pre-supposition,
non-conventional, non-conversational implicature etc. [Harnish 76].

S +> p = S conversationally implicates p

Grice: hints at a distinction:
Particularized CI, PCI, based on specific contextual assumptions hat would
       not invariably or even normally obtain, as opp to
Generalized CI (GCI): normal

(4) What time is it?
    Some of the guests are already leaving.
PCI: It must be late
GCI: Not all of the guests are already leaving

(5) Where's John
    Some of the guests are already leaving
PCI: Perhaps J has already left
GCI: Not all of the guests are already leaving

PCI's follow maxim of relevance (or relation)