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Salience and Defaults in Utterance Processing Salience and Defaults in Utterance Processing Edited by Kasia M. Jaszczolt and Keith Allan Contents Contributors vii Chapter 1. Introduction Keith Allan and Kasia M. Jaszczolt 1 Chapter 2. Default meanings, salient meanings, and automatic processing Kasia M. Jaszczolt 11 Chapter 3. Salient meanings: The whens and wheres Orna Peleg and Rachel Giora 35 Chapter 4. Graded salience effects on irony production and interpretation Eleni Kapogianni 53 Chapter 5. Salience in language production Istvan Kecskes 81 Chapter 6. On salience and enrichment in expressions of negation Alyson Pitts 103 Chapter 7. Understanding acronyms: The time course of accessibility Morton Ann Gernsbacher 151 Chapter 8. Graded salience: Probabilistic meanings in the lexicon Keith Allan 165 Chapter 9. Practices and defaults in interpreting disjunction Michael Haugh 189 Index 227 Contributors Keith Allan: Emeritus Professor, Linguistics Program, Monash University Vic 3800, Australia. http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/linguistics/staff/ kallan.php; [email protected] Morton Ann Gernsbacher: Vilas Research Professor and Sir Frederic Bartlett Professor of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin– Madison, USA. http://www.gernsbacherlab.org; [email protected] Rachel Giora: Professor of Linguistics, Tel Aviv University, Israel 69978; http://www.tau.ac.il/~giorar/; [email protected] Michael Haugh: Senior Lecturer in Linguistics, Griffith University, Nathan Qld 4122, Australia; http://www.griffith.edu.au/arts-languages- criminology/school-languages-linguistics/staff/dr-michael-haugh; [email protected] Kasia M. Jaszczolt: Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy of Language, Department of Linguistics, University of Cambridge, CB3 9DA, UK. http://people.pwf.cam.ac.uk/kmj21; [email protected] Eleni Kapogianni: PhD Candidate,Department of Linguistics, University of CambridgeCB3 9DA, UK; [email protected] Istvan Kecskes: Professor of Linguistics and Education, State University of New York at Albany, Albany, NY 12222, USA; http://www.albany.edu/ ~ik692; [email protected] Orna Peleg: Research Fellow, Institute of Information Processing and De- cision Making (IIPDM), University of Haifa, Haifa 31905; http:// iipdm.haifa.ac.il/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=68 &Itemid=48; [email protected] Alyson Pitts: Lecturer in English Language and Linguistics University of Turku, FI-20014 Turun yliopisto, Finland; http://www.hum.utu.fi/ oppiaineet/englantilainenfilologia/staff/pitts.html; [email protected] Chapter 1 Introduction Keith Allan and Kasia M. Jaszczolt In the last couple of decades we have witnessed great progress and the pro- liferation of approaches in post-Gricean pragmatics, aimed at providing an adequate account of utterance meaning and utterance processing. The main debates focus on the controversy around the conscious vs automatic pro- cessing of available contextual information and the controversy surrounding the distinction between literal and nonliteral meaning. This book adds some ground-breaking research to these debates. It brings the two issues together demonstrating that they are in fact two sides of the same question: the lit- eral/nonliteral distinction is closely bound with the distinction between the automatic and conscious retrieval of information. In particular, the articles in this collection focus on the concept of salient meaning as discussed in Giora’s seminal work and the concept of pragmatic defaults as utilised un- der different guises in the neo-Gricean tradition (e.g. Levinson 2000; Jaszczolt 1999, 2005, 2006, 2010a; Recanati 2004, 2010). For example Gio- ra writes: Though literal meanings tend to be highly salient, their literality is not a component of salience. The criterion or threshold a meaning has to reach to be considered salient is related only to its accessibility in memory due to such factors as frequency of use or experiential familiarity. (Giora 2003: 33) In this way evidence of direct access sheds light on what theoretical distinc- tions we should be drawing in pragmatics. In particular, it constitutes a sound argument for redrawing the literal/nonliteral distinction in order to make it reflect the processing of information – a task already begun, albeit not on the basis of experimental findings, in Recanati’s Literal Meaning (Recanati 2004) and taken further for example in Recanati 2010. Experi- mental findings are also increasingly revealing of the need for redrawing boundaries (see for example the contributing papers to Sauerland and Yatsushiro 2009). The question of literal meaning is inherently interwoven with the ques- tion of salience. The extent of this interrelation is best exemplified in the ordinary-language philosophers’ recognition of what was subsequently pop- ularised as the concept of illocutionary act, and in particular in the late- Introduction 2 Wittgensteinian (Wittgenstein 1953) slogan that meaning is use; instead of a quest for concepts as abstractions over uses that can be discussed and de- fined in isolation, it is possible that the creation of meaning in context is all there is. This common-sense idea has also slowly made its way into post- Gricean pragmatics in the form of what Recanati (2005: 189) calls ‘meaning eliminativism’ whereby concepts are constructed directly, ‘online’ with the direct help from past uses of a word in past contexts. Less radically, with the commitment to the distinction between the logical and the encyclopedic entry for concepts, relevance theorists also seem to be tacitly weakening the logical-form-based distinction between the explicit and the implicit content, recognising the powerful role of ad hoc concept-adjustment (Carston, e.g. 2002, 2010) and construing the logical entry as inference rules rather than propositional representations.1 What we are left with at the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century is a very interesting multi-faceted picture: either the literal-nonliteral distinction is utterly uninteresting because it is based on a questionable construct of context-free ‘core meaning’, or we can make it interesting by radically revising the concept of literality, allowing context to play its role directly in concept construction. At this point the consideration of salience of an interpretation proves to be very revealing. Giora’s (e.g. 2003) experimental work leading to her Graded Salience Hy- pothesis strongly suggests that salience of an interpretation maps onto its’ being foremost on our minds, which need not coincide with being literal but instead does coincide with familiarity and frequency of use. If we are to be guided by the considerations of automatic vis-à-vis conscious inferential retrieval, then it would make sense to revise the concept of literality in the 1. Cf.: On the relevance-theoretic view, what the encoded atomic concept amounts to is an address in memory or, viewed from a different perspective, a basic element of the language of thought (a monomorphemic ‘word’ in Men- talese). The content or semantics of this entity is its denotation, what it refers to in the world, and the lexical form that encodes it, in effect, inherits its de- notational semantics. This conceptual address (or “file name”) gives access to a repository of mentally represented information about the concept’s de- notation, some of which is general and some of which, such as stereotypes, applies only to particular subsets of the denotation. This information in- cludes conceptually represented assumptions and beliefs, held with varying degrees of strength, and also, in some cases at least, imagistic and/or senso- ry-perceptual representations. A distinction is standardly made in the theory between this kind of information, which is stored in the ‘encyclopaedic en- try’ associated with the concept, and the ‘logical entry’ for the concept. Log- ical entries consist of inference rules (rather than propositional representa- tions) which are, crucially, taken to be content-constitutive. (Carston 2010: 161). 3 Keith Allan and Kasia M. Jaszczolt direction of, so to speak, ‘locutionary literality’ that is informed by the fast, automatic, salient arrival of some content. But it would make even more sense to construe literality as informed by the main content that the speaker intended to communicate. We can call it, say, ‘illocutionary literality’. Guided by the considerations of modelling such primary intended content, Jaszczolt’s Default Semantics (e.g. 2005, 2010b) departs from the system- based (grammar- and lexicon-based) defaults postulated in Levinson (2000), as well as from the unconstrained context-dependence of interpretations of the followers of ‘nonce-inference’ and proposes salient, default interpreta- tions which are defaults for the context and for the speaker and come from socio-cultural, epistemic, general-knowledge, and other sources. Now, if what is ‘literal’ is to be permeated with the consideration as to whether ab- stract concepts are justified tout court, then we may be left with only the latter route to pursue, acknowledging that concepts are themselves created in context. To summarize, we may thereby not be able to assess ‘how lit- eral’, in the traditional core-concept-driven sense, the interpretation is. On the other hand, ‘locutionary literality’, or ‘neo-literality’, to review and re- label Recanati’s (2004) rather convoluted typology, coincides with salience, frequency, entrenchment, frequent patterns of neural activation, depending on the approach and level of explanation at which the discussion is conduct- ed.
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