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Relevance Theory and the Semantics of Non-Declarative RELEVANCE THEORY AND THE SEMANTICS OF NON-DECLARATIVE WILLIAM CLARK Thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of PhD University College London 1991 ABSTRACT Wilson and Sperber (1988a; Sperber and Wilson 1986) have proposed semantic analyses of declaratives, imperatives and interrogatives which are based on the notion of "a direct semantic link between linguistic form and representations of propositional attitude". They claim, however, that the various syntactic structures encode "procedural" rather than "conceptual" information. Rather than encoding concepts which appear in representations of propositional attitude (or what Sperber and Wilson call "higher-level explicatures") they convey information about how to proceed in recovering such representations. This thesis is an attempt to extend this analysis to some constructions which have not been explicitly discussed by Wilson and Sperber, to consider the differences between this approach and some alternatives, and to question the status of the notion of a "sentence type", which has often been assumed in analysing the various syntactic structures. Some evidence is provided that certain lexical items also encode procedural information about propositional attitudes, and the role of intonation in utterance- interpretation is also discussed. This analysis is based on relevance-theoretic assumptions about semantics and pragmatics. Chapter one presents the general approach to semantics assumed by relevance theory and shows how Wilson and Sperber's proposal fits into this framework. Chapter two is concerned with the proposed semantic analysis of imperatives. This analysis is extended to some "pseudo-imperatives": forms consisting of the conjunction or disjunction of an imperative and a declarative clause, which have often -3— been treated as conditionals. An analysis of imperative-like constructions containing j or is also proposed. This analysis can be extended to related forms containing Chapter three is concerned with the semantic analyses of interrogatives and exciamatives proposed by Wilson and Sperber. This approach is extended to some constructions which seem to resemble interrogatives in some ways and exciamatives in others. The relationship between grammar and intonation is also discussed. Tonal structure can also be seen as encoding procedural information. Chapter four contrasts this approach with alternatives which treat illocutionary force or mood as semantic categories. Wilson and Sperber's approach is more successful than the alternatives and suggests reasons for their inadequacy. A straightforward account of the relationship between form and force, and the interpretation of utterances which have been said to perform "indirect speech acts", follows from Wilson and Sperber's proposal. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I do not know how to thank Deirdre Wilson for all the help she has given me while I have been working on this thesis. Her kindness and generosity have been as invaluable as her wisdom and patience. Without her help, this work would not exist. I would also like to thank Robyn Carston, Neil Smith and Vlad Zegerac for friendship, good advice and encouragement. I am grateful to a large number of people, at University College London and elsewhere, who have discussed and commented on various aspects of the topic, including Regina Blass, Misi Brody, Annabel Cormack, Norman Fraser, Marjolein Groefesema, Dick Hudson, Reiko Itani-Kaufmann, Ruth Kempson, Geoff Lindsey, Rita Manzini, Jamal Ouhalla, Adrian Pilkington, Villy Rouchota and Chris Wilder. I would like to thank Hans van de Koot who solved all my computational problems in a flash. Last but not least, I would like to thank Ohna Falby who somehow managed to keep her own sanity as well as mine while this work was in progress. CONTENTS Chapter One: Relevance and Semantic Theory 7 1.1 Introduction 1.2 Linguistic "Semantics" and "Real" Semantics 1.3 The Principle of Relevance 1.4 Description and Interpretation 1.5 Conceptual and Procedural Encoding 1.6 "Sentence-Types" and Propositional Attitudes Chapter Two: Imperatives and Imperative-Like Constructions 54 2.1 The Semantics of Imperatives 2.2 "Pseudo-Imperatives" 2.2.1 Positive Interpretations 2.2.2 Negative Interpretations 2.2.3 Neutral Interpretations 2.2.4 Genuine Pseudo-Imperatives 2.3 Let-Constructions 2.3.1 Davies on Let-Constructions 2.3.2 A Relevance-Theoretic Account 2.4 Infmitives -6— Chapter Three: Interrogatives and Exclamatives 144 3.1 The Semantics of Interrogatives 3.2 The Semantics of Exciamatives 3.3 Exclamatory-Inversions 3.4 Other Inversions Chapter Four: Forces, Moods and Propositional Attitudes 212 4.1 Forms and Forces 4.2 Forms and Moods 4.3 Forms and Attitudes Footnotes 254 Bibliography 261 CHAPTER ONE: RELEVANCE AND SEMANTIC THEORY 1.1 Introduction This thesis is concerned with the semantic analysis of sentences like the following: (1) a. (John) you are calm. b. (John) be calm! c. (John) are you calm? Clearly, there are certain aspects of the meanings of (la-c) which they all share: they are all about the individual John and the property of calmness and about the possibility of a relationship between the two. However, it is also clear that they are not synonymous. A natural way of describing the differences would be to say that the speaker of (la) is stating that John is calm, the speaker of (ib) is telling John to be calm, and the speaker of (ic) is asking whether John is calm. While an adequate theory of the semantics of English sentences must account more formally for both the similarities and the differences between (la-c), it has proven extremely difficult for any particular semantic theory to do so. Interest in non-declarative sentences like the imperative (ib) and the interrogative (ic) has tended to focus on them as a problem for truth-conditional semantic theories. It has been claimed that truth-conditional approaches only work for declaratives like (la). Thus, we can give the meaning of (la) by stating under what conditions it would be true, e.g. that it is true in all possible worlds where the individual denoted by the name Johfl has the property of calmness. However, we cannot state such conditions for -8— sentences like (lb-c). They do not describe states of affairs and so we cannot describe the conditions under which the states of affairs they describe would hold. A common way of attempting to resolve this problem is to say that the three sentences share the same propositional content but that they differ in some other way. On such a view, at least the propositional content of the sentences would be amenable to truth-conditional semantic treatment. However, it has proven extremely difficult to characterise the differences in a satisfactory way. Certain theorists, for example, have suggested that (la-c) differ in their illocutionary force or ilocutionary force potential, i.e in the speech acts that they are capable of performing when uttered (see, for example, Searle 1969, 1975b, 1979; and papers in Searle, Keifer and Bierwisch 1980). Others have postulated that the three sentences differ in semantic mood (see, for example, Davidson 1979; Hare 1970; McGinn 1977; for survey see Lyons 1977, vol.2 16.2, 16.3). The mood of the sentence then interacts with pragmatics to determine the force of an utterance on a given occasion. Neither of these approaches seems wholly satisfactory. Their shortcomings will be examined in more detail in chapter four below.[Fn.l] Wilson and Sperber (1988a; see also Sperber and Wilson 1986) propose to account for the differences between these sentences in terms of "a direct semantic link between linguistic form and representations of propositional attitude" (Wilson and Sperber 1988a: 86). As they have shown, their proposal works well for a wide range of declarative, imperative and interrogative sentences. In this thesis I want to examine this proposal in more detail. In chapters two and three I attempt to extend it to constructions not explicitly discussed by Wilson and Sperber. In chapter four I consider the -9— differences between Wilson and Sperber's approach and the alternatives. I will argue not only that Wilson and Sperber's proposal is more successful, but also that it suggests reasons for the lack of success of the alternatives. In this chapter, I focus on the general assumptions on which Wilson and Sperber's proposal is based. The questions I am concerned with are essentially semantic rather than pragmatic. However, I will assume throughout that the semantic analyses proposed will interact with a relevance-theoretic account of pragmatic processes. In the remainder of this chapter, I want to give an outline of the approach to utterance- interpretation in general, and to linguistic semantics in particular, assumed by relevance theory. My aim is to show how the semantic analyses of English declaratives, imperatives and interrogatives proposed by Wilson and Sperber fit in to this overall approach. In section 1.2 I discuss the assumptions Sperber and Wilson make about the relationship between semantics and pragmatics. I show how they propose to account for the fact that linguistic expressions greatly underdetermine the content ascribed to them by hearers (what Kempson (forthcoming) calls the "underdeterminacy thesis") by postulating two distinct kinds of semantic theory: "linguistic semantics", which relates linguistic expressions to mental representations, and "real semantics", which relates mental representations to their truth-conditions. In section 1.3 I discuss how the principle of relevance, and the criterion of consistency with the principle of relevance, account for ostensive communication in general and utterance-interpretation in particular. On this approach, one way of looking at the task of pragmatic theory is to say that it must account for how hearers get from the small amount of content encoded in linguistic - 10 - forms to the much richer representations recovered in the process of utterance- interpretation. The criterion of consistency with the principle of relevance governs this process.
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