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Proquest Dissertations Pragmatics and the Showing-Saying Distinction Timothy John Wharton Thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. University of London, May 2003 ProQuest Number: 10010418 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest. ProQuest 10010418 Published by ProQuest LLC(2016). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 Abstract This thesis focuses on the role in communication of ‘natural’ signs and natural behaviours—facial expressions, spontaneous expression of emotion, interjections etc.—and considers how they might be accommodated within a pragmatic theory. Linguists generally abstract away from such behaviours and focus on the grammar, or linguistic code. However, there are two reasons why the pragmatist should cast a broader net. Firstly, it is increasingly recognised in pragmatics that verbal communication is not simply a coding-decoding process but an intelligent activity involving the expression and recognition of intentions. Secondly, sentences are rarely uttered in a behavioural vacuum; the aim of a pragmatic theory is to explain how utterances—with all their linguistic and non-linguistic properties—are understood. The analysis I propose has implications for theories of utterance interpretation. Firstly, verbal communication often involves a mixture of (what Paul Grice called) natural(N) and non-natural(NN) meaning, and there is a continuum of cases between ‘showing’ and meaningNN; I show that natural communicative phenomena may be located at different points along the showing- meaningNN continuum. This has clear implications for the domain of pragmatic principles or maxims, for it suggests that they are best seen as applying to the domain of intentional communication as a whole, rather than to the domain of meaningNN. Secondly, the wider question of how ‘natural’ communicative behaviours are to be accommodated within a pragmatic theory breaks down into several further, more specific, questions— How are natural phenomena interpreted? Do they all work in the same way? I argue that some natural behaviours have a signalling function: they are, in effect, natural codes. Such behaviours do not fit easily into Grice’s distinction between natural and non­ natural meaning, which suggests that it is not exhaustive, and that it does not provide the best starting point for constructing theories of communication. Pragmatics and the Showing-Saying Distinction Table of Contents Acknowledgments 5 Introduction 8 Chapter One 1. Natural and non-natural meaning 22 2. Showing and meaning 36 3. Deliberately shown natural behaviours 42 Chapter Two 1. Saying and meaning 1.0 The territory 49 1.1 Saying and truth-conditions 53 1.2 Underdeterminacy: bridging the gap 59 2. Saying 2.0 Grice’s wider programme 65 2.1 The four-step progression 74 2.2 Riddle of the strands 81 3. Implications 97 Chapter Three 1. Relevance theory and the showing-meaning^N continuum 104 2. Relevance theory and lexical pragmatics 116 3. Translational and non-translational activation of concepts 123 Chapter Four 1. Inteijections 133 2. Inteijections and concepts 138 3. Inteijections and‘response cries’ 149 4. Inteijections and meaning 153 5. Inteijections and procedures 160 6. Inteijections and language 164 7. The naturalness of inteijections 171 Chapter Five 1. Natural Codes 1.0 Codes, honeybee dances and smiles 180 1.1 Signs and signals 188 2. What do natural codes encode? 2.0 Sebeok’s codes and Peircean 194 2.1 The conceptualist approach to facial expression 201 2.2 Non-translational encoding II 209 Chapter Six 1. Mindreaders 219 2. Two ‘showing-meaning’ continua 233 3. A prince among primates 241 4. Myths 250 Bibliography 257 Acknowledgments I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to many people. I cannot hope to mention them all, and apologise to those I have left out. Thank you to my parents, Roy and Mary Wharton, and my brother Nick, for their love; Thank you to those few, close friends who have supported me in everything I have done—David Brown deserves special mention here, and Phil Harrison too, for happening to watch (and staying sober enough to remember) the Leonard Bernstein lecture that got him hooked on linguistics, and eventually led to my getting hooked too; Thank you to Katherine Bradley, for all her help in the past, and Peter Eastham for all his help in the present—special thanks also to Roma Loban, to whose memory this work is in part dedicated; Thank you to those teachers at school who recognised that education is (as Chomsky once said) 1% about methodology and 99% about inspiration—I single out Martin Herbert and Don Moffat here (though this is not to question their methodology); Thank you to everyone involved in the Department of Phonetics and Linguistics at University College London, where I have been studying and working for the past seven years—in particular I thank Neil Smith, whose book ‘The Twitter Machine’ reeled me in (having already been hooked). Thank you also to Nick Allott, Corinne Iten, Paula Rubio, Rosa Vega-Moreno and members of the Relevance Theory Reading Group for stimulating discussion, and Richard Horsey for sharing with me soft-shell crabs, crayfish popcorn and much discussion of cognitive linguistics in Santa Barbara, Summer 2001; Thank you to the UCL Graduate School who (somehow) deemed me worthy of investment, and provided me with the financial support that made it possible for me to continue my studies; Thank you to all the wonderful students I have taught at UCL; Thank you to Steve and Mary Skelly, who cut me my own set of keys to their beautiful West London house, and to Clive and Denise Smith, who generously provided me with office space in Lewes. I hope I will be forgiven if I also thank a man whose figure looms large over this thesis—a person I never met, but sometimes feel as if I have, and always feel as if I wish I had—Paul Grice. As well as all the above, I would like to single out five special people and reserve my biggest thanks for them. I have been uncommonly lucky that these five people have found (and find) it within themselves to think I am worthy of their guidance, fnendship and (in some cases) love. The first of these is my principal supervisor—Deirdre Wilson. To say she has been supportive over the past few years is to do no justice at all to everything she has done for me, both personally and professionally: on a personal level, she has helped me through some hard times, and shown patience, understanding and encouragement well beyond the call of duty; on a professional level, while some supervisors offer their students new roads down which to travel, Deirdre throws open the shutters to reveal whole new vistas, whole new landscapes to explore. I’ve really hardly begun my exploration, but I feel very lucky to have been given the chance. The second person is Robyn Carston, my second supervisor. I single Robyn out because as well as all the time, effort and patience she has invested in me during my time at UCL as both an undergraduate and postgraduate student, Robyn is a teacher with the kind of qualities I allude to above. Studying her undergraduate courses was never work, it was always pleasure; one course in particular in the Spring of 1998 was largely responsible for my decision to make ‘meaning’ the general direction I intended to pursue. And so to the final three: my wife Tamsin, and my daughters Xanthe and Zoë. I don’t think I’m easy to be with at the best of times, and during the past few years (some of which have not been the best of times) I’ve been plain impossible. Tam, thank you for your love and support, and for making home more than just a place I live. Xanthe and Zoë, I’m so lucky to be your daddy; and among all the wonderful things that await you in your lives, I hope that one day you too can experience the sheer, indulgent pleasure of being allowed, no encouraged, to think and to leam. (Just don’t leave it as late as I have.) Introduction ‘A wagging tongue ... proves to be only one part of a complex human act whose meaning must also be sought in the movement of the eyebrows and hand.’ (Goffman 1964, pp. 133-134) ‘We see it as a major challenge for any account of human communication to give a precise description and explanation of its vaguer effects. Distinguishing meaning from communication, accepting that something can be communicated without strictly speaking being meant by the communicator or the communicator’s behaviour, is a first essential step. [...] Once this step is taken, we believe that this framework we propose... can rise to this challenge.’ (Sperber and Wilson 1986/1995, pp. 57-58) Sentences are rarely uttered in a behavioural vacuum. We colour and flavour our speech with a variety of ‘natural’ vocal and facial gestures, which indicate our internal state by conveying attitudes to the propositions we express or information about our emotions or feelings. Though we may be aware of them, such behaviours are often beyond our conscious control: they are involuntary, spontaneous.
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