Experimental Pragmatics: a Gricean turn in the study of language

doi:10.1016/j.tics.2008.07.009

Trends in Cognitive Sciences

Volume 12, Issue 11, November 2008, Pages 425-431

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2008.07.009 Get rights and content

Discerning the meaning of an utterance requires not only mastering grammar and knowing the meanings of words but also understanding the communicative (i.e. pragmatic) features of language. Although it has been an ever present aspect of linguistic analyses and discussions, it is only over the last ten years or so that cognitive scientists have been investigating – in a concerted fashion – the pragmatic features of language experimentally. We begin by highlighting Paul Grice’s contributions to ordinary language philosophy and show how it has led to this active area of experimental investigation. We then focus on two exemplary phenomena – ‘scalar inference’ and ‘reference resolution’ – before considering other topics that fit into the paradigm known as ‘experimental pragmatics’.

Section snippets

What does ‘mean’ mean?

Grice’s [2] initial contribution was to propose a novel analysis of meaning. He distinguished ‘sentence meaning’ (the semantic properties of a sentence assigned to it by the grammar) and ‘speaker’s meaning’ (what the speaker actually intended to communicate by uttering a sentence). Retrieving a sentence meaning from an actual utterance is a matter of decoding that sentence, that is, of discovering the semantic properties that the grammar pairs to its acoustic form. Retrieving the speaker’s

Scales and Inference

John Stuart Mill noted (as cited in Ref. [8]), that utterances such as ‘I saw some of your children today’ are often interpreted as ‘I didn’t see all of your children today’ because if the speaker meant the more informative ‘all’, he would have said so. Although intuitive, this interpretation raises an inconsistency because the semantic meaning of ‘some’ is, in fact, compatible with ‘all’. (To appreciate this, consider a teacher who coyly tells her students ‘some of you passed the exam’ when in

Definite Reference

In referring to an object, interpretation is usually semantically underdetermined. For example, when an interlocutor says ‘I used to work for that paper’ (while pointing to the latest edition of a newspaper), the addressee’s interpretation relies heavily on identifying the speaker’s intention. ‘Reference’ is, thus, another natural area of utterance interpretation that fits into a Gricean framework and one that has inspired much experimental work. One constraint advanced to determine the

What is at stake?

Taken together, these two phenomena reveal what factors are in play when discussing utterance interpretation, which are ‘code’ (the words used), the (non-demonstrative) inferences they engender in context and a role for intentions (theory of mind). In the case of scalars, the theoretical tension has focused on the relative importance of code and inference, in which some researchers aim to include narrowing into the code (e.g. by making the distinction based on downward entailment) and others

Acknowledgements

We thank Dan Sperber, Edmundo Kronmuller and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

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