Relevance and the semantics/pragmatics distinction

Relevance theory is known as a theory of pragmatics, and, indeed, Sperber and Wilson regard their book as a result of their different interests in the study of contextual factors in verbal communication – in Wilson's case, an interest which began with her work on presuppositions (Wilson 1975), and in Sperber's, an interest in rhetoric and symbolism (Sperber 1975); (see Sperber and Wilson 1995: vi). However, as we have seen, it is impossible to have a view of pragmatics without having a view of semantics, or vice versa, and it is not surprising that the relevance theoretic approach to pragmatics comes with a view of semantics attached. My aim in this chapter is not to give a complete survey of relevance theory, but to outline those aspects which underlie the account of non-truth conditional meaning which I shall be giving in the next chapter. This will mean that the focus will be on the relevance theoretic view of the semantics/pragmatics distinction, the distinction between explicit and implicit content and the relationship between linguistic form and relevance which derives, on the one hand, from the relevance theoretic commitment to a computational view of the mind, and on the other, from the principle which, according to relevance theory, constrains the inferences involved in understanding utterances.

Usually, pragmatics is defined after semantics. That is, its definition is thought of as being a consequence of the way one defines semantics.

Introduction

If a VP merges with an infinitival suffix instead of a finite Tense, the resulting infinitival phrase can assume the role of a complement or adjunct in a matrix clause. If the subject of the infinitive is controlled by an argument of the matrix predicate, it is represented by a caseless PRO. If, on the other hand, the matrix predicate has no argument, and therefore cannot provide an adequate controller, the infinitive has a case-marked subject represented by a lexical noun phrase or a pro(noun), and it also bears an agreement marker. Infinitival phrases – whether agreeing or non-agreeing – can merge with the same types of operators that can extend a finite VP into a predicate phrase, and they can also combine with topic phrases into a TopP. Or, alternatively, both types of infinitives can be unified with their matrix V into a complex predicate.

Subject and object control constructions

Subject and object control verbs

A number of Hungarian verbs, among them those listed under (1a, b), are marked in the lexicon as selecting an infinitival phrase with a phonologically empty PRO subject controlled by the matrix subject.

Genealogy, areal distribution

Hungarian is a Finno-Ugric language. The Finno-Ugric languages and the practically extinct Samoyed languages of Siberia constitute the Uralic language family. Within the Finno-Ugric family, Hungarian belongs to the Ugric branch, together with Mansy, or Vogul, and Khanty, or Ostyak, spoken by a few thousand people in western Siberia. The family also has:

• a Finnic branch, including Finnish (5 million speakers) and Estonian (1 million speakers);

• a Sami or Lappish branch (35 000 speakers); as well as

• a Mordvin branch, consisting of Erzya (500 000 speakers) and Moksha (250 000 speakers);

• a Mari or Cheremis branch (550 000 speakers); and

• a Permi branch, consisting of Udmurt or Votyak (500 000 speakers) and Komi or Zuryen (350 000 speakers).

Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian are state languages; Sami is spoken in northern Norway, Sweden and Finland, whereas the Mordvin, Mari, and Permi languages are spoken in the European territories of Russia.

Hungarian is spoken in Central Europe. It is the state language of Hungary, but the area where it is a native language also extends to the neighboring countries. In Hungary it has 10 million speakers, in Romania 2 million speakers, in Slovakia 700 000 speakers, in Yugoslavia 300 000 speakers, in Ukraine 150 000 speakers. There is also a Hungarian minority in Croatia, Slovenia, and Austria, and a considerable diaspora in Western Europe, North America, South America, Israel, and Australia.

The inner structures of the various types of verb complements resemble the inner structure of the extended verb phrase in their outlines: they consist of a lexical phrase embedded in morphosyntactic projections and operator projections. The noun phrase, too, will be analyzed as a complex containing a lexical kernel (the NP proper) subsumed by operator projections extending it into an indefinite numeral phrase (NumP) and/or a definite determiner phrase (DP). The full range of morphosyntactic projections that play a role in the noun phrase will become evident in the analysis of the possessive construction.

The basic syntactic layers of the noun phrase

The minimal noun projection appearing in the Hungarian sentence is a bare singular case-marked noun; for example:

1. (1) a. János könyvet olvas.

2. John book-ACC reads

3. ‘John is book-reading.’

4. b. János moziba ment.

5. John cinema-to went

6. ‘John went to (the) cinema.’

In the unmarked case such nouns function as verb modifiers. In Section 3.6 verb modifiers were shown to display both phrase-like and head-like properties: they move into Spec, AspP like a phrase, and merge with the V in Asp like a head, which suggests that they are both minimal and maximal, i.e., they are phrases containing merely a head.

Having assigned to the Hungarian sentence a binary predication structure, and having examined the properties of the logical subject of predication, or topic, we turn to the analysis of the predicate phrase. Categorially the predicate is a VP merged with morphosyntactic elements such as tense, mood, and agreement, and either extended into an aspectual phrase, or embedded in operator projections such as a focus phrase, a distributive quantifier phrase, and/or a negative phrase. The subject of this chapter is the minimal predicate, consisting of a VP, merged with morphosyntactic heads, and extended into an AspP, but not involving a focus, a distributive quantifier, or negation.

Argument order in the VP

The lexical core of the predicate of the Hungarian sentence is a verb phrase. It is assumed to be verb initial, with the arguments following the verb in an arbitrary order – as illustrated in (1). (What motivated the assumption of a verb-initial VP in the late 1970s was that the set of possible permutations of a verb and its complements could be derived most economically from a V-initial base. Later theoretical considerations – concerning the direction of theta-role assignment and Case assignment in Universal Grammar – also confirmed this view.)

Introduction

In first language acquisition research, it has long been recognized that quite lengthy strings, which would correspond to several adult words, can be treated as a single unit by the young child (e.g., Bolinger 1975:100; Crystal 1997:244; Plunkett 1993:44). In this chapter and the next, an attempt will be made to reconcile a number of observations made over the last three decades or more about these strings, and to accommodate them within a model of the child's language use and linguistic development. Peters (1983) characterizes the child's encounter with spoken language as follows:

It is that process of ‘capturing pieces’ that lies at the heart of understanding the role of formulaic sequences in first language acquisition. That children do store and use complex strings before mastering their internal makeup is generally agreed. However, researchers have varied in their views about how significant they are. Brown (1973) acknowledges that strings like What's that in the very young child are not a product of a grammar, but, rather, “must be generated by some simpler mechanism either as fixed routines or as simple frames in which a set of words could rotate” (p. 181).