As one of the series Logic, Argumentation & Reasoning, this volume presents the latest treatment to the boundary between semantics and pragmatics, comprising 19 contributions by scholars expert in the specific fields. The contributions are organized into three parts: Part I, ‘Drawing a line’ (Chapters 2–3), treats the boundary issue between ‘linguistic meaning’ and ‘meaning in context’ in a strictly theoretical manner; Part II, ‘Crossing borders’ (Chapters 4–13), delivers more rigorous discussions on similar issues under interdisciplinary theoretical framework; and Part III, ‘Exploring new territory’ (Chapters 14–18), investigates a series of linguistic phenomena that have scarcely been touched upon from the perspective of the semantics/pragmatics distinction.
Part I begins with Chapter 2, ‘Free pragmatic enrichment, expansion, saturation, completion: A view from linguistics’, by Ilse Depraetere & Raphael Salkie (henceforth D&S), who focus on a three-layer discussion of meaning, which is, in some sense, akin to Bach’s proposal of the distinction ‘what is said’, ‘impliciture’ and ‘implicature’, and their explication suggests that meaning in context is supposed to be inclusive within the semantic enterprise. As a response, Kent Bach, in Chapter 3, ‘Drawing more lines: Response to Depraetere and Salkie’, points out that D&S’s distinction, new as it is, is highly dependent upon empirical evidence (i.e. work on English modal verbs), to which more abstract computation should be added. Bach holds a narrower conception of semantic underspecification, in contrast to the view by D&S that ‘meaning of a semantically underspecified expression does not have to be made more specific’ (49). Apart from Bach’s rebuttal, D&S’s distinction seems to contradict the viewpoint held by Relevance theorists such as Carston (Reference Carston2002), who treat ‘meaning in context’ as pragmatic, which requires the hearer to be involved in inferential processes.
In Part II, experimental pragmatics is a good example of recent developments in post-Gricean pragmatics, which, nevertheless, triggers an intriguing question: Is psychological plausibility the defining criterion for any pragmatic theory? Chapter 4, ‘Is pragmatics about mind reading?’, by Siobhan Chapman, demonstrates that psycholinguistic methods are seemingly weak in analyzing some ‘meaning’ issues such as scalar implicature, and pose no real challenge to pragmatic theories – Grice’s in particular – concluding that more emphasis should be laid upon ‘more traditional, less empirical approaches’ (71). As a response, Anton Benz in Chapter 5, ‘Pragmatics between experiment and rationality: Response to Chapman’, opts to be in partial consensus with Chapman’s argument. What is different is that Benz prefers an ability to predict pragmatic behavior to be the decisive criterion for testing the effectiveness of a certain theory, which to some extent represents innate advantage over the experimental results. For now, it is too hasty to decide what the defining element for evaluating Grice’s theories is but what is true about Chapman’s and Benz’s contributions is that when carrying research, scholars are expected to attach prominence to the core and specific aims of certain hypotheses and to figuring out the most suitable methodology for testing them before decisions about formulating pragmatic theories.
Alison Hall, in Chapter 6, ‘Lexical pragmatics, explicature and ad hoc concepts’, applies Relevance theory to the semantic–pragmatic distinction at the word level. As a matter of fact, Hall’s viewpoint is compatible with that of other protagonists of lexical pragmatics in that the adjustment of lexical meanings is regulated by the information package associated with lexical concepts in humans’ long-term memory, which shall be encoded by the contextual cues, leading to the outcome known as an ad hoc concept. However, in Chapter 7, ‘A cognitive, usage-based view on lexical pragmatics: Response to Hall’, Maarten Lemmens points out a theoretical inconsistency in Hall’s account in that if the frequently used word meanings became stable in humans’ memory, they would not be labeled as ‘contentless files’. Along this line, Lemmens proposes to address the contextual modulation of lexical meanings via the usage-based cognitive model which treats ‘grammar as learned from, and (re)shaped by repeated usage events in which processes of abstraction and entrenchment play a major role’ (112). In fact, we see no intrinsic differentiation between the two approaches. What seems a more intriguing question to lexical pragmatics is whether the ad hoc concept is atomic or decompositional, which is still under heated debate.
In Chapter 8, ‘What’s pragmatics doing outside constructions?’, Bert Cappelle disapproves of the long-entrenched bias that constructions are seen as units of form and function mappings, arguing that pragmatic information is equally important in interpreting constructions. Critically examining other scholars’ work on the ‘Can you X’ construction and Grice’s standard pragmatic model, Cappelle suggests that interpretation of some constructions is highly context-dependent and pragmatics has already intruded in the conventional uses of constructions. This challenges the viewpoint that since semantics subsumes other information including pragmatic kind in analyzing constructions, there seems no need for a strict distinction between semantics and pragmatics. To resolve this dilemma, Cappelle proposes a ‘constructional template’, within which, at the sentential level, semantic information contributes to the propositional content while pragmatic information contributes to the contextual use of constructions, showing that ‘semantics and pragmatics can live peacefully side by side in a single construction’ (145). In order to complete Cappelle’s picture, Frank Liedtke, in Chapter 9, ‘Constructions, templates and pragmatics: Response to Cappelle’, proposes a ‘pragmatic template’, which follows the Wittgensteinian path, linking utterances to varieties of environments (or ‘clusters’) comprising the form of utterance, encyclopedic knowledge, lexical meaning, stereotypical properties of the reported situation, etc. So the inspiration for later research with respect to the analysis of constructions from the semantics–pragmatics interface might be to combine ‘constructional’ and ‘pragmatic’ templates into ‘a systematic account which establishes a comprehensive picture of our pragmatic competence’ (158).
Chapter 10 is by Susan Foster-Cohen & Tze Peng Wong, entitled ‘Early intervention at the interface: Semantic-pragmatic strategies for facilitating conversation with children with developmental disabilities’, aiming at improving challenged children’s pragmatic competence under the Relevance-theoretic framework, which is a good perspective for understanding those ‘rather unusual ways of speaking’ (179). As a response, Gerhard Schaden, in Chapter 11, ‘Appropriate pragmatic behavior: Response to Foster-Cohen and Wong’, is in consensus with their approach but suggests that more attention should be paid to pragmatic performance or language behavior because ‘competence as such does not guarantee that it translates into behavior’ (185). In other words, the ultimate aim of therapeutic intervention is to help children with language delays to refine their pragmatic behavior rather than to define their pragmatic ability. Coincidentally, Schaden’s observations match Benz’s (Chapter 5 in this volume) argument about pragmatic behavior, although the focus of Benz’s chapter is the assessment of the effectiveness of a theory.
As a response to François Recanati’s Moderate Relativism (Recanati Reference Recanati2007), Max Kölbel, in Chapter 12, ‘About concerns’, asserts that lekton, meaning ‘explicit contents of assertion’ in Greek, is not the equivalent of ‘what is said’ in Recanati’s previous works. In turn, François Recanati in Chapter 13, ‘About the lekton: Response to Kölbel’, confirms that ‘what is said’, affected by ‘modulation process’, is equivalent to the Austinian proposition, rather than to the lekton, which does not contain any ‘unarticulated constituent’. This contribution is not only a rebuttal of Kölbel’s worry, but also a further illustration of ‘what is said’ for the benefit of puzzled readers of Recanati’s Literal Meaning. In fact, Recanati treats lekton as ‘an extra level of content’, an intermediate between context-invariant meaning of the sentence and the content of the proposition. It should be noted that Kölbel’s ‘worry’ is justified since Recanati uses a different term in the book and lekton is generally credited with a different denotation. Recanati’s response, however, clarifies the relationship between the Greek term lekton and the more transparent ‘what is said’.
In Part III, assuming Clark & Gerrig’s ‘demonstration’ theory (Clark & Gerrig Reference Clark and Gerrig1990), Philippe De Brabanter, in Chapter 14, ‘Why quotation is not a semantic phenomenon, and why it calls for a pragmatic theory’, notes that ‘any sound theory of quotation must be a pragmatic one at heart, with semantics playing only an ancillary role’ (227), and that quotation is a non-linguistic communicative act and semantics is not designed to deal with it, thus proposing that Depiction Theory is instrumental in analyzing quotations empirically and in making a clear distinction between pure quotations and hybrid quotations. In the follow-up Chapter 15, ‘Demonstrating vs. depicting: Response to De Brabanter’, Raphael Salkie endorses the pragmatic nature of quotations, but argues that Clark & Gerrig’s finding is short of providing convincing evidence for various types of quotations, which obfuscates the distinction between ‘demonstration’ and ‘depiction’. Thus, Salkie poses that De Brabanter’s framework based on Clark & Gerrig’s hypothesis might require further clarification. In fact, in his subsequent conference paper (De Brabanter Reference De Brabanter2018), De Brabanter acknowledges the problem, confessing that ‘classifying hybrid quotation as another type of quotation, with its own semantics, is a mistake that has been made in most of the literature, including by me’.
Chapter 16, ‘The meaning of have and the semantics/pragmatics interface’, written by Ilse Depraetere, presents a corpus-aided analysis of the ways in which have is used in the pattern ‘modal verb+perfect infinitive’ and identifies the four meanings of have on the basis of empirical evidence. With respect to an intriguing interface study of have, Depraetere admits that ‘the different meanings of non-finite have are semantically differentiated and that the context helps to determine what meaning it communicates’ (286), and she builds her own hypothesis on Carston’s (Reference Carston2002) ‘saturation’, labeling the meaning of have as ‘lexically restricted saturation’, through which, with the aid of contextual elements, the specific meaning of have might be landed. However, we detect no real distinction between ‘lexically restricted saturation’ and Carston’s ‘saturation’, with the only hint found in footnote 29 that the former concerns a marker (lexical or grammatical) accompanying ‘a restricted range of meaning, one of which is instantiated in context’ (287).
Assuming John Searle’s classification of indirect requests, Nicolas Ruytenbeek, in Chapter 17, entitled ‘The comprehension of indirect requests: Previous work and future directions’, presents a critical review of the previous experimental approaches to the comprehension of Indirect Requests (IRs), which have demonstrated that interpretation of the direct meaning of IRs does not require extra processing time when compared with the direct counterparts. Neuro-imaging technology has been a great aid in recent experimental studies, whereby Ruytenbeek suggests that the context has a primary influence on reading times and response times for appropriate requests when participants are offered ‘story context’ (302) and the context affects the way the request is registered in humans’ long-term memory. Needless to say, this chapter presents a good case for experimental pragmatics.
In Chapter 18, ‘Prosody, procedures and pragmatics’, Kate Scott rejects the view that prosodic phenomena are purely semantic or purely natural, and considers prosody along Wilson & Wharton’s (Reference Wilson and Wharton2006) lines: prosodic phenomena – including linguistic signals, natural signals, and natural signs – are involved in ostensive-inferential communication and contribute to speakers’ intended meaning. Among various prosodic strategies, Scott puts forward that contrastive stress is procedural in function, whereby hearers are guided by a ‘natural highlighting approach’ (334) to search for an appropriate interpretation of the unexpected prosodic pattern. Questions still remain open, however, as to whether the audience shall follow the speaker’s prosodic cues to retrieve the intended meaning or whether hearers are able to interpret a wide range of contrastive stresses without any consideration of semantic effect.
In conclusion, this volume is a must-read book for any scholar who shows a keen interest in the issue of the boundary between semantics and pragmatics. And the format of the book is greatly impressive: in the majority of cases, response papers follow target papers, which reads like dialogues between scholars. Readers may be highly impressed by scholars’ earnest arguments as well as friendly and illuminating debates. Besides, this book is abundant in theoretical implications, particularly in new thriving areas such as clinical pragmatics and experimental pragmatics. We believe the volume would attract more and wider attention if it included debates on minimalism and contextualism or the question of how meaning is to be interpreted under default semantics. Nevertheless, this volume, without any doubt, provides readers with a general picture of the most recent studies around the semantics–pragmatics interface, shedding new light on future research.
