Non-truth-conditional meaning and relevance theory: procedural meaning (or: how we can solve the Problem of Unfounded Connectivity

and Non-Truth-Conditional Meaning in one fell swoop)

Recall that relevance theory (and other neo-Gricean and post-Gricean theories) assume that there is a large gap between what is encoded and what RT calls the explicature. As such, pragmatic competence is necessary to go from what the speaker encodes in her utterance to what she means to communicate (both explicitly and implicitly). The

guided comprehension heuristic (Wilson & Sperber 1993: 9). Grice assumed that very limited pragmatic enrichment was necessary to derive a truth-evaluable proposition, but that this proposition was very close to the conventional meaning of the words uttered, i.e., that semantic decoding provides most of the input for a truth-evaluable proposition. The only way for Grice to maintain a truth-conditional semantics was to banish non-truth-conditional meaning to the realm of implicatures – if but, for instance, were to contribute to ‘what is said’, then ‘what is said’ would have to be at least partly described in terms of non-truth-conditional meaning (Iten 2005: 53-54). As we have seen, however, but is in fact part of ‘what is said’ – not only because it passes the IQ test, but because of their status in a Gricean framework. If conventional implicatures are indeed conventional, they are derived through linguistic decoding, and hence rely on an arbitrary connection between signifiant and signifié (Rosales Sequeiros 2012: 65-66). As such, they cannot be implicatures – implicatures are derived through pragmatic principles (on a Gricean account, the Cooperative Principle and the maxims which follow from it) and are hence calculable. ‘Conventional implicatures’, then, simply cannot be implicatures.

As such, non-truth-conditional meaning ensures that approaches (such as Grice’s) which conflate conventional meaning (semantics proper) and truth conditions collapse. Non-truth-conditional meaning is, pace Grice, part of ‘what is said’, and hence, an object of study not for pragmatics, but for semantics (Rosales Sequeiros 2012: 66). For relevance theory (and other post-Gricean pragmatic theories), this is, of course, no problem: RT assumes that widespread pragmatic enrichment is necessary to derive a truth-evaluable proposition. The output of linguistic decoding processes (the logical form) serves as input for inferential (that is, pragmatic) processes which enrich it; the output of those processes leads to a truth-evaluable proposition. As such, there is no direct link between semantics and truth conditions. RT argues that the object of interest for semantics is not whether meaning is truth-conditional or not, but what kind of information is encoded by different words from a cognitive point of view (Blakemore 2002: 81).

This is where we get into questions of how the human brain works. We have already discussed the notion of modularity, but these questions are, in a way, even more complex – they deal with how we think in the most basic sense. RT has embraced the computational representational theory of mind (see Fodor 1990, cited in Iten (2005: 70)), according to which humans mentally represent concepts as ‘words’ which form ‘sentences’ in a language of thought (so-called ‘Mentalese’).63 _{‘Concepts’ in this sense are}

“atomic mental representations” which can be manipulated through computational

rules – computational rules can operate on single concepts, or on conceptual representations which already combine multiple concepts (Iten 2005: 70; Rouchota 1998: 32). On the RT view, words can encode information about concepts, but also about the computational rules which the hearer should employ in manipulating these concepts (Wilson & Sperber 1993: 2). The RT view of semantics is radically cognitive, and distinguishes the conventional meanings of words not according to whether they encode truth-conditional or non-truth-conditional meaning, but according to whether they contribute to the decoding process (as conceptual representations) or to the inferential processes which operate on those conceptual representations (as computational rules) (Blakemore 2002: 78).

Most words, of course, encode representational information – these are conceptual items. As Iten (2005: 71) puts it, they are “the building blocks of the logical form”, that is, the ‘raw’ material which has to be developed into a fully propositional explicature. These include words such as car, eat, short and violently. Some words, however, encode information about how to manipulate these conceptual representations – they present semantic constraints, in Blakemore’s (1987) sense, on the derivation of explicatures and implicatures by guiding “pragmatic processes which are essential in deriving the intended interpretation” (Carston 2016: 159; Bezuidenhout 2004: 2-3). These are procedural items.64 _{Originally (see Blakemore 1987) procedural meaning was taken to be}

a cognitively-oriented synonym of non-truth-conditional meaning, and it was applied exclusively to DMs such as but and so (Blakemore 2002: 4). Additionally, Blakemore (1987) assumed that procedural items only constrained the derivation of implicatures. This initial construal of procedurality can be understood as flowing directly from Blakemore’s aim back then: providing a cognitively founded reanalysis of Gricean conventional implicatures (Blakemore 2002: 79).

Let’s take our earlier example of but again:

(40) He penned that 80 years ago, but those comments could apply perfectly today. According to Blakemore (1987, 1989), but does not encode a higher-order speech act, or a proposition with CONTRAST as a constituent. Blakemore argues that, instead, but encodes a constraint on the derivation of a contextual implicature: on the basis of the first clause (‘He penned that 80 years ago’), the expectation (i.e., implicature) might arise that what was penned, is not relevant anymore. The clause introduced by but would then negate that implication, and, as such, introduce a denial of an expectation

64 _{The conceptual-procedural distinction has also been sketched in terms of a distinction between}

raised in the previous clause (see also Blakemore 2002: 95).65 _{In this way, but would}

encode a procedure (a denial of expectation) which operates on contextual implications. Different DMs would encode different procedures:

(43) a. Peter’s not stupid; so he can find his own way home.

b. Peter’s not stupid; after all, he can find his own way home. (from Wilson & Sperber 1993: 11)

As Wilson & Sperber (ibid.) point out, so and after all would activate different procedures here. In (43a), so indicates that the first clause will provide support for the conclusion in the second clause; in (43b), after all indicates that the second clause will provide support for the conclusion in the first clause.

Both of Blakemore’s (1987) assumptions (that procedural meaning is non-truth- conditional, and that procedural meaning encodes constraints on the derivation of implicatures) have now been rejected in favor of a broader view of procedural meaning. Wilson & Sperber (1993) demonstrated that procedural meaning need not be non-truth- conditional, and that conceptual meaning need not be truth-conditional – in other words, they showed that the conceptual/procedural distinction in semantics was not just a reimagining of the truth-conditional/non-truth-conditional distinction. Illocutionary adverbials such as confidentially and frankly, for instance, are non-truth- conditional but conceptual (Wilson & Sperber 1993: 17-19).66 _{Within the RT framework,}

they contribute to so-called ‘higher-level explicatures’ – explicatures can be embedded under higher-level descriptions (such as speech act or propositional attitude descriptions) (Wilson & Sperber 1993: 5). Let’s say I say the following to my mother:

(44) I got rear-ended on the highway tonight.

This can be embedded into a higher-level explicature as follows: (44’) Samuel says that he got rear-ended on the highway tonight. But let’s say I said (45):

65 _{Blakemore (1989: 35) emphasizes that a sentence like (40) does not communicate two separate propositions,}

but a single conjoined proposition. The first clause provides contextual assumptions which affect “the context for the interpretation of the second” in a way which is constrained by but – that is, the first clause raises an implication which provides a context for but to operate on.

66 _{See Ifantidou (2001: 103-110) on the non-truth-conditionality of these adverbials – in short, they fail Cohen’s}

(45) Unfortunately, I got rear-ended on the highway tonight. Then the higher-level explicature would go as follows:

(45’) Samuel regards it as unfortunate that he got rear-ended on the highway tonight (see Ifantidou 2001: 153).

In this case, the adverbial unfortunately encodes the information that I regard the proposition (‘I got rear-ended on the highway tonight’) as unfortunate. It is not part of the proposition, and it is non-truth-conditional, but it is conceptual, for reasons we will discuss shortly (Ifantidou (2001: 113-115) and Wilson & Sperber (1993: 17-19); see also Zakowski (2014b) for Ancient Greek ἦ που as a constraint on higher-level explicatures in Ancient Greek).67

On the other hand, certain linguistic items are procedural yet truth-conditional. Pronouns (Wilson & Sperber 1993: 20) are one example here – the personal pronoun ‘I’, for instance, only points to a certain ‘search space’ (as Wilson & Sperber (1993) put it) in which a specific referent has to be located. It guides comprehension, but does not encode information about its specific referent (Carston 2016: 159; see Wilson & Sperber (1993: 20) for discussion). The same is true for demonstratives (Scott 2013; Zakowski 2014c) – they are procedural and non-truth-conditional as well.68 _{Note that, on this}

view, a pronoun such as ‘I’ would encode a constraint on the explicature – reference is resolved as part of the derivation of explicatures (Wilson & Sperber 1993: 21). As such, Blakemore’s (1987) second assumption, that procedurality deals only with implicatures, cannot be true either.

Today, the notion of procedural meaning has been extended even further. Interjections (ugh, oops), prosody and even unambiguously conceptual items themselves have been analysed as encoding (at least some) procedural meaning (see Carston 2016: 159; 161-165 for discussion). I will limit myself here to discussing DMs, of which many have been analyzed as carrying procedural meaning (see e.g. Blakemore 2002; Iten 2005). As stated in the introductory paragraph to §2.3, it should be underlined that not

67 _{But see Fraser (2006b) for an alternative view – he argues that illocutionary adverbials encode both}

conceptual and procedural meaning.

68 _{De Saussure (2011: 65) notes that a pronoun such as ‘she’ would encode both conceptual and procedural}

information: it would encode a procedure such as “find the appropriate female person”, which includes the concept ‘female person’. As such, “the procedural information” would probably take “the conceptual information as a parameter”. This is a thorny issue, which is related to the question of how we should conceptualize procedural meaning. I get into this problem later on, but a discussion of the procedurality of pronouns (such as it is) awaits further research.

all DMs are automatically procedural – ἦ που, for instance, is probably conceptual (Zakowski 2014b). It is important to keep in mind that I use ‘DM’ here to refer to the subset of DMs which are procedural (I’ll return to this point at the end of this section).

Blakemore (2002) is a fundamental reanalysis of Blakemore (1987) and, as such, of the procedural meaning which DMs can encode – on this analysis, they do not (only) encode constraints on implicatures, but can be used more broadly. DMs can also, for instance, point the hearer to the contextual assumptions which are necessary for deriving the speaker-intended interpretation. These contextual assumptions can be relevant for the recovery of the explicature or the implicature, but the crucial point is that the speaker assumes that they will not be readily available unless the hearer is guided towards them by the addition of a DM (Rouchota 1998: 41). This view is now broadly accepted within RT semantics (see Jucker (1993) and Innes (2010) on well; Curcó (2004) on Spanish siempre; Schourup (2011) on now). DMs can also be used to indicate that a communicated assumption is mutually manifest (see Hansen (1997) on French donc; also Blass (2000); Lay Vivien (2006)), or that it is not (Vaskó & Fretheim (1997) on Norwegian altså); that it is a reformulation (e.g. Sasamoto (2008) on Japanese dakara, Dedaic (2010) on Croatian dakle, or Unger (2012) on Kurdish ka); that it is an attributive metarepresentation (i.e., a representation of a thought or utterance which is attributed to someone else; see e.g. Blass (1989, 1990) on Sissala rɛ́); and so on. In all of these cases, these DMs have been analyzed as carrying procedural meaning. I’ll give three examples here:

(46) A: ‘That man speaks extremely good English.’ B: ‘Well, he is American.’ (from Jucker 1993: 442)

(47) Donc, pour revenir à ce disait la dame précédemment, il est difficile d’envisager une solution à brève échéance. (from Hansen 1997: 164; cited from Zénone 1981: 118)

‘So, to return to what the lady said before, it’s difficult to see a solution in the short term.’

(48) Mary: ‘Whose gig did you go to last night?’ Peter: ‘Black Rebel Motorcycle Club.’

Mary: ‘Who?’

Peter: ‘Dakara, the band we saw at Leeds Festival last year.’ (from Sasamoto 2008: 128) In (46), Jucker (1993: 442) argues that B uses ‘well’ to “renegotiate” the contextual assumptions A and B are using. A might assume that ‘that man’’s command of English is surprising or remarkable; this does not square with B’s assumptions about the man, and this induces the use of well – the contextual assumptions available to B are different from those available to A, and ‘well’ indicates that B assumes that a shift in context is necessary (id.: 451). In (47), ‘donc’, according to Hansen (1997: 170), encodes the

procedure ‘assume that the information which follows is mutually manifest’ – as the speaker here points back explicitly to what has already been mentioned, she uses ‘donc’ to indicate that what she is about to say, is already mutually manifest. In (48), finally, ‘dakara’ encodes the procedure ‘take the following information to be a faithful representation of the previous assumption’ (see Sasamoto 2008: 152) – in other words, it introduces a reformulation, or a representation of another assumption. In this case, Mary doesn’t know who Peter is referring to, so Peter activates some contextual assumptions related to the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club in the hopes that this will help Mary identify the band. The band is reformulated as ‘the band we saw at Leeds Festival last year’.

Procedural meaning, then, encodes instructions on how to manipulate conceptual representations in the inferential processes associated with utterance interpretation (see Wilson 2016: 10). The question now becomes, of course, (a) how we should conceptualize procedural meaning as something distinct from conceptual meaning; and (b) how we can test whether a given linguistic item is conceptual or procedural. The two questions are related, but I will deal with them in turn to keep things clear.

How does procedural meaning differ from conceptual meaning in how it is stored