Experimenting with Grice

Speranza

Commentary on F. Ervas & E. Gola, "The experimental turn in philosophical pragmatics", in "Philosophical perspectives on experimental pragmatics".

Grice was an experientialist.

He thought that 'experience', as understood by British empiricist philosophers, like he himself was, was the only tool a philosopher could use. Philosophical intuitions by Grice are ALWAYS based on 'experiences' and introspective intentional thinking that reflects his own unique considerations, which he hoped to (and succeeded in) sharing with his philosophical readers and friends.

Modern pragmatics has been defined as “philosophical” pragmatics, not only because its main representative author, Herbert Paul Grice (1913-1988) was a philosophers of ordinary language, but also because it has used philosophical "conceptual" analysis as the key method to give an explanation of the communicative features of language.

If we consider language in general as an object of analysis, on the one hand, psychological language models have focused on aspects that are studied through an empirical method: phonological and syntactic modules, models of acquisition and memorization or “storage” of lexis, biological foundations of language, etc.

On the other hand, philosophical models have mainly focused on the notion of
meaning and rhetorical-pragmatic aspects of verbal communication.

This gap,which has deep-rooted historical origins, still persists in theories of language
and in the approaches and methods of such theories, including pragmatics.
As some  stated the understanding of language in context has been studied by two
disciplines – pragmatics alla Grice and psycholinguistics – even though there has been
little communication between them.

However, in the last years, plenty of studies have brought classical pragmatic theories in front of the tribunal of experience to test their power of explanation and prediction.

The result has been the growth of a flourishing interdiscipline, called “Experimental
Pragmatics”, which claims that understanding an utterance requires access to
the speaker’s intention in specific contexts and uses experimental techniques
coming from psycholinguistics, cognitive science and psychology to highlight
the comprehension mechanisms of non-literal and figurative language.

The aim of this issue is to discuss the main empirical results of Experimental Pragmatics
and to explore its theoretical influence on “philosophical” pragmatics in its
most important research subjects, such as figures of speech, presuppositions,
translation, etc.

How and to what extent do experimental methods and
conceptual analysis interact in pragmatics?

Which consequences does this experimental turn bear upon theorizing in pragmatics?
Answering these questions is the aim of this special issue of
Humana.Mente, entitled “Philosophical Perspectives in Experimental
Pragmatics”.

The issue collects eight papers, two book reviews, one
conference review, and two interviews.

The contributions are tied by a
common thread, namely the view that philosophical pragmatics could and
should pay attention to the main findings coming from other disciplines, such
as psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics and cognitive science, to better
understand the possibilities as well as the limits of its main theoretical
proposals.

The eight essays introduce different ways in which data and
experiments can bridge the gap between concrete communicative behaviour
and pragmatic theories.

The range of experimental techniques presented in the
volume vary from neurolinguistic experiments to the analysis of language
corpora, from behavioural tests to the pathologies of communication, to show
the ways data can be collected and analysed in order to test, support or falsify
different theoretical perspectives.

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The essay “Experimental Investigations of the typology of Presupposition
Triggers” by C. Cummins, P. Amaral, and N.  Katsos, focuses on
presuppositions (Van der Sandt 1988) and the problem of distinguishing
backgrounded from foregrounded meanings (Shanon 1976), which influence
the interpretation of incoming information in a communicative encounter.

In
particular, the authors address the problem of potential differences between
presuppositions triggers, such as “continue”, “only” or “stop”. They discuss
alternative theories, also coming from the study of implicatures, and present
the results of a pilot study, a set of questions and answers containing
presuppositions triggers, to underpin the hypothesis according to which
lexical triggers entail their presupposed content and a negative answer to the
presupposed content should count as a negative answer to the question.

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S. Assimakopoulos, in his essay “On Encoded Lexical Meaning:
Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives”, considers the account of
meaning comprehension known as the “literal first hypothesis” (literal
meanings are processed first, easier and faster than figurative meanings), and
argues that the very psychological implausibility of this hypothesis is one of the
reason why Relevance Theory (Sperber & Wilson 1986/1995) shifts to the
account of ad hoc concept construction. A pragmatic process of lexical
adjustment, takes the linguistically encoded concept and generates an ad hoc
concept in the proposition the speaker intends to communicate, in order to
satisfy her expectations of relevance and make sense of the speaker’s utterance
(Wilson & Carston 2006). The mutual understanding does not necessarily
require that the speaker and listener share the same ad hoc concept: an
interpretive resemblance , i.e. a partial overlapping of logic and encyclopedic
knowledge of source and target concept, is sufficient (Wilson 2000). The
author argues that this view would have been incompatible with Fodorian
semantics, which instead had committed Relevance Theory with the “literal
first hypothesis”.

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A close look to the experimental data questioning the plausibility of the
“literal first hypothesis” is given in the paper by V. Bambini and
D. Resta, “Metaphor and experimental pragmatics: When theory meets
empirical investigation”.

In particular, the paper addresses an open problem in
non-literal language experimental literature, exploring the opposition between
the “literal-first hypothesis”, according to which the process of understanding
figurative language is indirect since it is necessarily dependent on a previous
literal interpretation (Janus & Bever, 1985) and the “direct access view”,
which does not imply the mandatory step of literal interpretation, supposed by
the “literal-first hypothesis” (Gibbs & Gerrig, 1989). The experimental
method taken into account to discuss these alternative hypotheses is functional
neuroimaging and the specific application field is the cognitive processes
involved in the comprehension of metaphors. The discussion concludes that
the process of metaphor understanding is far from being clear, but it shows that
the problem can be handled only from an experimental point of view. The
research on the cognitive architecture of mind-reading abilities can indeed
advance the research on metaphor, narrowing down the questions and allowing
the experimental paradigms to better address their theoretical key-points.
Advances in technology and artificial intelligence techniques represent
another way in which language use mechanisms come into play in the
redefinition of many questions which were previously the object of
philosophical disciplines.

**************************************************

The possibility to explore many linguistic data
applying algorithms and procedures allow scholars to discover regularities and
generalize relationships on texts, which represent (or can be considered a
mirror of) communicative behaviour. In the paper “Automated Translation
between lexicon and corpora” translations issues are examined, focusing, in
particular, on ways to solve representational and translation problems in
polysemy. The authors, E. Gola, N. Ruimy, S. Federici and
J. Wade, use tools coming from linguistics, metaphor and polysemy studies,
artificial intelligence and corpus analysis and review the state of the art of
Machine Translation (Hutchins 1986).

They present the computational
products they contributed to build up and proposed an integration between
lexical resources and corpus data throughout a machine learning technique.
Neuroimaging and behavioral evidence are instead discussed in Katarzyna
Bromberek-Dyzman’s paper, “Affective Twist in Irony Processing”, whose
main theme is irony. Verbal irony is one of the most difficult communicative
tasks and requires a very complex social ability. Irony adds a nuance of meaning
that changes the force of what is said and a full understanding of irony would
entail some appreciation of why speakers choose this communicative strategy
to express their thoughts. This question is even more urgent in case of
sarcasm, in which speakers are perceived as more angry and scornful (Leggitt
& Gibbs 2000), or as more verbally aggressive and offensive (Toplak & Katz
2000), or more insincere, impolite, non-instructional, and ambiguous (Katz,
Blasko & Kazmerski 2004) than speakers who pronounce a literal sentence. In
particular, the author focuses on the study of emotional meaning and she
argues that recognizing the ironic attitude is profoundly influenced by the
emotional load non-propositionally attached to the propositional contents.

*****************************************************

Other complex communicative phenomena that could be classified under
the umbrella-term “humour” are jokes and puns.

To puns, in particular, and to
the role of context in the comprehension process, is dedicated A.
Voltolini’s paper, “Puns for Contextualists”.

Voltolini discusses in detail
different sentences and cases of punny sentences from two points of view: the
contextualists (Recanati 2004) and the non-contextualists (Predelli 2005). He
argues in favour of the contextualist stand, showing that, in order to
understand a pun, it is not always necessary for the interpretive readings to
affect the truth-conditional level of what is said through such utterances. It is
indeed crucial to be able to grasp the speaker’s intention, which is a pragmatic
and contextual feature of meaning.

**********************************

The goal of experimental pragmatics is to
experimentally underpin or falsify this hypothesis, by establishing which
processes are in place among different possible ones, which range from the
supposition that there is an interpretation that removes the previous one, to
the judgment of “impossible” interpretations of the literal reading.
M. Mazzer’s paper, “The Text as a Context. Blurring the Boundaries
between Sentence and Discourse”, shown one more time, that sentence is not
enough to fully grasp a pragmatic phenomenon and thus a bigger unit of
analysis is needed: the text.

By reviewing data coming from recordings of
event-related brain potentials, Mazzer argues that cognitive mechanisms in
place in language understanding are better investigated when experimental
design focuses on discourse instead of sentence. Therefore, as widely
demonstrated by Josh Van Berkum and colleagues (1999, 2003, 2008,
2009), blurring the boundaries between sentence and discourse seems like a
mandatory step for meaning comprehension.


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I. Adornetti’s essa “Why Philosophical Pragmatics Needs Clinical
Pragmatics” shows the ways knowledge on communicative impairments
(Perkins 2007), such as aphasia and autism, can fruitfully inform the classical
theoretical models in pragmatics.

Classical theories in pragmatics – as those
elaborated by Grice (1989) – do not fulfill the cognitive
assumption necessary to explain the effective communicative behaviour. An
answer comes from elsewhere which
try to be consistent with the data on the actual functioning of the mind. Lastly,
Ines Adornetti highlights that another important area, which remains
underestimated in philosophical pragmatics, should assume a more central role
through clinical pragmatics: the coherence of discourse.
The “book reviews” section is dedicated to the two main experimental
methods discussed in this volume: psycholinguistics and corpus linguistics.
The first book review, written by Roberta Cocco, is indeed a report and a
discussion of Bruno Bara, Cognitive Pragmatics . The Mental Processes of
Communication (MIT press: Cambridge, MA, 2010). In the reviewed book,
Bruno Bara joins his own theoretical proposal on the cognitive mechanisms of
behaviour and conversational games with psycholinguistic data coming from
his own personal research. The second book review, written by Giuliano
Vivanet, is instead an introduction to the main themes and techniques covered
by corpus linguistics, presented in the recent published guide edited by Anne
O'Keeffe, Michael McCarthy, The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics
(New York: Routledge, 2012). The computational analysis of corpora is used
to highlight the linguistic mechanisms involved at various levels of language
production: syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, translation, etc.

*******************************************

The “interviews”section is mainly dedicated to two figures of speech, irony
and metaphor, through a discussion of the theories proposed by two influential
scholars, both employing experimental methods coming, respectively from
psycholinguistics and from artificial intelligence.

Rachel Giora (Tel Aviv
University, Israel) and Bipin Indurkhya (International Institute of Information
Technology, Hyderabad, India, AGH University of Science and Technology,
Cracow, Poland).

Rachel Giora discusses irony and other pragmatic
phenomena, such as idioms and jokes, in the light of her Graded Salience
Hypothesis (Giora 2003), a general view of language understanding that
postulates the activation of salient meaning in the first stage of language
processing, regardless of context.

Bipin Indurkhya, discusses his work on the
problem of metaphor, which escapes formalized methods and might be better
handled from an experimental point of view.

The interactionist theory of
metaphor he proposed (Indurkhya 1992) relies on the interaction between the
cognitive agent and her physical and cultural environment stands as the basic
principle also used for related problems, such as categorization, analogical
reasoning and creativity.

Finally, the conference report written by Tiziana Giudice (Metaphor and
Communication, international conference organised by the Italian Society for
Metaphor Studies and held in Cagliari in May 12-14, 2011) is also dedicated
to the issue of metaphor in relation to different communication fields. Indeed,
the main sections of the conference were concerned with i) the linguistic
aspects of metaphors as an intercultural communication process; ii) the
conceptual and imaginistic aspects of metaphors as an intercultural
communication process; iii) the use of metaphors in political communications
as a particularly relevant case study; and iv) metaphors in other forms of
communication, as for instance in education, arts and media.

Giudice presents
the contributions of the various fields, by underlying the reasons why metaphor
is a complex cognitive and communicative phenomenon, at the cross-road of
semantics and pragmatics, and why it can be considered a good litmus test to
experimentally investigate general hypotheses and theories.

The papers collected in this volume show that the tension between
philosophical and experimental pragmatics seems to be the dialectic motor of
the evolution of pragmatics itself. On the one hand, data, taken alone, do not
provide enough information to allow to produce a theoretically adequate
pragmatics. On the other hand, without seriously taking into account the
bottom-up constraints from neuroscience, corpora data, embodied
communicative situations, we will not be able to go far in inquiring the
pragmatic side of language and communication.

REFERENCES

Austin, J. L. (1962).
How to do things with words, edited by J. O. Urmson and M. Sbisa.
Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Austin, J. L. The Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford.

Gibbs, R. W., & Gerrig, R. J. (1989).
How context makes metaphor comprehension seem special.
Metaphor and Symbolic Activity , 4, 145–158.

Giora, R. (2003). On our Mind: Salience, Context, and Figurative language . New
York: Oxford University Press.

Grice H. P. (1938). Negation. The Grice Papers, UC/Berkeley, Bancroft Library.
Grice, H. P. (1989). Studies in the way of words . Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press.

Horn, L. R. A brief history of negation.

Hutchins, J. (1986). Machine Translation: Past, Present, Future. Chichester : Ellis
Horwood Series in Computers and their Applications.

Indurkhya, B. (1992). Metaphor and Cognition. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer
Academic Publishers.

Janus, R. A., & Bever, T. G. (1985). Processing of metaphoric language: An
investigation of the three-stage model of metaphor comprehension. Journal of
Psycholinguistic Research, 14, 473–487.
Katz A.N., Blasko D.G. & Kazmerski V.A. (2004). Saying What You Don't Mean:
Social Influences on Sarcastic Language Processing. Current Directions in
Psychological Science October, 13, 186–189.
Leggitt, J.S. & Gibbs, R.W. (2000). Emotional reactions to verbal irony. Discourse
Processes, 29, 1–24.
Noveck, I., & Sperber, D. (2004) (Eds.). Experimental Pragmatics, New York:
Pallagrave.
Perkins, M. (2007). Pragmatic Impairment. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Predelli, S. (2005). Contexts. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Recanati, F. (2004). Literal Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
X Humana.Mente – Issue 23 – December 2012
Shanon, B. (1976). On the two kinds of presuppositions in natural language.
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Speranza -- Join the Grice Club.
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Table of Contents


ESSAYS:

Francesca Erabas, Elisabetta Gola
"The experimental turn in philosophical pragmatics" -- cfr. Rorty, "The linguistic TURN in philosophy"

Chris Cummins, Patricia Amaral, Napoleon Katsos,
"Experimental Investigations of the Typology of Presupposition Triggers"
cfr. Grice, "Presupposition and Conversational Implicature".

Stavros Assimakopoulos
"On Encoded Lexical Meaning: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives".

Valentina Bambini, Donatella Resta
"Metaphor and Experimental Pragmatics: When Theory Meets Empirical Investigation."
Grice's only example of metaphor/disimplicature: "You're the cream in my coffee".

Elisabetta Gola, Stefano Federici, Nilda Ruimy, John Wade
"Automated Translation Between Lexicon and Corpora"

Katarzyna Bromberek-Dyzman
"Affective Twist in Irony Processing"
cfr. Grice on irony in "Logic and Conversation" and "Further Notes on Logic and Conversation". The Greek root to the concept of English 'irony'.

Alberto Voltolini
"Puns for Contextualists"

Marzia Mazzer
"The Text as a Context. Blurring the Boundaries Between Sentence
and Discourse"

Ines Adornetti
"Why Philosophical Pragmatics Needs Clinical Pragmatics" 

(We thank the referees for all the support given to the publication of this volume, whose main idea
came from a research project funded by the European Science Foundation’s EURO-XPRAG Program, and the authors of the contributions, for their willingness to improve their own work and the overall volume. We are particularly grateful to Amaury Fourtet, Thomas Moraine, Jacopo Romoli, Massimo Sangoi and Silvano Zipoli Caiani for all their suggestions and help to improve the final version of the special issue)