Gricean cross-examinations

by JLS
for the GC

An abstract:

"On the availability of ‘literal’ meaning: Evidence from courtroom interaction
by M.-B. M. Hansen,
University of Manchester.

Journal of Pragmatics, vol. 40.

"It has traditionally been assumed that the

distinction between ‘literal’ vs context-induced meaning

is relevant to drawing the semantics/pragmatics boundary. In recent

years, however, some scholars have argued that what is ‘said’ or

‘communicated explicitly’, as opposed to what is ‘meant’ or

‘communicated implicitly’, cannot be determined bottom-up, from

the linguistic input supplemented by disambiguation and

referential saturation of variables alone, and that putatively

‘literal’ meanings are not even consciously available to

language users (e.g. Gibbs and Moise, 1997; Recanati, 2001, 2004; [...]).

Others have already taken issue with these claims (e.g. Bach, 2001,

2005; Cappelen and Lepore, 2005a,b; García-Carpintero, 2001, 2006;

Martínez-Manrique and Vicente, 2004; Taylor, 2001), but it

is striking that none of the participants in this

otherwise fascinating debate appear to have looked even briefly

at data obtained by means other than introspection. The hypothesis

of the present paper is that literal meanings are, in fact,

available to ‘ordinary’ (i.e. non-linguistically trained) language

users, and that this is empirically attestable. I show that, even if

literal meanings may standardly be ignored in everyday cooperative

conversation whenever hearers have reason to assume that

speakers actually mean something more elaborate, they are

fairly regularly exploited in other, more marked, types of settings. One

such setting is courtroom interaction, from which the primary

data for this paper are drawn.

Keywords:

Literal meaning; Explicitness; Speaker's meaning; Implicature; Semantic/pragmatics interface; Courtroom interaction

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