Radical Pragmatics

Linguistics 233, Stanford University

Winter 2000, Wednesday's 11AM-1PM, 460-127B
Instructor: David Beaver

Tentative Schedule - will vary according to interests of seminar participants.
1/10	Introduction: Neo-Gricean Pragmatics Handout
1/17	Levinson (2000) Chapter 1, also Horn (1984), Sadock (1984) Handout
1/23	Levinson (2000) Chapter 2
1/30	Levinson (2000) Chapter 3
2/7	Levinson (2000) Chapters 4, 5
2/14	Traugott 2001
2/21	Horn 1989 (Also 1998, 1999)
2/28	Blutner/Jaeger, Dekker/van Rooy
3/7	Blocking (Kiparsky, Bauer, Hoeksema, Briscoe/Coepstake...)
3/14	Parikh, Merin, van Rooy, Game and Decision Theory

What is Radical Pragmatics?

This course concerns approaches to linguistic theory in which pragmatics, rather than being an after-thought or waste basket, plays center stage. For example, we will consider pragmartic explanations of such varied phenomena as syntactic binding conditions, lexical blocking, grammaticalization and semantic scope.

During the first half of the course we will read through Steve Levinson's new book Presumptive Meanings: The Theory of Generalized Conversational Implicature, which builds especially on work of Grice and Horn. At this point there are two directions I would like to take, and the extent to which I pursue each will depend on the interests of the participants. First we will follow up the Levinson reading with a look at some further empirical studies, including diachronic work. I am particularly interested in looking at the phenomena of blocking and of lexical semantic change. Second, we will look at a number of exciting developments in the formalization of pragmatics, most notably in in Bidirectional Optimality Theory, but also in Game and Decision Theory. In the closing weeks of the course we will consider to what extent accounts like that of Levinson's and Horn's can now be formalized using these new approaches.

The course will be structured around weekly readings, with those taking the course for credit expected to do at least one presentation, and to write a radically pragmatic final paper.

Duck

There is an iterated duck behind this page. I did a metacrawler image search for "pragmatics", and this duck is the only thing that was returned.


Principal Reading Steve Levinson, Presumptive Meanings: The Theory of Generalized Conversational Implicature, MIT Press, 2000, 450pp Background on Pragmatics Paul Grice, Studies in the Way of Words, Harvard University Press, 1989 Steve Levinson, Pragmatics, Cambridge University Press, 1983, 420pp Jeff Verscheuren, Understanding Pragmatics, Arnold, 1999, 295pp Some further possible readings Jay Atlas and Steve Levinson, It-clefts, Informativeness, and Logical Form: Radical Pragmatics, in Cole (ed.) 1981 Reinhard Blutner, Some Aspects of Optimality in Natural Language Interprutation, in: Helen de Hoop & Henriette de Swart (eds.) Papers on Optimality Theoretic Semantics. Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS, December 1999, pp 1-21. Also Journal of Semantics, to appear Reinhard Blutner and Torgrim Solstad, Dimensional designation: A case study in Lexical Pragmatics (with Torgrim Solstad). Ms Reinhard Blutner and Gerhard Jaeger, Against lexical decomposition in syntax, to appear in Proceedings of IATL 15 Reinhard Blutner and Gerhard Jaeger, Competition and interpretation: The German adverbs of repetition, MS Peter Cole, Syntax and Semantics 9: Pragmatics, Academic Press, 1978 Peter Cole, Radical Pragmatics, Academic Press, 1981 Paul Dekker and Rob van Rooy, Bi-directional optimality theory: an application of game theory, Journal of Semantics, to appear Gerhard Jaeger, Some notes on the formal properties of bidirectional Optimality Theory, MS. Larry Horn, A Natural History of Negation, Chicago University Press, 1989 (especially chapters 3, 4, 5) Larry Horn, Toward a Taxonomy for Pragmatic Inference: Q-based and R-based Implicature, in Schriffin(ed.) 1984, pp. 11-42 Larry Horn,, Conditionals 'R' Us: From IF to IFF, Handout, Stanford University May 27, 1998 Larry Horn, Parasitic Reference vs. R-Based Narrowing: Lexical Pragmatics Meets He-Man, Handout, LSA, Chicago 1999 James McCawley, Conversational Implicature and the Lexicon, in Cole (ed.) 1978 Arthur Merin, "Information, Relevance, and Social Decisionmaking, in Laurence S. Moss et al. (eds.) Logic, Language, and Computation, Vol. 2, Stanford CA: CSLI Publications (distr. Cambridge University Press), 1999, pp. 179-221. Rob van Rooy, Decision Problems in Pragmatics, Gotalog 2000 Rob van Rooy, Bi-directional OT: Q and I, or R and E?, Handout, Utrecht OT workshop 2000 Prashant Parikh, A game-theoretic account of implicature. In Proceedings of the Conference on Theoretical Aspects Prashant Parikh, The Use of Language, ms. of Reasoning about Knowledge, pages 85--93. Morgan Kaufman, August 1992 Jerry Sadock, Whither Radical Pragmatics, in Schriffin (ed.), 1984, pp. 139-149 Deborah Schriffin (ed.), Meaning, Form and Use in Context: Linguistic Applications, Georgetown University Press, 1984 Elizabeth Traugott, [article in preparation for Horn & Ward "The Handbook of Pragmatics"]