Believe it or not, I am acquainted with Gricean implicature, etc., but neglected this unfortunate use of the term "non-logical inference." I apologize. I suppose I could not take it seriously enough as significantly different at base. It distances social rules of implicature from logical operations. For me they are one and the same, just based on different assumptions. Just because we broaden the basis of analysis, many think to justify the introduction of a new theory. Grice's maxims help us to broaden our consideration of assumptions to facts about the concepts and acts of communication itself. When we move to other modes of communication, we bring language and its grammar with us. When we move about in language analysis, I think we necessarily bring logic with us, even if we choose to call it something else.
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From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of STAHLKE, HERBERT F
Sent: Tuesday, December 08, 2009 9:00 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Arial's Pragmatics and Grammar
"Non-systematic" might work, but "non-logical inference" is the term of art used to refer to the use of Gricean implicature, Relevance Theory, etc. It is not that these are not in a broad sense logical but rather that they don't involve formal logical operations but rather social rules of implicature. We assume, for example, that a conversational partner's contribution is relevant, truthful, and does not say more or less than needs be said. When any of Grice's maxims are violated, that violation made lead to other inferences. If the interlocutor says more than necessary, what does the extra information lead me to infer about what the speaker means?
Herb
Herbert F. W. Stahlke, Ph.D.
Emeritus Professor of English
Ball State University
Muncie, IN 47306
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From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Bruce Despain [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: December 8, 2009 10:26 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Arial's Pragmatics and Grammar
I am uneasy with the seeming contradiction in my mind about what Herb said relating to how pragmatics come up against grammar. I'm thinking that when he says, "non-logical inference," he must mean "non-systematic." This is the idea that so many of these relationships can be established by fiat and seem fully arbitrary. That the inference being used is not logical does not seem to cohere. I think that it might be more accurate to say that some of the assumptions are not explicit, but certainly, given the background and experience of the communicants, the inference itself would have to be in accord with the system of logic or communication would not take place, would it? Pragmatics should point out what the common assumptions of the communicants might be. Of course, some may rather throw out logic in trying to understand communication without trying to replace it with some other system or theory. However, its utility as a tool in mathematics, I believe, is unassailable. Still, there are certainly many mathematical objects available with which to build a system, one that would remedy the apparent lack of a systematic relationship.
-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of STAHLKE, HERBERT F
Sent: Monday, December 07, 2009 9:20 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Arial's Pragmatics and Grammar
Here's a little more on grammar and pragmatics, a mix of Ariel's and my take on it
Grammar is encoded information, e.g., morphology, word order, constituent structure, argument structure, topic/comment structure, etc. Pragmatics is non-logical inference drawn from this encoded information together with the lexical content it's encoded around. One of the assumptions we tend to make when talking about grammar is that it is stable, static, even though we know that linguistic structure is inherently variable. For example, The progressive passive construction, "My house is being painted" has been around for maybe a century and a half, a bit more perhaps. Up into the early 19th c. that sentence would have had the form "My house is painting." Actually, the present participle passive construction is still around, alternating with the infinitival passive, in constructions like "My car needs washing/needs to be washed/needs washed." The last of those alternatives is widely found in American Midlands English, the first two in Northern. Grammar encodes pragmatic inference through the process of grammaticalization. Semi-modals as in "need to go/need not go/don't need to go" are another instance of such grammaticalization. Sometimes encoding can be sufficiently complex that college students have trouble figuring out the meaning. I've found this to be more generally the case with poetry than with prose, but comparative structures, negative scope problems and quantifier scope problems can all be difficult to interpret. "Call me a taxi" represents a problem of Preferred Argument Structure. Our expected interpretation has "me" as IO. The joke hinges on its punch line, which treats "me" as DO and "a taxi" as Object Complement. With an ambiguous verb like "call" we tend to default to one rather than the other of the possible interpretations.
Languages differ widely as to what they encode and how much they encode. Some native American languages encode evidentiality, that is, how the speaker has come to know the information and how confident he is of it. Bantu languages encode argument structure by means of derivational suffixes on the verb. West African languages do so by using several verbs in a single clause, each one encoding an argument. English encodes number on count nouns but not on mass nouns and encodes gender on pronouns and a small number of nouns. Yoruba doesn't encode number or gender at all. English used to encode both on nouns, adjectives, and determiners, like German still does, but stopped doing so between the 12th and 16th cc. African-American English encodes a habitual aspect, using invariant "be" plus a present participle. Standard English does not. Children learn what to encode and how to encode it as they acquire their first language, and what they learn will differ slightly from what their parents learned.
What this all leads to is the conclusion that grammatical encoding is not fixed. There is at any time an area of variation in which pragmatic inference may or may not get encoded grammatically, and it is this variability that is at the core of grammatical change. One of the drivers of encoding is avoidance of ambiguity, but even that motivation varies with genre: headlines encode much less than the text of the article does and are therefore much more subject to ambiguity in their interpretation. We don't send telegrams much anymore, but I suspect that text messaging and maybe tweets also encode less and are more subject to ambiguity as well. (Since I don't do either, I'm not sure of that, but some of the texts I've seen suggest that.)
One of the areas of disagreement between functionalists and formalists is the question of how much of grammar encodes pragmatics and whether some or any of grammar does anything but encode pragmatics. I tend to think there are areas of grammar that are relatively non-pragmatic. Zero plurals in English might be such a case, plurals like "deer," "fish," "sheep," and "antelope." Not all animals (cow/cows, bean/beans), not even all wild animals (lion/lions, whale/whales) use the zero plural. However, since speakers have a tendency to extend the zero plural to other wild animals that don't historically take it, like "moose," I suspect that there is some pragmatic encoding going on even here. I think speakers want grammar to make some sort of pragmatic sense, and so the language changes accordingly. Are there areas of grammar that are strictly formal and encode no pragmatics? I think there may be, but I'm not fully convinced of it.
Herb
Herbert F. W. Stahlke, Ph.D.
Emeritus Professor of English
Ball State University
Muncie, IN 47306
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