Theoretical issues in pragmatics and discourse analysis
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The document discusses theoretical issues in pragmatics and discourse analysis from both cognitive and social perspectives. It notes key differences in how each views the nature and study of discourse - as static wholes shaped by social forces versus dynamic processes of information exchange. While acknowledging valid insights from both, it argues for a mechanistic "discourse as process" approach that models understanding as an incremental, parallel adjustment of representations over time. Coherence is seen as an emergent property of thought rather than an inherent feature of language.
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Theoretical issues in pragmatics and discourse analysis
- 1. Theoretical issues in pragmatics and discourse analysis Louis de Saussure University of Neuchâtel CADAAD, Norwich, June 30th, 2006
- 2. A day at the IPrA conference Gricean people (Semanticists, philosophers of meaning, formalists, cogniticians, computationalists…) Austinian people (social psychologists, discourse analysts, interactionists …)
- 9. What dogmas do they have? What do they think? Cognitive approaches, are a regression (because of Fodorian solipsism)! Meaning simply doesn’t exist! Does even reality exist? Syntax is dictatorial! Logical formalization won’t take us anywhere Discourse is not a scientific category! Discourses do not exist, only utterances do! They don’t explain meaning. And coherence, what’s that??
- 15. In short: the relevance-theoretic schema LF Utterance (stimulus) PF and Other Explicatures Implicatures Contextual information (referents, elliptic contents recovery…) Contextual information (implicit premisses)
- 24. Is there a discursive level of representations? Implicatures Explicatures b (unarticulated explicit.) explicatures 1 (referents) Logical / syntactic form Inter- pretation Discursive representations / Global intention… ?
- 27. Towards an interface of pragma-semantics with DA? UTTERANCE MEANING Syntactic-semantic processing Inferential pragmatic processing Linguistic And Contextual Data Meaningful discursive elements RHETORICAL ORGANISATION PSYCHO-SOCIAL ASPECTS ETC. Discursive analysis
- 28. Conclusive remarks Thank you for your attention
Editor's Notes
- DP describes causal relations at stake in NL understanding. Note on social determinism: the idea of social determinism, or determinism from psychosocial factors, boils down to this proposition: the environment – social context and situation of speech – determines – and is shaped at the same time by – speech acts obeing rituals. Yet things can be taken exactly the other way round: the environment is a set of information, including conventional, that are managed together with other kinds of information – factual information, logical context, etc., in the process of speaking. In this idea, there is no such thing as social determinism. There is a more complex process going on, that can be explained at the level of utterance interpretation, but that doesn’t allow for social determinism, something which simply doesn’t exist. Certainly, this being said, environment, and things like representations of the listener’s expectations, are strong constraints on speech production; although they maybe better explained through notions like folk psychology, empathy or theory of mind, that is, our natural cognitive ability to represent the other’s mental states, assumptions and intentions.
- Les approches DP sont mécanistes, car elles capturent / identifient des relations causales sans faire appel à une psyché individuelle, ou collective, qui déterminerait tel ou tel comportement humain. N’implique pas que ces facteurs psychologiques n’interviennent jamais. Mais supposition que ces facteurs psychologiques, éventuellement psychanalytiques, échappent à la science, car non satisfaction de principes épistémologiques (position de Wittgenstein à propos de l’Interprétation des rêves de Freud).
- Compatibility theory (compatibility of determinism with human free will)
- RST & autres: various possible and equiprobable analysis of a given text. The analyst uses he’s intuition. In predictive models: the intuition is wiped off the explanation
- Noter que pour certains, le discours implique une intentionalité globale (Reboul & Moeschler) Interprétation non = à analyse exégétique.
- Je ne parle pas de la transduction Get DEDUCTIVELY the inferential result. Say that I’m going to get back to the problem of discourse
- Is this a timeline? Recanati’s answer would be yes (although his architecture is different)
- Les exemples suivent
- Why am I talking about all this linguistic stuff? Because I will now wonder whether there is a discursive level of representations, besides the syntactic, semantics and pragmatic ones, so that we can jump from utterance understanding to discourse understanding and then possibly influence and belief changes.
- Because the set of representations determining the policy or set of actions is or is not coherent The most we can say is that discourses are documentation about the possible coherence of the underlining thoughts The set of assumptions provided by the interpretive procedure is or is not coherent; when it is, then a full interpretation can be postulated, given the effort / effect balance is satisfied.
- Discourse takes utterances as intuitively interpreted, with a full-fledged meaning. But let me just present a quick list of examples in order to show that meaning is a complicated thing even at the levell of what the speaker says. Understanding utterances is making contextually plausible hypotheses about what the speaker means, what he intends to convey as an information. Most of the time this process is easy and transparent, since the speaker actually wants openly and cooperatively the hearer to get the information. The context provides the basis for meaning enrichment. Often, though, information is not overtly communicated and problems of cooperation in communication arise. Tautologies can be a means to communicate non-cooperatively.
- Après la dia We all think that one of the most prominent problem of discourses is that discourses aim and often succed at modyfing the representations, the beliefs, of the target audience. In order to analyze influence through discourse, we certainly need to have a theory that helps with influence through utterance understanding in context.
- AD: Two utterances make a discourse when they are produced by the general laws of discourse as a specific subtype of human activity. CP: Two utterances make a discourse when the first one is a contect that provides more relevance for the second one. This latter assumption allows for thinking that psychosocially, for example praxeologically, defective discourses are in fact defective at the level of the potential of contextualisation an utterance should offer for the next ones.
- The epistemological problems remain, certainly, Top-down / bottom-up But are we talking about the same thing? If we tackle other scientific objects, can we use other tools? What’s the value of such a scheme? No answer. But One thing is sure: the discoveries of the ones are the heuristic material of the others.