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Fundamentals of pragmatics

As is well known, pragmatics, whose arrival Morris — who defined it as the study of
language use — heralded in the thirties, was born, twenty years later, with Austin’s works
on speech acts. This means, given that Morris was a philosopher, that pragmatics was
from its inception a domain at the hinge of philosophy of language and linguistics. The
founding act of Austin, inserting linguistic communication in the field of action rather than in
the field of the codic and vericonditional transmission of information, consisted in placing it
in the analysis and interpretation of action. This opened the way to a second pragmatic
revolution, due to Grice, who defined meaning as depending on the speaker’s intention,
rather than simply — as was still clearly the case in speech act theory — on linguistic code
and, what is more, as depending on the speaker’s ability to make recognizable by her
hearer her intention to produce, in that hearer, such and such an effect. This was
tantamount to linking interpretation with the capacity to attribute to others states of mind
(beliefs, intentions, etc.) or, in other words, with the possession by the interlocutors of a
theory of mind. Grice was recognized, not so much for his pioneering and still largely
topical work on meaning, but rather for his endeavour to base his view of linguistic
communication on a set of maxims of conversation underlying a principle of cooperation,
considered as the pillar of linguistic communication. Present tendencies in pragmatics rely
more on the Gricean approach, either to pursue or to contest it, than on speech act theory
as such, presumably in great part because the anti-vericonditionalist tendency of speech
acts pragmatics has lost ground in contemporary research on pragmatics, on semantics
and on the semantics-pragmatics interface. What is more, it is now admitted that language
is used to communicate and to act and that this does not come into contradiction with a
vericonditional approach.

Relevance theory is not a neo-Gricean theory, but a post-Gricean theory, in other


words, a theory which accepts some Gricean principles, but not all of them. Roughly
speaking, Relevance theory adopts (though it reformulates) the notion of non-natural
meaning (meaningNN), i.e. the idea according to which meaning crucially depends on the
speaker’s intention, in as much as it is recognized by his hearer. It substitutes to the
hypothesis of a principle of cooperation and a set of maxims of conversation underlying it a
single principle of relevance. However, the principle of relevance does not have to be
obeyed, rather it constitute a single principle embodied in human cognition. Finally, its
definition is cognitive: any stimulus is more relevant if its treatment is less costly and its
effects are more numerous. The principle of relevance is a principle of cognitive economy
which finds a specific realization in linguistic communication. Indeed, linguistic
communication relies on the fact that a speaker, by producing an utterance, gives ipso
facto to her hearer the guarantee of the optimal relevance of her utterance, i.e. the
guarantee that the effects yielded by the utterance will be sufficient to balance the efforts
necessary for its treatment. Additionally, Relevance theory borrows from Grice the
hypothesis of a double intentionality at the basis of human communication, by
distinguishing between an informative intention to transmit a given content and a
communicative intention to make manifest to the hearer that informative intention. From
that point of view, just as the Gricean view, Relevance theory supposes some kind of
theory of mind.

Thus, Relevance, just as speech acts theory did before it, locates pragmatics at the
hinge between linguistics and other domains, here not only philosophy of language, but
philosophy of mind and cognitive sciences as well. Yet Relevance theory is importantly
different from speech act theory in the kind of articulation it proposes with linguistics.
Indeed, speech acts theory, which remained largely conventionalist, located pragmatics in
the field of linguistics. By contrast, Relevance theory, which adopts the deeply Gricean
view of a linguistic under-determination of the speaker’s informative intention, conceives
the properly pragmatic (inferential) part of interpretation as a complementation of codic,
purely linguistic, interpretation and not as a part of this linguistic process. On that view, the
complete interpretation of an utterance is done through an inferential process which takes
as a premise the result of linguistic interpretation (i.e. the logical form of the utterance) and
some additional premises, drawn either from the interpretation of immediately preceeding
utterances, from the situation where communication takes place, or from the encyclopedic
informations attached to concepts in the logical form, the set of these premises being the
context against which the utterance is interpreted.

The Gricean view of communication is a HOT (Higher Order Thought) theory of


communication, as HOT theories consider that linguistic communication necessarily relies
on the capacity in interlocutors to form higher level thoughts such as [The speaker intends
that [the hearer recognizes that [the speaker has the intention that [the hearer believes
that [p]]]]]. From that point of view, Relevance theory is, all things being equal, faithful to
Grice. However, it has to be recognized that the precise articulation between
intersubjectivity and linguistic communication remains a central question.

The project Fundamentals of pragmatics concerns the defense of HOT theories as


well as the precise limits of the role of theory of mind in pre-linguistic communication and
in the lexical acquisition of children. It is also concerned with the interpretation of
implicatures. Additionally, speech acts theory raises problems which must be solved.
Finally, the latest developments of Relevance theory (the notion of ad hoc concept) has
consequences on the theoretical framework that Relevance theory proposes for pragmatic
investigations and for the question of the interface between semantics and pragmatics and
these consequences must be explicited and satisfactorily integrated in that theoretical
framework.

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