Abstract

There has been recent interest in the idea that speakers who appear to be having a verbal dispute may in fact be engaged in a metalinguistic negotiation: they are communicating information about how they believe an expression should be used. For example, individuals involved in a dispute about whether a racehorse is an athlete might be communicating their diverging views about how ‘athlete’ should be used. While many have argued that metalinguistic negotiation is a pervasive feature of philosophical and everyday discourse, the literature currently lacks an account of this phenomenon that can be situated within a ‘mainstream’ view of communication. I propose an independently motivated account where individuals reconstruct metalinguistic propositions by means of a pragmatic, Gricean reasoning process.

Highlights

  • Given the increasing interest in metalinguistic negotiation as a pervasive feature of discourse, it is surprising that the existing literature lacks a developed account situated within a ‘mainstream’ linguistic theory

  • I described my account of metalinguistic disputes, including metalinguistic negotiations

  • My account meets all three adequacy conditions. It explains how metalinguistic negotiation occurs at a context despite the fact that no metalinguistic content is semantically expressed by tokened sentences at that context

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Summary

Introduction

Disputes sometimes seem verbal, which roughly means that the participants ‘agree on the relevant facts about a domain of concern and just disagree about the language used to describe that domain’ (Chalmers 2011, p. 515). The following is a candidate for a verbal dispute, where A (a speaker of American English) and B (a speaker of British English) agree that the bowl contains what they would respectively describe as ‘chips’ and ‘crisps’:. 15–16) take (2-a) and (2-b) to be metalinguistic negotiations because participants in the dispute ‘agree on what the chili tastes like’ and ‘mutually know all of the facts about [the racehorse] Secretariat’s speed, strength, etc., and what races, awards, medals he won, etc.’, but disagree about how the words ‘spicy’ and ‘athlete’ should be used.

Existing accounts
Preliminaries for an account
Propositional accounts
Independent motivations and expression focus
Some of the most significant work in the vast literature on focus includes
An account of metalinguistic disputes
Examples
18 Here is an example: A
Conclusion
Findings
Compliance with ethical standards
Full Text
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