Ostension and the communicative function of natural language

Abstract

Linguistic pragmatics has traditionally focused on the ways in which speaker-intended meanings are contextually inferred in solid communicative contexts. In this paper, I explore the possibility that all linguistic utterances necessitate (at least some) pragmatic processing, even when they are not transparently embedded in a speaker's overt communicative behavior. Following a relevance-theoretic rationale, I argue that, being externalized objects with special characteristics which set them apart from their internalized mental counterparts – most notably the linguistic underdeterminacy of their propositional form, linguistic utterances automatically trigger the dedicated mental module that is responsible for pragmatic inference, because they would otherwise not have evolved to invariably pre-empt our attention, as they typically do. In this picture, external language's evolutionary advantage lies precisely in its unique ability to reveal meaning with an amount of precision that cannot be reached through the use of other types of stimuli, while at the same time avoiding unnecessary expressive prolixity. Viewed in this way, contextual inference becomes an underlying feature of the way in which external languages link up with our internalized linguistic capacity, in an approach that reinforces the possibility of incorporating it in the study of meaning over and above the remit of overt communication.