Abstract

This paper explores the prospect that grammatical expressions are propositionally whole and psychologically plausible, leading to the explanatory burden being placed on syntax rather than pragmatic processes, with the latter crucially bearing the feature of optionality. When supposedly unarticulated constituents are added, expressions which are propositionally distinct, and not simply more specific, arise. The ad hoc nature of a number of pragmatic processes carry with them the additional problem of effectively acting as barriers to implementing language in the brain. The advantages of an anti-lexicalist biolinguistic methodology are discussed, and a bi-phasal model of linguistic interpretation is proposed, Phasal Eliminativism, carved by syntactic phases and (optionally) enriched by a restricted number of pragmatic processes. In addition, it is shown that the syntactic operation of labeling (departing from standard Merge-centric evolutionary hypotheses) is responsible for a range of semantic and pragmatic phenomena, rendering core aspects of syntax and lexical pragmatics commensurable.

Highlights

  • The distinction between the uttered and the meant dates back at least to the 4th century rhetoricians Servius and Donatus (Horn 2004: 3)

  • Divisions between linguistic form and semantic content have been proposed from a number of perspectives, invoking unarticulated constituents and ‘completion processes’ such as free enrichment to derive and fully specify the supposedly underdetermined conceptual representations delivered by syntax (Carston 2007, 2009, 2012; Fodor 2008)

  • 8 As Hinzen (2014: 138) puts it: “If grammar is meaningful, and in a different sense of ‘meaning’ than we find in the lexicon, grammatical relations matter as an independent input to semantic interpretation, in a way that Agree or Merge, as abstractions from such meaningful relations, do not.”

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Summary

Introduction

The distinction between the uttered and the meant dates back at least to the 4th century rhetoricians Servius and Donatus (Horn 2004: 3). Divisions between linguistic form and semantic content have been proposed from a number of perspectives, invoking unarticulated constituents and ‘completion processes’ such as free enrichment to derive and fully specify the supposedly underdetermined conceptual representations delivered by syntax (Carston 2007, 2009, 2012; Fodor 2008). The status of unarticulated constituents in pragmatics is claimed to have a more much limited role in linguistic interpretation than standardly assumed, and what the computational system delivers is shown to be propositionally sufficient and psychologically plausible enough to eliminate certain pragmatic operations from the Conceptual-Intentional (CI) system (Chomsky 1995, 2014). Sed in relation to the syntax–pragmatics division of labour, and new directions are suggested for how the study of the computational system and pragmatic competence can embrace the plurality characteristic of the life sciences

Lexicocentrism and the Structure of CI
Polysemy
The Philosophy of Case
Lexical Semantics
Unarticulated Constituents and the Syntax-Semantics Interface
Phasal Eliminativism
Labeling Theory
Conclusion
Full Text
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