Pragmatics and Logical Form

Abstract

Robyn Carston and I, along with many others, share a general methodological position which I call ‘Truth-Conditional Pragmatics’ (TCP). TCP is the view that the effects of context on truth-conditional content need not be traceable to the linguistic material in the uttered sentence. Some effects of context on truth-conditional content come from the linguistic material (for example, from context-sensitive words or morphemes which trigger the search for contextual values), but others result from ‘top-down’ pragmatic processes that take place not because the linguistic material demands it, but because the utterance’s content is not faithfully or wholly encoded in the sentence spoken, the meaning of which requires adjustment or elaboration in order to determine an admissible content for the utterance.KeywordsLogical FormSemantic InterpretationLanguage SystemScalar ImplicatureSyntactic RepresentationThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.