LingLunch : Ira Noveck

Jeudi 04 Avril 2019, 12:00 to 13:00
Organisation: 
Pascal Amsili (LLF)
Lieu: 

LLF – Bât. ODG – 5e étage – Salle du conseil (533)

Ira Noveck (ISC-Marc Jeannerod, Lyon)
Can we isolate a role for pragmatics in conventional meanings and conventional representations?

Experimental pragmatic investigations have made headway into better appreciating the role of conversational implicatures, i.e. extralinguistic inferences, that listeners employ as they discern a speaker's meaning. Findings from those studies provide us with a relevant backdrop for investigating linguistic-pragmatic phenomena in which expressions themselves come ensconced with information having pragmatic import. The idea of making such a comparison comes in part from Grice, who distinguished between conversational implicature and conventional implicature, which refers to a class of expressions that include a pragmatic procedure but without altering an utterance's truth-conditional meaning (e.g., consider but, which provides contrast while being truth-functionally equivalent to and). However, before pursuing experiments on such phenomena, it also pays to consider more generally what is meant by convention.  These reflections serve as a prelude to some recent attempts with colleagues to experimentally isolate pragmatic features linked with conventional expressions (as well as with conventionalized representations).