Free Enrichment or Hidden Indexicals?

Abstract

A current debate in semantics and pragmatics is whether all contextual effects on truth-conditional content can be traced to logical form, or ' unarticulated constituents ' can be supplied by the pragmatic process of free enrichment. In this paper, I defend the latter position. The main objection to this view is that free enrichment appears to overgenerate, not predicting where context cannot affect truth conditions, so that a systematic account is unlikely ( Stanley, 2002a ). I fi rst examine the semantic alternative proposed by Stanley and others, which assumes extensive hidden structure acting as a linguistic trigger for pragmatic processes, so that all truth-conditional effects of context turn out to be instances of saturation. I show that there are cases of optional pragmatic contributions to the proposition expressed that cannot plausibly be accounted for in this way, and that advocates of this approach will therefore also have to appeal to free enrichment. The fi nal section starts to address the question of how free enrichment is constrained: I argue that it involves only local development or adjustment of parts of logical form, any global developments being excluded by the requirement for the proposition expressed to provide an inferential warrant for the intended implications of the utterance.

Impossible interpretations, impossible demands

“…22 In particular, the communicative intentions a speaker forms are constrained by the speaker's beliefs about the grammar of her language, the literal-compositional semantic content of the sentences of her language, the cooperative norms governing conversation, 23 the 20 Free enrichment approaches to domain restriction abound in the literature. For a very small sampling, see Sperber and Wilson (1986/1995), Neale (2004, and Hall (2008). To keep matters nice and tidy, I have chosen to cast the discussion at a pretty general level.…”

A Defense of Free Enrichment from Stanley’s Binding Argument

“…To answer these questions is out of the scope of this paper. For suggestions of the answers to these questions, refer to Hall (2008) …”

“…Further, I argue that the CA in itself is problematic. In Section III, even if we think that the CA 3) Robyn Carston (e.g., 1988Carston (e.g., , 2002, Francois Recanati (e.g., 2004), Hall (2008) is derived from the principle of compositionality, the BA begs the question. In Section IV, after briefly showing that Chomskian syntactocentrism is empirically seriously challenged, I adopt and expand the point briefly made in Section 4.2 of Jung (2010) on how a bindable variable for the bound interpretation of the examples used in the BA is pragmatically introduced at a non-linguistic representation in Representational Modularity, an alternative picture of language faculty, whose relevant points are outlined.…”

“…2) For them, they are actually 'articulated,' contrary to the appearance. Against this, contextualists have argued that the constituents are provided by 'free' pragmatic enrichment processes: here, the meaning of 'free' is 1) These examples have been used by many theorists (Bach (1994), Hall (2008), Carston (2002), etc. ) In this paper, I will focus on the cases of 'unarticulated' constituents in fully sentential utterances.…”

Testimony, Pragmatics, and Plausible Deniability

“…Indeed, one of the 11 Not all theorists take saturation to be mandated by variables in the underlying logical form. Some theorists deny the existence of such variables, yet maintain that utterances of the sentences in question fail to express full propositions, arguing that audiences supply unarticulated constituents in order to fill in the gaps by appeal to the knowledge contexts (Carston (2002a), Hall (2008), Perry (2001), Recanati (2004)). 28 primary reasons for positing hidden variables in clauses such as 'it is raining' is that it looks as if there are longer sentences in which they have a bound reading.…”