Metarepresentation in linguistic communication

Abstract

This paper is designed to illustrate and consider the relations between three types of metarepresentational ability used in verbal comprehension: the ability to metarepresent attributed thoughts, the ability to metarepresent attributed utterances, and the ability to metarepresent abstract, non-attributed representations (e.g. sentence types, utterance types, propositions). Aspects of these abilities have been separately considered in the literatures on "theory of mind", Gricean pragmatics and quotation. The aim of this paper is to show how the results of these separate strands of research might be integrated with an empirically plausible pragmatic theory. IntroductionSeveral strands of research on metarepresentation have a bearing on the study of linguistic communication. On the whole, there has been little interaction among them, and the possibility of integrating them with an empirically plausible pragmatic theory has not been much explored. This paper has two main aims: to illustrate the depth and variety of metarepresentational abilities deployed in linguistic communication, and to argue that a pragmatic account of these abilities can both benefit from and provide useful evidence for the study of more general metarepresentational abilities.A metarepresentation is a representation of a representation: a higher-order representation with a lower-order representation embedded within it. The different strands of research on metarepresentation that have a bearing on the study of linguistic communication vary in the type of metarepresentations involved and the use to which they are put. First, there is the philosophical and psychological literature on mindreading (or "theory of mind"), which deals with the ability to form thoughts about attributed thoughts

Interlocutors-Related and Hearer-Specific Causes of Misunderstanding: Processing Strategy, Confirmation Bias and Weak Vigilance

“…Communication succeeds if the hearer arrives at the intended message by forging an adequate mental representation -i.e. by means of metarepresentation (Wilson, 1999;Sperber, 2000) -of the speaker's informative intention. However, speakers are not sometimes fully conscious of all the thoughts or beliefs they entertain; they may have impressions or arrays of propositions that become manifest and may affect inferential processes (Sperber and Wilson, 2015: 135-138), so they cannot express them with precision.…”

Pragmatic failure, epistemic injustice and epistemic vigilance

“…On the one hand, the input produced by a seeming or real pragmatically incompetent speaker may achieve accidental relevance (Wilson, 1999) under another interpretation than the intended one. For instance, if an LF user belongs to a community of practice that assigns to compliments no value as solidarity-generating tokens, or does not perceive them to be expressions that suggest social proximity, concern for the complimentee, etc., he may perceive compliments in certain exchanges as flattering or insincere, among other possibilities.…”

“…On the other hand, the input produced by an incompetent LF speaker may achieve accidental irrelevance (Wilson, 1999) if the hearer cannot find in the database of his social categorisation system any assumptions linked to that input, so it does not yield any cognitive benefit that offsets the his effort. For instance, if an LF speaker does not know that small talk is not used by a target group in order to show a positive attitude towards other individuals or avoid the unpleasantness of silence (Laver, 1975;Padilla Cruz, 2004), her use of some small talk may have no social meaning for the hearers in that group and accidentally turn out irrelevant.…”

Towards an Alternative Relevance-Theoretic Approach to Interjections

“…One of the most significant contributions of relevance theory Wilson 1986, 1995;Sperber 2002, 2004) has been the analysis of exclamative sentences as cases of non-attributive metarepresentations of desirable thoughts, propositions or information in general Wilson 1986, 1995;Wilson 1999;Wilson and Sperber 1988). If we concede emotive/expressive interjections the status of exclamative sentences, and, in effect, they share with these suprasegmental or prosodic features such as tones and contours, then with an emotive/expressive interjectional utterance the speaker can metarepresent a non-verbalised thought or proposition that she expects and intends the hearer to entertain in a certain communicative situation.…”