Towards naturalness scales of pragmatic complexity

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to handle pragmatic complexity within the framework of Natural Linguistics. Specifically it aims at building two naturalness scales of the complexity of pragmatic inferences based on the naturalness parameters of transparency-opacity and of biuniqueness-ambiguity, illustrated mainly with French examples. The scales are complementary: transparency-opacity deals with hierarchized meanings, biuniquenessambiguity with exclusive alternative meanings.Pragmatic complexity is intended here as a function of the number and types of inferences or inferential steps included in the description of an utterance meaning. It is defined quantitatively and qualitatively and converges with cognitive complexity. The scales distinguish phenomena that are to varying degrees opaque or ambiguous (indirect, elliptic or non-literal) according to whether there is flouting or violation of a Gricean maxim and how this takes place.The number of cotextual and/or contextual dimensions as well as variable cognitive operations, modes of reasoning and meaning relations are taken as measures of pragmatic complexity.The paper also discusses the relation between complexity and markedness. This issue reveals a conflict between the perspectives of speaker and hearer.

Scaling morphosemantic transparency/opacity: A corpus-linguistic and acquisitionist study of German diminutives

“…Dressler and Merlini Barbaresi 1994) are excluded because hardly amenable to automatic tools of corpus-linguistic research (for the possibility of pragmatic scaling cf. Kilani-Schoch et al 2011). We have claimed Merlini Barbaresi 1994, 2017;Merlini Barbaresi 2015) that the basic morphopragmatic meaning of diminutive formation is to characterize the speech situation and/or the speech-act as non-serious and fictional, whereas change of the morphosemantic meaning refers only to the word to which a diminutive suffix is attached.…”