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Reporting, Dialogue, and the Role of Grammar

  • Chapter
Indirect Reports and Pragmatics

Part of the book series: Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology ((PEPRPHPS,volume 5))

Abstract

There is a lot of debate in the literature as to whether metalinguistic, echoing or metarepresentational phenomena require semantic or pragmatic explanations or, perhaps the widest consensus, a mixture of the two. Recently some attention has been paid on whether grammatical models, i.e., models that define syntactic-semantic mappings (see e.g. Potts 2007; Ginzburg and Cooper 2014; Maier 2014), can offer a more substantial contribution in answering this question. In this chapter, we argue that they can, but not under standard assumptions as to what kind of mechanism “syntax” is and what the differentiation is between grammatical and pragmatic processes. Like Ginzburg and Cooper (2014) we take natural languages (NLs) to be primarily means of social engagement and on this basis we believe that various mechanisms that have been employed in the analysis of conversation can be extended to account for metarepresentational phenomena, which, as stressed in the Bakhtinian literature, demonstrate how dialogic interaction can be embedded within a single clause. However, we take such phenomena as a case study to show that a model adequate for accounting for the whole range of metalinguistic data, as well as for their interaction with other dialogue phenomena, has to depart from some standard assumptions in grammatical theorising: (a) we have to abandon the view of syntax as a separate representational level for strings of words, and (b) we need to incorporate in the grammar formalism various aspects of psycholinguistic accounts of NL-processing, like the intrinsic incrementality-predictivity of parsing/production, and a realistic modelling of the context as information states that record or invoke utterance events and their modal and spatiotemporal coordinates.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    We use the term discourse as neutral between reporting language (written or spoken) and thought.

  2. 2.

    We cite throughout the publications where the relevant formal details can be found, and also see Gregoromichelaki (to appear).

  3. 3.

    The language of the epsilon calculus is combined with the lambda calculus in order to deal with quantification, see Kempson et al (2001); Gregoromichelaki (2006, 2011).

  4. 4.

    Two analyses for names currently co-exist in DS: (a) as constants resulting from the contextual enrichment of metavariables introduced by names, and (b) as iota-terms. We remain agnostic on this as it does not affect the issues we discuss here.

  5. 5.

    The differentiation context vs. content fields is for convenience of display only, it does not signify any substantial claim regarding any qualitative differentiation among the parameters handled.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, King’s College London, London, UK

    Eleni Gregoromichelaki & Ruth Kempson

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  1. Eleni Gregoromichelaki
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Correspondence to Eleni Gregoromichelaki .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Cognitive Sciences, University of Messina, Messina, Italy

    Alessandro Capone

  2. Department of Linguistics Department, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Research Institute for Linguistics, Budapest, Hungary

    Ferenc Kiefer

  3. Department of Philosophy, University of Palermo, Palermo, Italy

    Franco Lo Piparo

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Gregoromichelaki, E., Kempson, R. (2016). Reporting, Dialogue, and the Role of Grammar. In: Capone, A., Kiefer, F., Lo Piparo, F. (eds) Indirect Reports and Pragmatics. Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21395-8_7

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