Pragmatic Inferencing

• Speaker's role:
  • Ease of articulation, reduction of the signal especially in rapid speech (going to --> gonna, etc.)
  • Signal signification comes from routinization (idiomatization) of expressions.
  • Speakers use what they find easiest to use, rather than creating new stuff.
  • Idiomatization leads to reduction and simplification of the signal; compacting, obliterating boundaries, reduction of redundancy.
  • However, there is also a motivation to enhance expressivity which leads to innovation, deroutinization, finding new ways to say old things. It improves informativeness and
  • Allows speaker to convey attitudes about stuff, including the speech situation.
  • Also allows speaker to keep the hearer interested since new info is more interesting than old.
  • Innovation is itself economical if it reuses old material in new ways:
  • Use of gonna is more substantive (longer) than 'll and
  • more speaker based (attitude, perspective) in its transformation of going to (a location).

I.e. what we have here is a competition between motivations.

• Such claims are hard to test, can't be empirically proven
• They smack of "mentalism"
• They contradict American focus on understanding language out of context (i.e. abstractly, at the sentence level)
• they focus on purposes (functions)to which language is put rather than
• passive capacity for language, i.e.
• (functionalism vs. formalism)

In other words, American linguistics mistrusts functionalism and doesn't see language as "in flux" and "always changing" which is what grammaticalization is focusing on, crucially. H&T admit that

• languages aren't goal-oriented,
• but their users may be
• language doesn't have a will (or goals, or motives) of its own (e.g. linguistic imperialism, pace Philippson)
• but language is a tool of its users, who do have wills, goals and purposes.
• Perhaps goal-orientedness of change can be replaced by change as a result of goals (informativeness, attitude-expression, etc.) of speakers, a focus on cognitive processes (making sense, understanding language), i.e.
• communicative strategies means strategies used by speakers and hearers in producing and understanding the flow of speech as it is created, which draw on general cognitive processes.

• Semantic: (Bybee and Pagliuca 1985)
• Pragmatic: (Traugott and Koenig)
• Motivated by metaphorical processes (Claudi and Heine; Sweetser; Schiffman)
• Associative or metonymic as well as metaphorical processes(Traugott and Koenig, Heine, Claudi and Hünnemeyer)

Position taken by H&T: meaning changes and cognitive strategies that motivate them are crucially linked to expressivity. Changes are initially pragmatic and associative, arising in flow of speech. Later, as grammaticalization proceeds, meaning loss, "bleaching" occurs, but even then older meanings "hang in there " residually and constrain or affect the newer "emptier" or more generalized and abstract (because grammaticalized) meanings.

Can you pass the salt?

• literal meaning: Are you able to pass the salt?
• and its illocutionary force (pragmatic meaning):

  Please pass the salt.

Or, as some have put it:

• Semantics is concerned with meanings relatively stable out of context; arbitrary, analyzable in terms of logical conditions of truth circumstances.
• Pragmatics: concerned with beliefs and inferences about the nature of assumptions made by participants, and the purposes for which utterances are used in context of communicative language use. Concerned with hearers' indirect meaning, beyond what is said, what is relevant to discourse, what may be constrained by "culture". Such beliefs often thought to be cognitively "natural" (not learned, not arbitrary), not subject to truth conditions. ("They are the way things are")

In contemplating the role of meaning change and its involvement in the mechanisms and motivations for grammatical change, we have to talk about different elements or aspects of meaning. But as H&T say

(4.2.2) "there is little agreement ...[on how] to characterize the relationship between the various senses of a form. People don't even always agree on the idea that forms that 'sound the same' but have different meanings should be called homonymy or polysemy .

H&T declare themselves in favor of a theory of semantics that

allows for polysemy wherever some common semantic factor ... is present ... . From this perspective, any two or more conceptually related senses with the same form are regarded as one item.

1. Polysemy vs. Homonymy

   Polysemy has to do with the fact that a particular lexical item may have multiple meanings, which may have something in common with each other, such as the "will" example on pg. 70. Idea is that 'will' is polysemous, and the 3 meanings have something in common.

   • Prediction
   • Willingness
   • Intention

   Homonymy is the term that defines items that sound alike, but are really different, such as "two, too, and to" all sounding like [tu] but not sharing any meaning. Or different senses of the word down (i.e. 'opposite of "up"; fine feather-like undercoat found on some birds). Or McCawley's "bachelor" example.

2. Metaphor. Metaphor is a figure of speech where something is referred to as if it were something else, e.g. He's a stuffed shirt. One thing is referred to in terms of another, usually the direction being from concrete to more abstract meaning. "You take the high road and I'll take the low road."

3. Metonymy: there is confusion in the literature on the meaning and use of this term. For some, it has to do with contiguity (adjacency?) i.e. the kinds of meaning shift when some element acquires part of the meaning of an element that is near to it, spatially or figuratively. E.g., the borrowing of the French joue 'cheek' into English as "jaw".

   Another business is that of the phenomenon of defining something because of "part for whole" i.e. someone/something is identified by some (prominent?) feature of its characteristics, e.g. 'Mr. Stuffed Shirt' (for a pompous, self-absorbed person), 'Mr. High-pockets' for a tall man; "Four eyes" for someone who wears glasses; `Big-mouth' for someone who talks a lot, etc.

   Here's a cartoon playing on the expression Hanky-Panky. Or see this set of metonyms for Disney characters. Metonymy can get confused with synecdoche by some...

When it comes to the fine-grained continuum of meaning distinctions involved in the stages ( cline ) of grammaticalization, we may need a theory that allows for meanings to be closer, or more distant, i.e. multi-gradient (see various proposals p. 70). For grammaticalization, we must assume polysemy if there is a plausible semantic relationship, because if meaning is changing along the continuum, there has to be overlap of meaning at some (or multiple) points: it would not make sense for there to be discontinuity in the semantic "chain".

But what constitutes a plausible semantic relationship? H&T list some work on this:

• "Lexical fields" (various, p. 71)

• Cross-linguistic evidence for polysemies (Linguists are concerned about it because it complicates their task, and makes linguistics seem "unscientific"; but it seems natural and unavoidable.)

• Work on homonymy and polysemy of directional and recipient meanings of to (e.g. datives in Dravidian, datives in western I-E lgs.)

• Problem of one form, one meaning may be an ideal, but it may also be "natural" for humans to associate like things with like things; (in fact it may be a survival mechanism, hs).

Grice and his conversational implicatures (1975) outlined a number of maxims, but there are questions about whether they are the right ones; H&T say maybe the maxim of Relevance alone, defined to include informativeness, may be adequate to account for pragmatic meaning. Processes of grammaticalization draw on Relevance. (See also the review of Levinson's new book Presumptive Meanings: The Theory of Generalized Implicature.

H&T: most conversational implicatures are abductive since a speaker hears an utterance, concludes it is motivated by a particular Maxim, then guesses speaker's intent. But maxims can be flouted:

• Speakers may lie
• implicatures are " cancelable" by speaker, usually with an explanation.
• implicatures are "cancelable" by hearer, from inferences drawn from the situation.

Pragmatic effect of implicatures across utterances illustrated by examples where once clause may be assumed to be related in cause and effect when in fact it may be unrelated, as in:

1. Ned Devine saw on television what the winning numbers were for the Irish Sweepstakes, and realized he held a ticket with the winning number.
2. Ned Devine died of a heart-attack.

3. Denise Rich contributed $1.5 million to Clinton's Presidential Library fund.
4. Clinton pardoned Denise Rich's former husband.

Speakers assume that (2) results from (1) (and 4 from 3) but if the sentences are reversed:

1. Ned Devine died of a heart-attack.
2. Ned Devine saw on television what the winning numbers were for the Irish Sweepstakes, and realized he held a ticket with the winning number.

3. Clinton pardoned Denise Rich's former husband.
4. Denise Rich contributed $1.5 million to Clinton's Presidential Library fund.

Conversational implicatures are contrasted with conventional implicatures, which are unpredictable and arbitrary, and must be learned (and are not cancelable ). Example from Tamil of use of self-benefactive ko(L) which implies "success" as contrasted with lack of ko(L) which implies nothing; the latter can be cancelled; but the former can't be cancelled. (H&T give example of English manage to Vb and its implicature, which cannot be cancelled.)

We can therefore include conventional implicatures/meanings in the polysemies of a form. Examples of temporal and causal meanings of since which can be usually figured out (non-past event/state, causal; events in past, temporal); but sometimes ambiguous, as in

which could mean either that

1. There is a sequence of events (appointment of the foreign-born judge followed the suspension), but no causality or causality is implied; or

2. The appointment of the foreign-born judge was made precisely because Rocker had demonstrated xenophobia and homophobia.

Thus since is semantically ambiguous and polysemous. Next question: Are there pragmatic polysemies as well as semantic ones?

After Rocker was suspended for xenophobic remarks, a foreign-born judge was appointed to hear the arbitration case.

Because Rocker was suspended for xenophobic and homophobic remarks, a foreign-born judge was appointed to hear the arbitration case.

This problem of ambiguity illustrates the logical fallacy known in Latin as Post hoc, ergo propter hoc `After the fact, therefore because of the fact.'

Thus, if you want to avoid the pragmatic ambiguities, you have to say something like:

Precisely because Denise Rich contributed $1.5 million to Clinton's library fund, Clinton pardoned her former husband.

Grice stated tentatively that conversational implicatures may become conventionalized. Others hypothesized that the "secondary meanings" of tense and aspect (e.g. "present relevance" of the perfect) are derived by conventionalization of implicatures.

H&T state that in early stages of grammaticalization, conversational implicatures often become 'semanticized,' i.e. become part of the semantic polysemies of a form. Inferences, to play a role, must be frequent and must be standard in order to play a role, especially cross-linguistically. Standard would be such things as "since" having both temporal and causal meanings, i.e. the inference of causality from temporal sequencing. If something is local, idiosyncratic, highly contextualized (perhaps specific to a culture) we won't expect inferences to become conventionalized.

Another question: When can we recognize conventionalization to have occurred? H&T give examples of development of causality with English "since", some of which are ambiguous (could be causal, could be temporal; could be causal, but probably not conventionalized in OE, but only in late ME, i.e. attested in stative and other non-completive environments where the temporal reading is blocked.)

Metaphor heavily involved in meaning change. Metaphoric processes involve:

• inference across conceptual boundaries.

• Metaphoric processes are seen as mappings or associative leaps (itself a metaphor) from one domain to another;

• Such leaps are motivated by analogy and iconic relationships;

• These relationships can be observed cross-linguistically.

• One example of an iconic metaphor is that of the rock of Gibraltar as used by the Prudential Insurance company.

Traditionally, metaphoric processes seen as semantic, but lately, seen more as pragmatic (not being truth conditional, based in communicative use.) H&T:

We accept the view that metaphor is pragmatic, and ... that in so far as metaphor is primarily analogical in character, is different from the kinds of conversational processes based on maxims mentioned above... .

Earlier, metaphor was seen as being primiarily lexical, but now some people see it as an early motivation in grammaticalization: (Bybee and Pagliuca 1985)

Rather than subscribe to the idea that grammatical evolution is driven by communicative necessity, we suggest that human language users have a natural propensity for making metaphorical extensions that lead to the increased use of certain items.

Other typical metaphorical things are

1. the use of English particles up, down on, over for aspectual meanings;

2. the development of gonna , and of other modals, where obligation --> possibility, probability (epistemic meanings).

3. Sweetser takes a different approach: "socio-physical concepts of forces and barriers" i.e. tendency to experience the physical, social, and epistemic worlds in similar ways, allowing the mapping of sociophysical potentiality onto the world of reasoning. E.g. obligative must and epistemic must

   • You must marry the girl and do the right thing.
   • It must have rained last night (= it must be the case that...)

H&T criticize those who think only "lexical item > grammatical item" i.e. independent of context, instead of (what they prefer):

i.e. in utterance contexts. They say it is not go that is grammaticalized in gonna but rather the phrase be going to in the local context be going to in order to V. But see the development of Tamil poo (Kannada. hoogu ) meaning "go" that becomes a change of state aspect marker with certain verbs, such as die, rot, cool, spoil, break etc. e.g.

As for context here, it seems to be the Ta. and Ka. verbs that have a meaning involving transitional state (in fact they're all involved with a kind of semantic 'cline') which can be conjoined with hoogu to give the notion 'go to complete the change of state.' So hoogu meaning simply 'motion away from speaker' with these verbs is grammaticalized as an aspect marker meaning 'completive' (and usually with a nuance 'pejorative' i.e. the effect is undesirable.) Note that Lakoff says that states are 'bounded entities' so changes of state involve motion from one 'place' to another, crossing the 'borders' from one state to another.

H&T take the stand here that metonymy is more important than metaphor, since metaphor is 'merely' analogical. Metonymy, in contrast, depends on contiguity and reanalysis. They try to indicate (p. 81) that much of what has been called metaphoric in grammaticalization is perhaps not correct: the metaphoric use of 'go' becoming grammaticalized in gonna is, (they say) improper; it's not 'go' that was grammaticalized, but the context be going in order to V and it was the contiguity (adjacency?) with 'to' in the purposive sense that made the difference.

Meaning changes arising out of contiguity in Linguistic/pragmatic contexts are associative or conceptual metonymic changes. For short, H&T call them "(conceptual) metonymy".

Problems with Metonymy:

• originally, used for contiguity in the non-linguistic world, e.g. French joue "cheek" --> Engl. jaw (and other Latin to French. ex's). These are parts of the body that are contiguous. (Perhaps there are some politeness and euphemistic factors here, e.g. the French soutient-gorge (lit. 'support-throat') for "brassiere") Another famous ex: ME (ge)bed 'prayer' transferred to the actual 'bead' of the rosary.

• Other examples above, of part-for-whole, e.g. things/characters being named after a part (albeit distinctive) of their perceived physical or behavioral characteristics.

• tendency to confuse metonymy with synecdoche already mentioned.

• tendency by many linguists to include metonymy under metaphor, which H&T don't like.

• Or, if distinguished, consigned to an insignificant place.

• See also Jakobson & Halle's 'classic distinction' of metaphor as paradigmatic vs. metonymy as syntagmatic, thus metaphor leads to coherence, metonymy leads to juxtaposition and potential incoherence.

H&T reject these uses as useless (?), preferring the restrictive sense of conceptual association. In this process, meaning (say element A) permutes to another element that is adjacent to it. They refer to Brinton (1988) and his analysis of English considering, supposing and concessive 'while' (e.g. 'While I do admit that Mr. Gore has a point there, I otherwise reject his proposal.') Note also Brinton's analysis of development of English aspect markers, esp. have which sees this as metonymically motivated, rather than metaphorically motivated.

More useful views (acc. to H&T): Antilla, saying metaphor is analogical and iconic, while metonomy is (semantic transfer through) contiguity and thus is indexical. Metaphor operates across conceptual domains, metonymy operates across interdependent (morphosyntactic) domains.

Examples of conflicting conversational inferences, e.g. between 'purposive' go and 'directional' go:

• I was going to be married (implicature: purpose)

• I was going to be married, but on the way to the church I met an old friend and decided to go to Alaska. (implicature cancelled; directional meaning emphasised.)

Acc. to H&T, both inferences (later time [indexed by go] and purposive [indexed by to]) are involved in the grammaticalization of be going to , showing again their belief that a cluster of factors is involved.

Another example (from ME, 1482) they show that inferences can be not only cancelled and demoted, they can also be promoted i.e. one inference can be favored, another disfavored, by some other factor, e.g. the passive in S. 21, pg. 83: "was goyng to be broughte into helle" demotes the notions of (a) volitional, (b) responsible, and (c) directional, but promotes inference of imminent future. Thus semanticization + grammaticalization of be going to is shown best when following subject and/or verb is incompatible with purposiveness , yielding to only possibility: immediate future.

They reject the metaphoric explanation, the metaphor being "projection of a trajectory through space mapped onto a trajectory in time" doesn't explain why E. progressive (-ing) and "to" are involved. Compare cross-linguistically:

Tamil's grammaticalization of poo 'go' as an immediate future doesn't have the same morphology as English, i.e. no progressive marker (-ing), only an infinitive, which can have the inference 'purposive' but tends to not have it, since the second example, with a dative-marked VN, is more common as purposive in modern Tamil. (In LT, infinitive has a number of possible readings, such as purposive, but also 'simultaneous' and maybe some others.)

Note that in Kannada, however, the distinction between use of dative-marked verbal noun (for purposive) and the 'other' "old" or "second" infinitive (Kittel 1903:122) for other uses has broken down--the old infinitive is now used only with modals and negative, but can't be used (e.g. with hoogu 'go') to mean "going to Vb" in the way that Tamil has grammaticalized poo . So Kannada -okke (dative-marked VN) is used for both purposive and directional as in this example (Schiffman 1983:53.)

This sentence has two datives in it, one dative-of-Verbal-Noun for purposive, another directional dative ( -ige to town) and a verb 'go' which only means 'move in the direction of', not 'immediate future" etc.

Semanticization of 'concessive' while illustrates how something that starts out as a marker of temporal simultaneity was reduced phonologically to wile and with the lost of the demonstrative that signalled the simultaneity, less precise conversational inferences could arise, one of them being causality (or the reason for s.t.), i.e. 'all the time that' or 'all the while that' 'all during s.t. Then finally, a new inference of 'even though' e.g.

And finally, a concessive inference, i.e. there is a contrast of values, a "subjective construal of the world" in linguistic terms, i.e.

This is, of course, what H&T refer to often as the speaker-centered nature of these inferences and subsequent grammaticalizations, the subjectification of them. (E.g. development of epistemic modals.)

The problem?	The solution	Main Direction	Which Axis?
Representing things in one semantic domain in terms of another	Metaphor	toward informativeness	Paradigmatic: specify one (complex) thing as another not present in context
How to find ways to regulate communication and negotiate speaker-hearer interaction	Metonymy	Toward informativeness	Specifying one meaning in terms of others present, though covertly, in the context.

Another way of looking at it:

• Metaphor: correlated with solving problem of representation linked with analogy; (analogy is overt ).

• Metonymy: correlated with shifts to meanings situated in subjective belief state or attitude toward situation, incl. linguistic situation. Solve problem of expressing speaker attitudes (reanalysis which is covert.)

• Metaphor and Metonymy are complementary

• Metaphor is common enough, but

• Metonymy predominates in early stages, at least.

• Competing motivations of routinization and expressivity are involved at various stages, perhaps even cyclically (hfs).

Many researchers use the metaphor of Verbleichung, affaiblissement, bleaching or a process whereby linguistic units lose in semantic complexity, pragmatic significance, syntactic freedom, and phonetic substance. (Heine and Reh 1984). But H&T have talked about the opposite: pragmatic enrichment, strengthening, etc.

Summary of principles:

Weakening etc. occurs as grammaticalization progresses Strengthening etc. occurs at the outset; shift, not loss of meaning; or demotion of some meanings, promotion of others. Over time, items lose semantic/pragmatic meaning, becoming completely grammaticalized and thus empty morphosyntactic elements. Meaning changes in grammaticalization are not arbitrary but can almost always be reconstructed or derivable by inferencing. There are no sudden losses or shifts of meaning (with some questions about causative do in ME) Traces of lexical meanings and their constraints usually are carried along, so that e.g. Tamil postpositions that are derived from transitive verbs still take the accusative case, while other postpositions may not (cf. also example from Gã given by H&T.) Polysemies may be the result, then, as in English will

Development of Nominal Categories and of Verbal Categories: two typical paths. These are clines:

• A cline of grammaticality, making reference to hierarchical categories relevant to constituent structure.

• Clines of decategorialization i.e. starts with a full category (N, V) with then loss of morphological trappings of the category.

• Auxiliaries
• prepositions
• articles
• something seen in some other languages.

Clusters are not rigid, fixed points, but gathering places, like iron filings around magnets.

____________
___________________
	_________________________
		_________________
			_____________________	
				_________________________
					_________________
									Etc.

Remember that once embarked upon, grammaticalization does not have an inevitable result; it may be arrested etc. We can't work back from any one form to see a clear path; and we can't illustrate a particular cline with only one form. (Not enough historical record, they say; I would bet we might find examples in Tamil with its long time depth, hs). What is important is the issue of directionality between adjacent forms on the cline not demo. of complete sequence of events for a given form.

• Relational Noun -->

• Secondary Adposition --> (kind of prep/postposition)

• Primary Adposition --> (kind of prep/postposition)

• Agglutinative Case affix -->

• Fusional case affix.

  Examples:

  • Relational Noun: nouns such as 'top, side, way' or Tamil pakkam 'side' or meele '(on) top.'

  • Secondary Adposition: short phrases such as 'in/on the way', 'beside', 'ahead of' 'aside' (from ME 'on' +side', cf. all the other forms like 'ahead, askance, away, athwart, akimbo' etc.)

  • Primary Adposition: reduced, maybe monosyllabic, indicating purely grammatical relations (instead of locational) such as 'by, of, with, to.' Some of these may be themselves locational and relational, e.g. 'by'. Can be easily cliticized.

  • Agglutinative Case affix: Hungarian examples; Tamil (see below)

  • Fusional case affix. Latin example -ibus , Russian -yx, -ov, -amy etc.

  Again, not strictly discrete, but arbitrary clustering points on a cline. Most forms we find will not fit clearly into one or another of named categories, but will land somewhere on the cline.

• Example of the relational Noun: development of Tamil case and postpositions.
  • Relational Noun: pakkam 'side' as in maDraas pakkam 'Madras-side' (the Madras area, the Madras region)

  • Secondary Adposition: pakkattule which is pakkam plus loc. -ule e.g. maDraas pakkattule 'near Madras' (Note that loc. -il is itself derived from a noun il meaning 'house' and still has this meaning in e.g. Telugu ( illu ).

  • Primary Adposition: eduttaaple 'opposite' from the verb edir 'opposite' + taan 'itself' + poola 'like.' with phonological reduction of edir-taan-poola incl. deletion of long vowels in poola which otherwise doesn't happen.

  • Agglutinative Case affix --> 'Ablative' marker -lerundu, -lendu which is the LT loc. -il plus irundu past participle of iru 'having been' e.g. maDraas-leendu 'from Madras.

  • Fusional case affix: Dravidian doesn't get fusion in the way that IE lgs. do, but maybe the accusative -e which can't be analyzed as having any source, i.e. whatever its source, it's now obliterated and shortened (from LT ai ) to -e : avan-e paatteen 'him saw-I'.

• Verb to Affix Cline:
  • Full Verb -->

  • (Vector Verb -->)

  • Auxiliary -->

  • Clitic -->

  • Affix

  That is:
  • Full Verb: verbs with full lexical meaning, all grammatical characteristics, full morphology etc. like other verbs.

  • Vector Verb: may be a special category? See Hindi, Kannada, Tamil (below)

  • Auxiliary Verbs are finite, have tense/mood etc., but are syntactically specialized (e.g. English Aux inverted in Q's); maybe can't be marked for tense, or (in Dravidian) tend to not be marked for PNG. Many examples in many lgs. Can have examples of both full and aux status, e.g. Engl. have as full vb, aux (have gone etc.) and new development of hafta .

  • Cliticization: have becomes 've e.g. we've gone and done it again or the French cliticization of forms of avoir added to future, e.g. j'aurai, ils sauront 'I'll have, they'll know .