Presumptive Meaning Preface

This excerpt from Presumptive Meanings. Stephen C. Levinson. © 2000 The MIT Press. is provided in screen-viewable form for personal use only by members of MIT CogNet. Unauthorized use or dissemination of this information is expressly forbidden. If you have any questions about this material, please contact [email protected].

Preface

In this book I attempt to defend the notion of a generalized conversational

implicature as a speciesof preferred interpretation. I do not pretend that this notion is straightforward, and I grant that it is not easyto defend. Yet I believethat the idea of a preferred (or default) interpretation is much too important to be ignored just because it is a difficult concept . Moreover ,

the existenceof preferred intepretations has (for me at least) somethingof that

brute

self - evidence

that

Dr . Johnson

invoked

when

he kicked

a stone

to dispatch Berkeley 's idealism . We grope to grab and harness the beast without the slightest doubt about its existence.

I attempt in the book to justify the notion of a generalizedconversational implicature, first, by trying to show that some general theoretical sense can be made of the notion of a preferred interpretation ; second, by defending the notion against its detractors and exposing the deficiencies of

the proffered alternatives; and third , by showing that a rather simple first approximation to a theory of such things can give us coverageof a broad range of important interpretive phenomena . This is the thrust of the first two chapters . Then I try to show just how useful and important such a theory of pre-

ferred interpretation is for our understanding of how languageworks. To make the point with maximum dramatic effect, I have gone for the lin -

guistic jugular , as it were. On the one hand, I try to show that the phenomena of preferred intepretations force us into a radical reconstruction of the entire theory of meaning . On the other , I attempt to reduce much of the alleged grammar of anaphora -...-central to many recent developments in syntax - to matters of preferred interpretation . I feel that these attacks

are successfulenough to lend powerful credenceto the theory I provide. My ambitions , in this book at least, do not extend beyond this . There

are no general claims being made about the underlying mechanisms

. XIV

Preface constituting a fundamental aspect of human cognition or the essence of human communication . On the contrary , I believe that a theory of pre ferred interpretations is just another piece in the jigsaw puzzle of the

theory of meaning, that complex' multifaceted landscapewhich the explorers of twentieth -century philosophy and linguistics have proved to be rugged terrain indeed . Thus my modest ambitions contrast strikingly with another recent attempt to recast Grice 's theory of implicature , vile Sperber and Wilson 's ( 1986) Relevance theory , which is offered to us as a wide ranging cognitive principle from which all pragmatic facts follow just as do facts about human

attention , memory , and so on . Nevertheless , I do

not believe that my narrow , technical slant is devoid of general conclusions ; on the contrary , I believe that the theory of preferred interpre tation that I sketch, although crude , is sufficient to show that central problems in the theory of meaning and the theory of grammar have been completely misconstrued . A scalpel cuts deep just because it is thin . Finally , those who know other strands of my work may be puzzled that I should have written this book : the rationalist , universalist tinge may seem inconsistent

with my current

attempt

to divert cognitive

science into

a proper consideration of social and cultural factors , or my previous efforts

to understand

some

of the bases

of social

interaction

. But

I do not

believe there is any inconsistency. Current perspectiveson the relation between

universal

human

nature

and cultural

factors

often

seem to me to

be inverted : for example , language is held to be essentially universal , whereas language use is thought to be more open to cultural influences . But the reverse may in fact be far more plausible : there is obvious cultural codification of many aspects of language from phoneme to syntactic construction , whereas the uncodified , unnoticed , low -level background of

usageprinciples or strategiesmay be fundamentally culture-independent. This is not to suggest that culture is a mere veneer that sticks just to the more rule -bound aspects of human

behavior . Indeed , I think

I have dem -

onstrated that culture -specific semantic concepts can run deep in human thinking ( Levinson 1996, 1997) . But underlying presumptions , heuristics , and principles of usage may be more immune to cultural influence simply because they are the prerequisites for the system to work at all , precon -

ditions evenfor learning language. Whether the principles explored in this book really have universal application is, given the primitive state of our knowledge in pragmatics , merely a working hypothesis , which at least seems to fit what we currently know . { Incidentally , the idea that usage principles may be much more uniform and simpler than the conventions

xv

Preface of language is interestingly at variance with Chomsky ' s ( 1975: 25) oft -

repeated pessimism about " our very limited progress in developing a scientific theory of any depth to account for the normal use of lan guage," perhaps because " human science-forming capacities simply do not extend to this domain ." )

If this picture inverting the normal presumptionsis correct, then progress in this area of pragmatics, the theory of preferred interpretations, may be a prerequisite to progressin semantics, for we may eventually be able to use well-established pragmatic principles to help unravel what content is actually coded in lexemes and constructions in other languages, where we are far too prone to assume universal patterning . It may also help in the other direction , so to speak, by connecting to other , more

complex, areas of pragmatics like the study of verbal interaction. Here, our patterns of preferred interpretation should provide an additional semiotic out of which the moves in social interaction must willy -nilly be constructed (see Levinson 1987a). And here, there are perhaps connections to broader strands of thinking in the social sciences, such as Bourdieu ' s (1977) notion of habitus , a structure of dispositions that generates tendencies to act and interpret in certain ways .

This excerpt from Presumptive Meanings. Stephen C. Levinson. © 2000 The MIT Press. is provided in screen-viewable form for personal use only by members of MIT CogNet. Unauthorized use or dissemination of this information is expressly forbidden. If you have any questions about this material, please contact [email protected].