Sometimes, it is clear what the speaker intended to say or imply, but less clear what her attitude is to what she has said or implied. Consider a famous example from Pride and Prejudice. Elizabeth, the heroine, has finally agreed to marry Darcy, and her sister asks her when she first realised she was in love with him. Elizabeth replies:
(5) I think it was when I first set eyes on his magnificent estate at Pemberley.
The question raised by Elizabeth's utterance is this: are we meant to think she believes what she said? In his review of Pride and Prejudice, Sir Walter Scott took the utterance literally, and condemned Elizabeth (and Jane Austen) for being mercenary. Many later readers have assumed that Elizabeth did not believe what she said: that she was indeed making fun of the idea that one might fall in love with someone for his magnificent estate. The issue, in other words, is whether Elizabeth's utterance was intended as ironical or not.
A similar issue arises at the level of implicature. Consider (6):
(6) a. Peter: Is John a good cook?
b. Mary: He's English.
Given the reputation of English cooking, the most natural interpretation of Mary's utterance in (6b) is that she intended Peter to supply the assumption that the English are bad cooks, and to conclude that John is a bad cook. But while she clearly intended to commit herself to the claim that John is English, it is less clear that she seriously intended to commit herself to the truth of the assumption that the English are bad cooks, and the conclusion that therefore John is a bad cook. Perhaps she was merely being playful, encouraging her audience to entertain the stereotype without actually endorsing it? Clearly, there is room for misunderstanding here.
In deciding on the speaker's intended attitude to the propositions expressed and implied, the audience has to answer the following sorts of question. Is she endorsing these propositions or dissociating herself from them; is she asserting that they are true, wondering whether they are true, perhaps wishing or hoping that someone will make them true? To a certain extent, these attitudes can be linguistically encoded (e.g. by declarative, interrogative or imperative syntax), but, as (5) and (6) show, in this aspect of interpretation as in any other, what is communicated generally goes well beyond what is linguistically encoded.
3. The nature and role of context
Understanding an utterance, then, involves answering three main questions: (a) what did the speaker intend to say; (b) what did the speaker intend to imply; and (c) what was the speaker's intended attitude to the propositions expressed and implied? It is obvious that context or background assumptions play a crucial role in answering these questions. By 'context' here, I mean not simply the preceding linguistic text, or the environment in which the utterance takes place, but the set of assumptions brought to bear in arriving at the intended interpretation. These may be drawn from the preceding text, or from observation of the speaker and what is going on in the immediate environment, but they may also be drawn from cultural or scientific knowledge, common-sense assumptions, and more generally, any item of shared or idiosyncratic information that the hearer has access to at the time.
Selection of an appropriate set of contextual assumptions is crucial to the understanding of (1)-(6) above. With (1), the audience must have access to the assumption that jobs paying a thousand pounds a week are not handed out by advertising in the London Underground. With (2)-(4), the choice of context is crucial again: once we know what contextual assumptions we were intended to use, the intended implications follow by straightforward logical deduction. Finally, in (5)-(6), the difficulty of interpretation arises precisely because it is not clear what contextual assumptions we were intended to use: did Jane Austen in (5) mean us to assume that it is obviously ridiculous to imagine that one could fall in love with someone for his beautiful house, or did she mean us to assume that this was quite a reasonable thing to do?
Now if contextual assumptions affect the way an utterance is understood, then in order to recognise the intended interpretation, the hearer must select and use the intended set of contextual assumptions. Which adds a further question to our list of questions that the hearer has to answer: (d) what was the intended set of contextual assumptions? And in some ways, this is the most fundamental question of all.
In most writings on communication, while it is recognised that context makes a major contribution to understanding, the problem of how the intended context is identified is not seriously addressed. The assumption is that in normal circumstances only a single set of contextual assumptions could possibly have been intended. I want to argue that this assumption is inadequate, and that the problem of context selection is a genuine and serious one.
Imagine the following scenario. I am a keen club tennis player, and you know that I have recently begun playing with a new doubles partner. When we meet, you ask me what my new doubles partner is like, and I reply as in (7):
(7) He has much in common with John McEnroe.
At least for readers of the English tabloid press, the intended interpretation of this utterance will be immediately obvious. You are intended to use the contextual assumption that John McEnroe is extremely bad-tempered on court, and draw the conclusion that my new doubles partner is also bad-tempered on court. The question is why this is so.
Let's assume that our beliefs and assumptions about the world are organised in a sort of encyclopaedia in our minds under headings such as 'John McEnroe', 'tennis', 'doubles partner', and so on, and that in choosing a context for the interpretation of (7), the first place you will look will be under your mental heading for John McEnroe. Let's assume, too, that not all your beliefs and assumptions about John McEnroe are equally accessible, so that you don't pull out all of them at once. For most readers of the English tabloid press, as I have suggested, there is an immediate, very highly accessible assumption about John McEnroe that would come to mind in this situation: that he causes a lot of trouble on court. By using this assumption, and combining it with what was said in (7), you could derive the conclusion that my new doubles partner also causes a lot of trouble on court - which is the interpretation I have been assuming was correct.
Notice, though, that most people will have a lot more information than this stored under the heading 'John McEnroe'. You might know, for example, that John McEnroe is a very gifted tennis player, that he has a good serve-and-volley game, that he has played on the Centre Court at Wimbledon, that he is very rich, that he wears a headband when playing, that he is married to a film star, that he has a brother who plays tennis, that he enjoys rock music, and so on. By adding these assumptions to the context, you could derive a whole range of further implications: that my new doubles partner, like John McEnroe, is a very gifted tennis player, that he is very rich, that he has played on the Centre Court at Wimbledon, that he is married to a film star, and so on. What is there to stop you adding ever more contextual assumptions to the context, deriving ever more conclusions, and deciding that these were part of what I intended to imply? Notice, of course, that this is not what actual hearers would do.
This example suggests two important observations, which have to be taken account of in any adequate theory of utterance interpretation. First, it is clear that in interpreting (7) we do not assume that the speaker intended us to go on expanding the context indefinitely, deriving ever more implications. We do look for some implications, of course; but what we appear to do is choose the minimal set of implications that would make the utterance worth listening to, and stop there. In the case of (7), we assume that the speaker's new doubles partner is bad-tempered on court in much the same way as John McEnroe is bad-tempered on court, and stop at that. An adequate theory of communication should explain why this is so.
Second, we do not - and could not - compare all possible interpretations of an utterance before deciding on the intended one. Intuitively, we do not do this; but, as this example shows, theoretically, we couldn't do it either, since for any utterance there is a huge range of possible contexts and possible implications, not all of which could conceivably be considered in the very short time it takes to understand an utterance. What we need, and what hearers seem to have, is some method of recognising the intended interpretation as soon as it presents itself, without necessarily considering any alternatives at all.
It should be clear by now that understanding an utterance involves considerably more than simply knowing the language. The class of possible interpretations is determined, on the one hand, by the meaning of the sentence uttered, and on the other by the set of available contextual assumptions. The hearer's task is to choose, from among this vast array of possible interpretations, the actual, intended one. In what follows, when I talk of the intended interpretation, I will mean the intended combination of explicit context, contextual assumptions and implications, and the speaker's intended attitude to these.
If the intended interpretation of an utterance is not recovered by decoding, how is it recovered? Paul Grice, in his William James Lectures, suggested an answer to this question. The intended interpretation is not decoded but inferred, by a non-demonstrative inference process - a process of hypothesis formation and evaluation – in which linguistic decoding and contextual assumptions determine the class of possible hypotheses, and these are evaluated in the light of certain general principles of communication which speakers are expected to obey. According to Grice, speakers are expected to obey a Co-operative Principle and maxims of truthfulness, informativeness, relevance and clarity; any hypothesis not satisfying these expectations can be automatically eliminated.
In our book Relevance (1986), Dan Sperber and I developed a theory of overt communication and understanding based on this fundamental idea of Grice's. In the next sections, I will explain the assumptions of relevance theory and apply them to a variety of examples. I will end by making some comparisons between relevance theory and Grice's earlier approach.[1]
4. Relevance theory
Relevance theory is based on a few very simple assumptions. First, that every utterance has a variety of possible interpretations, all compatible with the information that is linguistically encoded. Second, that not all these interpretations occur to the hearer simultaneously; some of them take more effort to think up. For instance, we saw with example (1) that the 'thousand pounds' interpretation is generally more accessible than the 'thousand jobs' interpretation, and with example (7) that, at least for most English tabloid readers, the assumption that John McEnroe is bad-tempered on court is easier to retrieve than the assumption that he has a brother who is a tennis player. As these examples also show, the order in which possible interpretations will occur to the hearer is at least to some extent predictable, though it is unlikely to be the same for all hearers at all times.
The third assumption is that hearers are equipped with a single, very general criterion for evaluating interpretations as they occur to them. In the case of (1), for instance, we know that the 'thousand pounds' interpretation will be rejected on some basis, and the 'thousand jobs' interpretation accepted. And the fourth, and final, assumption is that this criterion is powerful enough to exclude all but at most a single interpretation, so that having found an interpretation that satisfies it, the hearer need look no further: there will never be more than one.
The criterion proposed in Relevance is based on a fundamental assumption about human cognition. The assumption is that human cognition is relevance-oriented: we pay attention to information that seems relevant to us. Now every utterance starts out as a request for the hearer's attention. As a result, it creates an expectation of relevance. It is around this expectation of relevance that the criterion for evaluating possible interpretations of an utterance is built. Different interpretations will be relevant in different ways: some will not be relevant at all; some will be fairly relevant; some will be very relevant. Which interpretation should the hearer choose? Clearly, the interpretation which best satisfies his expectation of relevance. To see how this criterion works, we need to know more about the nature of relevance and the expectation of relevance that every act of overt communication creates.
Relevance is defined in terms of contextual effect and processing effort. Contextual effects are achieved when newly-presented information interacts with a context of existing assumptions in one of three ways: by strengthening an existing assumption, by contradicting and eliminating an existing assumption, or by combining with an existing assumption to yield a contextual implication: that is, a logical implication derivable neither from the new information alone, nor from the context alone, but from the new information and the context combined. We claim that newly-presented information is relevant in a context when and only when it achieves contextual effects in that context, and the greater the contextual effects, the greater the relevance.
To illustrate these ideas, consider how the information in (8), given in tonight's weather forecast, might be relevant to you:
(8) It will rain in Paris tomorrow.
Suppose that you are going to Paris tomorrow, and already suspected that it was going to rain. Then (8) will achieve relevance by strengthening, or confirming, your existing assumption. Suppose instead that you are going to Paris tomorrow and were expecting it to be fine. Then, if you trust the weather forecast, (8) will achieve relevance by contradicting and eliminating your existing assumption. Finally, suppose that you are going to Paris tomorrow and have already decided to pack your raincoat if the forecast is for rain. Then (8) will achieve relevance by combining with this existing assumption to yield the contextual implication that you will pack your raincoat. All three types of contextual effect contribute to the relevance of (8), and the more contextual effects it achieves, the more relevant it will be.
Contextual effects, however, do not come free: they cost some mental effort to derive, and the greater the effort needed to derive them, the lower the relevance will be. To illustrate this idea, notice that (8) will seem more relevant to us if we really are planning to go to Paris tomorrow. In these circumstances, we will have no trouble thinking up an appropriate context, in which (8) will yield a satisfactory range of contextual effects, and hence be relevant to us. If we are not going to Paris tomorrow, we could no doubt still think up an appropriate context, but some effort of memory or imagination would be required. Intuitively, the greater the effort required, the less relevant (8) will seem to us.
The processing effort required to understand an utterance depends on two main factors. First, the effort of memory and imagination needed to construct a suitable context; second, the psychological complexity of the utterance itself. Greater complexity implies greater processing effort; gratuitous complexity detracts from relevance. Thus, compare (9a) with the longer and linguistically more complex (9b):
(9) a. It's raining in Paris.
b. It's raining in Paris and fish swim in the sea.
In circumstances where the hearer needs no reminding that fish swim in the sea, the extra linguistic complexity of (9b) will not be offset by any extra contextual effects, and will detract from the overall relevance of (9b) as compared with (9a).
The linguistic structure of an utterance is not the only source of psychological complexity. In fact, a linguistically simpler utterance may nonetheless be psychologically more complex. For instance, it is well known from psycholinguistic experiments that frequently-encountered words are easier to process than rarely- encountered ones. Thus, compare (10a) and (10b):
(10) a. I have no brothers or sisters.
b. I have no siblings.
Although (10a) is linguistically more complex than (10b), most English speakers in most circumstances would regard it as stylistically preferable to (10b). The reason is that although (10b) is linguistically less complex, it contains the very rare word 'sibling', which generally requires more processing effort than the longer, but more familiar, 'brothers or sisters'.
Relevance, then, depends on contextual effects and processing effort. The greater the contextual effects, the greater the relevance; but the greater the processing effort needed to obtain these effects, the lower the relevance. The connection between relevance and understanding should now be clear. To see the intended relevance of an utterance, the hearer must identify the proposition and propositional attitude expressed, and combine these with the intended set of contextual assumptions to obtain the intended contextual effects; the intended set of contextual effects will include the intended contextual implications of the utterance, or what we have been calling its implicatures. To see the intended relevance of an utterance, then, amounts to recovering the intended combination of content, context, attitude and implications. Relevance and understanding are two sides of a single coin.
The most basic assumption of relevance theory is that every aspect of communication and cognition is governed by the search for relevance. What is unique to overt communication is that, approaching an utterance addressed to us, we are entitled to have not just hopes but steady expectations of relevance. In the next section, I will argue that the expectation of relevance created by every utterance is precise enough, and powerful enough, to exclude all but at most a single interpretation, so that if we find an interpretation that satisfies our expectation of relevance, we can be sure that it will be the only one.
A word of caution here. Precisely because utterance interpretation is not a simple matter of decoding, but a fallible process of hypothesis formation and evaluation, there is no guarantee that the interpretation that satisfies the hearer's expectation of relevance will be the correct, i.e. the intended one. Because of mismatches in their memories and perceptual systems, the hearer may overlook a hypothesis that the speaker thought would be highly salient, or notice a hypothesis that the speaker had overlooked. Misunderstandings occur. The aim of a theory of communication is to identify the principles underlying the hearer's (fallible) choices. Relevance theory claims that the interpretation that satisfies his expectation of relevance is the only one that the hearer has any rational basis for choosing. To claim that a choice is rationally justified, however, is not the same as claiming that is invariably correct.
5. The criterion of consistency with the principle of relevance
The principle of relevance is the principle that every utterance (or other act of overt communication) creates an expectation of relevance. What exactly does this expectation amount to, in terms of effort and effect? Here, there is an obvious hypothesis: that what the hearer is looking for is the most relevant interpretation: that is, the one that yields the greatest possible contextual effects in return for the smallest amount of processing effort. It is worth seeing why this hypothesis is wrong. In order to find the most relevant interpretation of an utterance, the hearer would have to consider and compare all possible interpretations; but as we saw when discussing the McEnroe example above, it is clear for both intuitive and theoretical reasons that hearers do not compare all possible interpretations of an utterance before deciding on the intended one.
In our book Relevance, Dan Sperber and I define a notion of optimal relevance which is meant to spell out what the hearer is looking for in terms of effort and effect:
Дата добавления: 2015-09-11; просмотров: 122 | Поможем написать вашу работу | Нарушение авторских прав |