Speech acts and sub-sentential speech.
| Autor | Thompson, J. Robert |
RESUMEN: En este texto recopilo algunas razones para oponerse al análisis del habla suboracional que plantea Stainton (2006). Mi oposición surge de consideraciones en torno alas intenciones y expectativas de quienes se comunican usando el habla suboracional. Pongo en duda las razones que aduce Stainton para pensar que algunas proferencias suboracionales tienen el estatus de actos de habla en toda la extensión de la palabra y arguyo que resultan ser actos de habla degenerados. Después de ofrecer mi propio análisis del habla suboracional, recomiendo que, retomando la estrategia "divide y vencerás" que Stainton descarta para manejar los presuntos casos de habla suboracional genuina, podemos oponernos alas formas radicales de contextualismo que su análisis sugiere.
PALABRAS CLAVE: aseveración, contextualismo, elipsis, suboraciones
SUMMARY: In this paper, I compile some reasons for resisting Stainton's (2006) analysis of sub-sentential speech. My resistance stems from considerations about the intentions and expectations of those who communicate using sub-sentential speech. I challenge Stainton's reasons for thinking that some sub-sentential utterances have the status of full-fledged speech acts and argue that they turn out to be degenerate speech acts. After offering my own analysis of sub-sentential speech, I recommend that by revisiting the divide and conquer strategy Stainton dismisses for handling the alleged cases of genuine sub-sentential speech, we can resist radical forms of contextualism suggested by his analysis.
KEY WORDS: assertion, contextualism, ellipsis, sub-sentences
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Introduction
Robert J. Stainton's Words and Thoughts: Subsentences, Ellipsis and the Philosophy of Language (hereafter WT) is both an impressive defense of the fact that some instances of sub-sentential speech qualify as genuine speech acts, and a development of the implications that would seem to follow from this fact. His work forces us to question the role of natural language sentences both in linguistic processing and in thought in general. If Stainton is correct, not only will appeals to natural language sentences fail to be mandatory in many explanations of the relationship between language and thought, but such appeals obscure the phenomena being explained.
In this paper, I compile some reasons for resisting Stainton's analysis of sub-sentential speech. My resistance is not rooted in the considerations Stainton offers (e.g. worries about the context principle or the fact that sub-sentences couldn't be premises in an argument), but rather stems from considerations about the intentions and expectations of those who communicate using sub-sentential speech. I challenge Stainton's reasons for thinking that some sub-sentential utterances have the status of full-fledged speech acts and argue that they turn out to be degenerate speech acts. After offering my own analysis of what can be achieved by sub-sentential speech, I recommend that we revisit the divide and conquer strategy Stainton dismisses for handling the alleged cases of genuine sub-sentential speech. Though I can offer nothing like the chapters of detailed and sustained arguments in WT, I hope to suggest that when examining the examples of sub-sentential speech, most sub-sentential utterances will be seen as degenerate speech acts, and the ones that seem least degenerate are actually excellent candidates for being treated as cases of syntactic ellipsis. I am not sure if my analysis will handle every case of sub-sentential speech, but I think it offers a new strategy for how to deal with this phenomenon, and hence a way of avoiding some of the radical implications for the semantic-pragmatic distinction that would arise if Stainton is correct about sub-sentential speech.
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Setting the Stage: Why All the Fuss over Sub-Sentential Speech?
2.1. The Phenomenon
The phenomenon of sub-sentential speech--the uttering of words and phrases in isolation, i.e. not in the context of a sentence--dominates WT. Stainton summarizes the point of WT with the following argument schema:
Premise 1: Speakers genuinely can utter ordinary words and phrases in isolation, and thereby perform full-fledged speech acts.
Premise 2: If speakers genuinely can utter ordinary words and phrases in isolation, and thereby perform full-fledged speech acts, then such-and-such implications obtain.
Conclusion: Such-and-such implications obtain. (WT, p. 3)
Whereas many theorists deny that words and phrases can be uttered in isolation (and thereby perform full-fledged speech acts) Stainton insists that they are in fact uttered in isolation all the time (and often perform full-fledged speech acts). Hence, much of the book is a sustained examination of various attempts to undercut the legitimacy of this use of words and phrases in isolation.
Stainton offers a wide variety of sub-sentences in order to stress their heterogeneity as a class, including, inter alia, prepositional phrases, quantificational noun phrases, verb phrases, proper nouns, and definite descriptions. He hopes to show that many examples of these sorts of sub-sentences can be uttered in isolation, and nevertheless communicate a proposition. To use a favorite example from WT, Sanjay and Silvia are loading a moving van and Silvia is searching for a missing table leg. Sanjay utters the mere phrase
(1) On the stoop
and by so doing, according to Stainton, communicates the singular de re proposition that that leg is on the stoop.
To many, this example may not sound at all controversial, but Stainton goes to great lengths to explain exactly what he thinks is going on here and why his claim is taken to be controversial by so many theorists. Specifically, he wants to insist that there is not a natural language sentence present in this communicative exchange; not one somehow covertly present (e.g. unpronounced), not one produced in the mind of Sanjay, and not one recovered by Silvia. Moreover, what happens as a result of the utterance of this isolated sub-sentence is not that a fully propositional content is merely communicated, conveyed, implicated, or suggested--it is asserted. Much of WT, then, is dedicated to establishing the legitimacy of sub-sentential speech by arguing for two main claims: some examples of sub-sentential speech are full-fledged speech acts, a genuine assertion, command, question, etc.; and these sub-sentential utterances really are sub-sentential i.e. they are not actually sentential in some way or other.
2.2. The Fuss
It is important to note, as Stainton often does, that although subsentential speech is an interesting phenomenon for linguists and philosophers to study in its own right, the sorts of implications that seem to hold if it is found to be legitimate (the "such-and-such implications" of the argument above) are critical for several debates about the nature of language and thought. In this paper, I will be concerned primarily with the positive proposal Stainton offers in Chapter Eight and the debate discussed in Chapter Eleven regarding the boundary between semantics and pragmatics. The distinction between semantics and pragmatics is in an especially intense degree of flux these days, and I think that if Stainton is (mostly) right about sub-sentences, this is extremely good support for a certain perspective on the relationship between semantics and pragmatics--Relevance Theory. (1) Since I think there are serious problems for that perspective, I hope to cast some doubt on whether Stainton is right about sub-sentences.
My worries stem from the puzzle Stainton raises at the end of chapter three. He acknowledges that when considering sentences, we find it natural to distinguish between the content that is asserted and the content that is merely pragmatically conveyed. He describes the traditional account of how the asserted content is determined, "The content asserted, put roughly, is the context-invariant semantics of the sentence, plus the content contributed by context to elements of the sentence's structure" (WT, p. 59). (2) Though many theorists disagree as to how context interacts with the sentence structure, Stainton notes that these theorists still agree
that there is a content-bearing structure provided by the expression used, and that what is asserted is the content of what one gets by developing that structure. It is precisely the latter that affords the natural divide: what is merely pragmatically conveyed is content that doesn't result merely from development of the structure used. (WT, p. 59)
But, here is the puzzle Stainton acknowledges arises if sub-sentential speech is genuine: When it comes to sub-sentences, "the content of the assertion cannot be got merely by modifying or shading the contents of the expression uttered. No matter how we develop the expression that was spoken, the result will still be sub-propositional ..." (WT, p. 59). The result is that "when it comes to isolating what is genuinely asserted, we can no longer appeal to the difference between developing a given structure and bringing in a new structure entirely" (WT, p. 59). This result may not seem especially problematic--one need only find some other rule for including what is asserted and excluding what is merely conveyed. However, I will argue that coming up with such a rule can be difficult enough just for sentences, let alone for sub-sentences, given the perspective Stainton and the other Relevance Theorists take on the semantic-pragmatic divide.
Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore (2005a, 2005b, 2007) have generated a series of well-known worries for theories that claim that what is asserted does not result merely from development of the sentence structure (a position I call moderate contextualism, which includes Stainton and the Relevance theorists). These theories argue for the existence of unarticulated constituents of what is said or asserted--elements that are found neither in the surface structure of the sentence that is...
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