Post on 03-Feb-2023
Page 1 of 45
Cross-linguistic differences in expressing time
and universal principles of utterance interpretation
Kasia M. Jaszczolt
University of Cambridge
This chapter addresses the question how linguistic diversity and universalism in the
domain of representing time can be reconciled. It is demonstrated how the
contextualist theory of Default Semantics (Jaszczolt 2005, 2009, 2010a) accounts for
cross-linguistic differences in conveying temporal location, utilising at the same time
universal pragmatic principles. This is achieved by allocating information about
temporality to different but universally available sources of information about
meaning and to different universal processes which interact in producing a
representation of the primary, intended meaning. It offers some examples of how
lexicon/grammar/pragmatics trade-offs in conveying temporality can be represented
in merger representations of Default Semantics, at the same time reflecting the
underlying universal principles of the composition of meaning.
Keywords: Default Semantics, epistemic modality, linguistic relativity, semantic and
pragmatic universals, temporality
Page 2 of 45
1. Time concept and time talk
Languages afford a variety of ways in which referring to the past, present, and future
can be accomplished. Equally, relative temporal ordering of events can be conveyed
in a variety of ways. One temporal concept can be expressed by different means
across languages, and equally, there are various means available for speaking about
time within one single language. These ways range from the use of lexical and
grammatical markers of time, through automatically assigning salient interpretations
to overtly tenseless expressions, to relying on the addressee’s active, conscious
inference of the temporality of the situation in the particular context. In the context of
these significant cross-linguistic differences in conveying temporal location (see also
other contributions to this section), this chapter addresses the question whether there
are universal pragmatic principles beyond the linguistic diversity of expressing
temporality and if so, how the diversity and the universalism can be reconciled.
It is widely acknowledged that the conceptualization of time has both
universal and culture-dependent aspects (see e.g. Nishi, Yoshioka and Hilberink-
Schulpen, or Gladkova – all in this collection).1 In what follows I further develop the
view, following my earlier enquiry in Jaszczolt (2009), that the human concept of
time is universal but it is not primitive. The property of temporality supervenes, in the
sense of its dependence, providing definitional characteristics, on the property of
epistemic commitment, where the latter is taken to be a psychologically basic concept.
I defend a contextualist approach to meaning and demonstrate how the contextualist
theory of Default Semantics (Jaszczolt 2005, 2009, 2010a) accounts for cross-
1 On the co-existence of universal and language-specific aspects of conceptualisation in the
domain of space see e.g. Levinson (2003), Filipović (2010), and Marotta and Meini, this
collection, Filipović and Geva in this collection.
Page 3 of 45
linguistic differences in conveying temporal location, utilising at the same time
universal pragmatic principles. This is achieved by allocating information about
temporality to different but universally available sources of information about
meaning and to different universal processes which interact in producing a
representation of the primary, intended meaning. I give some examples of the
application of this analysis.
Memories, current experiences, and anticipations, as well as mental ordering
of events and states, constitute a large part of the subject matter of human discourse.
We talk about what happened or will happen, or we talk about current states of affairs,
either as known facts or as possibilities. What is fascinating in the ‘time talk’ from the
linguistic point of view is that languages afford a diverse array of means for referring
to the past, the present, and the future. Moreover, even within one natural language
there are often various options for expressing temporality. These means include
grammatical markers of time such as tense, aspect, or modality, lexical markers such
as temporal adverbs, temporal connectives, and other particles, as well as evidential
markers.2 In addition to overt devices present in the lexicon and grammar, there are
also what we can call pragmatic devices. These pertain to the principles on which
discourse is organised. Overtly tenseless expressions can obtain tensed interpretations
either due to the fact that such interpretations are salient to the interlocutors in the
particular context or salient and default for that construction in that language in
general. Securing a recovery of such a reading can be achieved either by relying on
the addressee’s active, conscious inference of the temporality of the situation in the
particular context or by relying on the automatic, unconscious assignment of the
reading by the addressee.
2 See (8) below for an example of the interaction between evidentiality and tense.
Page 4 of 45
These pragmatic devices can be of two types: some are universal, and some
are specific to the particular language and culture. In this chapter I address the
question of the universal status of the mechanisms governing the recovery of
temporality of a speaker’s expression, but rather than focusing on pragmatic devices
per se, as contrasted with lexical and syntactic ones, I ask whether one can discern
universal discourse principles on which such a selection, or trade-off, between the
types of devices can proceed. English, for example, relies predominantly on tense and
temporal adverbials in expressing temporality. Thai, on the other hand, has optional
markers of tense and aspect, random use of adverbials, and relies largely on situated
meanings, inferred from the shared background assumptions or assigned
subconsciously as default interpretations.3
In the context of the significant cross-linguistic differences in conveying
temporal location, one would naturally start by asking whether the human concept of
time is a universal concept, and if so, whether it is primitive. Having adopted a
universal but modality-based approach, this universal concept of time is confronted
with the intra- and inter-language diversity of expressing temporality. The question to
pose is then how the empirically demonstrable linguistic diversity reconciles with the
idea of language universals. In order to address this question, I defend a contextualist
approach to meaning and demonstrate, with the help of some examples from diverse
languages, how the contextualist theory of Default Semantics allows for representing
temporality as the result of processing of various overt and covert linguistic devices
discussed above. I demonstrate how we can account for cross-linguistic differences in
conveying temporal location by allocating information about temporality to different
sources of information about meaning and to different processes that interact in
3 See Srioutai (2006); Jaszczolt and Srioutai (2011).
Page 5 of 45
producing a representation of the primary, intended meaning. It is the universal
applicability of these sources, their mutual trade-offs, as well as the universal status of
the pragmatic processes that allow us to reconcile diversity and universalism about
language. In the process I also defend the methodological assumption of the
compositionality of utterance meaning, also known as pragmatic compositionality
(Recanati 2004; Jaszczolt 2005).
The chapter is structured as follows. In section 2, I discuss the diversity of
means for expressing temporality in discourse and illustrate it with pertinent
examples. In section 3, the question of universals is taken up and in particular the
proposal of pragmatic universals and processing universals. In section 4 I argue in
favour of a contextualist approach to meaning in which the linguistic diversity and
universal pragmatic principles find an explanation. Section 5 follows with a brief
presentation of sources of information about meaning and types of processes that
interact in meaning production and recovery, as proposed in the contextualist theory
of Default Semantics. It is argued that these sources and processes allow us to
adequately represent the diversity in time reference. The question that follows is that
of the principles of composing meaning when such sources and interacting processes
are involved. I address it in section 6, where I contribute to the ongoing discussion on
compositionality by supporting the view that a truly compositional approach to
meaning has to account both for overt and covert means, continuing in section 7 by
representing this variety of means in merger representations of Default Semantics.
Section 8 sums up the argument and makes some general remarks on the ‘depth’ of
diversity when confronted with the existence of universal principles of utterance
interpretation.
Page 6 of 45
2. Expressing temporality: Lexicon, grammar, and pragmatics
It can be easily observed that the diversity of ways of expressing meaning does not
only pertain to temporal reference but rather persists throughout the conceptual
system, affecting even those domains that at first glance, judging by common sense,
should not differ from language to language because they contain concepts that are in
frequent use across cultures. In short, meanings that are expressed overtly in one
language, by the lexicon or grammar, may be expressed in another through pragmatic
inference or default assignment of meaning to a construction. What is important is
that this diversity of expression is a common fact rather than an exception and
therefore should be regarded as such by any explanatorily adequate theory of
meaning. For example, basic knowledge of propositional calculus entrenches in many
people the conviction that concepts such as conjunction, disjunction, implication,
equivalence, and negation are so basic that they are necessarily lexicalised in all
languages. And yet, not all languages have clear equivalents of the English and, or,
if…then, only if, or not. In Wari’, a Chapacura-Wanham language of the Amazon, and
in Tzeltal, Mayan language spoken in Mexico, there is no direct equivalent of or. In
Maricopa, a Yuman language of Arizona, there is no direct equivalent of and. In
Guugu Yimithirr, an Australian aboriginal language, there is no direct equivalent of
if.4
Now, every student of linguistics introduced to the facts of linguistic diversity
knows that the lack of a word for a concept does not necessarily mean that the
language is unable to express that concept; if the relevant culture has a need for a
4 See Mauri and van der Auwera (2012), and Evans and Levinson (2009).
Page 7 of 45
particular concept, it can express it in some other ways. Or it can have various co-
existing means for expressing it. But what is still lacking in linguistics is a
comprehensive theory of meaning that would take this diversity seriously. When a
concept can be inferred or just ‘assigned’, so to speak, to a particular context-
dependent interpretation of a sentence in context, there is no reason not to give it
equal attention in a formal representation to that we give to words and structures.5
While some progress in this area has been achieved since the late 1970s, with the
rising awareness of the need to account for pragmatic ‘intrusions’ into the logical
form when we want the semantic representation to be in line with the intention of the
person who produced that sentence, this awareness has largely stopped at this
proposal of ‘intrusions’, ‘pragmatic enrichment’, or ‘pragmatic modulation’, or
resolving underspecification or underdetermination.6 What we need to do instead is to
address the questions: (i) if the language doesn’t have a word or grammatical structure
for expressing a certain concept, does it still have other means for expressing it, and if
so, (ii) how can we make sure that these means are given adequate attention in a
theory of meaning?
In order to exemplify the need for these research questions, let us continue
with the example of conjunction, this time closer to home, and interwoven with the
pertinent question of mental temporal ordering of eventualities (events and states, see
also Wallington, this collection). English language has lexicalised conjunction, most
commonly in the form of the word and, but the meaning expressed by and is not in a
bi-unique mapping with the logical connective of conjunction in propositional logic.
Example (1) presents a common and widely discussed scenario where and means
5 On this topic, see also Apresjan, this collection and Gladkova, this collection.
6 Literature on this topic is ample. For an overview see for example Recanati (2005); Jaszczolt
(2002); and Jaszczolt (forthcoming).
Page 8 of 45
more than conjunction; it means a temporal conjunction and then. The symbol ‘pr’
stands for, to use a theory-neutral term, ‘pragmatic elaborations’.
(1) Tom finished the chapter and closed the book.
pr Tom finished the chapter and then closed the book.
Various names have been given to this pragmatic inference of temporality that takes
place in the process of utterance interpretation. There have been intense discussions in
the literature concerning the status of such additional meanings. However, all these
discussions start with the presumption that since such additions are in principle
cancellable, they must be regarded, precisely, as ‘additions’. But it is not at all certain
that the criterion of cancellability is the appropriate one. To invoke example (1) again,
the temporal meaning may in fact be well entrenched in a particular context, to the
extent that, in some contexts, cancelling it may not be a feasible conversational move
at all. So perhaps it is not the different provenance and strength of lexical and
pragmatically conveyed meanings that we should be focusing on but rather the fact
that they are all present in, so to speak, ‘one basket’: all contributing to the meaning
of an utterance in a discourse situation. Moreover, it has to be noted that English
allows for the explicit expression of temporality as well, through and then, next, and
so forth. It would take a strong argument to maintain that there is a difference,
relevant for the interpretation of discourse, between lexical and pragmatic means of
expressing temporal ordering of events.
To continue with example (1), temporality is not even most accurately
described as a form of enrichment of and, nor is it well introduced when we speak
Page 9 of 45
about it as a form of shift, modulation, of the meaning of (1). It arises equally easily in
(2), where there is no connective.
(2) Tom finished the chapter. He closed the book.
A less controversial case would be that of disjunction, where the exclusive or
inclusive interpretation is often context- or content-driven as evidenced in the
obviously inclusive reading of (3).
(3) In order to qualify you have to be a citizen or a permanent resident.
Continuing on the topic of conjunction, contrary to English, in Swahili and
then is fully grammaticalised as the consecutive tense marker ka that replaces the
tense marker in all but the first clause. For example, in (4), the past time reference is
signalled in the first phrase by li, after which it is assumed, or inferred,7 from the
presence of the consecutive ka.
(4) a. …wa-Ingereza wa-li-wa-chukua wa-le maiti,
3PL-British 3PL-PAST-3PL-take 3PL-DEM corpses
‘…then the British took the corpses,
b. wa-ka-wa-tia katika bao moja,
3PL-CONS-3PL-put.on on board one
put them on a flat board,
c. wa-ka-ya-telemesha maji-ni kwa utaratibu w-ote…
7 I shall not discuss the big question of inference vs automatic meaning assignment at this
point. See for example Carston (2007); Jaszczolt (2010b).
Page 10 of 45
3PL-CONS-3PL-lower water-LOC with order 3PL-all
and lowered them steadily into the water…’
(adapted from Givón 2005: 154)
To summarise the options, conjunction can be lexicalised or not, and when it is, one
lexical item may carry more meaning than the meaning of conjunction alone, just as
the Swahili ka does. Or it may contribute to triggering more meaning, such as in the
English example (1), without, so to speak, being ‘enriched’ by this meaning as a
lexical item, as evidenced by (2). The temporality is rather expressed pragmatically by
the juxtaposition of two sentences pertaining to events, as is well summarised in
Asher and Lascarides’ (e.g. 2003) rhetorical structure rule of Narration, which states
that if both sentences refer to events, then the event expressed by the first sentence
takes/took/will take place before the event expressed by the second sentence, as in (5):
(5) Tom finished the chapter. He closed the book.
e1 e2
There does not seem to be any reason, methodological or
epistemological/metaphysical, for giving more representation to the lexical or
grammatical way of expressing the same concept than to the pragmatic ones; as long
as the concept is expressed and conveyed, it has to figure in the representation of
meaning.
Next, let us come back to the example of Wari’, which does not have a direct
equivalent of the logical connective of disjunction, neither does it have a word closely
Page 11 of 45
related to it like the English or.8 However, the concepts of the alternatives or
disjunction are present there no less than in languages with the connective. The
absence of a disjunctive marker is compensated by the use of some irrealis marker as
for example in (6).
(6) ’am ’e’ ca ’am mi’ pin ca
perhaps live 3SG.M. perhaps give complete 3SG.M.
‘Either he will live or he will die.’
(from Mauri and van der Auwera 2012: 391).
Again, the presence of the concept of an alternative is sufficient ground for including
disjunction in the representation of meaning of such a sentence – realised as a
juxtaposition of modal phrases. To repeat, the reason is simple and overwhelming. To
use von Fintel and Matthewson’s (2008: 170) words,
while perhaps none of the logical connectives are universally lexically expressed,
there is no evidence that languages differ in whether or not logical connectives are
present in their logical forms.
Examples of linguistic diversity in connectives can be continued endlessly: not
only do we have cultural and linguistic diversity, but also frequently one language
affords us choices of means. In addition, every discourse situation creates a locum for
new pragmatic inferences as well as automatic, default meaning assignments.9 I have
addressed here the issue of overt and covert temporal ordering of eventualities by
8 ‘Closely related’ because English or can adopt inclusive () or exclusive meaning.
9 I discuss this further in section 5.
Page 12 of 45
using an example of conjunction and consecutive tense. It goes without saying that the
phenomenon of Sequence of Tense (SOT) in English occupies the central place in this
topic. For our current purpose, the ambiguities created by the SOT phenomenon such
as in (7) are yet another domain in which we find corroboration for the argument that
grammatical, lexical, and pragmatic means have to be regarded on a par, on an equal
footing, in representing meaning.10
In (7), the temporal location of Mary’s state with
respect to the time of speaking can vary depending on the pragmatic inference or
default assumptions for the context.
(7) John will think that Mary is pregnant.
(from Hornstein 1990: 86).
Therefore, the same theory of meaning that accounts for the lexicon/pragmatics mix in
the consecutivity marker ka, the English or, or, less obviously, the English and, will
have to account for the grammar/pragmatics mix in SOT.
Two more examples discussed in the remainder of this section will add more
flesh to this argument: the evidentiality/temporality mix and the tense-time
mismatches. To address the first: in Matses, a Panoan language spoken in the Amazon
region, there is an evidential system that requires that the source of information is
overtly specified whenever a past event is reported on the basis of inferential evidence
(see Fleck 2007). In particular, it is specified in a sentence how long ago the event
took place, as well as how long ago the speaker obtained evidence. Fleck calls this
inflectional solution double tense. A relevant verbal inflectional suffix in Matses
10
I stay clear of the discussion as to whether this theory of meaning should be called
semantics – in the contextualist sense, as in Relevance Theory, Sperber and Wilson (1995), or
my Default Semantics, Jaszczolt (2005) – or pragmatics, such as truth-conditional pragmatics,
see Recanati (2010). In sections 4 and 5 below I adopt the first option but this choice makes
no difference to the argument.
Page 13 of 45
combines temporal and evidential information as in (8). ERG stands for ‘ergative’, and
DIST.PAST.INF-REC.PAST.EXP for ‘distant past inferential’ combined with ‘recent past
experiential’. The conveyed temporal information is that the speaker discovered the
hut a short time ago, while it was made a long time ago.
(8) mayu-n bëste-wa-nëdak-o-şh.
non.Matses.Indian-ERG hut-make-DIST.PAST.INF-REC.PAST.EXP-3
‘Non-Matses Indians (had) made a hut.’
(from Fleck 2007: 590).
Matses has three past tenses: recent, distant, and remote, and three evidential
distinctions: direct experience, inference, and conjecture (see Fleck 2007: 589). The
marker nëdak expresses the distant past, referring to any temporal interval from
between about a month ago to the speaker’s infancy, combined with the inferential
evidence, while o marks recent past, normally from immediately before the time of
speaking to up to a month ago (although a more extended scale is also used in some
contexts), combined with experiential source. Altogether we obtain nëdak-o which
combines two items of temporal reference: distant past, that of the making of the hut,
and recent past, that of the discovery or obtaining information. Analogously, markers
for other combinations, such as that for recent past inferential or distant past
experiential, are available in the language, making up nine markers for the past time
reference in total.
Now, Fleck suggests that the fact that these distinctions are present only for
referring to the past can be partly ascribed to the obvious fact that these distinctions
are less important (although perhaps not unnecessary, as Fleck suggests) in the case of
the future or the present. What is interesting for our purpose is that what is expressed
Page 14 of 45
as compulsory double tense in Matses would normally be achieved through a
grammar/lexicon means in English, or grammar/pragmatics when the time of
obtaining evidence is obvious from the context. In addition, when we also consider
the three-way distinction in marking past tense, we require an additional
grammar/lexicon or grammar/pragmatics mix in English, which may result, for
example, in a grammar/pragmatics/lexicon mix for expressing the combination from
(8), as in the rather crude attempt in (9).
(9) Tom built a house [a long time ago]. [I [have just] realised/deduced from
what you were saying that he did].
It is easy to envisage discourse scenarios in which the material in square brackets,
outer or inner, could be redundant. All such numerous differences in what languages
grammaticalise or lexicalise as far as temporal reference is concerned add more fuel to
the argument that, to put it in the form of a slogan, whatever information content there
is in an utterance has to be present in its meaning representation, independently of
how it got there, i.e. independently of what sources or what processes are responsible
for it. Finally, let us address tense-time mismatches. These are abundant in many
languages, and it is so for good reasons. For example, when a speaker uses present
tense with future-time reference, a phenomenon that is sometimes called tenseless
future, the choice is likely to be motivated by the intention to emphasise the high
probability of the future event or potential difficulty in altering the plan or schedule as
in (10).
(10) On Monday the Prime Minister is in Glasgow.
Page 15 of 45
The so-called futurate progressive as in (11) exemplifies a similar phenomenon.
(11) On Monday I am planting my hedge.
Vivid, or historic, present obtained through present tense forms used with past-time
reference as in (12) is yet another example of the discussed mix.
(12) This is what happened to me yesterday: I enter the office and see this guy
standing by my desk and smiling to me. I say to him, …
From the conceptual, or semantic, point of view, it is more appropriate to call the
phenomenon the past of narration in that the grammatical form is used to refer to past
eventualities – on analogy with the classification of (10) and (11) as examples of the
future.
In short, as is well known, future or past temporality need not map onto future
or past verb forms in English. Moreover, there are languages in which temporal
reference is not grammatically marked (Mandarin) or this marking can be optional
(Thai). I emphasise this fact as it serves as further supporting evidence that all
information about temporal reference has to be treated on an equal footing, no matter
what its provenance. In section 7 I exemplify how this representation can be
executed. What needs to be established first, in the logical order of explanation, is (i)
whether there is a ‘theoretical whip’ that would tame and subjugate this diversity
(section 3); (ii) the theoretical framework for the theory of meaning that should be
adopted in order to give us the required object of study and scope (section 4); as well
as (iii) the identification of sources and processes that contribute meaning information
Page 16 of 45
(section 5), followed by (iv) a disclaimer concerning the use we make of the principle
of compositionality (section 6).
3. Pragmatic universals?
It can be assumed that the composition of meaning must follow some universal
principles that have their provenance in the structure of the brain and operations the
brain is capable of performing, as well as in the broadly similar external environment
and purpose associated with language use. One way to proceed would be to begin by
ascribing generative capacity to syntax, following the generative syntax school, and
attempting to address all meaning composition through proposing adequate syntactic
operations. However, there are two categories of problems with this method. Firstly,
these operations would either have to be assumed to be cognitively real, or would
have to be discovered and thereby awarded a clear empirical status. If we manipulate
them in syntactic theory just to make them account for the data, we are in danger of
overgeneralising. Arguably, not all languages exhibit recursion, and even the
assumption of the universality of constituent structure poses some problems of
analysis as free-order languages such as Latin exemplify (see Evans and Levinson
2009 for a convincing argument in support of this claim). On the other hand,
conceptual universals seem to be beyond dispute: there are general patterns on which
semantic composition is founded. To quote Evans and Levinson (2009: 444),
Page 17 of 45
although recursion may not be found in the syntax of languages, it is always found in
the conceptual structure, that is, the semantics or pragmatics – in the sense that it is
always possible in any language to express complex propositions.11
Compositionality can be safely accepted as a property of conceptual structure, and
thereby, on the definition of semantics we will be accepting below, also as a property
of semantics, as it is understood on contextualist accounts. What it means is that
generative power is ascribed to semantics/pragmatics rather than to syntax. This can
be understood in a variety of ways. Richard Montague strove for a formal
representation of sentence meaning in terms of intensional logic. His followers in the
general tradition of dynamic semantics, such as Discourse Representation Theory and
Dynamic Predicate Logic, are striving for an adequate formal representation of
meaning, where meaning includes pragmatic addition such as the resolution of
anaphora and presupposition, allowing for various degrees of representationalism
while retaining the commitment to compositionality. The next step in the direction of
pragmatics is the so-called pragmatic, interactive compositionality adopted by some
post-Gricean contextualists and notably in Recanati’s (2004, 2010) Truth-Conditional
Pragmatics and Jaszczolt’s Default Semantics (2005, 2010a) and defended in section
6 below.
Let us first look at the proposal of semantic universals. Von Fintel and
Matthewson (2008) begin by invoking the Strong Effability Hypothesis and
Translatability Thesis, both attributed to Jerrold Katz. The Strong Effability
Hypothesis says that ‘Every proposition is the sense of some sentence in each natural
language.’ This is, needless to say, wishful thinking for a formal semanticist and it
doesn’t take much evidence to disprove it. Next, the more relaxed Translatability
11
On conceptual universals see also Pinker and Jackendoff (2009); on a neurobiological account of
universals see Müller (2009).
Page 18 of 45
Thesis says that ‘For any pair of natural languages and for any sentence S in one and
any sense σ of S, there is at least one sentence S' in the other language such that σ is a
sense of S’. This thesis, again, is much too strict and only workable when we
substitute the term ‘utterance’ for ‘sentence’ and construe semantics in a radical
contextualist way. On the other hand, von Fintel and Matthewson (2008: 191) note the
following:
We found that languages often express strikingly similar truth conditions, in spite of
non-trivial differences in lexical semantics or syntax. We suggested that it may
therefore be fruitful to investigate the validity of ‘purely semantic’ universals, as
opposed to syntax-semantics universals.
The obvious follow-up question is, what would such ‘purely semantic’ universals
have to be like? Von Fintel and Matthewson suggest (i) some universal semantic
composition principles, which, however, to sum up crudely, are problematic to
construe, or (ii) Gricean principles of utterance interpretation. If we select the latter,
then we opt for the semantics/pragmatics mix and the follow-up question is what role
universal processing principles play in such semantic/pragmatic universals. Evans and
Levinson (2009) contend that processing principles are the universals sought.12
The issue is this. What is important for the current discussion of the
provenance of universals is whether we choose to look for them in the domain of
formal semantic/pragmatic generalisations per se or rather, or also, in the domain of
processing generalisations. For example, if we were to go along with dynamic
semantics and incorporate more and more information from context into formal
representation, we would be opting for the first strategy. If we were to go along with
post-Gricean, and therefore intention-based, contextualism in semantics and
12
On universals in processing see also Hawkins (2004), (2009).
Page 19 of 45
incorporate results of pragmatic inference in the truth-conditional representation, we
could still opt for either focus on the final representation or focus on the kinds of
processes that lead to this pragmatics-rich representation. Evans and Levinson go with
the latter. As they say, “[f]or our generativist critics, generality is to be found at the
level of structural representation; for us, at the level of process” (ibid., p. 475).
To sum up, the methodological question is whether universal principles should
include generalisations about processing. There are multiple arguments in favour of
the affirmative answer.13
We need methodological assumptions about the theory of
meaning but we also have to see how they govern the production and comprehension
of meaning because, as was amply exemplified in section 2, and as is also widely
acknowledged in various current processing models, comprehension of meaning
involves the synthesis of chunks of information that come from different domains.14
Now, the main methodological assumption about the theory of meaning is the
Principle of Compositionality, which says that the meaning of a complex expression is
determined by the meanings of its parts and the structure in which they are combined.
Pursued in formal semantics by Richard Montague, Barbara Partee, and armies of
acolytes, the principle remains a Holy Grail of semanticists. There are intensional
constructs that refuse to succumb unless sophisticated changes or additions are
allowed in their logical form. Temporal reference is also in this problematic category.
The contextualist orientation in post-Gricean pragmatics is the most suitable approach
13
I argued extensively for the inclusion of processing consideration in semantic/pragmatic
theory in Jaszczolt (2008). See also Saul (2002). 14
Needless to say, the question is orthogonal to the question of lexical universals pursued in
lexical semantics: the proposal that words such as I, you, big, small stand for universal human
concepts because they are universally lexicalised feeds into the overall issue of meaning
universals but can fare independently of it as well. The universality of semantic types t,e is
also orthogonal in that when semantic/pragmatic universals allow for interaction across the
domains of lexicon, grammar, and pragmatics, neither domain has to separately exhibit
universals of this type.
Page 20 of 45
to look into for pursuing this pragmatic/semantic universal. This is the topic to which
I now turn.
4. A contextualist approach to expressing temporal distinctions
In the post-Gricean approach to utterance, and, more recently, also discourse meaning,
the focus of the debate has been on the pragmatic constituents of what is said. In other
words, since the late 1970s, the main debates have circled around the delimitation of
the propositional content as contrasted with what is truly implicit. Some pragmatic
constituents, such as the enrichment of the meaning of sentential connectives as in (1)
above or (13), the specification of the domain of quantification as in (14), the
precisification of the meaning of negation, and many others, are said to contribute to
the propositional content of the uttered sentence.
(13) You will pass the test if you practise a lot.
pr You will pass the test if and only if you practise a lot.
(14) Everybody read Frege.
pr Every member of the research group read Frege.
Whether we call them parts of explicature (Sperber and Wilson 1995), what is said
(Recanati 1989), or retain the term implicature (Levinson 2000), the common-sense
judgement remains that they are in some sense more basic and important than
implicatures, where the latter constitute separate messages to the addressee. This
pragmatics/semantics mix approach has been called radical pragmatics, sense-
Page 21 of 45
generality (in that the structure of the sentence affords only the general,
underdetermined representation of meaning), or more recently contextualism (see e.g.
Recanati 2004, 2005, 2010, 2012). The latter term is what we shall adopt.15
To sum up
the idea, semantic analysis takes us only part of the way towards the recovery of
utterance meaning and pragmatic enrichment completes the process. The standard
logical form of the sentence is enriched, or modulated, as a result of pragmatic
processing, either inferential or automatic in kind, and the entire semantic/pragmatic
product becomes subjected to the truth-conditional analysis.
Next, the question that has frequently been addressed, since it was brought to
the fore by Carston (1988, 1998), is how far the logical form can be extended. Or, in
other words, ‘how much pragmatics’ is allowed in the representation of the main
intended meaning of an utterance. According to Default Semantics, a contextualist
approach I am going to use in what follows (see Jaszczolt 2005, 2009, 2010a), the
answer is quite radical: as much as is required to faithfully depict the main, primary
message that the speaker intends to convey. This answer, albeit commonsensically
obvious, is not so easy to defend for a compositional and truth-conditional theory of
meaning because ‘as much as required’ also includes situations where the main
message is conveyed indirectly, and this happens surprisingly often and is true of
different languages and cultures (see e.g. Nicolle and Clark 1999; Pitts 2005;
Schneider 2009). Indirect main meaning means that the logical form of the intended
message may be significantly different from the logical form of the uttered sentence
and this pulls the rug from under the feet of formal semanticists who wish to retain the
backbone of sentence structure. But at the same time it opens a window for those of a
15
But note that contextualism can also be understood more broadly, to include pragmatics in
two-dimensional semantics such as Stalnaker’s approach. See Jaszczolt (forthcoming) for
discussion.
Page 22 of 45
more cognitive orientation who want to retain compositionality and at the same time
recognise the fact that meaning comes from a variety of sources and through a variety
of processes and is merged into one cognitive representation.
It is this cognitively real representation that is compositional and is the object
of study of Default Semantics (DS). It is called there merger representation and its
most distinctive feature, differentiating it from primary objects of other contextualist
accounts, is that it does not undergo a syntactic constraint. DS does not recognise the
level of meaning at which the logical form is pragmatically developed, enriched, or
modulated as a real, cognitively justified construct. To do so would be to assume that
syntax plays a privileged role among various carriers of information, which is
considered to be a contextualists’ mistake. In (15), the main intended message would
normally be as in (15c) and (15c) is therefore modelled as the merger representation
of the primary meaning in preference to its alternatives.
(15) Child to mother: Everybody has a bike.
(15a) All of the child’s friends have bikes.
(15b) Many/most of the child’s classmates have bikes.
(15c) The mother should consider buying her son a bike.
(15d) Cycling is a popular form of exercise among children.
Interlocutors frequently communicate their main intended content through a
proposition that is indirect and therefore not syntactically restricted by the uttered
sentence. It is this intended proposition that post-Gricean, intention-based
contextualism should attend to. Understood as being about meaning that is intended
by the speaker and recovered by the addressee, it is important not to conflate it with
the view that meaning is to be analysed from the position from which it is assessed.
Page 23 of 45
The latter is a relativist stance (see MacFarlane 2005, 2011); the first is a contextualist
one, Gricean in spirit.
5. Sources of temporal information
In section 2 I gave several examples of sentences in the case of which temporal
information had to be retrieved from the lexicon/pragmatics, grammar/pragmatics, or
even lexicon/grammar/pragmatics mix. In order to account for this diversified
provenance and merger of outputs, DS has to be able to assign information to clearly
defined sources. In the current version of DS (Jaszczolt 2009, 2010a), the following
sources have been identified:
(i) world knowledge (WK)
(ii) word meaning and sentence structure (WS)
(iii) situation of discourse (SD)
(iv) properties of the human inferential system (IS)
(v) stereotypes and presumptions about society and culture (SC)
I will not elaborate on these sources here. In what follows some basic knowledge of
DS will prove useful but not essential. Suffice to say, as a point of explanation, that
source (iv) accounts for interpretations that stem from the standard properties of
human intentional mental states. For example, when a speaker uses a definite
description, it will be, by default, understood as associated with the strongest
referential role a definite description can play, namely the referential rather than the
Page 24 of 45
attributive one, unless some other source of information intervenes and stops this
default from arising.
The outputs of sources of information about meaning are treated on an equal
footing. To repeat, the syntactic constraint present in other contextualist accounts,
such as relevance theory or truth-conditional pragmatics, is abandoned. Merger
representations have the status of mental representations. They have a compositional
structure: they are proposition-like constructs, integrating information coming from
various sources that interacts according to the principles established by the intentional
character of discourse. While the sources of information are delineated clearly, they
are not a claim to originality in DS. Many pragmatic approaches emphasise the role of
cultural and social assumptions and the role of the architecture of the brain in meaning
production and comprehension. Levinson (2000) makes out of them a rigid theory of
generalised implicatures. In his socio-cognitive approach Kecskes (e.g. 2010)
emphasises that pragmatics has to take into account both societal (cooperation) and
individual factors (egocentrism) as context-dependency is counterbalanced by
individual tendencies. He proposes that a dialectal model of pragmatics should present
both the speaker’s and the addressee’s perspective (Kecskes 2008) – a claim that is
clearly in line with the Model Speaker–Model Addressee perspective of DS
(Jaszczolt, e.g. 2005).
Next, the model of sources of information can be mapped onto types of processes
that produce the merger representation of the primary meaning, as well as the
additional (secondary) meanings. Lexicon and grammar represent both the source and
the type of processing that is unique to them (WS). Next, structure and properties of
the brain discussed as IS above, lead to so-called cognitive defaults (CD) – automatic
interpretations that trigger for example the strong referential reading of definite
Page 25 of 45
descriptions. Sources WK and SC are responsible for social, cultural, and world
knowledge defaults (SCWD).16
But they can also pertain to a process of conscious
pragmatic inference (CPI): information from world knowledge (WK) or knowledge of
society and culture (SC) can be accessed automatically (SCWD) or they can be
consciously inferred (CPI). Situational context of discourse (SD) will, when active,
lead to CPI.
A CD is exemplified in (16). Sentence (17) exemplifies the fact that SC can result
in either an SCWD or CPI process. PM stands for ‘primary meaning’.
(16) IS CD
The author of Presumptive Meanings is coming to Cambridge next spring.
PM: Stephen Levinson is coming to Cambridge next spring.
(17) SC SCWD or CPI
A Rembrandt was sold at Christie’s last week.
PM: A painting by Rembrandt was sold at the Christie’s auction house in
London last week.
In constructing merger representations DS makes use of the processing model and it
indexes the components of the representation (symbolised by , for summation of
information) with a subscript standing for the type of processing.
‘Default’ is a notorious term in the literature in that it is used in a wide variety
of ways and for a variety of purposes.17
Therefore it is important to stress that SCWDs
and CDs are defaults for the situation, for the Model Speaker and Model Addressee.
SCWDs depend on societal and cultural factors, as well as on shared knowledge of the
physical laws of the world. CDs, when present, are triggered by the structure and
16
These are marked as SCWDpm when they pertain to primary meaning and SCWDsm when
they result in secondary meanings. Analogously for CPI discussed below. 17
See Jaszczolt (2010b) for an encyclopaedic overview.
Page 26 of 45
operations of the human brain and in particular by the property of intentionality
exhibited by the relevant mental states.
All in all, what we have in DS is a set of universally utilised sources of
information and a set of universally applicable processes in meaning construction. We
are still far from knowing how exactly the merger of information proceeds; it is
possible that for this we require evidence from neurolinguistics. Evans and Levinson
(2009: 429) define universal principles as “stable engineering solutions, satisfying
multiple design constraints, reflecting both cultural-historical factors and the
constraints of human cognition”. In DS, as we have seen, these universal principles
translate into, respectively, (i) social, cultural, and world-knowledge defaults (SCWD)
or conscious pragmatic inference from societal and cultural knowledge or knowledge
of physical (world) facts (CPI); and (ii) cognitive defaults (CD), grounded in the
properties of the human inferential system (IS), and in particular in the property of
intentionality of mental states. After a brief explanation in section 6 of how the
requirement of compositionality of meaning fares under this DS-theoretic account,
in section 7 I put the above categories to use in representing the
lexicon/grammar/pragmatics mix in temporal reference.
6. Covert and overt devices and the question of compositionality
The requirement of compositionality is often considered to be a necessary condition
for any theory of meaning. However, sometimes it is overtly acknowledged that some
types of constructions, namely intensional contexts, evade it, and the claim that
natural language semantics is compositional is lifted. Schiffer’s (e.g. 1991, 1992,
Page 27 of 45
1994, 2003) way of approaching the problem is to stipulate what it would take for
semantics to be construed as compositional – for example, what it would take to
construct formal representations of propositional attitude reports that observe the
compositionality requirement (Schiffer 1992), but, nevertheless, conclude that the
natural language semantics in fact lacks these required features that would make
intensional contexts compositional. Instead, it is possible that the composition of
meaning reflects compositional reality; the structure of meaning supervenes on the
structure of the world. Next, Jerry Fodor, in his second and substantially rethought
attempt at the Language of Thought in LOT2 (Fodor 2008), proposes that
compositionality be sought on the level of referential properties. Now, if
compositionality is not to be found in traditionally understood semantics but
semantics must ‘stay close’ to the compositionality requirement by observing
referentiality and, generally, the world- dependence, then, equally, we can bring these
extra semantic components into a theory of meaning as long as we redefine semantics
as a semantics/pragmatics mix. In other words, we do not postulate slots in the logical
form of the expression that have to be filled from some extra-sentential source like
indexicalists do (see e.g. Stanley and Szabó 2000; Stanley 2002, 2007), but we say
that these sources contribute according to some still unknown principles of interaction
of processes of meaning construction and meaning recovery, as in DS. Recanati’s
‘top-down’ modulation of meaning is a middle station in this conceptual shift. It
denies indexical slots, allows free modification of sense, but does not address the
question of sources and interaction of processes. However, Recanati (2004) does
address the question of lifting compositionality to such an interaction:
compositionality belongs to modulated propositions, it is called ‘interactionist’, or
‘Gestaltist’ compositionality. Similarly, DS assumes compositionality of utterance
Page 28 of 45
meaning rather than sentence meaning. ‘Assumes’ because compositionality is here,
like in Recanati’s approach, a methodological assumption. It is at the same time an
empirical assumption, a necessary characteristic of all possible human languages, in
agreement with Szabó (2000). What remains is a colossal task of understanding the
interaction itself, through work on corpora, neurolinguistic evidence, and formal
theories. At present we can only demonstrate that a pragmatic compositional account
such as DS adequately accounts for the lexicon/grammar/pragmatics mix, and for the
syntactic-constraint-free primary meanings, keeping the identification of processes, as
well as the units on which they operate, perspicuous in the meaning representation.
7. Representing the diversity
Temporal reference that is of interest for our mixed-sources and interaction-of-
processes account was exemplified by, among others, (i) adding a temporal (and then)
meaning to a non-temporal connective in (1); (ii) adding temporal reference to
contiguous sentences in discourse in (2), juxtaposed with grammatical marking of this
relation in Swahili by the consecutive tense marker ka in (4); (iii) SOT phenomenon
with future-time reference in the main clause in (7); (iv) double-tense in Matses in (8),
contrasted with English (9) and normally analogous to a mere (9') below; and (v)
tense-time mismatches in English in (10)–(12), all repeated below for convenience.
(1) Tom finished the chapter and closed the book.
(2) Tom finished the chapter. He closed the book.
Page 29 of 45
(4) a. …wa-Ingereza wa-li-wa-chukua wa-le maiti,
3Pl-British 3Pl-Past-3Pl-take 3Pl-Dem corpses
‘…then the British took the corpses,
b. wa-ka-wa-tia katika bao moja…
3Pl-Cons-3Pl-put.on on board one
put them on a flat board…’
(7) John will think that Mary is pregnant.
(8) mayu-n bëste-wa-nëdak-o-şh.
non.Matses.Indian-ERG hut-make-DIST.PAST.INF-REC.PAST.EXP-3
‘Non-Matses Indians (had) made a hut.’
(9) Tom built a house [a long time ago]. [I [have just] realised/deduced from what you
were saying that he did. ]
(9') Tom built a house.
(10) On Monday the Prime Minister is in Glasgow.
(11) On Monday I am planting my hedge.
(12) This is what happened to me yesterday: I enter the office and see this guy standing by
my desk and smiling to me. I say to him, …
In (1), what is of interest is that the temporal meaning of and comes from the source
SCWD: since there are two events juxtaposed, the addressee automatically adds the
relation of temporal ordering 1 < 2; see Figure 1. Subscripts stand for the type of
process responsible for the contribution to utterance meaning and the square brackets
contain the material on which the process operates. To repeat, the processes can then
be easily, albeit not bi-uniquely, mapped onto sources of information. For clarity of
Page 30 of 45
presentation, the representation of past-time reference is omitted (but will be attended
to in other examples).
Page 31 of 45
Figure 1: for example (1)
Similarly, in (2), the juxtaposition of two sentences referring to events results in [1 <
2]SCWDpm. The difference is that the conjunction is present in the merger
representation qua conceptual representation but is not overtly present in the sentence,
hence we do not have [1 2]WS as in Figure 1. Instead, there is [1 2]CD as in
Figure 2. We assume that it is CD that is responsible for the conceptual conjunction
because the natural order of events happening in the world is mirrored here in the
mental states.
x y z 1 2
[1 2]WS
Tom (x)
chapter (y)
book (z)
[1 < 2]SCWDpm
1: [x finished y]WS
2: [x closed y]WS
Page 32 of 45
Figure 2: for example (2)
Example (4) demonstrates that the temporal order of events can be conveyed
with recourse to neither the lexicon (and then) nor to pragmatics (enrichment of and
with two events juxtaposed), but instead to grammar. In other words, there is
considerable variation in how the ‘order of narration’ is externalised. In Swahili, it is
the marker ka that conveys this meaning. In DS there is no difficulty in varying this
source of information about temporal sequence of events, as Figure 3 demonstrates.
The meaning 1 < 2 is ascribed there to WS. Upper case ‘X’ stands for a plural
referent with collective reading.
x y z 1 2
[1 2]CD
Tom (x)
chapter (y)
book (z)
[1 < 2] SCWDpm
1: [x finished y]WS
2: [x closed y]WS
Page 33 of 45
Figure 3: for example (4)
Example (7) obtains two interpretations: one where is pertains to the future, as
indicated by the preceding future-tense marker will, and the other one without a shift,
with the present-time grounded is. Following the theory of time adopted in DS, the
future is represented by a modal acceptability operator ACC qualified by the degree
and superscripted by the source of information (see e.g. Jaszczolt 2009). So, ACCrf ├
Σ' means ‘it is acceptable to the degree pertaining to the regular future form that it is
the case that Σ'’, where the sources of information are WS and CD – that is the
structure, lexicon, and the default sense of will. On the shifted reading, Σ'' remains in
the future, as the CD subscript on ACC indicates. This reading is represented in
Figure 4. The superscript rf stands for ‘regular future’.
X 1 2
[wa-Ingereza]CD (X)
1: [wa-chukua wa-le maiti [X]CD]WS
2: [wa-tia katika bao moja [X]CD]WS
[1 2]WS
Page 34 of 45
Figure 4: for the default shifted reading of example (7)
The present-time reading of Σ'' is obtained via context-triggered inference that
Mary’s state of pregnancy obtains at the time of discourse. The process is then CPIpm
as in Figure 5. The superscript rn stands for ‘regular present’.
x y Σ'
[John]CD (x)
[Mary]CD (y)
[ACCrf ├ Σ']WS,CD
': [x think '']WS
Σ'': [y be pregnant]WS
Page 35 of 45
Figure 5: for the contextually triggered reading of example (7)
Example (8) has a conceptual representation as in Figure 6, where the
information ‘a long time ago’ and ‘as I have just deduced’ (or something to that
effect) is obtained via the grammatical source, and hence WS. In the English
equivalent uttered as (9'), this double temporality and source of evidence is either not
intended or, in some circumstances, may be inferred via CPIpm or taken for granted.
For the clarity of argument, we did not attend to the nuances of the ergative structure
and regarded ‘bëste-wa’ as a unit and ‘mayu-n’ as the ‘subject’ in the sense of the
actor.
x y Σ' [John]CD (x)
[Mary]CD (y)
[ACCrf ├ Σ']WS,CD
': [x think '']WS
[ACCrn
├ Σ'']WS, CPIpm
Σ'' [y be pregnant]WS
Page 36 of 45
Figure 6: Σ for example (8)
Sentences (10) and (11) normally present a problem for formal semantic
accounts, where temporal reference is dictated by the tense of the sentence, as for
example in Kamp and Reyle’s (1993) account of Discourse Representation Theory. In
DS, however, all sources of information are treated on an equal footing and are
equally able to override or prevent the potential output of other sources. So, tense-
time mismatches are not an exception but simply a case where CPI is at work. (10)
obtains the representation in Figure 7. The superscript tf stands for ‘tenseless future’.
X Σ'
mayu-n (X)
[ACCREC.PAST.EXP
[ACCDIST.PAST.INF
├ Σ']]WS
Σ' [bëste-wa (X)]WS
Page 37 of 45
Figure 7: Σ for example (10)
Futurate progressive in (11) works analogously, with the temporality conveyed
through the CPIpm as in Figure 8. The superscript fp stands for ‘futurate progressive’.
x t Σ'
[the Prime Minister]CD (x)
on Monday (t)
[ACCtf
├ Σ']WS, CPIpm
Σ' [x be in London]WS
Page 38 of 45
Figure 8: Σ for example (11)
Finally, the past of narration in (12) is analogously represented by taking into
account the pragmatic source of information that, in merger representations of DS,
can override the information potentially carried by the grammar. Hence, (12') obtains
the past-time reference via CPIpm as in Figure 9.
(12') I enter the office.
For the purpose of the current argument it is sufficient to represent how the past-time
reference is assigned to the present-tense form. However, we must remember that
merger representations, being the ‘pragmaticky’ offspring of the discourse
representation structures of Discourse Representation Theory (Kamp and Reyle
1993), represent entire discourses. Hence (12') is normally part of a for a larger
chunk of discourse as in (12) and the discourse condition ‘yesterday (t)’ is already
x t Σ'
[the speaker]CD (x)
on Monday (t)
[ACCfp
├ Σ']WS, CPIpm
Σ' [x plant x’s hedge]WS
Page 39 of 45
present there by virtue of processing the previous sentence. The superscript pn stands
for ‘past of narration’.
Page 40 of 45
Figure 9: Simplified for example (12') as part of (12)
All in all, having the processes identified in DS at our disposal, aided by the
requirement of treating them all on an equal footing as far as their contribution to the
compositional mental merger representation is concerned, allows us to represent the
linguistic diversity of means of expressing temporal reference and temporal ordering,
at the same time making use of universal principles of utterance interpretation.
8. Concluding remarks: The depth of diversity
In discussing the various solutions to expressing temporal reference and temporal
ordering I have demonstrated how adopting merger representations allows for
representing the linguistic diversity of means of conveying information (the
lexicon/grammar/pragmatics trade-offs) by allocating them to contributing sources
and processes. An adequate representation of this diversity requires that all
contributing sources and processes are treated on an equal footing. The commonsense
x t Σ'
[the speaker]CD (x)
yesterday (t)
[ACCpn
├ Σ']WS, CPIpm
Σ' [x enter the office]WS
Page 41 of 45
principle of efficiency in communication may require leaving some aspects of
intended meaning to pragmatic means such as the capturing of defaults or situated
inference. In searching for universal sources of information and universal processes of
discourse interpretation it was proposed that the contextualist orientation, and in
particular its radical version in DS, withstands the test for cross-linguistic
applicability set up in this chapter.
The final question to address is whether in explaining language use one ought
to focus on language diversity or rather on universal patterns. Evans and Levinson,
(2009: 436), in their debate with generative syntacticians, opt for the first. They make
a programmatic statement that languages and cultures have adaptive character, reflect
the cultural and ecological interests of the community, and it is these diversified
solutions that languages adopt for this task that should be the core of linguistic theory.
Mapping languages onto formal (whether conceptual or not) structures disposes of
this core point of interest of language study. I hope to have demonstrated in this
chapter, in the case of some simple examples of the variety of means available for
expressing temporality, that neither focusing on the variety of means nor stressing the
universality of semantic/pragmatic principles and processes is a preferable option.
They have to be considered in tandem, à la Kantian percepts and concepts, in an
adequate account of intended meaning in communication – and thereby in any
adequate, compositional theory of meaning.
Page 42 of 45
References
Asher, Nicholas & Alex Lascarides. 2003. Logics of Conversation. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Carston, Robyn. 1988. Implicature, explicature, and truth-theoretic semantics. In R. M.
Kempson, ed., Mental Representations: The Interface between Language and Reality,
155–181. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Carston, Robyn. 1998. Postscript (1995) to Carston (1988). In A. Kasher, ed., Pragmatics:
Critical Concepts. Vol. 4, 464–479. London: Routledge.
Carston, Robyn. 2007. How many pragmatic systems are there? In M. J. Frápolli, ed., Saying,
Meaning and Referring: Essays on François Recanati’s Philosophy of Language, 18–
48. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Evans, Nicholas & Stephen C. Levinson. 2009. The myth of language universals: Language
diversity and its importance for cognitive science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32:
429–492.
Filipović, Luna. 2010. Thinking and speaking about motion: Universal vs.
language-specific effects. In G. Marotta, A. Lenci, L. Meini, & F. Rovai,
eds., Space in Language, 235-248. Pisa: University of Pisa Press.
Fleck, David W. 2007. Evidentiality and double tense in Matses. Language 83: 589–614.
Fodor, Jerry A. 2008. LOT 2: The Language of Thought Revisited. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Givón, Talmy. 2005. Context as other Minds: The Pragmatics of Sociality, Cognition and
Communication. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: Benjamins.
Hawkins, John A. 2004. Efficiency and Complexity in Grammars. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hawkins, John A. 2009. Language universals and the performance-grammar correspondence
hypothesis. In M. H. Christiansen, C. Collins, & S. Edelman, eds., Language Universals, 54 –
78. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hornstein, Norbert. 1990. As Time Goes By: Tense and Universal Grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Jaszczolt, Katarzyna M. 2002. Semantics and Pragmatics: Meaning in Language and
Discourse. London: Longman.
Jaszczolt, Katarzyna M. 2005. Default Semantics: Foundations of a Compositional Theory of
Acts of Communication. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Page 43 of 45
Jaszczolt, Katarzyna M. 2008. Psychological explanations in Gricean pragmatics and Frege’s
legacy. In I. Kecskes & J. Mey, eds., Intentions, Common Ground, and the Egocentric
Speaker-Hearer, 9–45. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Jaszczolt, Katarzyna M. 2009. Representing Time: An Essay on Temporality as Modality.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jaszczolt, Katarzyna M. 2010a. ‘Default Semantics’. In B. Heine & H. Narrog, eds., The
Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Analysis, 215–246. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jaszczolt, Katarzyna M. 2010b. Defaults in semantics and pragmatics. Second edition. In E.
N. Zalta, ed., Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
http://plato.stanford.edu/contents.html
Jaszczolt, Katarzyna M. forthcoming. Semantics and pragmatics: The boundary issue. In K.
von Heusinger, P. Portner, & C. Maienborn, eds., Semantics: An International
Handbook of Natural Language Meaning. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Jaszczolt, Katarzyna M. & Jiranthara Srioutai. 2011. Communicating about the past
through modality in English and Thai. In A. Patard & F. Brisard, eds., Cognitive
Approaches to Tense, Aspect, and Epistemic Modality, 249–278. Amsterdam &
Philadelphia: Benjamins.
Kamp, Hans & Uwe Reyle. 1993. From Discourse to Logic: Introduction to
Modeltheoretic Semantics of Natural Language, Formal Logic and Discourse
Representation Theory. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Kecskes, Istvan. 2008. Dueling context: A dynamic model of meaning. Journal of Pragmatics
40: 385–406.
Kecskes, Istvan. 2010. The paradox of communication: Socio-cognitive approach to
pragmatics. Pragmatics and Society 1: 50–73.
Levinson, Stephen C. 2000. Presumptive Meanings: The Theory of Generalized
Conversational Implicature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Levinson, Stephen C. 2003. Space in Language and Cognition: Explorations in Cognitive
Diversity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
MacFarlane, John. 2005. Making sense of relative truth. Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society 105: 321–339.
MacFarlane, John. 2011. Relativism and knowledge attributions. In S. Bernecker & D.
Pritchard, eds., Routledge Companion to Epistemology, 536-544. London: Routledge.
Mauri, Caterina & Johan van der Auwera. 2012. Connectives. In K. Allan & K. M.
Jaszczolt, eds., The Cambridge Handbook of Pragmatics, 377-401. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Page 44 of 45
Müller, Ralph-Axel. 2009. Language universals in the brain: How linguistic are they? In M. H.
Christiansen, C. Collins & S. Edelman, eds., Language Universals, 224 –252. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Nicolle, Steve & Billy Clark. 1999. Experimental pragmatics and what is said: A response to
Gibbs and Moise. Cognition 69: 337–354.
Pinker, Steven & Ray Jackendoff. 2009. The components of language: What’s specific to language,
and what’s specific to humans. In M. H. Christiansen, C. Collins & S. Edelman, eds.,
Language Universals, 126 –151. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pitts, Alyson. 2005. Assessing the evidence for intuitions about what is said. M.Phil. essay,
University of Cambridge.
Recanati, François. 1989. The pragmatics of what is said. Mind and Language 4. Reprinted
in S. Davis, ed., 1991, Pragmatics: A Reader, 97–120. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Recanati, François. 2004. Literal Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Recanati, François. 2005. Literalism and contextualism: Some varieties. In G. Preyer & G. Peter,
eds., Contextualism in Philosophy: Knowledge, Meaning, and Truth, 171–196. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
Recanati, François. 2010. Truth-Conditional Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Recanati, François.2012. Contextualism: Some varieties. In K. Allan & K. M. Jaszczolt, eds.,
The Cambridge Handbook of Pragmatics, 135-149. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Saul, Jennifer M. 2002. What is said and psychological reality; Grice’s project and relevance
theorists’ criticisms. Linguistics and Philosophy 25: 347–372.
Schiffer, Stephen. 1991. Does Mentalese have a compositional semantics? In B. Loewer & G.
Rey, eds., Meaning in Mind: Fodor and his Critics, 181–99. Oxford: Blackwell.
Schiffer, Stephen. 1992. Belief ascription. Journal of Philosophy 89: 499–521.
Schiffer, Stephen. 1994. A paradox of meaning. Noûs 28: 279–324.
Schiffer, Stephen. 2003. The Things We Mean. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Schneider, Anna. 2009. Post-Gricean Pragmatics without the Syntactic Constraint: A Study with
Reference to Requests in Russian and British English. PhD thesis, University of Cambridge.
Sperber, Dan & Deirdre Wilson 1995. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell.
Second edition. First published in 1986.
Srioutai, Jiranthara. 2006. Time Conceptualization in Thai with Special Reference to d1ay1II, kh3oe:y,
k1aml3ang, y3u:I and c1a. PhD thesis. University of Cambridge.
Stanley, Jason. 2002. Making it articulated. Mind and Language 17: 149-68.
Stanley, Jason. 2007. Language in Context: Selected Essays. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Stanley, Jason & Zoltán Gendler Szabó. 2000. ‘On quantifier domain restriction’. Mind and