Lexical Pragmatics - Journal of Semantics

Reinhard Blutner 141answer to this question, I claim, is clearly affirmative. Notions such assalience, cue validity, diagnostic value, informativeness, surprise, relevance,frequency of use, and so on are candidates for such non-representationalmeans. It would be a fallacy to assume—according to a superficial reflectionof the concept of mental representation—that each quantity that is involved indetermining our mental behaviour must be mentally represented in orderto become effective. Parameters like salience and cue validity need not berepresented mentally in order to exist and to determine our cognitiveactivity. Instead, such parameters involve the non-representational dimensionof our computational system. IS With regard to the theoretical framework ofLexical Pragmatics, the whole conception ofcost function is interspersed withnon-representational means. A problem for ordinary symbolism: we need away of manipulating non-representational elements.Thesis 3: Lexical Pragmatics crucially involvesEconomy principlesEconomy principles are crucially involved in determining how nonrepresentationalparameters control the selection and suppression ofrepresentations. With Zipf (1949) as a forerunner we have to acknowledgetwo basic and competing forces, one force of unification, or Speaker'seconomy (I-principle), and the antithetical force of diversification, orAuditor's economy (Q-principle). The two opposing economies are inextreme conflict, and we have reformulated this conflict in a way thatmakes it possible to obtain definite outcomes with regard to the selection ofinterpretative hypotheses. However, I feel that there must be an independentjustification of this kind of Economy principles, perhaps onederived from the general economics involved in defining connectionistnetwork behaviour (e.g. Rumelhart, McClelland, & the PDP ResearchGroup 1986).Downloaded from http://jos.oxfordjournals.org/ by guest on September 12, 2014Thesis 4: Lexical Pragmatics has to explain whenconversational implicatures are cancellableand when notDoes cancellability constitute a necessary condition for conversationalimplicatures? Grice himself notes that cancellability doesn't hold for allkinds of conversational implicatures and mentions implicatures based onthe Quality maxim as an exceptional case. Our discussion of Moore'sparadox has demonstrated this case in the context of the present theory.Another type of conversational implicature constituting a counterexample