18. Some Interactions of Pragmatics and

18. Some Interactions of Pragmatics and

18. Some Interactions of Pragmatics and

18. Some Interactions of Pragmatics and Grammar

Grammar

Grammar

Grammar

GEORGIA M. GREEN

GEORGIA M. GREEN

GEORGIA M. GREEN

GEORGIA M. GREEN

It has been recognized in generative grammar since the 1960s

1

that the acceptability of sentences

depends on the referential and predicative intents imputed to the speaker. Of course, this fact has not
always been represented in those baldly pragmatic terms; for a long time it was (and in some quarters
still is) socially or tactically unwise to refer to speakers' mental states in describing syntactic
knowledge, so the problem was reframed in terms of the properties of the syntactic or semantic
properties of the sentence (see e.g. Karttunen 1977, Karttunen and Peters 1979). Now, however, a
deeper understanding of the relation of knowledge of grammar and lexicon to knowledge of the

principles of language use, both universal (e.g. Grice's (1967) Cooperative Principle

2

) and language

particular (cf. e.g. Morgan 1978), allows a direct and straightforward description of linguistic
competence (Green 2000). The problem is not an isolated one restricted to a few troublesome
constructions. Many or most of the constraints that have been proposed by generative grammarians
(e.g. binding constraints, constraints on the reference of unexpressed subjects of infinitives) must
either be stated in ultimately pragmatic terms or describe constructions whose use conveys pragmatic
information about the beliefs of the speaker -beliefs about the world (presuppositions), about the

propositional attitudes of the addressee, or about the structure of the ongoing discourse.

3

This

chapter reviews a broad selection of syntactic phenomena that have been observed to have pragmatic
values, and sketches the properties of a description of competence that straightforwardly reflects
them.

1 What Kind of Information is Pragmatic?

1 What Kind of Information is Pragmatic?

1 What Kind of Information is Pragmatic?

1 What Kind of Information is Pragmatic?

In a sense, all pragmatic information is ultimately indexical information, that is, related to indices for
speaker, hearer, time, and location of an act of uttering something that the sign represents (Bar-Hillel
1954, Nunberg 1993, Levinson this volume). It is important to be clear that it is not linguistic forms
(words, morphemes, expressions) that carry pragmatic information (though informal descriptions
often suggest this, in formulations like “this form expresses/marks the speakers belief/intention that
…”), but the facts of their utterance. Pragmatic information is information about the relation between
the user of the form and the act of using the form. First and foremost, pragmatic information is
information about mental models: speaker's and addressee's mental models of each other. Linguistic

pragmatics irreducibly involves the speaker's model of the addressee, and the hearer's

4

model of the

speaker (potentially recursively). For George to understand Martha's utterance of “Xxx” to him, he
must not only recognize (speech perception, parsing) that she has said

“

Xxx,” he must have beliefs

about her which allow him to infer what her purpose was in uttering “Xxx,” which means that he has
beliefs about her model of him, including her model of his model of her, and so on, as illustrated in

figure 18.1

. Thus, when Martha says “Xxx” to George, meaning by it

“p”

, she does so believing that

George believes “not

p”

. And when George hears her speak to him, he recognizes that she has said

Xxx, and understands that she believed that he believed the negation of what she meant by it. Any of

Theoretical Linguistics

»

Pragmatics

grammar

10.1111/b.9780631225485.2005.00020.x

Subject

Subject

Subject

Subject

Key

Key

Key

Key-

-

-

-Topics

Topics

Topics

Topics

DOI:

DOI:

DOI:

DOI:

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these beliefs could be incorrect at one level of detail or another. That is why, in

figure 18.1

, we see

that George's image of Martha, and his of her, as well as his belief about what she meant, are not
quite accurate. Martha's image of George as having less, longer, and straighter hair than we can see
he has, and his image of her as being smaller and having longer hair than she in fact does are visual
metaphors for the fact that we have imperfect knowledge of each other. Significantly, the participants'
images of each other are also successively less detailed, illustrating that their knowledge of each
other is incomplete as well as not quite accurate. And most important, illustrated by the different
fonts for the letter “p” that represents Martha's meaning, what Martha meant by

Xxx

is distinct from

what George believes she meant. As a

New Yorker

cartoon caption once had it: “I know you believe

you understand what you thought I said, but I'm not sure that you realize that what you heard was not
what I meant.” Since acts are interpreted at multiple levels of granularity, this built-in indeterminacy
or margin of error is present for acts involved in choosing words and construction types, as well as for
acts of uttering sentences containing or instantiating them.

These are background assumptions against which all discussion of linguistic pragmatics must take
place, and which in fact motivate a pragmatic load for both “meaningless” discourse particles like

um,

well

, and

like

(Schourup 1985, Kose 1997, Schwenter and Traugott 2000, Green 2001, Fukada-Karlin

(in preparation), Blakemore this volume) and truth-conditionally equivalent alternative constructions
to express the same proposition.

2 Some

2 Some

2 Some

2 Some Illustrative Phenomena

Illustrative Phenomena

Illustrative Phenomena

Illustrative Phenomena

In English and probably all other natural languages, there are truth-condition-ally equivalent
alternatives to practically every describable construction, and to the extent that this is true, the

alternatives turn out to have different pragmatic values.

5

Horn (1984a, 1993) offers a detailed and

convincing explanation of why this is inevitable.

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Figure

Figure

Figure

Figure 18.1Illustration of speaker's and addressee's mental models of each

18.1Illustration of speaker's and addressee's mental models of each

18.1Illustration of speaker's and addressee's mental models of each

18.1Illustration of speaker's and addressee's mental models of each other

other

other

other

The factors which might enter into the choice between or among truth-conditionally equivalent
constructions are numerous. To take one of the most familiar examples, choosing a passive
construction over an active counterpart might be motivated by an intention to represent the patient as
the topic, and/or defer information about the agent to the end of the sentence, as in (1a), where it will
be more perceptually prominent, naturally receiving sentence stress. On the other hand, using the
passive allows expression of the agent to be entirely suppressed, enabling a speaker to accommodate
the fact that it is unknown (1b) or irrelevant (1c) who the agent is, or to just avoid saying who the
agent is, even if he does know, as in (1d).

(1) a. The bank was robbed by two young men with extensive facial scars.
b. My bike was taken between 3:00 and 5:30 on Monday.
c. Over 20,000 copies of the book were sold before it was discovered that pages 285 and 286
were missing.
d. [Do you know where the February

Scientific American

is?] It was thrown out.

Using a passive also commonly implies a belief that the event described had a particular effect on
some contextually salient sentient individual (R. Lakoff 1971a, Davison 1980, Fukada 1986). Often the

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affected individual is the subject (as in (2a, 2b)), but it can be any contextually salient legal person,
including, but not limited to, the speaker or addressee, as in (2c, 2d).

(2) a. He was interrogated for three hours.
b. He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for that photograph.
c. The evidence was destroyed in the fire.
d. This idea has been attacked as simplistic and naïve.

The effect can be negative, as in (2a), or positive, as in (2b); only the details of the context in which
the sentence is uttered could tell us which it is in (2c). The jarring effect of (3a) is attributable to the
fact that the referent of a term is clearly affected, but the construction does not represent that term
as a subject (cf. 3b).

(3) a. #A car hit your dog, but he's OK now.
b. Your dog was hit by a car this afternoon, but he's OK now.

There is even suggestive evidence that details of complementizer choice have pragmatic implications
associated with them (cf. Bolinger 1972a, Borkin 1974, Riddle 1975,1978), reflecting different
assumptions of the speakers as in (4) and (5), where the (b) examples imply a stronger conviction on
the part of the subject.

(4) a. He expects that he will win.
b. He expects to win.

(5) a. I know that it' s raining.
b. I know it' s raining.

In the cases that are the focus of this chapter, the connection between the way something is said and
what is intended to be conveyed is automatic, suggesting an analysis as fossilized conversational
implicature, according to the following logic. Since implicatures exploit (assumed) literal meanings,
with “live” conversational implicature, and even with short-circuited conversational implicature
(Morgan 1978), it is often reasonable to deny that an implicature was intended. Thus, denying the
causal implicature of the embedded conjunction in (6) is acceptable.

(6) The committee money disappeared from the safe that day, and Lee came home with a new
jacket that night, but I don't believe or intend to imply that the two events have anything to do
with each other.

In contrast, the cases discussed here involve use conditions which refer to beliefs or attitudes of the
speaker and amount to presuppositions; they are so strongly linked to a syntactic construction that it
sounds irrational to use that construction and then deny that the conditions hold. For example, the
present tense can be used to refer to future time as long as the event referred to is assumed to be
prearranged, and there is an adverbial expression indicating a future time indicated explicitly or in
ellipsis (G. Lakoff 1971b, Prince 1982). Thus, (7a) can be used in many of the same situations as (7b).

(7) a. The Celtics play the Bucks tomorrow.
b. The Celtics are going to play the Bucks tomorrow.

If the event is not (mutually) understood to be prearranged or scheduled, simple present tense cannot
be used for future time, so using (8) would imply that the speaker (and the addressee, in the
speaker's estimate) either (a) knew that the game was fixed, or (b) had a firm belief in predestination,
and believed that the speaker had an inside line on the Omnipotent's plans for basketball games.

(8) The Celtics crush the Bucks tomorrow.

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The time adverbial can be either explicit as in (7) and (9a), or implicit, as in (9b).

(9) a. Sandy arrives tomorrow, so we'll have to clean up the guest-room.
b. A: What' s on the docket for tomorrow?
B: Well, Sandy arrives, so I have to go to the airport.

But when a shared presumption that the event is scheduled cannot be assumed, as in (10), people
won't use a present tense form to refer to a future event.

(10) A: What' s new?
B: #My sister comes in from Seattle, so I'm getting ready to go to the airport.

The bizarreness of (11a) shows that this belief requirement cannot be denied like a conversational
implicature, but can be suspended, like a presupposition (11b).

(11) a. #The Celtics win tomorrow, but it's not preordained or fixed; there's an off chance the
Pistons might beat them.
b. The Celtics win tomorrow, if Benny got the fix in and explained to the players on the other
team what would happen to them if they didn't lose.

The main focus of this chapter is how the construction used to say something reflects the speaker's
attitude toward and beliefs about the topics and referents in the ongoing discourse. Other aspects of
how what is said is said that have been shown to affect what is conveyed include intonational choices
(Schmerling 1976, Cutler 1977, Olsen 1986, Ward 1988, Hirschberg 1991) and more segmental
phonological choices (e.g. sarcastic nasalization, Cutler 1974: 117), as well as the choice of which
language to use (Gumperz 1976, Burt 1994). In the cases to be discussed, the focus is more on what
the speaker intends (or is content) to convey than on an appreciation of the addressee's limitations in
processing language “on-line,” though of course, a rational speaker will take the hearer's needs into
consideration in deciding how to say what must be said. This topic is addressed briefly in section 5.
However, a primary goal of this chapter is to draw attention to a variety of cases where potential
inferences from the way something is said are grammaticalized as part of the syntactic repertoire. The
following sections describe a selection of other constructions that differ from their truth-conditionally
equivalent counterparts in various ways. Most reflect different beliefs about or attitudes toward
referents of linguistic expressions that are part of the utterance. Of course, truth-conditionally
equivalent sentences may also differ from each other in rhetorical function (i.e., in what gets asserted
and what is presupposed), and these are treated in section 3. Section 4 treats syntactic devices that
reflect the speaker's assumptions about the structure of the discourse. Section 5 addresses
processing-related issues: syntactic constructions that enable a speaker to compensate for
(perceived) difficulties in producing or parsing a complex utterance. Many of the constructions have
more than one use or function, and show up in more than one category.

3

3

3

3 Belief/Attitude/Value Cases

Belief/Attitude/Value Cases

Belief/Attitude/Value Cases

Belief/Attitude/Value Cases

Another instance of “stylistic variants” exhibiting a difference in rhetorical value involves constructions
with sentential complements as in (12) and (13), or adjuncts as in (14). The (a) sentences in these sets
differ from the (b) sentences in that the italicized subordinate clause represents a presupposed or
otherwise subordinate proposition in the (a) sentences, but has its own declarative illocutionary force
in the (b) sentences.

(12) a. I bet

it'll float if you throw it in the lake

.

b. It'll float if you throw it in the lake, I bet. [SLIFTING]

6

6

6

6

(13) a. That

Sandy thought it was Tuesday

is obvious/clear.

b. It's obvious/clear that Sandy thought it was Tuesday. [

EXTRAPOSITION

]

(14) a. Someone

who said the girls were supposed to bring two quarts of potato salad

called.

b. Someone called who said the girls were supposed to bring two quarts of potato salad.

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[

RELATIVE

CLAUSE

EXTRAPOSITION

]

Thus, depending on the sense intended for

bet

in (12a), (12a) is either a wager or a speculation, but

(12b) can only be a speculation -

bet

does not have a performative interpretation in that construction

(Ross 1975, Horn 1986). And while both (13a) and (13b) could be used to assert something about the
claim that Sandy had some belief about the identity of a day, only (13b) could be used to make

make

make

make the

claim that Sandy had that belief (Morgan 1975b, Horn 1986). In the case of (14), the (a) sentence
reports who called, while the (b) sentence reports what someone said the girls were supposed to bring
(Ziv 1976).

Other constructions reflect particular kinds of beliefs speakers have about the objects of their
discourse. For example, use of the

INTERNAL

DATIVE

construction (Green 1974) in (15b) implies that the

speaker believes that the referents of the subject and beneficiary noun phrases were alive at the same
time.

(15) a. Win this one for the Gipper/me
b. Win me/#the Gipper this one.

Wierzbicka has argued (1986) that use of the internal dative construction reflects more generally the
speaker's greater interest in the referent of the indirect object noun phrase.

The

RAISED

SUBJECT

constructions in (16b, d-f) (Borkin 1974, Postal 1974, Steever 1977, Schmerling

1978) reflect the speaker's assumption of the possibility of interaction between the (implied)
experiencer (MacArthur in (16b)), or agent (Eks in (16d-f)) and the referent of the raised subject
(Caesar, Sandy, Dale) at the time referred to by the raising verb.

(16) a. It seemed to MacArthur that Patton/Julius Caesar was the greatest general in history.
b. Patton/#Julius Caesar seemed to MacArthur to be the greatest general in history.
c. Eks asked that Sandy leave.
d. Eks asked Sandy to leave.
e. Eks allowed Dale to examine Dana.
f. Eks allowed Dale to be examined by Dana.

A similar construction with finite complements and predicates including

looks like

and

appears as if

(Rogers 1971, Postal 1974: 356–68) has related properties, so that sentences like (17a) provide no
information about the nature of the evidence for the claimed resemblance, while ones like (17b)
reflect the speaker's ability to perceive the referent of the subject displaying the predicated property
at the time of the speech act.

(17) a. It looks like Stalin's been dead for years.
b. #Stalin looks like he's been dead for years.

R. Lakoff (1969a) and Horn (1971, 1978b, 1989) have described the

NEGATIVE

TRANSPORTATION

phenomenon illustrated in (18a) where, with a certain class of verbs and adjectives, a negative occurs
one or more clauses above the clause it conversationally negates. Thus (18a) would communicate
what (18b) straightforwardly asserts, and (19a) would be conversationally ambiguous between a
report that Dana lacks the desire to wash dishes, and a report like (19b) that Dana desires not to wash
dishes.

(18) a. I don't think Sandy will arrive until Monday.
b. I think Sandy won't arrive until Monday.

(19) a. Dana doesn't want to wash dishes.
b. Dana wants to not wash dishes.

The difference between the (a) sentences and the (b) sentences in (18–19) is that the (a) sentences,
with transported negatives, are hedged - they represent weaker claims, apparently by implicating

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rather than asserting the relevant negative proposition (cf. Horn 1978b: 131–6, 177–216 and Horn
1989, Chapter 5 for discussion). A similar phenomenon is evident in the fact that the morphologically
incorporated negative in (20b) is pragmatically stronger than the unincorporated negative in (20a)
(Sheintuch and Wise 1976), though of course, as (20a,b) are truth-conditionally identical, they have
the same entailments.

(20) a. I didn't see anyone there.
b. I saw no one there.

The use of

some

or

any

described by R. Lakoff (1969b) provides a very clear reflection of speakers'

attitudes. As Lakoff showed, in the class of interrogative, conditional, and hypothetical constructions
where

some

and

any

are truth-conditionally equivalent, the use of

some

indicates a positive attitude

toward the situation described by the proposition it is part of, while

any

reflects a neutral or negative

attitude. Thus, the condition in (21a) is satisfied by the same state of affairs as the one in (21b), but
(21b) implies an assumption that it is likely that there are no apples on the table.

(21) a. if there are some apples on the table
b. if there are any apples on the table

Similarly, the question in (22a) reflects the hope that Bill wants spinach, while (22b) may reflect the
hope that he does not.

(22) a. Does Bill want some spinach?
b. Does Bill want any spinach?

In the same vein, (23a) could be a bribe, intended to get the addressee to eat bread (treating cooking
hamburgers all week as a reward), while (23b) would be a threat, intended to keep the addressee from
eating bread (and treating cooking hamburgers all week as an undesirable event).

(23) a. If you eat some bread, I'll cook hamburgers all week.
b. If you eat any bread, I'll cook hamburgers all week.

A whole host of other

NEGATIVE

POLARITY

ITEMS

(cf. Baker 1970, Horn 1971, 1989, Schmerling 1971a,

Israel this volume) reflect attitudes similar to those which

any

reflects (Ladusaw 1980). The examples

in (24) expose the speaker's suspicion that Bo spent, ate, and knew nothing, and did not bother to
RSVP, respectively.

(24)

In addition to the negative polarity sensitivity of syntax illustrated just above, languages may display
sensitivity to ignorance. Both the inversion of subject and auxiliary verb in embedded questions that
is common in many dialects of English and truncation of embedded questions (

SLUICING

) imply that the

individual to whom the answer is implied or assumed to be relevant is in fact ignorant of the answer.
Thus the (a) sentences in (25) and (26) are more acceptable than the (b) sentences, which have
contradictory implications which their acceptable and uninverted or unreduced (c) counterparts lack
(cf. Ross 1975).

(25) a. She wants to know who did I appoint.

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b. #She already knows who did I appoint.
c. She already knows who I appointed.

(26) a. John broke something, but he won't say what.
b. #John broke something, and he said what.
c. John broke something, and he said what he broke.

This property of subject-auxiliary inversion and sluicing explains why the examples in (27) induce the
implicature that the speaker does not know the answer to the question.

(27) a. It never occurred to me to wonder who did she appoint.
b. John went somewhere with my car, and you know where.

Although the examples cited here are all from English, it would be surprising to find a language where
custom didn't link beliefs or attitudes to the use of particular words or constructions. Sakakibara
(1995) and Kose (1997) give detailed examples of the speaker beliefs associated with the use of
Japanese long-distance reflexives and sentence-final particles, respectively; cf. Huang (this volume)
for additional discussion of the pragmatics of anaphora.

4

4

4

4 Reflections of Discourse Structure

Reflections of Discourse Structure

Reflections of Discourse Structure

Reflections of Discourse Structure

Language scholars have long recognized that there are correlations between the order of syntactic
constituents in a sentence and the discourse function of the information which a particular
constituent references (Mathesius 1928, Firbas 1964, Halliday 1967, Kuno 1972, Gundel and

Fretheim, this volume; Ward and Birner, this volume, inter alia).

7

In general, and all other things being

equal, the first phrase in a sentence tends to be intended to denote familiar (or

TOPICAL

, or

GIVEN

, or

OLD

, or presupposed, or predictable, or

THEMATIC

) material, while phrases toward the end of the

sentence tend to denote

NEW

(or

FOCUSED

, or asserted, or

RHEMATIC

) material. Other things are not

always equal, however. Sentence stress or intonational accent (higher pitch which falls off rapidly and
is perceived as louder) also correlates with information being treated as new (Schmerling 1976), and
new information may be expressed in phrases that occur toward or at the beginning of a sentence if
they bear the main sentence stress, as in (28) (Olsen 1986).

(28)

John

ate the cookies.

Furthermore as Prince (1981a) demonstrated,

familiar, predictable, given, old, theme

, and

sentence

topic

do not denote interchangeable notions, and different writers have used the same term to refer

to rather different categories. Still, the various writers seem to have been addressing the same point,
summarized by Horn's (1986) observation that the initial slot in a sentence tends to be reserved for
material taken to refer to the discourse theme or sentence topic (i.e., what the sentence is about).
Typically, this is material that the speaker (reflexively) assumes to be familiar to the addressee, and
preferentially, it is material which is either salient (assumed by the speaker to be in the addressee's
consciousness) or presupposed (taken as non-controversial) (Horn 1986: 171). It is not surprising,
then, that syntactic rules of languages provide for numerous alternative constructions which differ in
the order of phrases while preserving truth-conditional semantics and illocutionary force. This is true

even in a “fixed word order” language like English,

8

as illustrated by the incomplete list of options for

English declarative sentences given in examples (29–32):

(29) a. Eks delivered a rug to Aitchberg.
b. A rug was delivered to Aitchberg by Eks. [

PASSIVE

]

c. There was a rug delivered (to Aitchberg) (by Eks). [

THERE

-

INSERTION

]

d. A rug, Eks delivered to Aitchberg. [

TOPICALIZATION

]

e. It was a rug that Eks delivered to Aitchberg. [

CLEFT

]

f. What Eks delivered to Aitchberg was a rug. [

PSEUDO

-

CLEFT

]

g. … and deliver a rug to Aitchberg, Eks did. [

VERB

PHRASE

PREPOSING

]

(30) a. Finding typographical errors is never simple.
b. It is never simple to find typographical errors. [

EXTRAPOSITION

]

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c. Typographical errors are never simple to find. [

TOUGH

-

MOVEMENT

]

d. Simple to find, typographical errors are not. [

ADJECTIVE

PHRASE

PREPOSING

]

(31) a. Eks met a woman who said she was the Princess Anastasia's governess at Treno's.
b. At Treno's, Eks met a woman who said she was the Princess Anastasia's governess. [

ADVERB

PREPOSING

]

c. Eks met at Treno's a woman who said she was the Princess Anastasia's governess. [

HEAVY

NP

SHIFT

]

d. Eks met her at Treno's, that woman who said she was the Princess Anastasia's governess.
[

RIGHT

DISLOCATION

]

e. That woman who said she was the Princess Anastasia's governess, Eks met her at Treno's.
[

LEFT

DISLOCATION

]

(32) a. The little bunny scampered into its hole.
b. Into its hole, the little bunny scampered. [

LOCATIVE

PREPOSING

]

c. Into its hole scampered the little bunny. [

INVERSION

]

Of course, old information does not tend to go first just because it is old, or become old just because
it is first. Sometimes none of the material in a sentence represents “old information,” and as noted
above, new information sometimes goes first; generally speakers have more particular reasons (not
necessarily conscious reasons) for making a particular constituent first or last in a sentence (cf. Green
1982a). Such functions of word order have been explored in some detail for a number of
constructions. Two are described below.

4.1 Preposing

4.1 Preposing

4.1 Preposing

4.1 Preposing

Ward's (1988) analysis of preposings like those in (29d), (29g), and (30d) indicated that while they
may serve a variety of discourse functions, which he described in detail, they have two properties in
common. In Ward's terminology, they first of all mark the preposed element as referring to an entity
which is related in a certain way (as a

BACKWARD

LOOKING

CENTER

) to entities previously evoked in the

discourse (the set of

FORWARD

LOOKING

CENTERS

).

9

Second, they mark the presupposed open proposition

of the unstressed part of the sentence as salient in the discourse. Viewed from a different perspective,
the referent of the presupposed element must function as a backward-looking center and the open
proposition must be salient in the discourse for the utterance of a sentence with a preposed phrase to
be acceptable in its context. Thus, a sentence like (29d) might be used in a context like (33), where
the referent of

one of these rugs

is very obviously in a subset relation to the previously mentioned set

{rugs to be given as rewards} and the open proposition is “Eks deliver a rug to someone”.

(33) An Eastern bloc embassy official gave Eks six full-size oriental rugs, and directed him to
give them to the senators who had been most cooperative. One of these rugs Eks delivered to

Sen. Aitchberg.

10

10

10

10

It might also be used in a context like (34), where

one of these rugs

is a member of the set {rugs

concealing cocaine}, and the open proposition “Eks delivered something to Aitchberg” is salient in the
discourse.

(4) FBI agents suspected both Eks and Aitchberg of trafficking in cocaine, and had been tailing
them for months. In March, they learned from an informant that six oriental rugs concealing 20
pounds of cocaine each had come through JFK airport, and as Exhibit B indicates, one of these
rugs Eks delivered to Aitchberg.

But a sentence like (29d) could not be used in a context like (35), where neither of these conditions
holds.

(35) Eks and Aitchberg played golf together regularly. ??An oriental rug Eks delivered to
Aitchberg one day.

4.2 Main

4.2 Main

4.2 Main

4.2 Main-

-

-

-verb

verb

verb

verb inversion

inversion

inversion

inversion

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English is graced with a number of inversion constructions which, as in (32c), allow the subject noun
phrase to appear after the main verb instead of before it (Green 1980, 1982b, 1985, Birner 1992,
1994, Ward and Birner, this volume). The inversions begin with a preposed adjective phrase,
participial phrase, or locative or directional adverbial phrase. Because of this, they can be used to
serve any of a number of functions which exploit that phrase order (Green 1980, Birner 1992, 1994).

For example, a writer

11

may use an inversion with a preposed phrase which refers to a previously

established or implied referent to describe how information following it relates to previous discourse,
as in the examples in (36), where the initial phrase contains something explicitly ((36a,b)) or implicitly
((36c)) anaphoric to something preceding in the discourse.

Passages (1a-b) provide evidence for such a coherence constraint.

In other instances, what is exploited is the fact that the inversion construction puts what would
otherwise be a subject noun phrase in the sentence final position, which is typically reserved for
focused, new information. This enables a writer to introduce a new discourse element (e.g. an

important character or object or an element of the setting) in a focused position, as in (37).

12

Travelog-style descriptions exploit this extensively, as in (37c).

Passages (1a-b) provide evidence for such a coherence constraint.

A related use of inversions is to describe an event or locative relationship which resolves a salient
indeterminacy in a narrative as it has been established up to that point. It might be the whereabouts
of an important character, as in the second inversion in (38a), or the identity of the previously
unknown agent of some significant action, as in (38b), or an event significant in the protagonist's
execution of his plans, as in the second inversion in (38c) (the first introduces a new discourse
element).

Passages (1a-b) provide evidence for such a coherence constraint.

(36) a. [… new license …] Attached to it, as always, is an application blank for next year's license.

 

b. Jerome and Rita Arkoff and Tom and Fanny Irwin were in the front row … Back of the Arkoffs

and Irwins were William Lesser and Patrick Degan, and between them and slightly to the rear
was Saul Panzer. [Rex Stout,

Might as Well Be Dead

, p. 180. (New York: Viking Books, 1956)]

 

c. At issue is Section 1401(a) of the Controlled Substances Act.

(37) a. In a little white house lived two rabbits.

 

  [Dick Bruna,

Miffy

. (New York: Two Continents, 1975)]

 

b. Competing with the screamers for popularity are the phone-in programs, an adaptation of

two rural American pastimes - listening in on the party-line and speaking at the town
meeting.

 

  [Robert Dye, “The Death of Silence,”

Journal of Broadcasting

, 12, 3 (1968). Reprinted in

Subject and Strategy

, ed. Paul Escholz and Alfred Rosa, 169–72, p. 170. (New York: St.

Martins, 1978)]

 

c. The grounds were lavishly furnished with ceramic, stone, and wrought-metal sculpture.

There were an enormous stainless steel frog and two tiny elves in the foyer of the guest
house, and outside stood a little angel.

(38) a. Then at the darkest hour dawned deliverance.

Through the revolving doors swept Tom

Pulsifer

.

 

  [S. J. Perelman, “The Customer is Always Wrong,”

The Most of S. J. Perelman

, p. 227. (New

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The particular discourse values of several other of the constructions in (29–31) have been explored in

some detail.

13

For Japanese, Makino (2001) describes the conditions on the use of the formal nouns

no

and

koto

.

5

5

5

5 Reflections of Perceived Difficulty

Reflections of Perceived Difficulty

Reflections of Perceived Difficulty

Reflections of Perceived Difficulty

Finally, speakers may take advantage of constructions like

EXTRAPOSITION

(39b) and

HEAVY

NP

SHIFT

(40b), which allow a constituent to appear at the end of the sentence to put the longest or most
conversationally significant constituent last.

(39) a. Whether Kim will visit museums in France and Dana will go to concerts in Vienna, or
Dana will visit museums in France and Kim will go to concerts in Vienna is unclear.
b. It is unclear whether Kim will visit museums in France and Dana will go to concerts in
Vienna, or …

(40) a. Dana attributed a poem in which intuitions were compared to anemones and academic
theories were described as battlements to Coleridge
b. Dana attributed to Coleridge a poem in which intuitions were compared to anemones and
academic theories were described as battlements.

It is not clear whether this option serves to make the sentence easier to articulate (cf. Olsen 1986) or
simply easier to keep track of, or whether the motivation is altruistic - accommodating the
addressee's likely strategies or difficulties in parsing, or some combination of these. Length and
discourse significance seem to be at least partially independent factors. Longer postposed noun
phrases tend to sound better, as in (41a), even if they have no more semantic content, as in (41b), but
of two noun phrases of equal length the more significant-sounding sounds better, as (41c) shows.
(See Arnold et al. 2000 for related discussion.)

(41) a. But they attributed to Blake

The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire/?Typee

.

b. The district attorney considers indictable Montgomery J. Jingleheimer-Smith III/?Rose Budd.
c. The committee has attributed to Margaret Thatcher an extraordinary poem/?the 27-line
poem.

6 Representing the Pragmatic Value of Syntactic

6 Representing the Pragmatic Value of Syntactic

6 Representing the Pragmatic Value of Syntactic

6 Representing the Pragmatic Value of Syntactic Constructions

Constructions

Constructions

Constructions

In the early years of generative grammar, the distribution of linguistic expressions in sentences was
taken to be an exclusively formal matter, and the relevant notion of identity among expressions was
assumed to be identity of form. However, as early as 1965, attempts were made to incorporate
various kinds of pragmatic conditions into the framework then available for syntactic description. For
example, G. Lakoff (1965), assuming that restrictions on distribution were all syntactic in nature,
claimed that the unacceptability of

beware

in certain constructions (e.g. in (42)) reflected the fact that

beware

bore a syntactic

RULE

FEATURE

which indicated that auxiliary inversion could not apply in

clauses where

beware

was the main verb.

(42) #Did you beware of John?

York: Simon and Schuster, 1958)]

 

b. One night there was a tap on the window. Mrs. Rabbit peeped through the window.

Outside

stood a little angel

.

 

  [Bruna]

 

c. Dumble vanished and in his place rose a dark, angry cloud of bees.

 

  They flew straight at the soldiers' faces, and

from the soldiers came yells of anguish, of

sorrow, and of despair

.

 

  [Jay Williams,

The King with Six Friends

(New York: Parents' Magazine Press, 1968)]

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Of course, Lakoff's system would break down when confronted with the fact that pragmatic factors
influence the acceptability of using syntactic constructions, such as inversion in embedded
interrogatives. It cannot be claimed that

know

has a (different) rule feature which precludes its

complement from appearing inverted, to account for the unacceptability of (25b), because inversion is
fine in the complement of

know

in (25a). Lakoff (1965) also proposed

STRUCTURAL

DESCRIPTION

FEATURES

to constrain a structure from meeting the structural description of a transformational rule, but these

would be equally inadequate to the task of excluding (43a), while allowing (43b).

14

(43) a. #We need a registrar who can beware of phony addresses.
b. We need a registrar who will beware of phony addresses.

At the same time, addressing other issues, Chomsky (1965) proposed indexing nodes in constituent
structure trees for coreference so that the kind of identity required for personal and relative pronouns

could be represented as syntactic information.

15

Approaches to accommodating other kinds of pragmatic conditions into syntactic descriptions
involved representing contingent assumptions about real-world relations among situations as
syntactic information (e.g. Green 1968). For example, to distinguish between the appropriateness of
(44a) and (44b), one would have to have access to the proposition that being interested in sports (but
not being interested in knitting) entails or implies the ability to tell a zone press from a fast break.

(44) a. Jo isn't interested in sports, and Bo couldn't tell a zone press from a fast break either.
b. #Jo isn't interested in knitting, and Bo couldn't tell a zone press from a fast break either.

This proposal was taken seriously despite the fact that it clearly required making the rules of the
grammar (insertion of the particles

too

and

either

) sensitive to properties of speakers (specifically, to

whether they believed that some proposition implied some other proposition), and this involves a
gross category error. A later proposal (Green 1973) to encode the implication as part of the deep
structure - as was then being done at every turn to account for the syntactic constraints imposed by
various illocutionary forces (e.g. R. Lakoff 1968, Ross 1970a) - was equally doomed. Morgan (1973a)
showed that this approach led to theory-internal logical contradictions.

Meanwhile, linguists' interpretation of Grice's paper “Logic and Conversation” (Grice 1989: Chapter 2),
which had been circulating underground for several years, prompted them to begin to describe
relations between grammaticality and usage. Although Morgan (1975b) had demonstrated that
making a strict separation in grammatical descriptions between constraints on form and constraints
on usage wasn't going to be as simple as it looked, given the fact that certain forms (like those in
(45)) induced implicatures which are not induced by semantically equivalent forms (cf. (46)), this
warning went largely unheeded.

(45) a.

Do you have any idea

how much that cost?

b.

Why

paint your house purple?

(46) a.

Any idea

how much that cost?

b.

Why do you

paint your house purple?

Gordon and Lakoff (1971) had interpreted Grice's proposal as sanctioning the codification of likely
implicatures into “conversational postulates” and the incorporation of speech act participants' beliefs
and intentions into syntactic derivations in the guise of constraints on derivations that referred to
other possible derivations (a sort of precursor of today's optimality syntax (e.g. Grimshaw 1997) and
pragmatics (Blutner, this volume)). Gordon and Lakoff claimed that a rule of

you

-T

ENSE

DELETION

derived sentences like (45a) from structures similar to that of (46a) if and only if the logical structure
L of (46a), taken in conjunction with C

ON

i

, a class of contexts, and the set of conversational postulates

entails (47).

(47) Unless you have some good reason for doing VP', you should not do VP'.

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Gordon and Lakoff's C

ON

i

encoded speakers' intentions and beliefs as if they were semantic matters of

truth. But that obscures the fact that the relation between the use of a form and its interpretation in
context depends on the speaker's and addressee's beliefs and intentions about each other's beliefs
and intentions (Cohen and Perrault 1979, Cohen and Levesque 1990, 1991, Green 1996a) and not on
any other kinds of contingent facts.

An approach that is more consistent with these facts and with the better understanding of implicature
now available to us will minimize the number of grammatical constraints on the syntactic combination
of grammatical categories and unify them with lexical and syntactic constraints on their semantics,
and with construction-specific pragmatic constraints of the sorts discussed here. Such an approach
would be, in effect, a complex function on a theory of communication which entailed the integration
of such more or less universal principles as Grice's Cooperative Principle and the strategies of
relevance and quantity (cf. Horn 1984a) that derive from it (strategies for referring, predicating,
focusing, etc.), with culture-specific interpretations (or implementations) of politeness principles (cf.
Brown and Levinson 1987, Green 1993b). All of these aspects of pragmatics refer directly to language
users' intentions and beliefs, linking them to the conventions of usage (Morgan 1978) that the
construction-specific constraints encode. Such a treatment, in contrast to known predecessors, would
not claim that sentences like (25b) are ungrammatical.

(25) b. #She already knows who did I appoint.

Rather, it would predict (a) that the use of such sentences will cause hearers to make certain
inferences about their speaker, (b) that some of these may result in the sentence being considered
inappropriate, given what else the hearer knows about the speaker and the subject matter, or
contradictory, or ineffective for the purpose the hearer imputes to the speaker, or, in plain language,
dumb, and (c) that the speaker is aware at some level of (a) and (b).

Thus, while the approach of the 1960s entailed claiming that a sentence like (25b) was ungrammatical
because the auxiliary-inversion rule had applied in the complement of a verb constraining it from
applying there, and the approach of the 1970s entailed claiming such a sentence was ungrammatical
because inversion in the complement implied that the speaker believed that the referent of the
subject of the embedding verb didn't know the answer to the evoked question, contradicting the
assertion of the whole sentence (that the referent of the subject has it figured out, and does know),
the approach sketched here claims that sentences like (25b) are perfectly grammatical: they conform
in every respect to the rules of syntactic combination that comprise the grammar. It claims that such
sentences are nonetheless inappropriate, ineffective, or dumb because of the contradiction between
what is asserted and what is implicated by the choice to use an inversion in an interrogative
complement.

Pollard and Sag (1994) take a first step toward such an approach, treating speaker's presuppositions
and other categories of propositional attitudes as part of the representation for lexical and phrasal
expressions. As discussed in Green (1994, 2000), such representations might be very detailed,
incorporating much of the same sort of information as might be expressed in a Discourse
Representation Theory representation (Kamp 1981, Kamp and Reyle 1993). One concern of Pollard
and Sag (1994: 332–5), however, is that while background presuppositions have to be projected from
lexical items to phrases containing them, it has been known since the early 1970s that the projection
is not a function of tree geometry (Morgan 1973b, Karttunen and Peters 1979), or even of the
semantic class of predicates and operators in the structural projection path. Morgan showed that
neither the problem nor the solution is strictly linguistic, but depends instead on beliefs attributed by
the interpreter to the speaker and agents and experiencers of propositional attitude verbs in the
sentence. Morgan's account, and Gazdar's (1979) formalization of it, show that conversational
implicatures of the utterance of the sentence limit the presuppositions of a sentence uttered in
context to the subset of presuppositions associated with the lexical items in it that are consistent with
the speaker's assumptions and intended implicatures.

Conversational implicature, of course, is a function of a theory of human behavior generally, not
something specifically linguistic (Grice 1989, Green 1993a), because it is based on inference of
intentions for actions generally, not on properties of the artifacts (sentence and utterance tokens) that

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are the result of linguistic actions. Conversational implicatures arise from the assumption that it is
reasonable (under the particular circumstances of the speech event in question) to expect the
addressee to infer that the speaker intended the addressee to recognize the speaker's intention from
the fact that the speaker uttered whatever the speaker uttered. Thus, it would be naïve to anticipate
that the filtering in the projection of presuppositions or other associated propositional attitudes could
be represented as a constraint or set of constraints on values of some attribute of linguistic
expressions and therefore as of the same character as, say, the constraints on the projection of
agreement or subcategorization or unbound dependency information, precisely because
conversational implicature is inherently indeterminate (Morgan 1973b, Gazdar 1979, Grice 1989).

This does not necessarily mean that a projection principle for pragmatic information is logically
impossible. Background propositions of a phrase can be computed as a conjunction of the
background propositions of all the daughters, along the lines suggested by Pollard and Sag (1994:
333) and Wilcock (1999). This sort of context inheritance principle would be completely consistent
with the inherently indeterminate character of Gricean conversational implicature. If that conjunction
should happen to contain predications that are inconsistent with each other, or predications that are
inconsistent with what is predicated by the sentence as a whole, that does not pose a logical problem,
or a problem for a formal theory. It is not even a linguistic problem. It is a practical sort of problem
for a human being who wants to construe the speaker's behavior in uttering the sentence as

rational.

16

Doing that requires using knowledge of principles of sense and/or reference transfer

(Nunberg 1995, this volume) and lexical rules, as well as beliefs about what is sensible and what is
silly. For example, one way of resolving a conflict involving lexical presuppositions would be to
interpret one or more of the presupposition-bound phrases involved as figuratively intended in a way
that allows propositions intended to be conveyed to be regarded as all true. In any case, the
resolution of such contradictions is precisely what the Cooperative Principle was invented for (Grice
1989, Green 1996b) and what the computation of implicatures is about, as Morgan and Gazdar have
demonstrated.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

This work owes much to Jerry Morgan, whose deep understanding of these issues has influenced my
articulation of them in uncountable ways. Some of the discussion in this chapter is reworked from
material that has appeared elsewhere (e.g. Green 1982a, 1996a, 2000).

1 Cf. Lees and Klima (1963).

2 Cf. Green (1990, 1996a) for discussion.

3 An extensive, and still incomplete, catalog may be viewed at

http://mccawley.cogsci.uiuc.edu/~green

.

4 The choice of

addressee

and

hearer

in this sentence is not accidental. Speakers plan speech with a

particular audience in mind, but everyone who hears it has access to the same rules for interpreting it.

5 There are also well-known cases where the number agreement morpheme on a verb with an apparently
plural subject induces inferences from the fact that one choice was made rather than another, inferences
that, in fact, affect the truth conditions, not just “mere” pragmatic differences (Morgan 1972a, 1972b,
Pollard and Sag 1994). Thus, (i) would be used to extol the virtues of two foods, while (ii) is about a single
unusual concoction.
(i) Pickles and ice cream taste good.
(ii) Pickles and ice cream tastes good.

6 The construction names in

SMALL

CAPITALS

are those familiar in modern generative grammar. See Green and

Morgan (2001: Appendix) for further references.

7 For some more recent treatments, see Prince (1981a), Zaenen (1982), and Horn (1986).

8 It has generally not been claimed that the Old Information First principle is a universal principle, though it
may be a universal tendency driven by the interpersonal nature of discourse. Most of the illustrations have
come from Czech, English, French, and Japanese.

9 Specifically, the backward-looking center must stand in a salient scalar relation to the partially ordered set

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Bibliographic Details

Bibliographic Details

Bibliographic Details

Bibliographic Details

The Handbook of

The Handbook of

The Handbook of

The Handbook of Pragmatics

Pragmatics

Pragmatics

Pragmatics

Edited by:

Edited by:

Edited by:

Edited by: Laurence R. Horn And Gregory Ward

eISBN:

eISBN:

eISBN:

eISBN: 9780631225485

Print publication

Print publication

Print publication

Print publication date:

date:

date:

date: 2005

constituting the forward-looking centers. A partially ordered set is a set whose members are all related by
some ordering relation which is transitive, and either reflexive and antisymmetric, like “is as tall as or taller
than,” or irreflexive and asymmetric, like “is taller than” (cf. Ward 1988 52ff., Hirschberg 1991). Salient
scalar relationships include any where one element is higher or lower than another on some scale, or they
are incomparable alternative values, but there are values higher or lower than both. Some examples are the
set/subset relation, part/whole, type/subtype, entity/attribute, and of course,

greater than

and

less than

.

10 The example is adapted from a passage in Nixon's

Six Crises

cited by Ward (1988: 57).

11 Or speaker; cf. Green (1982b) for discussion of the genres and registers where these constructions are
found.

12 This common function of inversions may be what has misled some writers (e.g. Longuet-Higgins 1976)
into thinking that inversions after directional phrases must describe a character coming into (the narrator's)
view. Inversions have other uses, and we do find such inversions as (i)-(iii), which describe a character going
out of view.
(i) Then off marched the little tailor, cocky as could be, with his thumbs thrust through his boasting belt.
(ii) Into the forest ran the four, and soon they could be seen no more.
(iii) Off across the grass ran the three little girls. Examples (i) and (iii) are from children's books whose exact
titles I cannot locate.

13 Cf. for example Prince 1981c, 1984 (T

OPICALIZATION

and L

EFT

D

ISLOCATION

); Prince 1978 (C

LEFT

and

P

SEUDO

-CLEFT); Milsark 1977, Napoli and Rando 1978, Aissen 1975 (T

HERE

-INSERTION). Further references

may be found in Green and Morgan (2001: Appendix).

14 The pragmatic condition on

beware

, still mysterious, seems to involve (not all that surprisingly, given its

meaning) reference to awareness of a threat. Cf. Green (1981) for some preliminary observations. The
absence of inflected forms explains the unacceptability of such forms as

*We bewore of the bandersnatch,

*We bewared of the dog

.

15 McCawley (1968) argued that referential indices have the structure of sets rather than being discrete
units; Postal (1967) outlines some reasons to be skeptical about Chomsky's notion. Morgan (1968, 1970)
provided early demonstrations that the kind of identity required varies from syntactic construction to
syntactic construction.

16 Obviously, it is also a practical problem of enormous dimensions for any automated natural language
processing system that seeks to interpret natural language input, if for no other reason than its inescapable
dependence on the encyclopedic knowledge that human natural language users take for granted.

Cite

Cite

Cite

Cite this article

this article

this article

this article

GREEN, GEORGIA M. "Some Interactions of Pragmatics and Grammar."

The Handbook of Pragmatics

. Horn,

Laurence R. and Gregory Ward (eds). Blackwell Publishing, 2005. Blackwell Reference Online. 28 December
2007 <http://www.blackwellreference.com/subscriber/tocnode?
id=g9780631225485_chunk_g978063122548520>

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