BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//Talks.cam//talks.cam.ac.uk//
X-WR-CALNAME:Talks.cam
BEGIN:VEVENT
SUMMARY:Minimal pragmatic content - Eleni Kriempardis (RCEAL)
DTSTART:20080603T150000Z
DTEND:20080603T163000Z
UID:TALK11499@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Napoleon Katsos
DESCRIPTION:One of the major debates in pragmatics continues to concern th
 e status of minimal semantic propositions. While Minimal Semanticists (Bor
 g 2004\, Cappelen & Lepore 2005) defend semantic truth-conditions\, Contex
 tualists (eg Carston 2002\, Recanati 2004) argue that it is only utterance
 s that have truth-conditional content. A further\, related\, issue is whet
 her minimal propositions are psychologically real. Mostly\, this is unders
 tood to relate to processes of utterance interpretation. In this talk\, I 
 will take a slightly different perspective on these questions and argue th
 at a notion of minimal\, but pragmatic\, content is needed for another rea
 son: to capture the speaker’s restricted overt commitment and accountabi
 lity (cf Searle 1969\, Liedtke 1995). \n\nThe number and kinds of constitu
 ents of the minimal pragmatic content of an utterance are determined by th
 e lexical-conceptual structure of the sentence used\, which is ‘conventi
 onal’ (ie context-independent) without necessarily corresponding to its 
 syntactic structure. The content-side is determined not by convention\, bu
 t by an individual’s information processing. It is argued that this enti
 ty enjoys another kind of psychological validity\, which is often neglecte
 d. It is the entity that is accepted\, and whose content is negotiated\, b
 y speaker and hearer in an interpersonal domain. Similar to Cappelen & Lep
 ore’s idea of ‘shared content’ (2005\, 2006)\, I assume that speech 
 behaviour provides evidence for the boundaries of minimal content\, althou
 gh I disagree about which boundaries deserve attention. \n\nIn contrast to
  the semantic minimalists’ formally driven content\, minimal pragmatic c
 ontent is genuinely pragmatic. As a result\, neither the difficulty of tru
 th-evaluability nor Cappelen & Lepore’s problem of semantic content bein
 g both context-independent and asserted arises. At the same time\, minimal
  pragmatic content significantly differs from the contextualists’ what i
 s saidpragm\, and indeed from their speaker meaning\, in scope and functio
 n. I will argue that it would be not only inappropriate in view of the spe
 aker’s commitment\, but also unnecessary to postulate a richer notion of
  utterance content in the restricted interpersonal domain\, which I regard
  as the proper domain of speaker meaning. In this way\, the ‘slippery sl
 ope’ to unrestricted context-sensitvity that Cappelen & Lepore (2005) wa
 rn about is avoided for independent reasons. 
LOCATION:GR-06/07\, English Faculty Building
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR