From: daj@reef.cis.ufl.edu (David A. Johns)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: NegV vs. NegQ
Date: 16 Apr 92 14:24:31 GMT
Organization: Univ. of Florida CIS Dept.

In article <12214@tamsun.tamu.edu> e343mh@tamuts.tamu.edu (Michael Hand) writes:

# Why is this so difficult for folks to grasp?  Whether an
# interpretation is "simply wrong" (or even complicatedly wrong) is a
# theoretical issue, if "wrong" means *semantically* wrong.

I guess I'm just dense.  For the life of me I can't see how the
meaning assigned to an utterance by a native speaker is a theoretical
issue.

# Most of the time, the theoretical issue is not interesting or
# difficult, but it's no less theoretical! If "wrong" means
# "intuitively unacceptable," then wrongness is not a theoretical
# property, but the theory I suggested (and again I emphasize, do not
# hold) was a theory concerned with what interpretations are
# grammatical (in the broad sense of syntax+semantics).

Again, the problem is that you can't access the syntax directly. You
have to reconstruct it based on your knowledge of the meaning of the
words in the sentence and the meaning(s) of the entire sentence.  Thus
any attempt to justify your negV interpretation by appeal to the
grammar (syntax + semantics) is circular.

Your original definition of p-interpretation vs s-interpretation
seemed to line up with a distinction that most linguists would
probably be comfortable with: the distinction between the range of
meanings *inherent* in the sentence, and the meaning the sentence
would have in a given (pragmatic) context.  Granted the existence of
this distinction, the assignment of the meaning of a given sentence to
one category or the other would presumably be done independently of
theory.  If you assign meanings to sentences based on theory, you have
destroyed the empirical basis of linguistics.

# Here's some data: negQ is the preferred message, negV is
# unacceptable.  The question --a theoretical one -- is what to make
# of this fact.  There are options.  If you don't like mine, you
# gotta argue against it theoretically, 'cause I accept the same data
# you accept.

OK, how about these?  (1) With the exception of a few formulaic
phrases, every sentence in natural language must have at least one
s-interpretation (which may or may not also be a p-interpretation);
(2) The meaning assigned to a sentence by native speakers as its
literal meaning (i.e., "Do you have the time?" is a question) is its
s-interpretation; and (3) Any s-interpretation has to be accounted for
without reference to pragmatics (i.e., through the syntax and
semantics).


# [Leo Connolly]
# >You're trying to save your theory by claiming that it's a
# >p-interpretation.  That remains to be shown.  What evidence to you
# >have to support this view?
#
# The claim that negQ is a p-interpretation is hardly a defense of my
# sad theory.  You've misunderstood it.  If people read a sentence a
# certain way, then that way is a p-interpretation.  That's all I
# meant by "p-interpretation".  So uncontroversially, negQ is a
# p-interpretation. Some people think it's the *only*
# p-interpretation of the sentence in question.  (It isn't, but some
# people seem to think it is.)  But not every p-interpretation is an
# s-interpretation, unless you just wanna stipulate, and not every
# s-interpretation is a p-interpretation, unless you wanna stipulate
# a second time.  I don't wanna stipulate.

OK, so p's are easy.  The issue is how you determine the s's.  Since
your original goal seemed to be how to determine when and how p's
could override s's, you might want to have a principled method for
determining what the s's are.

#[Leo Connolly]
# >Lacking such evidence, many of us will claim: any theory which does
# >not yield negQ *as an s-interpretation* is preposterous on its face
# >and should be abandoned.
#
# This is an objection I hadn't considered.  Not being a linguist,

Hmmm ...

# I wasn't aware that such powerful modes of argumentation occurred
# in the field.
#
# Just how powerful an objection do you think it is?  ;->

Not very, I guess, if you consider linguistics a branch of logic. But
for people concerned with finding out how language works, it's pretty
convincing.

David Johns


Newsgroups: sci.lang