Belief Reports and Pragmatic Intrusion(The Case of Null Appositives)
In this chapter, I explore Bach’s idea (2000) that null appositives, intended as expanded qua-clauses, can resolve the puzzles of belief reports. These puzzles are crucial in understanding the semantics and pragmatics of belief reports. I propose that Bac
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Belief Reports and Pragmatic Intrusion (The Case of Null Appositives)
In this chapter, I explore Bach’s idea (2000) that null appositives, intended as expanded qua-clauses, can resolve the puzzles of belief reports. These puzzles are crucial in understanding the semantics and pragmatics of belief reports. I propose that Bach’s strategy is not only a way of dealing with puzzles, but also an ideal way of dealing with belief reports. I argue that even simple unproblematic cases of belief reports are cases of pragmatic intrusion, involving null appositives, or, to use the words of Bach, ‘qua-clauses’. My contribution in this chapter develops ideas broached by Salmon (1986) but is more linguistically-determined. The main difference between my pragmatic approach and the one by Salmon (1986) is that this author uses the notion of conversational implicature, whereas I use the notion of pragmatic intrusion and explicature. From my point of view, statements such as “John believes that Cicero is clever” and “John believes that Tully is clever” are assigned distinct truth-values. In other words, I claim that belief reports in the default case illuminate the hearer on the mental life of the believer, that includes specific modes of presentation of the referents talked about. Furthermore, while in the other pragmatic approaches, it is mysterious how a mode of presentation is assumed to be the main filter of the believer’s mental life, here I provide an explanatory account in terms of relevance, cognitive effects, and processing efforts. The most important part of the chapter is devoted to showing that null appositives are required, in the case of belief reports, to explain certain anaphoric effects, which would otherwise be mysterious. My examples show that null appositives are not necessitated at logical form, but only at the level of the explicature, in line with the standard assumptions by Carston and Recanati on pragmatic intrusion. I develop a potentially useful analysis of belief reports by exploiting syntactic and semantic considerations on presuppositional clitics in Romance.
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 A. Capone, The Pragmatics of Indirect Reports, Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology 8, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-41078-4_9
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Chapter 9
Introduction
As Mey (2001) says: Pragmatics admonishes the linguistic scientists that they should take the users of language more seriously, as they, after all, provide the bread and butter of linguistic theorizing (…) (Mey 2001, 289). It is in the spirit of this view that I write a chapter on belief reports and pragmatic intrusion.1 In this chapter, I discuss the issue of belief reports and propose to integrate it with the recent idea (mainly proposed by relevance theorists such as Carston 2002 and Sperber and Wilson 2002, but also, in different form, by Bach 1994; Levinson 2000; and Mey 2001) that the proposition expressed by an utterance (in a context C) is ultimately fleshed out (supplied on the basis of a skeletal semantic templat
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