Anaphora, Relevance and the Conceptual/Procedural Distinction
Pronominal anaphora is a phenomenon that has been studied from many different perspectives and within many different theoretical frameworks, with varying levels of success. Approaching the problem from the cognitive perspective of relevance theory, this work applies the fundamental distinction between 'conceptual' (representational) and 'procedural' (computational) linguistic meaning, in order to account for the myriad different instantiations of such anaphoric phenomena in English. It is proposed that pronouns are fundamentally procedural in nature, following Wilson & Sperber (1993:20), forming part of an underspecified linguistic representation needing substantial pragmatic enrichment to reach propositionality. Guided by the overarching principle of relevance (Sperber and Wilson 1986/95), it is argued that speakers typically resolve such reference pragmatically as part of the relevance-theoretic comprehension procedure, drawing information from many possible sources in the process. Pronominals are thus seen as 'linguistically encoded means for constraining the interpretation process' (Blakemore 2000: 472), contributing (in their resolved state) to the explicature(s) of the sentence, and so to the proposition
Hedley, Paul
Anaphora, Relevance and the Conceptual/Procedural Distinction. Pronominal anaphora is a phenomenon that has been studied from many different perspectives and within many different theoretical frameworks, with varying levels of success. Approaching the problem from the cognitive perspective of relevance theory, this work applies the fundamental distinction between 'conceptual' (representational) and 'procedural' (computational) linguistic meaning, in order to account for the myriad different instantiations of such anaphoric phenomena in English. It is proposed that pronouns are fundamentally procedural in nature, following Wilson & Sperber (1993:20), forming part of an underspecified linguistic representation needing substantial pragmatic enrichment to reach propositionality. Guided by the overarching principle of relevance (Sperber and Wilson 1986/95), it is argued that speakers typically resolve such reference pragmatically as part of the relevance-theoretic comprehension procedure, drawing information from many possible sources in the process. Pronominals are thus seen as 'linguistically encoded means for constraining the interpretation process' (Blakemore 2000: 472), contributing (in their resolved state) to the explicature(s) of the sentence, and so to the proposition
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