The structure of CONTEXT: The representation of ... - Semantic Scholar

The structure of CONTEXT: The representation of pragmatic restrictions in HPSG Georgia M. Green University of Illinois January 31, 1997

Abstract

One of the design considerations for HPSG is the integration of pragmatic information with grammatical and semantic information. This paper describes how the current framework might be adapted to re ect a general theory of pragmatics, and at the same time, enable more accurate accounts of pragmatic constraints on linguistic forms within HPSG. After xing the denotations for some necessary terminology, I describe and elaborate some proposals that are incompletely sketched in the initial expositions of HPSG (Pollard and Sag 1987, 1994). I then demonstrate how two familiar pragmatic constraints on the use of lexical items (so-called extended reference, and Japanese empathy-sensitive verbs) can be represented more completely and more accurately. The paper concludes with a discussion of what is required to represent pragmatic conditions associated with particular syntactic constructions.

1 Some background

This paper is about constraints on the felicitous utterance of signs. A sign is an abstract, structured object with phonological, syntactic, semantic, and contextual attributes|like a word or a phrase. An utterance event is what Austin (1962) called a locutionary act, encompassing, to paraphrase Austin (1962: 92-93), making some noise1 that is intended to be recognized as belonging to a certain vocabulary and conforming to a certain grammar, and as having a certain intended sense and reference. An act of uttering a particular sign X is then an act of producing a noise that corresponds to the phonological attribute of that sign, with the intent that the product of that act be understood as intended to have syntactic, semantic, and contextual properties that correspond to the respective attributes of that sign. Thus, by utterance I will mean utterance as (sincere, communicative) use, not utterance as mention.2

This work was supported in part by the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The comments of Jerry Morgan, Andreas Kathol, Lynne Murphy and Tsuneko Nakazawa on earlier drafts have made this a better paper than it might otherwise have been. 1 Noise being a technical term referring indierently to whatever medium is employed, whether speech, gesture, writing, or something else. 2 E.g., citation, recitation. Perhaps the proper treatment of mention is as a specialized subtype of use, but that cannot be resolved here. 

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Just as grammars limit the possible expressions of a language to those that satisfy certain constraints (including constraints on relations among details of the internal structure of those forms), cultures associated with languages impose conditions on the felicitous use of those expressions, limiting felicitous use to those contexts which satisfy certain constraints. The felicitous utterance of signs is thus the subject matter of pragmatics, and the constraints that linguists propose are its nuts and bolts and I-beams. In HPSG, signs are modelled as completely speci ed sorted feature structures (Pollard and Sag 1994: 8, 17-18; Shieber 1986, Pollard and Moshier 1990, Carpenter 1992).3 The linguistic rules that constitute a grammar are formulated as constraints on the values of attributes de ned for various classes of linguistic objects. They are represented in AttributeValue-Matrices (AVMs) like (I) below, where values are written to the right of the names of the attributes they are values of. For perspicuity, sometimes values are labelled with the name (in italics) of the sort that structures their content. An appropriate use-utterance of a linguistic object must correspond to one or more of these formal objects in that a description of its properties must unify with the description of theirs.

2 The character of contextual constraints in HPSG

In general, contextual constraints on the appropriate use of a linguistic expression are represented in the value of the attribute CONTEXT. This value is of sort context, and has in turn an attribute CONTEXTUAL-INDICES (abbreviated C-INDS), whose values indicate the contextual anchors for an utterance (pointers to speaker, addressee, time of utterance, location of utterance, and so on). CONTEXTUAL-INDICES is always an attribute of contexts, but, for legibility, is suppressed in diagrams where it does not gure in any constraint. Contexts also include background assumptions, essentially presuppositions, which are represented as a set of (possibly open) propositions. These are called \psoas" in HPSG, for Parameterized-States-of-Aairs, with appropriate argument values declared independently for various subsorts (1994: 338). The label on the sort description supplies the type of relationship among the values for the roles which are the attributes of the sort, as illustrated in Fig. I,4 which represents the constraint that use of the proper noun John is appropriate only when the intended referent of a particular third person singular index is named John. (The BACKGROUND psoa with the label \naming" identi es the relation between a name and a bearer. For legibility, I have left out syntactic information, which is irrelevant to what is at issue here. The CONTENT representation of nominals will be discussed shortly.)

In fact, as totally well-typed and sort-resolved feature structures. For the sake of readability, AVMs in this paper routinely suppress information that is irrelevant ot the purposes of the discussion, and readily reconstructible by a sympathetic reader who is familiar with the ontology of sorts in Pollard and Sag (1994) (e.g., sorts and complete path speci cations where only the terminal information is made explicit). 3

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2 3 phon /jan/ 66 7 3 2 2 3 7 66 7 per 3rd 7 7 6 66content 66index 1 4num sing5 7 7 7 7 66 7 5 4 7 66 7 restriction fg 7 66 nom-obj2 2 3 37 7 66 7 name John 7 5g7 64context 64background f 4 7 5 5 bearer 1

naming context Figure. I: Partial representation of lexical entry for a proper name according to Pollard and Sag (1994)

The BACKGROUND value would include assumptions about social relations of the sort that aects pronoun choice, as well as presuppositions of uniqueness or factuality associated with2 particular lexical items, as in 3Fig. II, for English regret. / 6phon /riygret i 7 D 66 66subcat NP 1 , S[content 66 2 66 66content 4experiencer 66 state-of-affairs 66 regret 64 context j bkd f 2 g

7

2 >7 77

7 377 1 7 577 2 7 77 77 5

Figure II: Partial lexical entry for a factive verb, in the style of Pollard and Sag (1994) In Fig. II, the subject of regret is represented as the rst item on the SUBCAT list, and the subscript 1 on it matches the value of the EXPERIENCER attribute in regret's CONTENT value. This represents the constraint that the subject of regret is the regretter. The fact that the CONTENT of the state of aairs that is regretted is the same as the BACKGROUND proposition in the CONTEXT represents the constraint that the complement of regret is presupposed to be true. Thus, in general, pragmatic constraints are represented in available articulations of HPSG as a set of BACKGROUND propositions, which can in principle be about anything at all, but typically are about entities and events mentioned in the description of the semantic content of the sign. There is one exception, however. The constraint that the referent of a common noun be an instance of the class referenced by the noun is part of the CONTENT of the noun, not the CONTEXT. The representation of referential NPs calls for a CONTENT value which has, in addition to an INDEX specifying values for grammatical person, number, and gender features, a RESTRICTION attribute whose values are interpreted as placing semantic conditions on the entities that the indices appearing in them can be anchored to in a given context (or range over, in case an index is quanti ed). (Pollard and Sag 1994: 26) 3

Fig.2 III, for the2 meaning of book, is representative.33 3 2 per 3rd 66 66 7 7 7 6 7 7 7 16 66index 66 7 7 num sing 5 4 7 7 66content 66 7 7 gen neut 7 6 6 7 77 4

4

restriction f

h

i 55

1g

instance

book Figure III: A CONTENT value, after Pollard and Sag (1994: 26)

It is not entirely clear what it would mean for there to be semantic conditions on the unconstrained entities that populate a (model of a) world, but Pollard and Sag explain their intentions, with regard to a representation like Fig. III, as follows: The signi cance of the RESTRICTION value is that when the word book is used referentially (e.g. in a referential use of the phrase a book), the index 1 introduced by that use must be anchored to an entity which renders each psoa in the set (in this case, a single psoa) factual; that is, the index must be anchored to a book. (1994: 26)

3 Some inadequacies in the current treatment

3.1 Indexes and anchors

The constraints on the intended referents of nominal expressions (whether in BACKGROUND or in CONTENT) have been represented as constraints on indexes. But indexes are de ned (1994: 24-26) to be abstract linguistic objects (with attributes only for person, number, and gender), so it is a category error to say that indexes are constrained to instantiate such relations as `dog' or `book', or to be named John, that is, to be dogs or books, or be named John. It is clear that the intent is to constrain the anchors of those indexes in such ways. For example, Pollard and Sag describe the BACKGROUND value in Fig. I as corresponding to the presupposition that the referent of a use of the name John be named John, or, to be somewhat more precise, that the referent be identi able in the utterance context by means of the name John. (1994: 27) This is an improvement on what Fig. I appears to say, since it is easy to show that the relevant relation is neither `naming' nor `calling', because both would make sentences like (1a) and (1b) contradictions, which they are not. 1a. Haj Ross is not named Haj Ross. 1b. John Robert Ross is not called John Robert Ross. Two problems remain. First of all, empirically this is a halfway measure. It does not indicate by whom the referent is to be identi able, or according to whom the referent is supposed to be identi able by that person. Second, nothing in either the BACKGROUND representations or the representations of RESTRICTION values requires the interpretation that Pollard and Sag suggest, and it is 4

hard to see how a model-theoretic interpretation of this could be made consistent with the rest of the theory. The gist of the interpretation quoted is that while indexes are just person, number, and gender-class information associated with a linguistic expression, a constraint of the sort in the BACKGROUND value in Fig. I constrains not the index 1 , but the entity to which it is anchored, to be the bearer of the name John. The formal interpretation of this must be context-sensitive in that when an index is a value of the attribute INDEX, it represents person, number, and gender information, but when a referential index is the value of some role name in a psoa, it represents the entity to which that grammatical information is anchored.5

3.2 The domain of BACKGROUND propositions; names and factive verbs

The examples of BACKGROUND psoas that Pollard and Sag provide invite the inference that they constrain objective properties of the context. This inference is supported by such claims as: ...BACKGROUND psoas are not part of the CONTENT value but should rather be considered as felicity conditions on the utterance context. (1994: 27) ...we...will treat honori cation via constraints on when the speaker owes honor to the referent of the subject. (1994: 93) Quite likely, such characterizations are a response to accumulating evidence that certain aspects of linguistic form correlate with dierent kinds of facts about the situations in which those forms are appropriately used. Nonetheless, it cannot be right to say that objective facts of the sorts provided in the examples constrain utterance contexts. For example, taken at face value, a representation of proper nouns as NPs with CONTEXTjBACKGROUND values as in Fig. I above predicts that reference to an individual by a name that is not their name is incorrect or impossible. But any N' can be used as a proper name in context without supposing any formal or customary naming relation, as shown in (2). 2. A nurse glanced up from her paperwork through bifocal glasses. \Just a minute," Bifocals said. \You're supposed to be in traction." (adapted from People of Darkness, by Tony Hillerman (Perennial Library, Harper and Row, 1988, p. 139))

This has implications for the proper treatment of reference in general, which I take up shortly. Of course, it is nonsensical to think of either linguistic signs or utterances of them as actually limiting the world (in the form of contexts in which the signs might happen to be uttered), and in general, it is empirically incorrect to treat BACKGROUND propositions as propositions about the objective world in which the sign is used. It is (since Morgan 1973) trivial to show that the relevant background propositions are not about objective aspects of any world, but rather are propositions about beliefs which the speaker supposes to be mutual. The option of saying that indexes have person, number, and gender-class attributes and refer to their anchors would seem to claim, contrary to experience, that the property of being named John (or being a dog) and being third person can belong to the same sort of entity; but third person is a property of a linguistic expression, and linguistic expressions normally don't have personal names of their own, and barring witchcraft, are never dogs. 5

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For example, factive verbs are said to normally presuppose their complements. If this means that the proposition corresponding to the complement has to be true of the context of utterance for a factive verb sentence to be felicitous, then when that proposition is false of the context of utterance, even if no speech act participant knows that it is false, such sentences ought to be infelicitous. This prediction is wrong. For example, it predicts incorrectly that if it was the case that french fries were actually healthful, but no one knew it, everyone would still nd it perfectly acceptable to say things like (3). 3. Clinton realizes french fries are bad for him.

3.3 Common nouns and names

From the description of the RESTRICTION attribute of the CONTENT values for nominal objects quoted above, it is clear that restrictions on indices are pragmatic in character. The passage cited above not only refers (three times) to the use of an expression, it invokes the notion `intended referent' in referring to the entity to which the expression's index is anchored. This is necessarily something that is contextually determined (rather than grammatically or semantically determined), because its identi cation depends as much on the speaker's intention to refer to that entity as on the words she chose. Without information about what entity the speaker intended the index to be anchored to, the utterance of a sign containing an index cannot be evaluated, in the sense that its well-formedness in context cannot be determined. But if information about the identi ability of an intended referent of the use of a sign under a given description is pragmatic when the sign is a name, then that same sort of information is pragmatic when the sign is a common noun. It is the goal of the next section to show that treating both as involving BACKGROUND propositions, following Grice (1957), Kripke (1972) and Nunberg (1978), has the added attraction of suggesting a means for representing the regularities of transferred reference which re ects Nunberg's (1978) insights about polysemy.

4 Towards a fuller account of reference

All reference involves mutual beliefs about normal beliefs about what things are called by what names in which sub-communities, and about metaphor-like techniques for extending the usual domain of reference of a term to entities functionally related to entities in that domain. The aspects of situations that gure in restricting when a form is appropriately used all refer, at bottom, to conditions on attitudes (typically beliefs and intentions) of speech act participants and role-bearers (typically, agents and experiencers) in referenced state and event relations. A more accurate account of the contextual condition on the use of proper names than that in Fig. I would refer to the speaker's belief described in (IV). IV. Condition on felicitous use of a name X: The speaker believes that the addressee will be able to identify the intended referent from the reference to it by that name and will believe that the speaker intended him to do so by recognizing that belief of the speaker. But since (IV) re ects a general condition on the use of referring expressions (Grice 1957), it shouldn't have to be represented as part of the grammar or lexicon, but should follow from 6

the fact that language is used in accordance with a Cooperative Principle (Grice 1975, Green 1993a) which entails that general condition.6 Perhaps all that has to be said with reference to particular proper names is that an entity anchored to the index the name introduces is being called by the proper name uttered. Up to now, we have not addressed the well-known fact that the \restrictions" assiging indexes of common (and proper) nouns to entities of particular sorts are not linguistically constrained. That is, as language users, we are free to use any word to refer to anything at all, subject only to the purely pragmatic constraint that we have to consider how likely it is that our intended audience will be able to correctly identify our intended referent from our use of the expression we choose. We frequently exploit this freedom, referring to movies as turkeys, cars as lemons, and individuals in terms of objects associated with them, as when we say that the ute had to leave to attend his son's soccer game, or that the corned beef spilled his water. Yet we all act as if we believe, and believe that everyone else believes, that individual words dierentially constrain the mapping from index to anchor. We can represent such \normal" word meanings in terms of mutual belief in a normal belief about referential expressions,7 following Nunberg (1978). The relation mutually-believe (abbreviated mbelieve) is a familiar relation that holds among two sentient beings (let us call them an experiencer and a standard) and a proposition. Mutual belief does not involve perfect mutual knowledge, but rather the recursive relation of the experiencer believing the proposition, believing that the standard believes the proposition, believing that the standard believes that the experiencer believes the proposition, and so on (Cf. Cohen and Levesque 1990). The relation normally-believe (abbreviated nbelieve) holds of a community and a proposition P when people in that community believe that it is normal in that community to believe P and that everyone in that community believes that. Figure V illustrates representing the meaning of dog in terms of a mutual belief that English speakers normally believe that2 dog will refer to dogs. 3 phon / dog / 6 7 h i 66 66content 66 66 66 66 66 66context 66 66 64

7 7 2 37 7 3 2 7 7 2 spkr 66c-inds 4 7 7 5 7 7 66 7 addr 3 7 7 7 66 2 37 7 7 7 2 expr 66 7 7 7 6 7 7 66 7 66standard 3 7 7 7 7 2 37 77 66bkd 6 f 66 g77777 expr English speakers77 66 7 6 h 77 i 64soa 4 57 64 57 inst 1 soa 57 5 canis index

1

mbelieve nbelieve Figure V: Partial lexical entry for a common noun, following Nunberg (1978) (naive version)

When a speaker uses a proper name with a referent not resolvable by the addressee, in open de ance to the Cooperative Principle (rather than in honest error), that fact communicates information by conversational implicature in the familiar way. 7 Including nominal expressions and also verbal and adjectival, insofar as they refer to events, states, and properties (or situation-types). 6

7

Fig. V says, roughly, that when you use the word dog to refer to something, you take it for granted that people will take you to be referring to a dog. In saying this, it makes the treatment of common nouns quite parallel to that of proper names (cf. Kripke 1972, Green 1984, 1993b). Some uses of referential expressions are not so much abnormal or less normal as they are normal in a more narrowly de ned community. Their representations will re ect this dierence, as well as their relations to less remarkable uses, which can be described in terms of fairly simple functions.8 For example, milkshake as used in (4) might have a representation like that in Fig. VI, where in addition to a mutual belief about what English speakers normally use milkshake to refer to, there is a mutual belief that it is normal for sales agents to use a description of a purchase to refer to the purchaser, as well as a mutual belief that the person identi ed as the plainti bought a milkshake. 4. The milkshake claims you kicked her purse. 2 phon 66 66content 66 66 66 66 66 66 66 66 66 66context 66 66 66 66 66 64

/milkseyki/ h index

1

2 3 2 2 spkr 66c-inds 4 5 addr 3 66 2 66 2 66 66expr 66 3 66standard 3 2 66 66 expr English speakers 66 7 66soa 64 i h 5 ^ 66 66 inst 4 soa 66 6nbelieve milkshake 66bkd f 66 66 66 2 3 66 expr sales agents 66 66 2 37 66 7 66 6 7 demonstratum purchase 66 64soa 4 66 57 4 designatum purchaser 5 4 rfunction mbelieve nbelieve

^

3 7 7 7 37 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 3 77 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 g7777 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 37 2 7 7 7 7 7 1 7 purchaser 7 7 57 7 4 7 7 7 7 4 purchase 7 5 57 purchase 5

Figure VI: Representation9 for a transferred reference, following Nunberg (1978) (preliminary version)

5 Representing constraints on the utterance of signs

An interesting property of these conditions on the referential use of expressions which is not represented so far is that they seem to require reference to properties of the expressions

For example, in lexical or (more likely|cf. Nunberg 1978, Green 1989, 1993a, Helmreich 1994) semantic or pragmatic rules. 9 The symbol ^ is an ad hoc abbreviation whose purpose in this gure and those following is to keep the representation as compact and intuitively intelligible as possible. Strictly speaking, the value of BKD is a set of mutual-belief psoas, all of which involve the speaker and the addressee. One of them is about normal beliefs of English speakers, one of them is about normal beliefs of sales agents, and one of them is about a particular purchasing event. 8

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themselves. For example, just as it is the intentions accompanying the uttering of an expression that make it a warning, not any property of or condition on the expression itself, the general pragmatic condition on using a nominal expression to refer to some intended referent is not that the index of that expression have a certain name or instantiate a certain category. That doesn't make any sense, since an index is just person, number, and gender information associated with a use of a nominal expression. The general condition is rather that the speaker believe that the addressee will recognize the speaker's intention in using the expression that its index be taken to be anchored to that intended referent.10 Figs. V and VI do not re ect this; Fig. V actually refers to English speakers normally believing that the index of the entity that the speaker is using the word dog to refer to is a dog. Insofar as the structure-sharing capacity of HPSG (\the central explanatory mechanism" (1994: 19)) allows the same feature structure to be the value of dierent attributes within a sign, it is possible to represent properties of the utterance act itself among the BACKGROUND psoas by invoking the general HPSG sort sign as the value of a role-attribute like INSTRUMENT or UTTERANCE in an instrumental psoa.11 In the case of normal word meaning, all that is needed is to add to the CONTEXTjBACKGROUND set a proposition relating to intentions accompanying utterance of a sign which shares certain properties with the sign actually uttered, as shown in Fig. VII. 10 In the case of so-called extended referents (ham sandwiches and so on) the reasonableness of this belief depends on the addressee's ability to get from beliefs about normal beliefs about the use of the expression to contextually likely referents for it. 11 The value of such an attribute has to be a sign with a particular phonstring rather than a fully speci ed sign in order to allow for the unintentional utterance of ambiguous expressions, and for the utterance of unassignable phonstrings such as expressions in foreign languages. It can't just be a phonstring, because that would preclude the possibility of homonymy.

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2 phon 66 66category 66content 66 66 66 66 66 66 66 66 66 66 66 66context 66 66 66 66 66 66 66 66 4

4

/dog/

5

h

index

1

i

2 3 2 2 spkr 66c-inds 4 5 addr 3 66 2 66 2 66 66expr 66 66standard 3 2 66 66 expr English 66 66 66 66 66 66 66 66 66 66 66 66 66 6 66 f 66 66bkd 66soa 66 66 66soa 66 66 66 66 66 66 66 66 66 66 66 66 66 66 4 4 4 mbelieve nbelieve

speakers

2 agent 6 6 6 6 instru 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6 soa 6 6 6 4

shows-intent

2

2 phon 6 4 sign

4

category

2 agent 2 6 6 instru 6 6 2 6 6 inst 6 6 6 theme 4 4

refer

referent

5

restr

3 5

7

f

h

canis

inst

3 7 7 7 7 7 7 37 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 37 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 37 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 37 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 g 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 37 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 37 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 i7 7 7 7 7 5 7 7 77 7 g 5577 77 7 57 57 57 5

Figure VII: Lexical entry for a common noun, following Nunberg (1978) (closer approximation) This representation replaces the (bizarre) constraint that it is normally believed that the index anchored to the intended referent is a dog, with the constraint that it is normally believed that uttering the noun dog indicates intent to refer to an object which is a dog. The information that the actual anchor of the index 1 is a dog is then treated as a conversational implicature from this information. This analysis requires adding to the HPSG ontology of objects only one new object type: referent. Referents are de ned as having two attributes, INSTANCE (which takes any sort of object in the universe as its value (i.e., it is a completely free variable), and the RESTRICTION attribute which was formerly de ned for nominal-objects. RESTRICTION continues to have sets of propositions (psoas) as its value, and they can now legitimately restrict the class to which the anchor may belong. Since this analysis doesn't constrain indexes at all, but rather the class of entities to which they might be anchored, RESTRICTION is no longer declared for nominal-objects. The representation of transferred reference uses is re ned similarly, as shown in Fig. VIII.12 The observant reader will note that the anchoring condition on the index is made explicit in Fig. VIII. If the values of the SPKR and ADDR values of C-INDS are objects of type referent, and not of type index, there is no need to include corresponding anchoring conditions for them in representations of expressions that do not include rst and second person pronouns. 12

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2 66phon 66content 66 66 66 66 66 66 66 66 66 66 66 66 66 66 66 66 66context 66 66 66 66 66 66 66 66 66 66 66 66 66 4

/milkseyk / i h 4

index

1

2 3 2 2 spkr 66c-inds 4 5 66 addr 3 66 2 expr 2 66 66 66 66std 23 66 66 expr English speakers 66 66 6 2 66 66 agent 2 66 3 2 66 66 6 66 6 4 phon 66 66 6 66 5 6 instru 6 4 66 66 6 5 category 66 6 66 66 6 sign 66 6 2 66 66soa 6 6 agent 2 6 soa 66 66 66 6 6 6 6 instru 6 66 66 66 6 6 2 6 6 66 66 66 6 6 soa 7 inst 6 6 6 66 66bkd f 66 h 6 6 theme 4 6 4 64 66 restr f inst 66 4 milkshake 66 referent 66 refer shows-intent 66 66nbelieve 66 66 2 3 66 66 expr sales agents 66 66 66 2 37 7 66 66 66 7 demonstratum purchase ^ 7 4 5 66 66 4soa 5 designatum purchaser 66 66 66 66nbelieve 2rfunction 3 3 2 66 66 8 1 index purchaser 5 ^ 4 5 4 64 4 7 purchase referent 8 mbelieve purchase

3 37 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 37 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 3777 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 i7 7 7 5 77 7 g 557 5

anchor

3 7 7 7 37 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 37 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 ^77 77777 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 g 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 57 57 5

Figure VIII: Representation for a transferred reference, following Nunberg (1978)

6 Empathy verbs

Empathy-sensitive lexical items (words whose use re ects the speaker's degree of association with various participants and the relative social rank of participants) may now be seen as unexceptional. The constraints on them dier from other pragmatic constraints only in the particular relations invoked. Suppose the conditions on empathy verbs involve something like `the anchor of this index bears such-and-such social or emotional relation to the anchor of that index.' For example, yaru is one of several Japanese verbs which refers to the `giving' relation. It is used when the giver is associated with the speaker, and ranks higher socially than the recipient (so that it is typically appropriate to use it in saying `my father gave that boy a yo-yo' but not in saying `the beggar gave me a paper ower'). In any case, empathy is not measured between words, but rather between their referents. Thus, a particular empathysensitive verb is selected by an utterer (by act of will), to index the intended referents of words in accordance with particular social goals. It is not ungrammatical to use yaru to 11

describe a gift from a socially lower person, although it will implicate that the referent is not socially lower than the recipient. At any rate, the condition is not strictly that the giver actually be associated with the speaker, or the recipient socially lower. The re ection of such social relations is a conversational implicature of saying something, the saying of which presupposes that the speaker believes that the various conditions are met.13 For concreteness' sake, Fig. IX illustrates the condition on the use of the verb yaru, described above. 3 2 /yaru/ 6phon 7 2 3 66 5 donor 66 6 77 66content 64gift 5 66 beneficiary 6 give2 66 3 2 66 1 spkr 66c-inds 4 66 5 66 addr 4 66 66 2 66 expr 1 66 66 6 66 66std 4 66 3 2 3 2 66 66 66 1 5 higher center 66 66context 66 5 ^ 4 5 ^ 4 66 66soa in 66 5 6 lower f 6ingroup 66bkd rank 66 66 66 66 66 2 3 2 66 66 6 2 index 66 64 66 4 5 ^ 4index 4 4 referent 5 referent mbelieve anchor

anchor

7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 37 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 37 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 g 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 37 7 7 7 7 7 3 7 7 7 55 77 57 6 5

Figure IX: Partial representation of the constraints on a verb of giving Note that it is not necessary to represent the speaker's intent that uttering the form will cause the addressee to believe that the speaker intends the addressee to believe the propositions in the form's BACKGROUND value; the Cooperative Principle guarantees that on hearing the speaker utter some expression, the addressee will attribute intentions to the speaker in doing so, and they will include the intention to represent herself as believing the propositions required for the felicitous utterance of that expression. Because the use of such forms re ects beliefs about the speaker's association with participants which the speaker believes to be mutual, it will induce inferences when those beliefs are not in fact mutually held. For this reason, it is a mistake to assume that the use of forms which re ect con icting assumptions necessarily results in a defective utterance (called \infelicitous" rather than \ungrammatical" because the \violation" is pragmatic rather than a matter of grammar). As often as not, when language users hear in context an utterance which would seem to require mutually inconsistent background assumptions, they will attribute to the speaker additional beliefs which eliminate the contradiction. For example: given the propositions that the Speaker respects Y and that the Speaker doesn't respect Y, they may add domains or reasons for each proposition and be content to assume that the Speaker respects Y in some role, but doesn't respect Y in some other role. 13

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7 Constraints on constructions All of the pragmatic constraints on forms (constraints on the use of forms) discussed so far have aected individual words or morphemes. Yet it has long been noted (e.g., Davison 1980, Borkin 1974, Prince 1978, Green 1981) that the use of syntactic construction types may also be constrained by speakers' assumptions about referents and their relations to each other, to speech act participants, and to properties of assumed worlds. For instance, Davison (1978) and others have observed that the use of passive constructions may imply that the passive subject is aected for good or ill by the event referenced by the passive verb. The use of raising-to-object constructions in English has been observed (Borkin 1974, Postal 1974) to be associated with an assumption that (roughly put) the referent of the subject (could) perceive the state of aairs involving the referent of the object through direct interaction with that individual. The use of focus constructions of various sorts (e.g. clefts, pseudo-clefts (Prince 1978), argument preposing (Ward 1985)) re ects assumptions about the relation of the referent of the focussed element to an appreciation of the state of aairs in which it gures. There are two ways in which CONTEXT speci cations can be associated with constructions in the framework being considered. First, if the construction is described by means of a lexical rule which speci es one set of constraints in terms of another, the contextual constraints can be included as part of the \derived" lexical entries. Thus, an aective passive lexical rule might look something like the in Fig. X.i 14 3 2 function2represented 3 h 2 2 head h 4cat 4

verb

subcat h

NP 1 , NP 2

6 6 cat 6 6 6 6content 33 6 6 6 55, 6 6 i 6 6 6 6 context 6 6 6 6 4

4head

vform

subcat h

NP 2 , ...,

4

2 h spkr c-inds 6 2 6 6 expr 6 6 6 6 6 6 bkd f 6 6 6 4soa 4 believe

3

7 7 7 (PP 1 ) i 7 7 7 7 37 7 7i 7 7 3 77 7 3 7 7 7 7 3 7 77 2 7 7g7 7 7 4expr 2 5 7 7 7 5 57 4 soa 5

psv

i

5

aect-fortune

Figure X: Skeleton of a passive lexical rule for an aective passive Focus Inversions (Birner 1992) would seem to be amenable to similar treatment (cf. Levine 1989, Green 1993c). In English, passives with sentential and prepositional subjects, such as (i) and (ii) obviously are not subject to the constraint mentioned in Fig. X. i. That welfare encourages the expansion of single-parent families is taken for granted by a frightening number of people. ii. In the garden was considered the best place to hide. Whether this means that there are two passive lexical rules in English, one for derived NP-subjects, and one for any sort of subject, or that the constraint is better represented in the description of English as a detail in the multiple-inheritance lexical type hierarchy (see below), is tangential to the point being illustrated here. 14

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Not all constructions are described by lexical rules, of course. Raising-to-object verbs, for instance, are just the subtype of transitive verb which seeks for its object whatevever its VP complement subcategorizes for. Insofar as raising-to-object verbs thereby de ne a subsort of transitive verbs, which are a subsort of verbs, the CONTEXT speci cations can be described as part of the sort de nition in the description of the lexical type hierarchy for verbs (cf. Pollard and Sag 1987: 191-218). At the termini of such type hierarchies are individual lexical entries with non-disjunctive speci cations; words with multiple subcategorizations, for instance, will occur at multiple terminals, each with a dierent speci cation. The verb be, to take an extreme example, will have dierent subcategorizations for its use in clefts, pseudoclefts, property predications, identity predications, etc. Dierent CONTEXT constraints can be described along with the dierent subcategorization constraints as needed. It appears, then, that the means for representing contextual constraints on constructions are built into HPSG, in the form of the basic multiple-inheritance lexical type hierarchy and the lexical rules which instantiate grammars.15 8 Conclusion and prospects I hope to have demonstrated that it is possible, within the framework provided by HPSG for representing information about linguistic signs (and their use), to describe pragmatic constraints on forms at whatever level of detail is empirically necessary, without ad hoc syntactic features or auxiliary components or modules. Contextual information is necessarily a part of the representation of rst and second person indexicals common to all languages, and to the representation of reference. The framework HPSG provides for describing those aspects of the relation between linguistic form and language use does not need to be distorted to describe more subtle contextual constraints. At the very least, I believe I have shown (by example, if nothing else) that this framework provides a means for articulating pragmatic constraints in such a way as to encourage their empirical investigation. That alone is a contribution to our understanding of them. It would simplify matters if we could remove all mention of beliefs and intentions to an extralinguistic account of language behavior as just intentional action. Unfortunately, I do not see at the present time how this could be done. First, distinct references to mutual belief and re exive intentions appear to be necessary because sometimes one is invoked and sometimes the other. Particular kinds of intentions are part of the description of particular illocutionary forces and intended perlocutionary eects, but the description of lexical elements and constructions involves invoking mutual beliefs. Second, insofar as there are regularities in the invocation of beliefs and intentions, factoring them out will depend on having a fully explicit theory of their projection. Since the projection of presuppositions in particular (and probably of propositions about contexts, generally) is in part dependent on conversational implicature (Morgan 1973, Gazdar 1979), and since conversational implicature is a function of a general theory of intentional behavior and its interpretation (Grice 1975), not something speci cally linguistic, a theory of the I have not described the propagation of these constraints from individual forms to larger expressions of which they are a part. That is a fairly complicated matter, the outlines of which are to be found in the treatment of the projection problem for presupposition described by Morgan (1973) and formalized by Gazdar (1979). 15

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projection of background propositions would seem to be just the linguistic subcase of a more general theory of the interpretation of human behavior. In any case, it is a topic for another time, probably a rather long time. REFERENCES Birner, Betty Jean. 1992. The discourse function of inversion in English. Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern University. Evanston, IL. Borkin, Ann. 1974. Raising to object position. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Michigan. Ann Arbor, MI. Carpenter, Bob. 1992. The logic of typed feature structures. Cambridge Tracts in Theoretical Computer Science 32. New York: Cambridge University Press. Cohen, Philip R., and Hector J. Levesque. 1990. Rational interaction as the basis for communication. Intentions in communication, ed. by Philip R. Cohen, Jerry Morgan, and Martha E. Pollack, 221-256. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Davison, Alice 1980. Peculiar passives. Language 56: 42-66. Gazdar, Gerald. 1979. Pragmatics, implicature, presupposition, and logical form. NY: Academic Press. Green, Georgia M. 1981. Pragmatics and syntactic description. Studies in the Linguistic Sciences 11(1): 27-38. Urbana, Illinois: Department of Linguistics, University of Illinois. Green, Georgia M. 1984. Some remarks on how words mean. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Linguistics Club. Green, Georgia M. 1989. Pragmatics and natural language understanding. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Green, Georgia M. 1992. The cooperative principle, rationality, and the nature of politeness. Ms. Green, Georgia M. 1993a. Rationality and Gricean inference. Cognitive Science Technical Report UIUC-BI-CS-93-09. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Green, Georgia M. 1993b. Nondescriptional accounts of word meaning and reference. Cognitive Science Technical Report UIUC-BI-CS-93-12. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Green, Georgia M. 1993c. Towards an HPSG account of co-called `Focus Inversion'. Ms. Grice, H. Paul. 1957. Meaning. Philosophical review 66: 377-388. Grice, H. Paul. 1975. Logic and conversation. Syntax and semantics, vol. 3: Speech acts, ed. by Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan, 41-58. NY: Academic Press. Helmreich, Stephen. 1994. Pragmatic referring functions in Montague grammar. Ph.D. dissertation. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 15

Kripke, Saul. 1972. Naming and necessity. Semantics of natural language, ed. by Donald Davidson and Gil Harman, 253-355. Dordrecht: D. Reidel. Levine, Robert. 1989. On focus inversion: syntactic valence and the role of a SUBCAT list. Linguistics 27: 1013-1055. Morgan, Jerry L. 1973. Presupposition and the representation of meaning: prolegomena. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago. Nunberg, Georey. 1978. The pragmatics of reference. Ph.D. dissertation, CUNY. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Linguistics Club. Pollard, Carl, and Drew Moshier. 1990. Unifying Partial descriptions of sets. Information, Language and Cognition. Vancouver Studies in Cognitive Science, Vol. 1: 285-322. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Pollard, Carl, and Ivan Sag. 1987. Information-based syntax and semantics, vol. 1. Stanford University, Center for the Study of Language and Information. Pollard, Carl, and Ivan Sag. 1994. Head-driven phrase structure grammar. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Postal, Paul M. 1974. On raising. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Prince, Ellen. 1978. A comparison of WH-clefts and pseudo-clefts in discourse. Language 54: 883-906. Shieber, Stuart. 1986. An introduction to uni cation-based approaches to grammar. CSLI Lecture Notes Series. Stanford: Center for the Study of Language and Information. [Distributed by University of Chicago Press] Ward, Gregory. 1985. The semantics and pragmatics of preposing. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.

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