Text and Thinking: On Some Roles of Thinking in Text Interpretation 9783110870305, 9783110132502

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Text and Thinking by Roger G. van de Velde

Research in Text Theory Untersuchungen zur Texttheorie Editor Janos S. Petöfi, Macerata Advisory Board Irena Bellert, Montreal Antonio Garcia-Berrio, Madrid Maria-Elisabeth Conte, Pavia Teun A. van Dijk, Amsterdam Wolfgang U. Dressler, Wien Nils Erik Enkvist, Abo Robert E. Longacre, Dallas Roland Posner, Berlin Hannes Rieser, Bielefeld Dieter Viehweger f , Berlin Volume 18

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G Walter de Gruyter • Berlin • New York 1992

Text and Thinking On Some Roles of Thinking in Text Interpretation By Roger G. van de Velde

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G

Walter de Gruyter • Berlin • New York 1992

® Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines of the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability.

Libraty of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication

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Velde, Roger G. van de. Text and thinking : on some roles of thinking in text interpretation I by Roger G. van de Velde. p. cm. — (Research in text theory = Untersuchungen zur Texttheorie. ISSN 0179-4167 ; v. 18) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 3-11-013250-8 (alk. paper) 1. Discourse analysis — Psychological aspects. 2. Thought and thinking. I. Title. II. Series: Research in text theory ; v. 18. P302.8.V45 1992 401'.41-dc20 92-23305 CIP

Die Deutsche Bibliothek — Cataloging-in-Publication

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Velde, Roger G. van de: Text and thinking : on some roles of thinking in text interpretation / by Roger G. van de Velde. — Berlin ; New York : de Gruyter, 1992 (Research in text theory ; Vol. 18) ISBN 3-11-013250-8 NE: GT

ISBN 3 11 013250 8 ISSN 0179-4167 © Copyright 1992 by Walter de Gruyter & Co., D-1000 Berlin 30 All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Printed in Germany Typesetting and printing: Arthur Collignon GmbH, Berlin Binding: Luderitz & Bauer, Berlin

To Helgi

Preface

§ 1 Language interpretation and thinking are interrelated. The present book is concerned with these interrelationships. More specifically, it tackles the following problems: which thinking processes are needed to make text interpretation possible? In which ways is thinking made possible through language? How is thinking mediated through language? There are many areas in life which demand thinking. In particular, much thinking is required when we work with meanings. This book demonstrates that there is meaning not only in the language used, but that there is also much meaning outside language. It argues that language-internal and language-external meanings must combine in the whole of interpretative activities/results and that we therefore need expansionist perspectives which are to be connected with each other in the study of language meaning. This book offers ways of widening the perspectives of meaning research. To this end, it claims that all questions of meaning, in one way or another, involve the ego-consciousness of the producer(s) of meaning and the egoconsciousness of those who receive meaning. In this respect, it defends the view that, in matters of interpretation, language cannot and should not be examined in isolation from human beings. This view does not diminish the complexity of language understanding. On the contrary, as more elements and factors concerning the meanings of man's inner psychic life are considered the complications grow. § 2 The complexity of language understanding is dealt with by conjecturing that there are specific forms/levels of organization which hold both inside and outside language. The conjectures involved concern the organization of man's inner psychic life (in 'macrocoherence'). They also pertain to the ways in which man organizes the outwardly observable phenomena of language (in 'cohesion'). They concern the content of verbal texts (in 'low-level coherence'). They relate to person-external reality and to the ways in which language refers to it (as is partly the case in 'referential connectedness'). They also have to do with what the producer means by the particularities of her/ his verbal behaviour (in 'high-level coherence'). In all these forms/levels of organization, thinking (i. e. inferencing or making inferences) is indispensable. This book shows that thinking is needed for the 'within perspective', the 'between perspective' and the 'beyond perspective' of organization. It also demonstrates that the understanding process

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Preface

is to be seen as an unbroken whole in which these three perspectives merge together. § 3 This book opens with a general introduction setting out what can be done and what will be done. It also offers a broad framework of justification, as follows: the study of language (use) and of the meanings which relate to it has too often been carried out to the exclusion of our thinking practice. In the study of language (use), which ranges from the single sound or letter to the most complicated verbal text, meaning should not be separated from the physical form in which language appears. In dealing with the inseparability of the physical form and meaning of language, thinking is of immeasurable importance. Its role cannot and should not be ignored. This book introduces some novel ways of looking at the functioning of language by paying careful attention to the crucial role of inferences. The present book closes with a general conclusion in which a concise and simplified overview of its main ideas is given. From this overview the reader can see how the separate chapters fit into the whole picture of the relationships between text and thinking which the present book sets forth. If the reader wants a preview of the global perspective of this book, (s)he would do well to begin by reading the general introduction and the general conclusion. These can provide her/him with some means of orientation in the immense fields of research to which this book is related. If (s)he feels interested or is provoked by these guidelines/pointers (s)he can find more detailed information in the individual chapters. § 4 The present book contains some cross-references, anticipations, repetitions and overlaps. Their purpose is to enhance the readibility and comprehensibility of the whole text. The whole text need not be read from the beginning to the end without interruption. Each chapter can be studied separately. For the reader's convenience, each individual chapter starts with a short introduction in which elementary background information is provided and a concise statement of its main issues is given. After every chapter a succinct summary provides a recapitulation of the main points made. Each summary (except that of the final chapter) also offers a brief anticipation of what is to be found in subsequent pertinent parts of the book. § 2 There is no ideal book because there is no perfect producer of verbal texts. Nor is there any ideal reception of a book. These relativizing attitudes have led the present author to minimize his aspirations after the ideal, the absolute and the perfect. His 'omne trinum perfectum' is restricted to three purposes: 1) to expand the global perspective of language understanding; 2) to get the reader's mind moving in directions not taken by most investigators of language and meaning; 3) to point out in detail that, whenever language is used, the key to its use is thinking.

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IX

§ 6 When one studies meaning, as it is involved in thinking, in texts, and in verbal communication, one may know where to start but not where to end. The further one proceeds in the discernment of meaning the more one recognizes that there is much mystery in the realms of signification and interpretation (van de Yelde, 1988 a; 1988 c; 1991). However, this is no reason to mystify the ideas one has about the ways in which meaning is handled in texts. Despite the mysteries of meaning (and the mystifications which may have resulted from accounting for meaning), there should be no fear of being clear about what we know and about what we do not know with respect to the intricacies of interpretation. It is in this spirit of intellectual modesty that the present book has been written and is meant to be understood. § 7 This book does not completely coincide with any specific school/ paradigm of linguistics, psychology, philosophy (of language/mind), logic, semiotics, etc. Nor does it slavishly adapt to prevailing views in languageoriented disciplines. It simply goes its own way. Moreover, it does not fit into any fad or fashion. That does not mean that its author has not taken into account most conceptions and views which are held in the disciplines concerned with language and its communicative/cognitive functioning. As appears from the many references, much information is gathered from current multidisciplinary literature. My tribute to all authors from whose insights my work has profited is beyond any measure. § 8 I would also like to acknowledge my gratitude to H. Van Vlaenderen for reorganizing various versions of this book on her personal computer. I also thank V. Story for checking my English after the final draft was completed. Antwerpen, June 1992

Roger G. van de Velde

Contents

Preface

VII

INTRODUCTION

1

CHAPTER ONE On discourse comprehension and inferencing 1.1. 1.2. 1.3. 1.4. 1.5. 1.6. 1.6.1. 1.6.2. 1.7. 1.8.

Introduction On co(n)textual information On coherence On inferences On the different kinds of cotext-directed inferencing . . . . On processing strategies On the processing stages of graphemic decoding On the inferential nature of graphemic decoding On the supplementation of discourse-directed inferences . . Summary

12 17 21 29 35 39 41 45 48 53

CHAPTER TWO On syntactic inferencing 2.1. 2.2. 2.3. 2.4. 2.5. 2.5.1. 2.5.2. 2.6. 2.7. 2.8.

Introduction On the realms of syntax On singling out syntactic processing From graphemic cotext to syntactic cotext Inferences based on and going beyond the knowledge of syntax On ordering syntactic constituents On ordering single words Inferences based on the rules of syntactic ordering On pure thought syntax On the inferential nature of syntactic processing

55 57 60 62 64 64 66 67 69 71

XII 2.9. 2.10.

Contents

On the interaction of syntactic inferences Summary

73 77

CHAPTER T H R E E On semantic inferencing 3.1. 3.2. 3.3. 3.4. 3.5. 3.6. 3.7. 3.8. 3.9. 3.10. 3.11.

Introduction 79 On singling out semantic processing 82 On ILRRR information 84 On ILRRR organization 88 On the neuropsychological evidence for ILRRR organization 90 On the neurolinguistic evidence for ILRRR organization . 91 On the lexicalized counterparts of ILRRR information . . . 95 On standard meanings and private meanings 99 On some conditions of handling ILRRR information . . . 101 On the importance and limits of ILRRR information . . . 103 Summary 106

CHAPTER FOUR On semantic-logical inferencing 4.1. 4.2. 4.3. 4.4. 4.4.1. 4.4.2. 4.4.3. 4.4.4. 4.5. 4.5.1 4.5.2. 4.5.3. 4.6. 4.7. 4.8. 4.9.

Introduction On some extrapropositional problems On predicate assignment and some intrapropositional problems On some conditions of interpropositional meanings . . . . On the argument identity condition On the predicate identity condition On the argument overlap condition On the predicate overlap condition On some global meaning conditions On the consequence consistency condition On the topic compatibility condition On the context integrativity condition On controlling human thinking On some limits of logic in interpretation On some restraints of rationality Summary

107 Ill 114 116 116 118 119 119 120 121 122 124 126 129 131 136

Contents

XIII

CHAPTER FIVE On action-oriented inferencing 5.1. 5.2. 5.3. 5.4. 5.4.1. 5.4.2. 5.5. 5.6. 5.7. 5.8. 5.9.

Introduction On action and its related inferences On the need for action-oriented inferences Action-oriented inferences made from cotextually expressed actions Inferences oriented to local actions Inferences oriented to global actions Action-oriented inferences made from contextually performed actions On mental background activities and action co(n)texts . . . On expectations and knowledge schemata On hypothetically reconstructed actions and free interpretation Summary

137 141 146 148 148 150 151 153 155 159 164

CHAPTER SIX Inferencing towards text organization 6.1. 6.2. 6.3. 6.4. 6.5. 6.6. 6.7. 6.8. 6.9.

Introduction On referential connectedness On coreference On cohesion On the cotext integrativity condition On interpretative elaboration and coherence On the indispensability of coherence On the indispensability of ILRRR-related inferences . . . . Summary

166 168 172 174 177 178 183 186 188

CHAPTER SEVEN On interpretative elaboration 7.1. 7.2. 7.3. 7.4. 7.5. 7.6. 7.7.

Introduction On the two sides of interpersonal communication On low-level and high-level coherence On producer-oriented explicative interpretation On receiver-oriented evaluative interpretation On some problem areas of literary evaluation On meaning transformation

191 192 194 196 200 203 206

XIV 7.8. 7.9. 7.10. 7.11.

Contents

On meaning complementation On the justification and plausibility of meaning complementation On the incompleteness/infiniteness of interpretation . . . . Summary

209 212 214 215

CHAPTER EIGHT Interpretation, inferencing and illusion 8.1. 8.2. 8.3. 8.4. 8.5. 8.6. 8.7. 8.8. 8.9. 8.10. 8.10.1. 8.10.2. 8.10.3. 8.10.4. 8.10.5. 8.10.6. 8.10.7. 8.11.

Introduction On some illusory facets of dream interpretation On some illusory facets of interpreting spatial data On some illusory facets of interpreting deictic data . . . . On some illusory facets of interpreting unimedial data . . . On the illusion of interpersonal/(cross-)cultural understanding On the illusion of correctness and completeness in interpretation On the illusion of orthodox mono-interpretability On some illusions in the cognitive models On scepsis and caution in exegetic practice On rule-conformity On rule-conformity and correctness On the relative character of rationality On rational control and correctness What is ideal? On scepticism On relativism Summary

217 219 223 225 227 229 231 234 236 239 239 241 242 243 245 245 246 247

CHAPTER NINE Inferences in Alice in Wonderland 9.1. 9.2. 9.3. 9.4. 9.5. 9.6. 9.7. 9.8.

Introduction Inferences as relating activités Inferences in hypothesis construction/evaluation On discourse-directed inferences in AAW On conditionals and textual organization On classification and textual organization On inferential elaboration Summary and conclusion

249 251 253 255 259 262 266 271

Contents

XV

CONCLUSION

273

References

292

Name Index Subject Index

319 324

INTRODUCTION § 1 Generally speaking, this book is about some of the human activities in verbal communication. It is concerned with the meaningful aspects of (inner psychic) life which underlie them. It concentrates on some of the most fascinating facets of man, notably his language, his thinking, his ego-consciousness and the relationships between them. It attempts to provide an account of how language use and thinking are interwoven in the realm of text interpretation. Human activities result, in most cases, from what man knows, assumes, believes, etc. and from how man thinks (evaluatively); thus, they are related to man's cognitive life. They also arise from man's emotions or affective states; then, they pertain to man's affective life. Human activities may also emerge from man's plans, intentions, goals, desires, volition(al aspects), wishes, longings, reasons, expectations, conations, motivations, etc.; in which case they relate to man's conative life. § 2 In the present book, I consider the quintessential parts which play a role in meaning conveyance and meaning assignment. To this end, I examine which characteristics of the physical medium of language and which ways of organizing the inner/outer world render verbal interaction about cognitive, affective and conative life possible. Cognitive, affective and conative life is, to a great extent, conveyed through and determined by the written/spoken medium of language. Language is mostly manifested in discourse. Discourse comprises an immense territoty. It relates, amongst other things, to person-external reality, ego-consciousness, action and communication. Cognitive, affective and conative life is also largely determined by the ways in which the inner psychic world, the outer world and the relations between them are organized. This organization is part of the individual's macrocoherence. The individual's macrocoherence is indispensable to her/his appropriate and undisturbed bio-psycho-social functioning. § 3 What is the species-specific characteristic of man's appropriate and undisturbed bio-psycho-social functioning? D o the Aristotelian and Cartesian views on man as a thinking animal provide a complete answer? Are these views to be complemented by the answer that man is an animal symbolicum and that language is his appropriate means of symbolizing what is in his cognitive, affective and conative life? Or is man an unfinished animal, as Nietzsche and others claimed? The present book considers aspects of these

2

Introduction

views/answers/claims. However, it is the view of man as a thinking animal that receives most attention. Man's thinking plays an enormous part in his ways of organizing (the relations between) the inner psychic world and the outer world. Man's thinking, like discourse, comprises an immense territory. It includes all sorts of creative problem-solving activities as well as the specimina of non-imaginative, non-inventive, repetitive and reproductive mental worrying. In its creative facets, man's thinking may unexpectedly switch from rigid and vertical logical reasoning to lateral thinking (de Bono, 1980; 1987; 1988 and further references therein). It may range from concept identification/ formation, categorization, judgement and decision making to association, game playing, everyday reasoning, day-dreaming/fantasy, thinking and the mystic/meditative/contemplative aspects of man's superconsciousness. It may even develop into states of ruminative thinking which might be specific to depression. Thinking can also involve the construction, control and acceptance or refutation of hypotheses. It may pertain to logically valid argumentation as well as to many kinds of non-stringent interpretative elaboration and free creativity. In interpretative elaboration, thinking may combine with affective and conative connotations. It can call upon imagination, ingenuity and inventiveness in order to identify/impose organization within/between/beyond the observed phenomena. § 4 Above these kinds of thinking and their relations, there is self-reflection whereby one may inspect one's own thoughts. Self-reflection, in turn, relates to self-awareness, metacognition and self-knowledge (Johnson-Laird, 1988 a). Man may cogitate on his person-internal reality and on its interactions with person-external reality. As he does so, the types of thinking treated in this book may become candidates for critical self-reflection. § 5 In this book, no definition of thinking will be given. The reasons are manifold. Let me single out one of them and comment a little on it: any definition of thinking would be a complex statement whose main constituents would require definition; these subsequent definitions would then be analysable into separate parts which, in turn, would also have to be defined, and so on ad infinitum. Let me give just one practical example of endless definition: suppose that one conceives of thinking, in a very simplified way, as any response of memory to intelligent perception (Bohm, 1983, 48 — 64). Here, the following questions arise: what is 'response'? What is 'memory'? What is 'perception'? What is 'intelligent perception'? There is such a wide variety of opinions and so much dissension on any of these questions that one would be forced to try to establish order/unity in the welter of possible answers.

Introduction

3

One way of achieving this order/unity would be by asking which prevailing point of view should be selected to account for the lack of unanimity: should a mechanistic viewpoint be chosen in which the electrical/chemical processes of the 'response' of the brain/nervous system receive attention? Are machineoriented endeavours required to simulate/systematize the processes which are supposed to occur in the relations between 'memory' and 'intelligent perception'? Or are mentalistic vistas needed in which the intellectual, emotional and sensuous aspects of man's 'memory' and 'intelligent perception' are to be considered? Weighing the relative importance of the respective viewpoints may easily lead to indecision and this indecision may grow when one seeks answers to the following questions: is thinking to be seen as a process? Is most weight to be lent to its content? Or is most attention to be given to the order in which its constitutive steps occur? etc. As long as no consensus on complex terms, such as 'response', 'memory', 'perception', 'intelligent perception', can be reached and as long as no decision can be taken over which viewpoints deserve most attention, it is impossible to propose a general and precise definition of thinking. (A similar reticence about defining the word 'text' and the notion of 'illusion' will be defended in chapter one and chapter eight.) § 6 Human thinking has become the main subject of cognitive science. This can be seen in the disputes between philosophers, logicians, psychologists and linguists on aspects of thinking as well as in the related discussions about man-machine analogies. This can also be observed in multidisciplinary concerns with language use and with the circumstances in which verbal communication takes place. Moreover, inquiries into the judgemental activities which people carry out in all areas of social life as well as other scientific endeavours have placed human thinking at the centre of current interests (Nisbeth, Ross, 1980; Elster, 1986; Hawthorn, 1987; Lakoff, 1987; Garnham, 1988; Johnson-Laird, 1988 a, 1988 b; Sternberg, Smith, 1988; Gernsbacher, 1990; Graesser, Bower, 1990; Strohner, 1990 and references therein). The present book does not concern itself with all the interests which centre on thinking processes. As already announced in the preface, it concentrates mainly on thinking as it is needed for text interpretation. In this respect, text interpretation is seen both as a set of activities and as the result of these activities. In addition, this book is concerned with the problems of how thinking is made possible through language and mediated through language. In its concern with thinking processes, this book defends views which do not completely conform with conventional/current linguistics. The main tenet is that thinking is intricately intermingled with different stages of language processing. § 7 This book does not and cannot provide the reader with a direct and complete rendering of the cerebral mechanisms which are at work when text

4

Introduction

receivers actually process the information of verbal texts. In the present state of brain and behaviour research, the specific ways of discourse processing cannot as yet be associated with particular brain processes. In the light of this situation, I confine myself to the formulation of moderate and modest hypotheses, showing that only a few of them are supported by the empirical findings of neuropsychology, psychopathology and neurolinguistics. From the perspective of psycholinguistics, I do not deal with the avalanche of writings on empirical and theoretical issues in text comprehension (Graesser, Bower, 1990; Gernsbacher, 1990; Strohner, 1990 and further references therein). I shall only make it clear that some of my moderate and modest hypotheses are controlled by requesting different groups of informants to solve the problems under discussion. Hypotheses which are not (sufficiently) supported by non-controversial knowledge data and by conclusive evidence are not considered. So, for instance, hypotheses relating to the problem of whether inferences occur in 'short-term memory' or belong to 'long-term memory' are left in abeyance. Moreover, some of the issues which are open to debate do not receive sufficient attention. For instance, are all inferences made during text comprehension? Or are some (additional) inferences generated during retrieval (Graesser, Bower, 1990)? Is it necessary to distinguish inferences which are made at the level of perception from those which are generated by and based on knowledge (Swiney, Osterhout, 1990)? Is comprehension of an expository text facilitated by reorganizing this text in such a way that the number of necessary inferences is reduced (Britton, Van Dusen, Shawn, Hemphill, 1990)? Is a literal meaning the first one assigned to a text and is non-literal meaning inferred from it at a later stage in text processing? Does it take more time to process non-literal meaning than to assign a literal meaning to a text? § 8 Text interpretation can take many forms depending on the nature of the texts, on the interpersonal relationships of the text producer and the text receiver, on the wider communicative contexts in which texts occur, on the intentions/motives/reasons of the text producers, on the (cap)abilities/value systems/expectations/beliefs/attitudes/preferences of the text receivers, and on the person-external reality to which texts refer. I focus attention on the interpretation of written (i. e. typewritten and printed) verbal texts. Research perspectives which go beyond the intrinsic qualities of verbal texts and/or which are directed towards the text-external determinants of interpretation are not given the same weight as the typically text-internal vistas. Only chapter eight and chapter nine show an overwhelming interest in fields of interpretation which are not of a "dominantly-verbal" nature (Petófi, 1990, 208). In the course of this book, texts (sometimes called 'cotexts') are always taken to be verbal texts. In this regard, the attribute 'verbal' serves to distinguish texts expressed in a human natural language from non-verbal text

Introduction

5

phenomena, as they occur in musical, pictorial, scenic and other semiotic domains (Petófi, 1973; 1986 b; 1991, Nóth, 1990; Tobin, 1990). In the term 'human natural language' the attribute 'human' is used to refer to language as a species-specific system which is distinct from the communication systems of other animal beings. When the attribute 'natural' is combined with 'language' it is utilized to denote naturally occurring verbal phenomena as well as language data which are produced for illustrative purposes by the language researcher or which are elicited in experimental designs. Their naturalness is opposed to the artificiality of mono-interpretable codes which are constructed to be used in science, technology and other domains in which the precise transmission of the message is crucial. Interpretation of written verbal texts is often identified with reading. However, one should be aware of the fact that there is reading without understanding (in the strictly isolated processing stage of graphemic decoding) and reading with understanding (in the interaction of graphemic decoding with higher-level stages of text processing). With respect to the issues of this book, the terms 'text' and 'discourse' are often interchanged. In the same vein, the related terms 'discourse reception', 'discourse processing', 'discourse understanding', 'discourse comprehension' and 'discourse interpretation' are used as synonyms. They become interchangeable with the terms 'text reception', 'text processing', 'text understanding', 'text comprehension' and 'text interpretation'. Though there are technical discussions on the distinction between the notions 'text' and 'discourse', I take no part nor sides in them. Nor do I go into the proposed (definitional) criteria for such a distinction or dwell on the conditions of textuality. Instead, I concentrate on the interpretative activities involved in the denotata of these terms as well as on the interpretative results of text processing. § 9 I begin in chapter one with a very general characterization of some elements and factors which belong to discourse reception. From amongst these elements and factors I single out thinking processes (i. e. inferences) for particular attention. Because text interpretation can take many forms, the thinking processes needed for and involved in it can be directed towards different problem areas. Let me single out four of them. Firstly, they may involve the problem of how to deal with the properties of the verbal text itself. Secondly, the thinking processes of text reception may also be concerned with the problem of what the producer meant by the verbal text. Thirdly, the thinking processes of text reception may pertain to the problem of how the receiver relates the information of the verbal text and the information about what the producer meant by the verbal text to her/his own value systems, attitudes, opinions, beliefs, preferences, expectations and the like. Fourthly, the thinking processes may concern the problem of how the meanings of verbal texts are related to the person-external reality which is denoted by these verbal texts.

6

Introduction

§ 1 0 For these four problem areas I demonstrate that inferences are indispensable. As to the problem of how to deal with the properties of the verbal text itself, I point out that inferences are needed to identify the information parts and to relate them to each other. In a wider text-oriented perspective, inferences serve to discern the discourse-internal surface links, to disentangle the deeper meaning relations and to add information to the text under consideration in order to construct low-level coherence. Regarding the problem of what the producer meant by the verbal text, I describe the ways in which inferences help receivers to find relations which exist between discourse phenomena and the producer's intentions/motives/ reasons. I also demonstrate the way in which inferences may contribute to identifying the complex difficulties which arise when the receiver attempts to approximate to the producer's person-internal meanings. In this respect, I am also concerned with the problem areas connected with the interpersonal relationships between the producer and the receiver and with the wider communicative contexts. Ultimately, these concerns with producer-oriented interpretation are to establish high-level coherence. Regarding the problem of how the receiver relates the information of the verbal text and the information about what the producer meant by the verbal text to her/his own value systems, preferences, attitudes, expectations, etc., I argue that text interpretation leads the receiver to transform the original text meaning. I also demonstrate that the justification and plausibility of the resulting text transformation can be controlled only by relying on inferences. Regarding the problem of how the meanings of verbal texts are related to the person-external reality denoted by these verbal texts, I show that the relations between the text-internal properties and person-external reality are not directly mediated, but are constituted through the intermediary stages of man's ego-consciousness. The term 'ego-consciousness' is used to distinguish the strictly inner psychic world of the individual from the collective inner world of people who share sociocultural values, ideas, norms, attitudes, etc. and who are organized as groups, nations, tribes or other communities. §11 The first parts of this book (chapters one to five) set out the specific ways in which inferences are made in organizing the information provided by realized text phenomena. These chapters may seem rather technical to a reader who has a broader interest in the diverse facets of interpretation. However, the technical specifications of these chapters are necessary preconditions to providing the reader with a better realization of which inferential/ organizing steps render the assignment of meanings possible. These technical specifications are also needed to ensure the rational/empirical control of meaning assignments. The subsequent stages of this book present the less technical parts of meaning assignment. In progressing through these subsequent stages, the reader will see the widening perspectives of interpretation.

Introduction

7

§ 12 Reali2ed text phenomena are not the exclusive subject domain of linguistics. This is because texts are parts of the totality of information data in the person-internal and person-external reality to which receivers (may) give signifying responses. In the light of this consideration, realized text phenomena are also semiotic objects of study (Noth, 1990). Since linguistic methods are basic to semiotic accounts of realized text phenomena (Segre, 1988; Petofi, 1991), chapters one to five concentrate predominantly on linguistic viewpoints. Because of my preoccupation with inferencing, I graft my views about inferences onto the conventional/current views of linguistics. More specifically, I attempt to provide a clear and convincing account of how four kinds of discoursedirected inferences (i. e. syntactic inferences, ILRRR inferences, semanticlogical inferences, and action-oriented inferences) work in discourse reception. However, this account is incomplete. To make up for its incompleteness, the ninth (and final) chapter deals with the roles which inferences play in the interpretation of pictorial information. It also focuses attention on those inferences which are of importance to (the discernment of) particular levels/forms of logical organization in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and which are responsible for (the understanding of) its intellectualizing humour. In this final chapter, it is possible to substantiate further the main tenet of the present book, notably that interpretation is impossible without the involvement of inferences. § 13 One of the main prerequisites/preconditions in making discourse reception a justified or plausible practice is that discourse receivers identify the different forms/levels of organization which are characteristic of verbal texts. In this respect, I consider mainly the properties of graphemic, syntactic, referential, semantic, logical and pragmatic organization. I also dwell on the organization of verbally denoted/described and coverbally performed actions. In the first chapter I concentrate on the interpretative organization condition and on graphemic organization. The following chapters (chapters two to five) deal with the inferential steps which are needed to identify other forms/levels of organization. In chapters five and seven, the antecedents of man's inner psychic life which make (co)verbal actions and their organization possible receive attention. The sixth chapter is concerned with those forms/ levels of organization which I term 'referential connectedness', 'cohesion', and (low-level) 'coherence'. The seventh chapter is devoted to some facets of pragmatic organization and to the distinction between low-level and highlevel coherence. The eighth chapter shows that the receiver's identification of organization may cause interpretative illusions. The ninth chapter is concerned with particular forms of logical organization. § 14 When discourse reception is directed towards the problem of how the properties of the verbal text can be dealt with, then it may be seen as a

8

Introduction

descriptive practice. When text processing is oriented towards the problem of what the producer meant by the verbal text and towards the complex problem of why (s)he selected/imparted a specific message and why (s)he chose a specific formulation, it may be considered as an explicative enterprise. When text understanding pertains to the problem of how the receiver connects the text-oriented and producer-oriented information with her/his own value systems, criteria of judgement, etc., it may be conceived of as an evaluative practice (but see also Petofi, 1981 a; 1981 b; 1983; 1985; van Dijk, 1982 a; van de Velde, 1986 b). As can be seen in several passages of the present book, the distinction between descriptive, explicative and evaluative interpretation does not reflect clearly delimited and autonomous stages of the total hermeneutic process. For instance, when one friend tells the other your cake has a beautiful brown crust, this statement is at the same time to be interpreted as referring to a state of affairs (descriptive interpretation), as conveying the producer's communicative intention(s) (explicative interpretation) and as expressing/evoking a positive appraisal (evaluative interpretation). It is mainly for methodological reasons that descriptive interpretation is separated from explicative and evaluative practice. § 1 5 In the first stages of this study, I concentrate on descriptive interpretation. I surmise that a global and systematic account of inferences, such as is offered in this study, should start from (the rational perspectives and standards of) descriptive interpretation. In many respects, they are basic to other types of discourse processing including the explicative and evaluative perspectives of language understanding. Later stages of this study are concerned with the explicative perspectives of interpretation. I also consider some aspects of evaluative interpretation. In particular, chapter seven is complementary to the views on descriptive interpretation proposed in chapters one to six. It shifts the main interests from the meaning which is inside the verbal text to the meaning which is outside language. It concentrates on what is on the mind and/or in the heart of the text producer. It deals with the intentions, goals, reasons and motives which may have led the producer to express what was in her/his mind and/ or in her/his heart. It demonstrates that there is more to human unterstanding than that which is propounded in cognitive psychology. It shows that meaning must be studied from the perspective of interpersonal communication. It also argues that many texts in which meaning is not completely and not explicitly expressed must be complemented inferentially by retracing the person-internal meanings. § 16 In all these respects, the seventh chapter makes it clear that the interpretation of verbal texts is extremely restricted, when it must serve as a means to a thorough and felicitous understanding of the fellow-human being

Introduction

9

and when the related problems of interpersonal communication are under analysis. The seventh chapter also investigates the ways in which text-oriented information and producer-oriented information become the object of the receiver's evaluation. On the one hand, it deals with the problem of how evaluation can be concerned with the descriptively disclosed propositional content of the verbal text. On the other hand, it focuses on the problem of how the receiver can make value judgements about what the producer meant by her/his text and about the goals, plans, motives, reasons, intentions, etc. which may hypothetically be ascribed to the producer. The eighth chapter focuses attention on a number of additional complexities which are to be faced in our attempts at discerning unexpected, misleading, implicit and deeper layers of meaning. It raises philosophical issues in a very unusual way. It demonstrates that critical reflection is required if we are to see the restrictions of our interpretative endeavours. It goes beyond the borders of text research in order to illustrate better the fundamental doubt whether our interpretations can ever be absolutely correct and complete. It introduces the idea that naive realism (which is characteristic of many investigations of meaning) should be replaced by a relativizing attitude. It substantiates the claim that our interpretations of reality may often be coloured, if not (partly) impeded, by illusion and/or self-deception. Chapter nine continues to devote attention to fundamental problems of interpretation raised in chapter eight. In so doing, it is concerned with the following basic questions: 'What is real?', 'What ist interpreted as real?' and 'What seems to be real?' It addresses the dream-world of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in which interpretation has to deal with the fact that the boundaries between 'what is real', 'what is interpreted as real' and 'what seems to be real' are blurred. § 17 As is already apparent from the foregoing, the present book has much wider aims and claims than those predominant in linguistics alone. These widening perspectives become unavoidable when one sets oneself the task of understanding realized verbal texts as being expressions of the individual's cognitive, affective and conative life. With respect to this task, the different views defended in this book relate to linguistics, cognitive psychology, the study of literary art, artificial intelligence, neuropsychology, psychopathology, neurolinguistics, semiotics, theology, pragmatics, philosophy, and logic. In these widening perspectives, it is demonstrated that an exclusive concern with realized verbal texts provides only partial access to the intricacies of meaning conveyance and meaning assignment. More specifically, it becomes clear that basic notions of linguistics, such as 'rule of grammar', 'rule of syntax', and the like, as well as the multidisciplinary concerns with the basic

10

Introduction

notions of 'convention', 'norm', etc., in several respects, offer, unsatisfactory tools for the study of discourse and discourse processing. In demonstrating this, the present book provides a conceptual framework which is very close to human natural language. But it also takes into account that man is not only a reasoning producer/receiver, but also an interactant who conveys/assigns meanings which concern the non-inferential facets of ego-consciousness. In this regard, it touches upon many issues which await further investigation. § 1 8 The present book is fundamental to a number of disciplines which are concerned with signs, signification and communication. The reason is straightforward: the predominant functions/characteristics of signs, including the signs of human natural language, are based on their inferential links (Eco, 1984). This book demonstrates that inferences are the non-material tools which make the identification of signs (occurring in/as verbal texts) and their relations possible. § 1 9 When the writing of a book is finished its author can look back at the preparatory activities involved and look forward to their possible effects. In addition, some mental background activities which underlay and/or accompanied the intellectual endeavours and efforts may be seen with hindsight. In this regard, some relevant remarks of a more personal nature may be added. In writing this book, I was guided by the expectation and hope that a better understanding of (language) understanding may result. This inner psychic life background is not inappropriate in view of the fact that "it is a much easier task for humans to understand natural language that it is to understand how we understand it" (Matlin, 1989, 271; see also Avramides, 1989, 7ff). At the same time, I was convinced that a better understanding of (language) understanding can be attained by investigating the elements and factors which are involved in (language) interpretation and by examining the ways in which these elements and factors are related. We are still a long way from discerning all the elements and factors of (language) interpretation. For this reason, I do not wish to imply that my treatment of inferencing can account for all the relations between the elements and factors of (language) interpretation. What I really want to demonstrate in this book is the idea that any attempt to investigate the relations between the elements and factors of (language) interpretation cannot disregard the role which inferencing plays. § 20 I am fully aware of the danger of having taken only a modest startingpoint in the systematic study of an immense field. The risks of failure and error are proportionately greater when one is at the beginning of a research programme.

Introduction

11

Irrespective of these risks, this book may stimulate those who assume that meaning conveyance, meaning assignment, meaning exchange, understanding, and (non-)verbal communication are connected with the individual's states of consciousness and with their harmonious integration in macrocoherence. It may also invite the reader to a detailed reflection on the view that these aspects of meaning and the thinking processes which are involved turn out to be indispensable to the appropriate and undisturbed bio-psycho-social functioning of man. Above all, it may highlight and substantiate the claim that, in dealing with different sorts of information, in handling problems, etc., human beings show a fundamental need to find out forms/levels of organization and to make inferences. § 21 This book has been announced on several occasions under the working title Discourse processing as reasoning reception. However, over a longer period of struggling through broader fields of research, I have developed a wider range of thinking than that specifically concerned with the reasoning reception of verbal texts. After completing the final version, I decided to replace the working title by the much simpler and more general one Text and Thinking. The conjoined nouns in this title may convey, inter alia, two main connected ideas of the present book: firstly, that texts cannot be produced or interpreted without the involvement of thinking; and secondly, that thinking can be actualized in the process of identifying the text-constitutive information parts, in relating them to each other and in bringing them together into an organized whole which is the mental representation of what may be called 'text'. The subtitle On some roles of thinking in text interpretation signals that the inferences considered are those which are close to language and which have important roles in the discernment of language meaning. § 22 One small technical remark is still necessary. Each chapter is divided into sections which are typographically marked by paragraph signs. This is done to facilitate the practice of cross-referring. The cross-references made throughout this book are placed between square brackets, in which the roman numeral denotes the chapter and arabic numerals preceded by paragraph signs designate the sections concerned.

CHAPTER ONE

On discourse comprehension and inferencing 1.1. Introduction § 1 The search for understanding constitutes the cornerstone of human civilization and science. Human civilization and science are predominantly preserved in written discourse. This is reason enough for raising the following basic question: 'How is written discourse itself understood?' Written discourse can be seen, very roughly, as a conglomeration of (ink) marks on the page. When taken together, these marks have an organization of their own [I, §§6—12; VI, §§1—9]. As such, they differ from other conglomerations of marks, such as small red spots scattered on a child's skin, and grains of sand lying on the road near the desert. The small red spots and the grains of sand have no syntax. They are distributed at random. Moreover, they have no meaning since they have no syntax to which meaning can be related. Nonetheless, some people can assign a specific interpretation to them: a geologist can interpret the grains of sand from the viewpoint of erosion; and the physician can interpret the small red spots as the symptoms of a disease, such as rubella, measles, smallpox, and the like. Written discourse, on the contrary, has a syntax which one has to master in order to see that the distribution of marks on the page is governed by grammatical rules [II, §§ 1 — 12] and that syntactic data may relate to semantic data. In other words, under normal circumstances, one may assume that written discourse has meaning: the combined marks constitute words which carry semantic information in them [III, §§1 — 11]. It may also be the case that words gain their meaning from the contextual or other data in which they are embedded [IV, § 12; VI, § 5]. And these words are connected. Some of these connections are logical ties which obey the rules/norms of human reason [IV, §§ 1 — 18]. Other connections concern human actions, their antecedents/precipitating circumstances and their consequences [V, §§1 — 13]. By scrutinizing the connections between actions (their antecedents/precipitating circumstances and their consequences) one can identify the relations of causality, temporality, and intentionality. In most cases, written discourse has causal antecedents. These differ from the natural causes of disease and erosion which resulted respectively in the occurrence of red spots on the child's skin and in the existence of grains of

1.1. Introduction

13

sand. The causal chain of written discourse is of a mental nature. Its predominant mental background activities are related to human intentionality: the existence of written discourse arises from the intentions, reasons and motives of its producer [VII, §§2—4]. As such, written discourse has a special role in interpersonal communication. With regard to this special role and with respect to the different kinds of information which are carried along with written discourse, the following basic question can be raised: 'How is written discourse itself understood?' The basic question 'How is written discourse itself understood?' cannot be answered in isolation. It is intimately connected with the following 'What?' and 'Where?' question. 'What information is needed to understand a specific written discourse?' 'Where is that information to be found?' For instance, when a sequence of utterances gives us only partial information (van de Velde, 1988 c; 1988 d), what information must then be sought and added? Is this information to be retrieved from semantic memory? Or is it to be derived from the (non-)verbal environment in which the sequence of utterances occurs? Or is it to be found in other texts and/or in the intertextual relations (Petofi, Olivi, 1988; Tschauder, 1989; Plett, 1991)? In order to provide an answer to the 'How?', 'What?' and 'Where?' questions, one must take into consideration the social context of discourse reception. One should attend to the situations in which a text has its specific function(s). One should focus on actions which co-occur with discourse or which are denoted by discourse. One should consider communicative hints which can be derived from the pragmatic context of discourse. One should attempt to identify which intentions, reasons, motives or other inner-life constellations cause or underlie a particular text or go together with it(s production). One should direct one's attention towards the syntactic and semantic(-logical) nature of discourse-internal links. One should be concerned with the rhetorical/stylistic characteristics of texts. One should also deal with the graphemic form in which discourse is manifested. This first chapter outlines some considerations which relate to these areas. However, a strict selection of the subjects to be covered by this chapter is necessary. As the title suggests, the focus is on the inferential ingredients of discourse comprehension. Because of this focus, a number of questions pertaining to language perception (Levelt, 1978) and to related cognitive fields (Graesser, 1981; Sanford, Garrod, 1981; Tyler, Marslen-Wilson, 1982; Gernsbacher,1990; Strohner, 1990) are not considered. More specifically, some facets of meaning which have long been the subject of philosophical, logical and psychological semantics (Parker-Rhodes, 1978; Blau, 1978; Omanson, e. a. 1978; Goetz, 1979; Warren, e. a. 1979; Noordman, 1979; Seuren, 1979; 1985; Oh, Dinneen, 1979) are not included. Concomitantly, I cannot give exhaustive attention to specific questions which concern the processing stages involved in decoding graphemic material (Carpenter, Just, 1977; Just, Carpenter, 1980; Adams, 1982; Groner, Fraisse, 1982; Just, Carpenter, 1987;

14

Chapter one: On discourse comprehension and inferencing

Barber, 1988; Günther, 1989; Matlin, 1989; Siegel, 1992). I confine myself here to an account of those 'What?', 'Where?' and 'How?' questions which may reveal the ways in which comprehension of written discourse results from making inferences. The question 'What information is needed to understand a specific written discourse?' can receive quite different answers. These answers may vary from text to text. Suppose, for instance, that one reads Since Jay always jogs a mile and a half seems like a very short distance to him (Just, Carpenter, 1980; Strohner, 1990, 170). By asking what information is needed to understand this text, it may become clear that, amongst other things, specific information about the relations and functions of its syntactic constituents is needed. This information belongs to the cotext. I call it 'cotextual information'. (The morphological element co- signals that form and content are joined in a verbal text. The terms 'cotext' and 'cotextual information' will often be interchanged with the terms 'text' and 'discourse'). Suppose also that one has to interpret Was man für bedeutend hält, ist alles auf schwache Füße gestellt. It is clear that — apart from knowledge of German — one needs, amongst other things, information which concerns the historical, sociocultural or other circumstances which are connected with the fact that Goethe wrote this cotext. This information may be considered as belonging to the context. I call it 'contextual information'. Of course, the reader can call up additional contextual information when (s)he realizes that a non-literal meaning is to be assigned to this German cotext. In the light of these preliminary considerations, the 'What?' question can be answered by conjecturing that two kinds of information are primarily needed in discourse comprehension: cotextual information and contextual information. These two kinds of information can be approached on the basis of different methodological background assumptions. For instance, in addressing the cotextual information, the container view (Moore, Carling, 1982; van de Velde, 1989; 1991) and the non-deficit view (van de Velde, 1989 d; 1991) may be used. In these views, it is assumed respectively that meaning and reference are contained in the language material under investigation and that they are expressed verbally in non-deficit ways. In addressing the contextual information, one may assume that the producer of language and the receiver of language are the main communication participants. With respect to them, one may take the conveyer view, the commitment view and the neutrality view (van de Velde, 1989 d; 1991). The conveyer view claims that the meaning of the verbal text depends on what is conveyed/intended/meant by its producer. In the commitment view, it is held that the producer commits herself/himself to the truth of what (s)he imparts in the text. In the neutrality view, it is assumed that the receiver can process the information of a text in a detached or machine-like fashion so that her/his value systems, preconceptions, predilections, attitudes, biases, etc. can be excluded from her/his interpretation.

1.1. Introduction

15

Each of the above views has its own drawbacks, inappropriateness, inaccuracies and restrictions. They are not my concern here (van de Velde, 1989 d; 1991). Instead, I will concentrate on the problem of which specific information is handled in inferential processing of discourse. The solution to this problem depends on the answer to the question raised above: 'Where is the needed information to be found?' This 'Where?' question is to be tackled by surmising that the contextual information is gathered from the social context, the action context, and the pragmatic context. These contexts constitute the communicative context of discourse. In addition, it is to be supposed that the cotextual information concerns the syntactic, semantic(-logical), action-oriented, stylistic, logical, rhetorical and graphemic properties of discourse. When I speak about syntactic properties, they should be thought of as general characteristics which include all other grammatical features. The question 'How is written discourse itself understood?' finds an answer in the conjecture that specific inferential processes are indispensable to the different ways in which human beings handle the information required for discourse reception. Inferences are needed to deal with the graphemic information of Since Jay always jogs a mile and a half seems like a very short distance to him. A receiver who is used to Chinese, Russian or Arabic writing, but is quite unfamiliar with the Latin script, cannot make the required inferences to identify the individual letters and the letter combinations of this utterance [I, §§ 6—12], With respect to the grammatical information, syntactic inferences are necessary to solve the problem as to whether a mile and a half is a separate syntactic constituent. Syntactic inferences are also needed to find out whether a mile and a half belongs to the first clause or is part of the second clause [I, § 5 ; II, § § 1 - 1 2 ] , etc. With regard to the semantic information of the cotext about Jay, one has to rely on inferences to disclose that a mile and a half can be related in its meaning to a very short distance and that jogs is semantically connected with these two constituents. These inferences which deal with (the connections of) semantic material will be called 'ILRRR inferences'. The acronym ILRRR denotes the internal lexicon (abbreviated as IL) which serves as the cognitively reflected representation of reality (abbreviated as RRR) [I, §§4 — 5; III, §§1-10]. Moreover, we need inferences to make assumptions about the higher modal qualification (or propositional attitude) of the cotext about Jay. We can also assume that the producer of the cotext about Jay commits herself/himself to the truth of what (s)he imparts in it. Inferences are also necessary to break down the cotext about Jay into its predicates and its arguments and to discern how they relate to each other. These inferences are also needed to find out whether Jay and him are the main arguments and whether they are referentially identical. On the one hand, these inferences work on semantic data; on the

16

Chapter one: On discourse comprehension and inferencing

other hand, they have a specific orientation towards logic. I call them 'semantic-logical inferences' [I, § 5; IV, §§ 1 — 17]. Inferences are also needed in order to relate the actions which are denoted by jogs to concepts of temporality (as indicated by always). These inferences may also serve to identify the cause-effect relationship between the two clauses. I call these thinking processes 'action-oriented inferences' [I, § 5; V, §§1 — 13]. In the course of this book, I give a detailed account of the roles of these different discourse-directed inferences. When all the discourse-directed inferences are made, still other inferences may be needed to do justice to a text. For instance, in order to deal with the subtleties of meaning in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, we not only have to rely on discourse-directed inferences; we have also to discern in which ways Carroll played inventively and wittily with the inference rules which govern the use of conditionals and classification. In so doing, we can appropriately follow the lines of his thinking in the cotext " i f it had grown up ... it would have made a dreadfully ugly child; but it makes rather a handsome pig ..." (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, p. 87) and in many other humorous fragments [IX, § § 1 - 8 ] . In addition, we need inferences, which specifically concern spatial, temporal and causal relations. Such inferences (should) contribute to the (reconstruction/identification of coherence links between seemingly unconnected utterances. So, for instance, an inferential elaboration is necessary to fill the meaning gaps between A can of paint stood on top of the ladder and Suddenly, Brigitte's husband noticed a splotch of white on the lawn (Gernsbacher, 1990, 78 — 83). In order to construct coherence for these two utterances, we must, inter alia, make the inferences (in the form of bridging assumptions) that the can of paint was probably open, that the colour of the paint was probably white, that the can of paint had probably fallen on the lawn, and so on. It is by making such inferences that we can add meaning to utterances to the extent that they develop into an organized whole which may be called 'text'. To avoid any misunderstanding with regard to the aforementioned basic 'How?', 'What?' and 'Where?' questions, let me add that I do not aim to provide a definition for the terms 'text' ('discourse' or 'cotext'). From the viewpoint of logic, a definition of the term 'text' cannot be given without defining those information parts which together constitute the organized whole which is called 'text'. This organized whole may be a sequence of well-formed utterances. If so, then utterances are not to be seen as the actions of uttering, but as the product of verbal behaviour (Lyons, 1981, 25, 171 — 172). Alternatively, this organized whole may consist of expressions which are referentially connected. It may be a written message whose content is coherent. It may be a set of graphic signs which have a particular communicative function. Or it may be a combination of (some of) these possibilities.

1.2. On co(n)textual information

17

In my view, it is possible to study interpretative text reception without defining the term 'text'. This becomes fully plausible when one considers the fact that Latin i ('go') can have the communicative function of a verbal text and that a long novel, a short story, a scientific treatise, a chronicle, a poem, etc. can also have the communicative function of verbal texts. In a similar vein, any sound or graphic sign can be(come) a conventionalized reduction of a sequence of well-connected utterances. For instance, let us assume that the recurring co-ordination of two bricklayers has given rise to the convention that ggr stands for a series of remarks in which an evaluation about an inappropriate or wrong action is expressed. In such a situation of recurring co-operation, it is clear that ggr may roughly serve the same communicative purpose as a sequence of utterances which constitutes a well-organized verbal text (see also Avramides, 1989, 69 — 73). My reluctance to define 'text' does not mean that no elucidations on the properties of verbal texts are possible. On the contrary, in the present book, I attempt to shed light on text characteristics. But I am not willing to propose a precise and general definition of 'text' which accounts for all the types of text, such as conversations, narrative texts, recitations, proverbs/words which function as (inchoative) texts, inscriptions, etc. (Wienold, 1990), and for all the communicative situations in which fragments of language may function as texts. My reticence about providing a precise and general definition of the term 'text' is strengthened by the following consideration: throughout intellectual history it has been possible to devote innumerable studies to the concept 'man' without defining it. These studies have dealt with the properties of man and with the conditions of man's bio-psycho-social functioning. In a similiar vein, one can restrict oneself to the properties of texts and to the conditions of their communicative functioning. In this connection, I start from the basic assumption that verbal texts contain information parts which, in the first place, have to be identified and related to each other by the receiver's inferencing.

1.2. On co(n)textual

information

§ 2 Language comprehension is but one specific form of the general human ability to understand. As such, it draws on general cognitive processes and mechanisms (Gernsbacher, 1990). In this regard, the comprehension of written discourse may be considered as a specific type of complex information processing. Its different stages/levels are in interaction. Much about them is beyond empirical/rational control and subject to debate. Beyond debate, however, is the view that the processed information encompasses both discourse-internal and discourse-external data.

18

Chapter one: On discourse comprehension and inferencing

In operating with the discourse-internal and discourse-external data, the receiver should not only (be able to) identify them, but (s)he should also (be able to) find links within, between and beyond them. As will be seen later, finding these links is, in effect, a matter of inferencing. Inferencing is an indispensable part of the construction of coherence. In addition, I will defend the view that the construction of coherence itself is indispensable for a justified descriptive interpretation [VI, § 7], In other words, the descriptive interpretation of a written discourse d, requires the construction of coherent mental representations/models. To make these views clear, let me start from the following general hypothesis: Hi The activities of discourse comprehension can be circumscribed as dynamic cognitive processes which operate on the contextual and cotextual information parts of discourse. Hypothesis H t can be the subject of far-reaching additions and refinements. This is due, amongst other things, to the fact that it is a very incomplete characterization of discourse comprehension. Discourse comprehension may also have to do with elements and factors of the human psyche which do not belong to the domain of the dynamic cognitive processes mentioned in Hi (van de Velde, 1991). However, since I am predominantly concerned with thinking processes, I will first of all consider the dynamic cognitive processes and the co(n)textual information parts on which they operate. In so doing, my preliminary comments on Hi are confined to the following general points: (A) Verbal texts are phenomenal wholes which encompass manifold information parts, such as the phonic/graphemic, morphological, syntactic, semantic(-logical), rhetorical, stylistic, logical and other information parts. These information parts are called 'cotext'. (B) There are data which co-occur with the production/reception of verbal texts, such as the actions performed by the interlocutors, their mental background activities (motives, intentions, expectations, etc.), their states of (expert) knowledge, their goal and plan perspectives, and the like. These co-occuring data are called 'context'. (C) There are information parts which are to be called up or hypothetically (re)constructed by the receiver to serve the aims of interpretation. They are also called 'context'. As will be immediately apparent, the way the receiver deals with these information parts depends on her/his pertinent prior knowledge (about logic, literary aesthetics, and the like). In using the term 'cotext'. I am leaving out a number of difficulties and limitations (van de Velde, 1989 d; 1991). One of them relates to the assumption that meaning and reference are contained in language or transmitted by language or carried along with language. This assumption is representative of the 'container view' [I, § 1]. Here, it should be noted that the container

1.2. On co(n)textual information

19

view idealizes away the fact that the verbal cotext cannot be isolated from man. A simple illustration may suffice to show that language is inseparable from man: the study of the linear order of syntactic phenomena [II, §§5 — 9] makes us realize that adverb preposing, topicalization, inversion and other alternative positions of words/phrases reflect the producer's choice. This choice has to do with her/his intentions, her/his motives, her/his emotions, her/his beliefs about and her/his attitudes towards the information parts of the cotext under consideration. In view of this choice, it would be unrealistic to separate the linear (and other) cotext characteristics from man. For expository reasons, this separation will sometimes be maintained in the course of this book. I will then, misleadingly, set out things as if language were the exclusive carrier of meaning and reference. This way of setting things out owes a lot to the fact that descriptive interpretation is distinguished from explicative and evaluative interpretation [Introduction, §§ 14—15]. However, descriptive interpretation is to be complemented by those perspectives which may teach us that the realms of meaning cannot be restricted to language and that the mysteries of meaning make the denotation and use of the notion of 'context' indefinitely extensible. For instance, the interpretation of the cotext love is endlessly unlimited does not depend only upon solving the problem of what its connected words, in this specific linear order, mean. This cotext also conveys abundant meanings of a person-internal nature [VII, § 3]. To deal with these person-internal meanings, consideration must be given to the multiplicity, depth and richness of the inner-life constellations which may be involved. To this end, it is possible to call up or to (re)construct hypothetically a potentially infinite number of contexts. As will be seen later on, the cotext can be integrated into these contexts [IV, § 12], and this integration may give rise to an endless process of interpretative elaboration [VII, § § 3 - 1 0 ] , Before proceeding to a further clarification of (A) —(C), let me also emphasize that the notions 'cotext' and 'context' cannot always be a matter of precise demarcation. There are many reasons for this emphasis. I would single out one of them: in domain (C), one is confronted with the individual differences of the human receivers. Individual diffenrences probably constitute the most intricate problems for psychology and for all scientific accounts of interpretation (van de Velde, 1989 b; 1989 d). Human receivers happen, amongst other things, to identify and to relate the cotextual and contextual information parts on the basis of inequalities in their semantic memories, and in dependence upon their divergent goals, plans, attitudes, expectations, wishes, value systems, etc. Generally speaking, individuals differ in their ability to build coherent mental representations/models of the written discourse they are trying to understand (Gernsbacher, 1990, 167 — 215). To clarify this view, I would adduce cotext (1). (1) If everything is a novel, then there is no novel any more.

20

Chapter one: On discourse comprehension and inferencing

If we ask a logician or a theorist of science to demarcate in (1) what is cotextual information and what is contextual information, then her/his answer will differ widely from that of the literary critic or the proponent of reception aesthetics. The differences in their answers are due, amongst other things, to their distinct standards of interpretation as well as to the pertinent prior knowledge resources on which they rely in assigning meanings to verbal phenomena. The logician/theorist of science may look for a higher proposition which may serve as a modal qualification (or propositional attitude) of (1) and which, as a propositional attitude, will determine the logical account of (1). In addition, the logician/theorist of science may integrate (1) into her/his called up contextual information on conditionals, quantification, negation and the inference rules which apply to them. The logican/theorist of science may point to the contradiction in the literal content/interpretation of (1), etc. The literary critic or the proponent of reception aesthetics, on the contrary, may search for what the producer meant by the inconsistency of (1). In so doing, (s)he may ask what caused/led the producer of (1) to formulate her/ his view(s) on the novel in such a contradictory way. To deal with these problems, (s)he may purposely resort to the contextual information derived from studying literary genres. In so doing, (s)he may look quite differently at the relations between the cotext and the context of (1). One may object that the issue of demarcating the notions 'context' and 'cotext' is problematic only for an academic example such as (1). To deal with this possible objection, let us consider an example of a non-academic message. (2) John ploughs.

In reading (2), the receiver may rely on the cotextual information provided by the inflected action verb ploughs and infer that John carries out mental and physical actions [V, §§ 1 — 12]. But this cotextual information does not include any indication as to how these mental and physical actions are performed, which agricultural instruments John uses, whether the soil is turned up in an arbitrary or a preplanned way, etc. If such detailed information is needed, one must inevitably have recourse to the perception data of the situation(s) in which John carries out his actions. But, more importantly, one also has to rely on pertinent prior knowledge about agricultural actions. Regarding pertinent prior knowledge, striking differences may exist in the semantic memories of the individual receivers. These differences may affect their (goal and plan) perspectives of interpretation (Gerrig, 1988). For instance, (2) may lead one receiver to conjure up an action context in which John is a farmer and his ploughing becomes part of a sequence of preplanned and well-ordered agricultural actions, whereas another receiver may be led to look at John's actions and at the whole action context as preconditions for providing the population with food. In the latter case, the action cotext

1.3. On coherence

21

and the action context of (2) can merge together because of the receiver's knowledge about a social system in which the activities of some members are of importance to the survival of other members. In the former case, the action cotext and the action context can become blurred because the receiver (as the adult son of the farmer) has pertinent prior knowledge about the mental background activities of ploughing farmers, about the tasks which are to be executed before and after ploughing, about the activities which cooccur with ploughing, and about the consequences which normally flow from the action of ploughing [V, §§1 — 12], Such general considerations show that, in calling up contextual data about working as a farmer or having the social role of providing people with food, it is hard to mark off the precise limits of the action cotext and the action context. When we also take into account the reflections made on example (1), it becomes sufficiently clear that it is not always feasible to demarcate neatly the confines of the cotextual and contextual information parts.

1.3. On coherence § 3 I presume that, in descriptive interpretation, discourse receivers must primarily base their interpretative acumen on the cotext. Their basic task is then to identify information parts and to discern the relations between them. In so doing, they must establish specific forms/levels of organization [VI, §§1 — 9]. In establishing the levels of content organization, they have to construct coherence for the cotext and, if necessary, to relate the cotext to its contextual information, as formulated in the following hypothesis: H 2 Discourse comprehension is based on the construction of coherence which results from identifying the (links within / between ¡beyond the) cotextual information parts and from relating them to the contextual information parts. It is one of the predominant properties of the language user that (s)he strives to organize the information which (s)he receives, stores in memory or makes accessible to others. This is why, in identifying the links within/ between/beyond the cotextual and contextual information parts, the human receiver attempts to fulfil a general condition which I term the 'interpretative organization condition'. The interpretative organization condition runs as follows: if sequences/sets of utterances occur in a specific (fragment of) discourse, then sufficient contextual and cotextual information should be (made) available and inferentially used to establish an interpretative organization of the relevant information parts of these sequences/sets of utterances. These relevant information parts may be graphemes, strings of letters, words, phrases, etc. [I, §§7 — 9]. They may also concern higher/global organization patterns [VI, §§2—8].

22

Chapter one: On discourse comprehension and inferencing

In order to allow the reader to experience the significance of and the need for the satisfaction of the interpretative organization condition, I introduce the following examples (3), (4), (5), and (6) without providing any further contextual and cotextual information on them. (3) I had no more energy. I was no longer sure I was myself. I was no longer master of my own thoughts and actions; it was as if I were spellbound. In this state I could no longer speak. Then came the fear that I was being overpowered from without, manipulated, persecuted. (Scharfetter, 1980, 54) (4) All manner of thing shall be well When the tongues of flame are in-folded Into the crowned knot of fire And the fire and the rose are one. (T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding, 48) (5) and Merlin called it 'The Siege Perilous', Perilous for good and ill; 'for there', he said 'No man could sit but he should lose himself.' (Lodge, 1984, 245) (6) I didn't wanna tell 'em that I didn't think, eh, that I know, he wasn't doing it right ... they tried here and they tried there ... the poor fellow was having such a tough time, he just couldn't get it. (Engel, 1980, 540)

It is intuitively clear that examples (3) —(6) do not encompass sufficient contextual and cotextual information. Because I do not provide any further comment on (3) —(6), it is inevitable that not enough contextual information can be called up or hypothetically (re)constructed by the receiver. As a consequence, it is impossible for the receiver to find all the necessary discourse-internal and discourse-external data to satisfy the interpretative organization condition. Hence, an optimal/maximal degree of comprehension cannot be achieved. In the foregoing, I have used the notion of 'information' and the related terms 'cotextual information', 'contextual information' in a rather vague way. Some additional remarks are necessary in order to make these terms answer the reader's need for clarity and to distinguish my views on information from a number of multidisciplinary conceptions (Baars, 1988; Noth, 1990 and further references therein). As is already clear from hypothesis H 2) coherence is not something that exists on its own and for its own sake. On the contrary, it is a necessary condition of text interpretation. As such, coherence has to do with the specific kind of information which is destined for the receiver and to which the receiver is (held) to give a signifying response. Accordingly, coherence is bound to the interpretative organization condition. Basically, the interpretative organization condition is met by the receiver of information. This may, in normal cases, happen as follows: during text reception, the incoming information to which the receiver gives a signifying response may turn out to be compatible or semantically congruent with her/his pertinent prior knowledge. In that case, the receiver may map the incoming information onto her/his pertinent prior knowledge. The mental representation which

1.3. On coherence

23

results from this process of mapping is itself an instance of organization. However, it may also be the case that, in progressive reading, the incoming information is incompatible or semantically incongruent with the receiver's pertinent prior knowledge. If so, then the receiver has to shift to a reorganization of the incoming information in order to make it fit into her/his pertinent prior knowledge. Or the receiver may ri-organize her/his pertinent prior knowledge on the basis of what is propounded in the text under consideration. Normally, the mental representation which results from such transformation processes is also an instance of organization (see also van de Velde, 1978, 2 7 3 - 2 8 1 ; 1984, 3 3 - 3 8 ; Gernsbacher, 1990). In this respect, the organization of information is related to three domains: a) The domain of what is inside the self (or ego-consciousness). It is concerned with the realms of cognitive, affective and conative life. This domain is also called the 'inner psychic world', 'inner microcosmos', 'mental world', 'inner world', 'subjective world', 'inner psychic life', 'innerlife constellations' or 'person-internal reality'. Its meanings are often shared with other minds. Often, however, they are purely person-internal meanings of the text producer which cannot be identified or lived anew by the receiver. b) The domain of what is outside the self. This domain is referred to by the cover terms 'outer world', 'outer macrocosmos', 'objective world' or 'person-external reality'. Sometimes, it is artificial to separate personexternal reality from the self which perceives it. In this respect, it is claimed that there is no standard objective world and that there are as many realities as there are perceivers (Blake, Ramsey, 1951, 8ff). Even in scientific observation individuals see the same thing, but interpret what they see differently (Chalmers, 1982, 24 f f ) . c) The domain of the relations between what is inside the self and what is outside the self. This domain concerns the interaction of ego-consciousness with person-external reality. Person-external reality includes also the culture in which we live. Anthropological case studies on the relations between culture and thinking teach us that our experience of personexternal reality is the product of what we think (Hutchins, 1980). The product of what we think is, to a great extent, influenced by our culture or it conforms to our cultural code. In this regard, one has to account for certain socioculturally determined roles of thinking in interpretation, as they are based on the conventionalized meanings of the internal lexicon [III, §§3—10]. In addition, one has also to tackle problems of interpretation concerning dreams, illusions, self-deception, delusion, and the like [VIII, § § 1 - 1 0 ] , There are strong reasons for seeing reality as a whole in which domain (a) and domain (b) merge and in which there is no separate space for domain

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Chapter one: On discourse comprehension and inferencing

(c). In this view, thinking is part of the undivided wholeness of personexternal and person-internal reality (Bohm, 1983). In the present book, I neither deny nor disregard holism in matters of complex information processing. I merely take a slightly different stance and assume that, within the wholeness of the interpretation processes, there is interaction between domain (a) und domain (b). I also claim that thinking has an indispensable part to play in this interaction. That is, thinking is part of domain (a) and is constitutive of domain (c). Despite this somewhat different stance, I maintain that it is necessary to consider the integr(ativ)ity of domains (a), (b) and (c) as central to epistemological and psychological discussions of (macro)coherence. There must be full co-ordination and integration of the three domains (a) —(c) to meet the interpretative organization condition. If this co-ordination and integration are not achieved, as is the case with personality disorders, cognitive impairments, language disturbances, etc., then there can be no harmonious bio-psycho-social functioning of man. This can be seen in both language production and comprehension. To simplify the illustrations, I adduce some cases of language production only: (7) —(12) are verbal texts of schizophrenics, whereas (13) is a discourse fragment produced by an amnesic aphasic: (7) My face is plastic. It does not live. (8) What other people do is charged on me as a burden. When I see that someone limps I feel I must limp too. (9) When the doves flew up I was in panic: everything would split up. (10) My trunk is divided into halves. I am four people. (11) I am unprotected. Everything penetrates in me. (12) On the right, I am my father. On the left, I am my mother. On my nose, I have the skin of a cow. (Scharfetter, 1986, 4 2 - 5 4 ) (13) Well, I had trouble with ... oh, almost everything that happened from the ... eh, eh ... Golly, the word I can remember, you know, is ah ... When I had the ... ah biggest ... amh ... that I had the trouble with, and I still have a ... the ... ah ... different ... (Marshall, 1977, 1 4 1 - 1 4 2 )

If examples (7) —(13) are destined for the receiver, then they are so lacking in organization of their semantic (and other) information parts that no receiver can achieve a maximal/optimal understanding of them. As a consequence, the diverse communicative functions of (7) —(13) are largely hampered. In particular, the meanings which are in the producers of (7) —(13) cannot fully be retraced (van de Velde, 1988 a; 1988 c; [VII, §§ 2 - 4 ] ) . Now, the following question can be raised: 'What is meant by the notion 'information' in the discussion of (macro)coherence?' Multidisciplinary answers to this question may reveal that, apart from the mathematical framework, the notion of 'information' is polysemous and vague in reference (van de Velde, 1989 c, 247 — 248). Roughly speaking, multidisciplinary research has

1.3. On coherence

25

related the notion of 'information' to 'reduction of uncertainty', 'reduction of alternatives', 'provision of novelty', 'mismatch of expectations', and the like. However, most multidisciplinary writings do not consider the fact that 'information' is to be related to ego-consciousness. Here, I would make the following claim: insofar as information is the object of interpretation it must be conscious. In my conception of (macro)coherence, any concern with 'information' must therefore take into account the three aforementioned domains (a) —(c). I conceive of information as anything inside and/or outside the self to which the self gives a signifying response. Or to put it differently, what is inside and/or outside the human receiver can become 'information' to her/ him if (s)he answers the question 'What does it signify for me?'. In this respect, 'information' signifies something for the human receiver which differs from what it signifies for (any concern with) the computer (van de Velde, 1988 c, 97 — 102). This is because 'information for the human receiver' involves intentionality (Searle, 1989; but see also Dennett, 1990). Moreover, 'information for the human receiver' relates to value systems, free choice, etc. No less importantly, 'information for the human receiver' is not only conditional on individual cognition, it is also dependent upon the person's affective life and conative life (Ochs, 1989; van de Velde, 1989 d). If the human signifier succeeds in achieving the organization of all three domains (a) —(c), then one can speak about her/his construction of macrocoherence. Because the macro-organization of the three domains (a) —(c) is ultimately dependent on ego-consciousness and its interaction with the person-external reality (van de Velde, 1991), I conceive of macrocoherence as a set of organized properties of ego-consciousness. Macrocoherence involves the harmonized states of an individual's egoconsciousness. These harmonized states depend on the integration/co-ordination/regulation of the individual's cognitive, affective and conative life. Macrocoherence ensures the appropriate and undisturbed bio-psycho-social functioning of man. From the viewpoint of interpersonal communication, the coherence of a particular cotext is closely related to macrocoherence [VII, §§1-10]. In language comprehension, the establishment of coherence is to a very great extent dependent upon what the receiver does with the information to which (s)he gives a signifying response. For instance, one receiver r, may fail to understand local meanings and local meaning connections, but still feel confident enough to construct coherence for the topic/aboutness of the whole cotext. Another receiver rj5 on the contrary, may be willing to construct global coherence for a cotext only if (s)he can identify all the local meanings and meaning connections, if (s)he can discern how they relate to the global meaning, and if (s)he can untangle how the global meaning results from the connection/integration of local meanings. Receivers differ widely in their ability to deal with the local and global information of the cotext. In many discussions about cotextual information,

26

Chapter one: On discourse comprehension and inferencing

the (roles of the) receiver's signifying responses are not sufficiently differentiated. However, it is necessary to differentiate between receivers. When one attempts to characterize the amount of information which cotexts carry with them, one soon realizes that this characterization is largely dependent upon the individual receiver's signifying response. If one concludes that for one receiver ^ a cotext conveys more information than for another receiver rj, then this conclusion is to be understood as follows: the receiver has a richer signifying response to the cotext. This may, amongst other things, be due to the fact that (s)he recognizes puns, that (s)he succeeds in coping perfectly with the irony of the cotext, that (s)he is fully aware of its stylistic changes, that she can better retrace the external causes/intentions of the actions described by the text or that (s)he can follow/anticipate the consequences of these actions more inventively, etc. It may also be caused by the fact that the receiver is a more erudite person than the author, that (s)he is more aware of the connotative meanings of a text than other receivers, that (s)he possesses semantic ILRRR information which is more justified than the meanings carried along with the text, and so on. It may, however, also be the case that the receiver gives too poor a signifying response to the text, because (s)he is a minus habens, because (s)he erroneously believes herself/ himself to be sufficiently sensitive to the author's intentions, because (s)he is under the illusion of having identified the (deeper layers of) meaning of a text [VIII, §§2 — 10], and so on. Needless to say, a receiver's signifying response may also be too rich in that (s)he reads too much into the cotext and in that too free an interpretation results [V, §§8—12], Let me now give some clarification of the notion of 'coherence'. 'Coherence' is a notion that belongs par excellence to the realms of multidisciplinary research. For instance, the term 'coherence' can be used in physics to refer to patterns consisting of elementary particles and to describe the properties of a laser beam. 'Coherence' can be employed in biology to account for the organized functioning of biological systems. In psychology, 'coherence' can denote, amongst other things, the organized results of visual/auditory perception. In logic, 'coherence' is the core notion of those approaches to truth assignment which are complementary to correspondence theories. In text linguistics, 'coherence' concerns the content properties and the communicative functioning of verbal texts. In pragmatics, 'coherence' may be considered as a function, not of the content properties of the cotext, but of the producer's plans/goals/intentions/motives. Moreover, 'coherence' is also held by pragmaticians to be contingent on the producer's estimate of the receiver's inferencing capacity and on the producer's abilities/skills/willingness to act appropriately on that estimate. According to pragmatic views, 'coherence' is ultimately determined by the interactants' ways of abiding by the Gricean cooperative principle (Green, 1989 and further references therein). Here, I consciously refrain from exploring the notion of 'coherence' as it is used in philosophy (Stalker, 1984; Ziff, 1984b). Nor do I consider the

1.3. On coherence

27

conceptions of coherence used in sociolinguistics (Schlieben-Lange, 1987). I also disregard the possibilities of accounting for coherence within the broad conceptual framework of general systems theory (Strohner, Rickheit, 1988; Strohner, 1990 and further references therein). Moreover, I abstain from the psycholinguist's approach, dealing with coherence as a consistency/compatibility/congruence relation which, in progressive reading, holds between the receiver's pertinent prior knowledge and the incoming information (Gernsbacher, 1990). Finally, I have to relinquish the role attributed to coherence in the design of machine translation systems (Papegaaij, Schubert, 1988). All the foregoing remarks on the use of 'coherence' may sufficiently illustrate that 'coherence' is a basic tool of human thinking. The present book defends the view that coherence results from relying on inferences. Moreover, it claims that coherence is indispensable to verbal comprehension. In human thinking, man's predominant property of striving for organization becomes apparent. In striving for organization of the information received, man must aim at constructing coherence. As such, the construction of coherence is the heart of science in the sense that any investigation of person-external reality fragments must relate them to other person-external reality fragments in order to bring them conceptually into an organized whole. In view of this, coherence turns out to be established by the human brain and to be produced by nature (Dorfmiiller-Karpusa, Dorfmiiller, 1985). In the course of this book, it will become clear that the notion of 'coherence' can denote different properties depending on whether one is concerned with descriptive or explicative or evaluative interpretation [Introduction, §§ 14—15]. In descriptive interpretation, coherence has to do with the content properties of the cotext. In explicative interpretation, coherence pertains to a number of antecedents/precipitating circumstances which can be assumed in the producer's inner psychic life. In evaluative interpretation, coherence can concern properties of the cotext content and/or properties of the producer's inner-life constellations as far as these properties have become the object of the receiver's judgemental/evaluative activities [VII, §§ 4—5], In the following paragraphs [I, §§4—12], I shall be concerned only with the notion of 'coherence' as far as it has to do with the descriptive interpretation of verbal cotexts. Here, I should like to introduce the following anticipatory consideration: if a text receiver has sufficient insight/imagination/ ingenuity/inventiveness, then (s)he can always construct lines of coherence for the received verbal material even if.it is incomplete/scrambled/unrelated at first glance. Let me illustrate this with the help of example (14) (14)

text

car

There is no prima facie evidence that there is any line of coherence between the separate words of (14). Creative thinking can supply associative links between apparently unconnected verbal stimuli (Radford, Burton, 1974, 100 ff). If these associative links are further developed, they may constitute

28

Chapter one: On discourse comprehension and inferencing

lines of coherence. In example (15), I show that particular coherence lines can be constructed between text and car. To this end, I add sufficient cotextual information in order to meet the interpretative organization condition [I, § 3] and the cotext integrativity condition [VI, § 5]. The cotext (15) which results from these additions is full of metaphorical involutions which apply to the central ideas of this book. However, (15) is not to be understood in such a way that I fully subscribe to the container view [I, § 1] and to its consequences for text research (van de Velde, 1989 d; 1991). (15) A text may be conceived of as a car with content. As a car with content a text is an instrument of communicative traffic. The meaning of a car/text depends on what the driver/human processor does with it. A car/text is thus a physical medium through which something is achieved. There may be high, ordinary or low achievement in interpreting a text depending on whether the human processor constructs high, ordinary or low degrees of coherence. The horse-power of a particular text is its intrinsic coherence. The petrol of text processing is inferencing. The higher the horse-power of the text and the more petrol used, the higher the total effect in communicative traffic.

As I shall show in the course of this book, coherence is a matter of degree; and so is understanding, because it is dependent upon the construction of coherence. The construction of a high degree of coherence can warrant optimal/maximal understanding, whereas the establishment of a low degree of coherence cannot. For instance, if affect is encoded in language, then one may be able to recognize the producer's mood, disposition, intensity of emotion, etc. by focusing attention on the pertinent particles, adverbs, modals, verb voice, word order, iterated forms, and the like (Ochs, 1989; DorfmiillerKarpusa, 1990). However, recognition of expressed affect does not guarantee that the interpretative organization condition [I, § 3] can be entirely satisfied and that all levels/degrees of coherence can be constructed. There is a striking example in Shakespeare's Othello (IV, ii, 32, quarto edition Q,) where Desdemona admits to having identified only Othello's expressed affective state without grasping the deeper layers of meaning of his cotext: I understand the f u r y in your words but not the words. For the construction of a high degree of coherence Desdemona would have to have known Iago's motives/purposes. Moreover, she would have had to be able to retrace the effects which Iago's words had produced on Othello's affective life. She would also have had to have access to those inner-life constellations which caused/led Othello to produce the inquiring cotext Let me see your eyes. Look in my face (Othello, IV, ii, 2 5 - 2 6 ) , etc. [VII, § § 2 - 4 ] , In its extreme forms, high-level coherence can be distinguished from lowlevel coherence [VII, §§3 — 4]. All the levels/degrees of coherence discussed in this book are constructed by relying on inferences. Roughly speaking, inferences are there to identify information in verbal texts, to connect information within/between/beyond verbal texts, to add information to verbal texts and to establish organization within/between/beyond verbal texts.

1.4. On inferences

29

From the very moment that a human receiver identifies a particular element of a set of information parts {ij, , in} and relates it to another particular element of a set of information parts {ji; , jn} (s)he makes inferences. These inferences may concern the graphemic, grammatical, semantic(-logical), action-oriented, pragmatic, logical, rhetorical, stylistic and other information parts of a verbal text. Inferences may also have to do with non-verbal information parts of a verbal text, such as Tenniel's drawings in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland [IX, §§1 — 8]. In face-to-face communication, inferences may go beyond the unimedial character of verbal texts. In such cases, inferences may pertain to gestures [VIII, § 4], facial signals, gaze, tactile data, etc. In written texts, inferences may concern the description of these non-verbal data [IV, § 11; V, §§5 — 7], In sum, inferences are at work in identifying the information parts of the verbal medium, in relating them to each other and in relating verbal to non-verbal data. The relating activities characteristic of inferences are carried out by the receiver. It is the receiver who is responsible for attributing coherence to the cotextual and contextual information parts (van de Velde, 1981a; 1981b; 1984; 1988 b). Because I dealt with twenty-eight properties of coherence in van de Velde, 1986 b, I restrict myself here to the roles which inferences play in the construction of coherence. I return to various facets of coherence in later parts of the present book.

1.4. On

inferences

§ 4 Suppose that someone imparts the following message: I am grey like a dove. I do not care too much. A dove is a symbol of peace. In interpreting this message, one may make many inferences: that its separate utterances are statements for which the modal qualification (or propositional attitude) THE PRODUCER AFFIRMS THAT may be assumed; that this message refers to observable properties of the producer's physical appearance, in particular to her/his hair colour; that the iteration of a dove is a means of semantic and referential chaining; that the second utterance is a comment on the first utterance; that there is a causal relation between the third and the second utterance, and so on. However, it may not be inferred, with logical necessity, from this message that its producer is a symbol of peace, that the producer does not care too much for reasons not mentioned in the above message, that a dove is always the same colour as the producer's hair, etc. From these considerations it can be seen that interpretation is intricately interwoven with inferencing, that inferencing serves the purpose of identifying cotextual information parts and relating them to each other, that the identification of these relations is part of the construction of coherence and that inferencing is not an arbitrary activity.

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Chapter one: On discourse comprehension and inferencing

In discussing the inferential processes, one must first of all consider vast fields of psychology and logic. The notion of 'inference' is used very differently in these two vast fields of research: there is not only dissension on terminological issues, but also a lack of concord on the range of application of inferencing. Roughly speaking, psychology may be considered to be concerned with the actualization of various thinking processes, whereas logic prescribes the rigorous ways in which thinking must take place to be characterized as logically valid argumentation. In other words, psychologists examine the logically valid and invalid ways in which thinking processes are carried out (Evans, 1982; 1983; 1989; 1990; Wason, 1983 and further references therein). They are interested in (the explanation of) concrete facts, such as the high and low error rates in thinking performance. Logicians, on the contrary, are interested in the ideal and abstract norms/rules/prescriptions/ principles of rationality. In the present book, my views on inferences do not coincide completely with the views of psychology and logic. I am, in particular, concerned with those thinking processes which are closely related to the cotextual information of language and to its integration into the contextual information. As this occurs, inferences are seen as a matter of the receiver's signifying response to the cotext. In addition, the inferences which I consider also pertain to the conditions, properties and functions of language in communication. Research concerned with human thinking can be subdivided into many areas (Sternberg, Smith, 1988 and further references therein). In fact, these areas may comprise the phylogenetic aspects of the history of science and civilization [VIII, § 1] as well as the ontogenetic aspects of an individual's intellectual biography. These extended areas, however, are not of concern here. I restrict myself to the following two main areas: (I) Thinking which must take place within strictly closed systems. This must happen when the rigid rules/norms/prescriptions of (formal) logic govern human reasoning. Strictly closed systems of thinking include arithmetical calculation and logical inference in particular. (II) Thinking which is directed towards open systems. This happens in the practice of everyday life, in the empirical sciences and in the regions of artistic creation. Open systems of thinking are often contingent on human imagination (Johnson-Laird, 1990). Actualized thinking can be seen as a set of dynamic cognitive processes. It then has a goal-directed character. The main goal of thinking which is actualized in text comprehension is the identification of different forms/levels of organization, such as cohesion, referential connectedness and coherence [VI, §§1—9]. However, while not all thinking is directed towards a goal, most thinking processes are (Johnson-Laird, 1988 a, 432). The goal-directed steps of thinking are not haphazard. On the contrary, they are subject to specific principles which are constrained in number and

1.4. O n inferences

31

order. Moreover, these principles do not apply arbitrarily but by way of analytical, sequential and holistic processing strategies. More details about these introductory remarks will be provided later on. For the moment, let me demonstrate that, in my views about the relationships between interpretation and thinking, inferencing is indispensable to dealing with the meanings which are explicitly expressed in the cotext as well as with the meanings which are implicit/hidden in the cotext. To this end, I start by discussing example (16): (16) If I make a mistake, then I am the present President of the United States.

First of all, the propositional attitude of the producer is missing in (16). Nothing expressly indicates whether THE PRODUCER OF (16) AFFIRMS THAT (16), DENIES THAT (16), DOUBTS WHETHER (16), etc. If the receiver, in her/his signifying response to (16), conjectures that a particular propositional attitude, e. g. THE PRODUCER OF (16) AFFIRMS THAT (16) must be added to assign an appropriate meaning to (16), then this conjecture is part of her/his inferencing operations. The inferences made from the cotext C; are determined by the propositional attitude assumed for c, because this propositional attitude has repercussions on the assignment of a truth value to q. For instance, if one assumes that THE PRODUCER OF (16) AFFIRMS THAT (16), then (16) must be true. The consequences thus drawn from (16) will then differ from those which can be drawn from (16) being false. If (16) is true and if the added meaning that I am not the present President of the United States is true, then it must also be true that I make no mistake. The propositional content of (16) is false when one assumes that THE PRODUCER OF (16) DENIES THAT (16). In that case, one has to take into consideration ex falso quodlibet. Secondly, within (16) the proposition I am not the present President of the United States is not verbally expressed. Any reading of (16) must take this non-expressed information into account. The receiver's (c)overt complementation of this non-expressed information depends on inferencing. Such inferencing is based on the knowledge about the present President of the United States which is stored in a person's semantic memory. Insofar as her/his semantic memory is concerned with the word President and its connections with other words, with person-external reality and with diverse cognitive domains, it belongs to I L R R R . The information of I L R R R is organized according to inferential principles which will be discussed later on. The thinking processes which have recourse to this organized knowledge of I L R R R are what I call ' I L R R R inferences' [I, § 1; III, § § 1 - 9 ] , Thirdly, it is not possible to know from (16) who the producer of (16) is. However, it is indispensable to know who produced (16). This knowledge has repercussions on the inferential approach to (16). I f the present President of the United States expresses (16), then the receiver may interpret (16) in the sense that it is a distinctive characteristic of the present President of the

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Chapter one: On discourse comprehension and inferencing

United States to make mistakes. If the producer of (16) is not the present President of the United States, then (16) may, amongst other things, be held to be implicitly criticizing the present President of the United States for making mistakes. If the producer of (16) is a scientist, then (s)he may convey the meaning that her/his making a mistake is inevitable in her/his research and that this fallibility is, in a certain sense, comparable with the unavoidable imperfection/faultiness of leading politicians. It is, of course, possible to make many other conjectures about the question of who the producer of (16) is and about the repercussions which the answers to this question have on the discernment of the conveyed meanings of (16). In dealing with these conjectures, one cannot dispense with inferencing. Fourthly, in addition to taking into account who the producer of (16) is, we need inferences to figure out which inner-life constellations led her/him to convey the particular meanings of (16). For the purpose of illustration, let us assume that these inner-life constellations were related to the producer's intentions/motives: maybe the producer intended to be liked by the receivers, because (s)he admitted that (s)he was not perfect; or the producer may have wanted to show that (s)he was really human in conforming to the 'errare humanum est' principle; the producer may have had the intention of producing a change of attitude towards mistakes; or the producer may have had the goal of conveying her/his high self-esteem, and so on. Fifthly, (16) is to be analysed into its semantic-logical constituents, and then the relations between them are to be identified. One train of inferencing could be the following: suppose that THE PRODUCER OF (16) AFFIRMS THAT (16). If so, the semantic-logical structure of (16) can be approximately represented in propositional logic as follows: let 'p' symbolize I make a mistake and let 'q' stand for I am the present President of the United States. Let the elements i f . . . then be expressed by the logical connective '—>'. The resulting representation of (16) is: (p—> q). In the light of ILRRR inferencing, the proposition I am not the present President of the United States must be added to (16). Therefore, the underlying logical structure (p—• q) must be extended as follows: [(p—* q) A Iq] where the connective ' l' denotes the logical negation and the logical connective ' A ' serves to represent the verbal conjunction and. Accordingly, the modus tollens rule applies so that ([(p—> q) A iq]—• ip). In view of this logical operation, it necessarily follows from (16) that I do not make a mistake. The inferential steps sketched here are warranted by semantic-logical inferences which satisfy the norms of rationality [IV, §§ 1 — 18], One caveat, however, is appropriate here: the use of logically well-formed formulas to illustrate the logically valid line of thinking, which is followed in interpreting (16), does not aim to suggest that propositional calculus can sufficiently account for the meanings of human natural language (van de Velde, 1975, 97 ff; Lyons 1981, 119 ff). The semantic-logical inferences which satisfy the norms of rationality concern the propositional content of (16). The propositional content is part

1.4. On inferences

33

of the literal meaning. However, the propositional content can differ greatly from the conveyed meaning of (16). The conveyed meaning is part of the non-literal interpretation. In view of the preceding considerations, it may be claimed that the receiver's decision about whether a literal or a non-literal meaning has to be assigned to (16) is a matter of her/his weighing the arguments for and against. In this regard, inferencing is also indispensable. Another example of the need for inferencing can be found in cases where people should rely on controlling and correcting mechanisms in order to avoid any unjustified or logically invalid interpretation. This is particularly the case when they tend to indulge in partial misinterpretations of i f . . . then cotexts which express promises, threats, predictions, law-like statements, commands and counterfactual conditionals. For instance, the premiss if you mow the lawn, then I'll give you five dollars is at the same time understood by most people as (M—> G) and misunderstood as ( iM—> iG). The symbol M stands forjo« mow the lawn and G represents I'll give you five dollars. Rational control is needed in order to reject the identification of the propositional content ( IM —> IG) as logically invalid and unjustified. This logically invalid and unjustified interpretation is caused by what may be called 'invited inference' (Geis, Zwicky, 1971). It illustrates the discrepancy between the role of strictly logical inferences and that of inferences suggested by natural language (see also Lakoff, 1970; Karttunen, 1971; Evans, 1989, 68 ff). The above discussion of if ... then cotexts should not lead the reader to the erroneous assumption that inferences are needed only to deal with explicitly expressed conditionals. Inferences are also needed for cases in which meanings are implicit and in which the elements if ... then do not occur as in (17) —(19). It cannot be denied that any method which aims at making the meanings of (17) —(19) explicit must lead the receiver to add information to (17) —(19). In so doing, the receiver must carry out inferential steps. These inferential steps are needed to make (17) —(19) fit into higher forms/levels of organization. (17) The scientific director is famous for loving female animals of all sorts. (18) I would not like to be his wife. (19) I am afraid of fleas.

To interpret (17) —(19) appropriately, it is not sufficient to rely only on one's competence of English. Too much would then be left unidentified or be missing (van de Velde, 1988 c; 1991). To complement the missing meanings, additional hypotheses such as (20) —(24) can be constructed. I call them 'bridging assumptions'. (In contrast with current writings in pragmatics, in philosophy of language and in their related fields, I do not make use of the terms 'implicature', 'pragmatic inference', 'invited inference', 'natural inference' and 'presupposition'.) Bridging assumptions are examples of inductive inferencing. As such, they can provide us only with degrees of probability and plausibility. Their use

34

Chapter one: On discourse comprehension and inferencing

leads the receiver to add information to a cotext. Their application is not completely free: firstly, they are restricted by the verbal material which is to be interpreted [V, §§ 11 — 12]; secondly, they are constrained by the receiver's pertinent prior knowledge (schemata) (Johnson-Laird, 1988 a); thirdly, they are limited by non-inductive mental operations and by the discourse-directed inferences with which they interact. The interpretative elaboration of (20) —(24) offers examples of bridging assumptions which are plausible for (17) —(19). The vertical dots under (24) indicate that the bridging assumptions can be extended in number and can become more complex. (20) It is probable that the scientific director is an ethologist. (21) It is probable that the scientific director's fame and authority relate to his love for female animals. (22) It is probable that being a wife is not a pleasant experience when the husband is famous for loving female animals of all sorts. (23) It is probable that the scientific director has fleas on his body. (24) It is probable that fleas move from the scientific director to his wife.

All these and the augmentable related bridging assumptions may be added to (17) —(19) in order to complement the non-expressed meanings. The complementations of non-expressed meanings are necessary to construct syntactic, semantic, referential and other connections between (17), (18) and (19) and to make (17) —(19), inter alia, a semantically coherent cotext [VII, §§1-10]. Lastly, I can also illustrate the need for inferencing by returning to the semantic problem encountered with (14). In example (14), the receiver has been given two separate words arranged in a particular linear order. As suggested in (25), a specific semantic problem arises when the receiver realizes that Sj holds, that su is the ultimate goal and that (s)he wants to bridge the gap between s, and s u by transforming S; into s u . (25) Si The words text and car do not stick together semantically.

su The words text and car should stick together semantically within an organized whole.

The problem of changing s, into su can be solved by adding well-organized semantic and other cotextual information, as exemplified in (15). Additions of information to the cotext will be discussed in [IV, §§ 9—12; V, §§ 3 — 14; VI, §§1 — 8; VII, §§7 — 9; IX, § 7]. For the moment, it may suffice to notice

1.5. On the different kinds of cotext-directed inferencing

35

that complementations of the cotext, such as (15), are a matter of satisfying the interpretative organization condition [I, § 3] and the cotext integrativity condition [VI, § 5]. The attainment of the ultimate goal su can then be equated with arriving at coherence. Coherence can be constructed on the basis of inferencing. 1.5. On the different kinds of cotext-directed

inferencing

§ 5 Any thorough examination of the fulfilment of the interpretative organization condition [I, § 3] raises the following question: which kinds of cotextdirected inferencing are operative here? I do not aim at providing a complete and definitive answer to this question. Nor can I review the answers suggested in the literature on inferences (see van de Velde, 1988 b, 284 — 288 and further references therein). Any classification of inferences runs the risk of being incomplete. It cannot do justice to the depth and breadth of scholarship in all areas of research on human and artificial thinking. This is even more true in view of the fact that there is an enormous diversity of accounts and that literature on inferences is still growing. With regard to artificial thinking, this is not the place to deal with the ways in which machines can think (Garnham, 1988 and further references therein). I concern myself with human thinking to the extent that it is made possible through language and insofar as it is mediated through language. The fact that thinking is made possible through language has mainly to do with the graphemic/phonic, grammatical, semantic, logical, referential and other properties of language. They constitute the major area of interest in the following chapters. The fact that thinking is mediated through language has mainly to do with the communicative functioning of language. Language then serves as a medium for transmitting thoughts, feelings, wishes, needs, etc. from the producer to the receiver. In this regard, the communicative functioning of language is a function of the producer's communicative intention(s) and of the receiver's ways of dealing with it/them. These domains are addressed in the seventh chapter. Dealing with the communicative functioning of language requires inferencing which is not primarily cotext-directed, but which specifically concerns the inner psychic life of the producer and the inner psychic life of the receiver. It is particularly in these inner-life constellations that it is impossible to retrace fully the imponderabilia of interpretation and that inferencing may develop into endlessly extendable guesswork [VII, §§ 2 — 10], if not into illusion or self-deception [VIII, § § 6 - 9 ] , For the moment, I would attempt to illustrate the enormous complexity inherent in the inferential approach to the communicative functioning of language. To this end, let me adduce the following cotext:

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Chapter one: On discourse comprehension and inferencing

(26) As the reader knows, there are three main virtues: the first is modesty, the second is modesty, and the third is modesty.

First of all, what can be inferred from as the reader knows? It can be conjectured that the producer of (26) intended to diminish the risks of giving the impression of informational superiority. The inference might be made that the producer wanted to evoke a certain sharing of knowledge with the receiver. It might be presumed that the producer's aim was to compliment the reader on her/his knowledge. It might be assumed that as the reader knows is intended to produce the effect of a captatio benevolentiae. It might be hypothesized that the producer intended to fool the reader in her/his expectations, because the subsequent cotext of (26) which is a mere repetition of three identical topics has nothing to do with what the reader already knows. It might be surmised that the combination of the clause as the reader knows with the subsequent constituents of (26) conveys an ironical or satirical meaning. Whatever conjectures are made about why the producer selected/ used the expression as the reader knows, they cannot provide an unequivocal account of its communicative functioning. What can be inferred about the communicative functioning of the other information parts of (26)? Should the receiver infer from them that the producer made an arithmetical mistake? Should (s)he flush out the missing semantic details by hypothesizing that an appeal is made to irrational or mystic thought? Should (s)he infer from the relevant information parts of (26) that the producer did not like critical reflection and free intelligence? Should (s)he make the inference that the producer wanted to prevent the receiver from being conceited or arrogant? Or should (s)he speculate on the producer's tendency to moralize? There is no conclusive answer to any of these questions. Recent studies on the communicative functioning of language have suggested that the producer and the receiver are supposed to abide by the Gricean co-operative principle (Green, 1989 and further references therein). In so doing, the receiver is expected, amongst other things, to infer that the producer of (26) was not conforming to the communicative maxim of quantity ('make your cotext as informative as is required but not more informative than is required') and to a specific submaxim of the communicative maxim of manner ('make your cotext brief) [VII, § 3]. The receiver is also expected to infer why the producer did not conform to these communicative maxims if (s)he wants to figure out which communicative effects the producer of (26) was aiming at. Why did the producer of (26) select this message, impart it and prefer this bizarre formulation? Any answer to this question will require a thorough examination of cotext-external variables. Some of these cotext-external variables cannot be fully identified. Accordingly, inferencing which has to serve the aim of producer-oriented interpre-

1.5. On the different kinds of cotext-directed inferencing

37

tation may develop into infinite and inconclusive interpretative elaborations [VII, §§1 — 10; VIII, §§6 — 9], Though the producer's thinking is mediated by (26), there is no unequivocal access to what (s)he thought, felt, planned, wished, desired, etc. before/in conveying the meanings of (26). Instead of dwelling on the fact that thinking is mediated through language and on the related indeterminacy of the producer-oriented perspective, I should now like to return to the issue that human thinking is made possible through language. In this regard, I will deal with cotext-directed (or discoursedirected) inferences. Their areas of application range from the actions which are denoted by the cotext to the grammatical properties of the cotext, to the lexical, semantic-logical, rhetorical/stylistic characteristics of the cotext and to the features of letters and letter strings. Let me begin by mentioning those inferences which have the widest range of application: action-oriented inferences. They have to do with (the organization of) actions denoted by the cotext and with the various contexts in which actions occur. They typically concern the temporal and causal relations of actions. They also pertain to the motives, reasons and intentions which give rise to, go together with or underlie actions [I, § 1; V, §§ 1 — 13], Actionoriented inferences may also relate to actions which co-occur with the production/reception of cotextual data: as will be seen in [VIII, § 4], the action(s) co-occurring with the production/reception of language may have a dominant role in the interpretation of the verbal text. They may even cause the illusion of having rightly understood the referential and semantic data. All that need be noted here is that the attribute 'action-oriented' should not be misunderstood. Action-oriented inferences are in fact considered in this book as (a kind of) cotext-directed inferences. The inferential processes which specifically have to do with the semanticlogical properties of the cotext will be termed 'semantic-logical inferences'. Semantic-logical inferences contribute, amongst other things, to identifying the underlying propositions of the cotext. They help the reader to analyse these underlying propositions into their predicates and arguments. In so doing, they allow the discourse receiver to discern the intrapropositional and interpropositional meaning characteristics [I, § 1 ; IV, §§1 — 14]. Semanticlogical inferences also enable receivers to reflect critically on their discernment of interpropositional meaning characteristics and to judge whether specific meaning relations in argumentative discourse are logically valid or invalid [IV, § § 1 3 - 1 4 ] , As far as the meanings of the individual predicates and arguments of the underlying propositions of the cotext are concerned, inferential processes rely on semantic information about lexical entities (words, expressions). These lexical entities belong to the internal lexicon. As I show in the third chapter, the internal lexicon includes knowledge about the meaning characteristics of percept-concept conglomerates, knowledge about reality, knowledge about the spelling and pronunciation of lexical entities, and knowledge about the

38

Chapter one: On discourse comprehension and inferencing

relations which lexical entities have with reality and/or with other cognitive domains, etc. [Ill, § § 3 — 4; §§7 — 8]. Ultimately, the knowledge which is stored in the internal lexicon is related to ego-consciousness. As noted before, I refer to the internal lexicon by the acronym ILRRR. The inferences which are based on the semantic information of ILRRR and which make semantic processing, referential processing, logical processing and action processing possible are called 'ILRRR inferences' [I, § 1, § 4; III, § § 1 - 9 ] . The thinking processes which rely on the grammatical properties of the cotext will be denoted by the term 'syntactic inferences'. Syntactic inferences are needed for the identification of syntactic constituents and for the assignment of the relations which hold between them. Syntactic inferences also serve to recognize the syntactic functions (subject, object, apposition, main clause, etc.) which the identified syntactic constituents fulfil in the cotext under consideration [I, § 1, II, §§ 1 — 12]. Syntactic inferences depend on the receiver's knowledge of the rules of grammar. They concern the linear order, the morphemes of gender, number, tense, etc. They also have to do with the hierarchical relations between main clauses and subordinate clauses, between the elements of hypotactic syntagms, etc. The roles fulfilled by the four kinds of cotext-directed inferencing in the construction of coherence can hardly be overvalued. They enable the receiver to organize the outer worlds of the co(n)texts and to make them fit into the inner world of her/his ego-consciousness. In so doing, it is possible to identify different degrees/levels of cotextual organization ('cohesion', 'referential connectedness' and 'low-level coherence' [VI, §§1—9]) and to relate them to macrocoherence. Three main caveats are to be added here: firstly, however important they may be, discourse-directed inferences do not constitute the nec plus ultra of human thinking. This is due to the fact that texts are produced and received by individuals who differ in many respects. When these individuals do not pursue the same aim(s), have different values/attitudes or rely on divergent knowledge (schemata), they may make inferences which are not of a cotextdirected nature. These non-cotext-directed inferences may even lead them towards conflict. For instance, one spouse may place career advancement ahead of her/his marriage. If so, her/his cotext about the career schema may (mis)direct the inferential processes of the other spouse in such a way that meanings are assigned which were not intended at all (Fitzpatrick, 1991, 359). Secondly, particular texts require inferences which are purely logical in nature. For instance, the cotext some A are B; some A are C; therefore some B are C requires purely logical inferences to assess its logical invalidity. In a wider perspective, textbooks in logic and mathematics, scientific treatises, etc. are dominated by canons of rationality and are, par excellence, in need of logical inferences. In contradistinction, literary texts may display playful variations on standards of reason and excel in deviating from the norms/ rules/prescriptions/principles of logical thought. A typical example is Alice's

1.6. On processing strategies

39

Adventures in Wonderland which was written by an expert in mathematical logic and, as such, contains a gamut of deliberate deviations from logical thought [IX, §§ 1 — 8]. Nonetheless, for all these types of text we must find guidance in logical thought: to follow the lines of argumentation of scientific discourse, we have to rely on rules of logic; to identify the frivolous departures from logical standards which occur in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, we must resort to standard logic itself. The purely logical inferences which are needed to do justice to the logical (dis)organization of these texts have to co-operate with and to complement the discourse-directed inferences. Thirdly, we have also to consider the fact that largely uninvestigated modes of inferencing are involved in the discernment of the stylistic and rhetorical organization of verbal texts. I assume that these forms/levels of organization can be established in a justifiable way only when co-operating discoursedirected and purely logical inferences are taken as a basis for untangling stylistic and rhetorical knots. For this reason, the present book is primarily concerned with discourse-directed and purely logical inferences. It also touches upon the ways in which informal logic serves the purpose of rhetorical organization. 1.6. On processing

strategies

§ 6 Making discourse-directed inferences is a necessary condition for language understanding, but it is not a sufficient condition. In other words, if no inferences can be made, then language interpretation is impossible, but if they can be made, then this is not an absolute guarantee that one understands the language phenomena under analysis. For instance, scholars who decipher and transcribe texts which are transmitted in highly complicated writing systems, have to make many inferences, but these thinking processes do not warrant their understanding. In addition, people who read hermetically closed lyrical texts, visual poetry or literary texts belonging to a culture which differs in many ways from their own, must inevitably make inferences. But these inferences cannot ensure/guarantee that they assign justified or plausible interpretations to these texts [VII, § 9]. The view that discourse-directed inferences, if taken on their own, are not sufficient conditions to interpret texts has many problematic facets. I mention only two of these problematic facets: on the one hand, there are more mental operations involved in interpreting written discourse than those which strictly concern the discourse-directed inferences discussed in [I, §§ 1—5]. Some of them are not known. As such, they cannot be submitted to empirical and rational control. Some of them will be treated in [I, §§6 — 12] and in later parts of this book. On the other hand, there is still a lack of clarity about the details of how people carry out inferential operations and about the specifics of how these inferential operations relate to other parts of their

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Chapter one: On discourse comprehension and inferencing

mental world. In this respect, studies which concern man-machine analogies have opened new, broad and rich horizons on the working of our mind, but they have not cleared all the cloudy complexities involved here (van de Velde, 1989 d; 1991). I return to some of their positive results in the course of this book. For the moment, let me merely make the point that in the areas of research which deal with computer simulation of thinking processes and in the experimental approaches to human thinking there is a consensus with respect to the general conjecture that inferences do not operate arbitrarily. In the present book, I conjecture that they are applied by way of different strategies. These strategies are in the main directed towards the goals of fulfilling the interpretative organization condition [I, § 3] and of contributing to the identification of cohesion, referential connectedness and coherence [VI, §§ 1—9]I distinguish three processing strategies: 1) analytical processing strategies, 2) sequential processing strategies, and 3) holistic processing strategies. They overlap with what is covered in cognitive science by the terms 'bottom-up processing strategies', 'on-line processing strategies' and 'top-down processing strategies' respectively. The views about these three processing strategies which are presented in the following paragraphs (and chapters) are purely hypothetical in character. This is due to the fact that the interpretation of written texts requires various processing stages, but that we have no X-rays or other technical means of identifying accurately what happens in the human mind when the low-level stages of visual perception are related to the high-level stages of interpretation. We can only observe the input stimulus which is given to subjects and their output signifying response to it (van de Velde, 1989 d; 1991). What lies in between can only be the object of indirect examination. In indirect examination, we can rely on off-line methods, in which tests are made after the reading processes have taken place. Or we can direct the off-line methods towards the receivers' protocols about the mental operations which they carried out during text processing. Alternatively, we can gather evidence for our conjectures from self-report questionnaires/indexes. In such cases, the test results, protocols and self-reports inevitably contain much which has nothing to do with reception/interpretation proper, but is due to (interference with) the subjects' reproduction/retrieval from memory. We can also use on-line methods to test the processing operations during reading. In the on-line methods, however, subjects are not and cannot be requested to assign global interpretations. They can only assign local meanings by progressing through the text in a segment-by-segment way. As a consequence, on-line methods do not allow us to gain a global insight into the mental processes which are involved in the identification of cohesion, referential connectedness and coherence [VI, §§ 1 — 9]. In the light of these restrictions of indirect examination, it can be concluded that whatever off-line or on-line methods are employed, they can do no more

1.6. On processing strategies

41

than enhance the plausibility and probability of our conjectures. As in other psychological inquiries into what is happening in the conscious mind, no maximal/optimal approximations to certainty can be attained (Gross, 1987, 30). In what follows, I shall not address the full complexity of the reading processes (Giinther, 1989 and references therein). I merely illustrate the ways in which analytical, sequential and holistic processing strategies function to solve the problems of graphemic decoding. In later parts of this book, and particularly in the sixth chapter, I focus on the issue of how these processing strategies must combine in order to find referential, syntactic and semantic organization. The seventh chapter is concerned with pragmatic organization. The eighth chapter deals with those cases in which receivers may have (had) the illusion of establishing correctly and completely particular forms/levels of organization. The ninth chapter goes into (playful variations of) logical organization. 1.6.1. On the processing stages of graphemic

decoding

§ 7 If there were no way of communicating by means of the medium of written language and through the channel of seeing, this situation would be devastating for education (see also Nóth, 1990, 251—266 and further references therein). There would also be negative consequences for all forms of sociocultural life which are not based on oral tradition and on the channel of hearing. Can mature readers and visually non-handicapped people ever imagine what life would be without writing, printing and reading? What would present-day international communication be, if visual information processing and reading (comprehension) were totally excluded? How could we use our computers as word processors if no letters or other graphic signs appeared on the screen? Are not the invention and the development of writing systems representative of the most remarkable achievements of mankind? How could we have sufficient knowledge about the Etruscan religion/ culture if we had to dispense with the(ir) pertinent writings? How could the Aztec religion/culture have significance for the historian if (s)he could not study its sacred books? These general considerations offer reasons enough for devoting primary attention to the ways in which written discourse is read (and comprehended). In this connection, the ideas put forward here are not in complete agreement with the majority of current views on the psychology of reading. This is due to the fact that I conjecture that reading (comprehension) requires more than perceptual processes, pattern recognition, selective attention, and the like. More particularly, I claim that intricate (but largely unknown/uncontrolled) inferential steps are needed for letter and word recognition and for relating the stage of graphemic decoding to higher-level stages of information processing.

42

Chapter one: On discourse comprehension and inferencing

It is unrealistic to run research programmes on reading (comprehension) which are based on the assumptions that only in-depth interpretation requires thinking operations and that these thinking operations are predominantly concerned with semantic, logical and pragmatic information. It is even selfdeceptive to assume that in graphemic decoding we are not guided by thinking and that we have no metacognitive skills with which we can reflect upon the details of thinking activities while reading the cotexts under analysis. In particular, deciphering activities and paleographic practice can provide counterfactual evidence for the hypothesis that there is no harm in the neglect of thinking processes. Here, I would also refer to the history of language study. The comments which sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth century scholars made on their transcriptions of the Gothic characters in Ulfilas' biblical translation confirm the view that inferences are indispensable to graphemic decoding and to its relations with higher-level interpretative activities (van de Velde, 1966, 1980). § 8 The issues raised in this section and in the following sections may seem somewhat out of place [I, §§8 — 12]. However, they must be taken into account before any thorough concern with higher-level interpretative steps is envisaged. This is because the interpretation of written discourse starts with perceptual processing of visual features present in the utterances at hand (Carpenter, Just, 1977; Just, Carpenter, 1980; Adams, 1982; Groner, Fraisse, 1982; Just, Carpenter, 1987; Barber, 1988; Seegers, e. a. 1987; Günther, 1989; Matlin, 1989 and further references therein). It would be a serious error to disregard the primary perceptual processing strategies involved. If it is true that visual perception is not only a matter of seeing but also of interpreting what one sees (Gross, 1987, 34 ff), then one must pay careful attention to the question of how the visual features of the written medium determine the interpretation of the message. This may be especially necessary when calligrams, anagrams, acrostics, cryptograms, and other complex marks on the page are under analysis. In the following, I leave aside the various technicalities of the methods which have been used in assessing the perceptual processes of reading. Instead, I concentrate on the part which inferences play in the relations between the visual perception of letters/letter strings and language interpretation. To this end, I start with the most elementary question: 'Where do the primary perceptual processing strategies of reading really begin?' This question may be directed to three problem areas presented here in order of increasing complexity. (A) Do they start from the extraction of those distinctive features which are characteristic of separate letters in the printed or typewritten utterances? If so, then line segments, curvature and angular properties, a circular form, etc. will play an important role in the correct identification of

1.6. On processing strategies

43

letters. In that case, one may also ask whether there is phonological mediation in recognizing separate letters (see, in addition, the comment on cotext (31) in [I, § 12] and on fig. 7 in [IX, § 6]). Here, I cannot take into consideration handwritten material and the graphological problems it involves. (B) Do these primary perceptual processing strategies of reading start from the detection of features pertaining only to strings of letters? If so, then functional spelling units, such as syllables, or grammatical constituents, such as morphemes/words/syntagms, may constitute a predominant part in the visual processing of printed or typewritten utterances. In that case, one may also ask how graphemic parsing leads the receiver to the identification of functional spelling units or to the recognition of morphemes/words/syntagms. (C) Or is the feature detection of letters and letter strings guided by higherorder perceptual units which belong to the receiver's lexical store? If so, then organized lexical entities of ILRRR will provide possibilities for matching letters and letter strings to words/expressions. In that case, one may also ask whether the perceptual processing of discourse will (have to) take into account information which is gathered from the cotext in which these letters and letter strings occur. One may also question whether information derived from the pragmatic context, from the action context and from the social context might be of any help in graphemic decoding. § 9 The aforementioned questions (A) — (C) which different approaches to human information processing (Smith, Spoehr, 1974; Massaro, 1975; Coltheart, 1978; Adams, Collins, 1979; Adams, 1980; Gross, 1987 and references therein) or to reading disorders (Siegel, 1992) have dealt with, cannot be treated here in sufficient detail. Nor can I go into the role which different kinds of memory play in the identification of ink marks on the page. I will confine my interests to a brief summary of the different processing strategies working together to render possible the reading of graphemic material. a) Analytical processing strategies prevail in the feature detection (or feature extraction) of the single letters. b) Sequential processing strategies are involved in the left-to-right scan of the letter array. c) In scanning across the lines, readers also make use of the information parts carried along with the punctuation marks: a period, a dash, a colon, a semicolon or a comma may signal different degrees of integration/ separation between the groupings. I conjecture that punctuation marks co-determine, to a great extent, the subtleties of language interpretation. Let me adduce an interesting example to support this conjecture: Smith

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Chapter one: On discourse comprehension and inferencing

where Jones had had had had had had had had had had had the examiner's approvial. This example can only be recognized as a well-formed fragment of English, if, inter alia, commas and a full stop are inserted and if quotation marks are added. The result is then: Smith, where Jones had had "had", had had "had had". "Had had" had had the examiner's approval, (van de Velde, 1991). d) The rules of spelling play an important part in letter and word recognition. In addition, expectancies about where to find blank spaces, where to observe different sorts of visual redundancy, etc. may determine graphemic decoding. e) When pre-existing knowledge and the related expectations determine graphemic decoding, holistic processing strategies come into play. Holistic processing incorporates all low-level information mentioned in the foregoing points (a) —(d). §10 Within the scope of the present considerations, it is important to emphasize the point that the interpretative organization condition [I, § 3] must be fulfilled in the processing strategies. This becomes apparent in the following empirical findings: it is a much more demanding task to recognize a string of unrelated letters and confusable graphemes than to identify strings of letters which are organized according to the orthographic rules of a human natural language HNL;. Moreover, the recognition of words is manifestly superior to the reading of less pronounceable non-words or pseudowords. As a supplementary piece of evidence for the conjecture that the interpretative organization condition must be fulfilled [I, § 3] in processing written material I may point to a small reading comprehension task to which I submitted 57 graduate students. The following examples (27) —(30) were simultaneously presented on a blackboard and on a screen: (27) MARYSAIDTHETOPLESSLADYISAMISS (28) YAW LAICEPS A NI REH FO ERAC E K A T OT DETNAW EH (29) yaw laiceps a ni reh fo erac ekat ot detnaw eh (30) MjlNNS>£irATIM«liMAZNS£INANjlSTAIN/l

All readers could perceive (27) —(30) at their own pace. I surmised that limitations in the fulfilment of the interpretative organization condition would affect recognition of words and word groups. This surmise was confirmed by the results of this reading task. Although (27) did not display blank spaces and was written, unusually, in upper-case letters all the students could read it very easily. I conjecture that the limitations in the fulfilment of the interpretative organization condition caused by the lack of blank spaces were not strong enough to prevent them from identifying the English words and word groups under perception. Examples (28) and (29), on the contrary, imposed more limits on the fulfilment of the interpretative organization condition. As I indicated earlier

1.6. On processing strategies

45

[I, § 9], sequential processing strategies operate from left to right in reading English alphabetical print. That may explain why it took advanced readers much longer to arrive at the key insight that every separate string of letters was a reversal of an English word and that the whole utterance was to be read from right to left as be wanted to take care of ber in a special way. I hypothesize that limitations on the fulfilment of the interpretative organization condition had to be overcome by selecting strategic steps which work in reverse order. This switching to other strategic steps is dependent on finding out the real nature of the problems and difficulties at hand. Hence, reading (28) and (29) presumes interpretative re-organization which was a more demanding task and took more time than reading (27). Finally, example (30) is written in the Gothic characters of the codex argenteus. There are no blank spaces and no punctuation marks. It is a slightly adapted fragment of Ulfilas' biblical translation. Some students had studied Gothic and had read fragments of the Gothic Bible (Streitberg, 1950) during their undergraduate years. But they were totally unfamiliar with the Gothic characters of the codex argenteus. Though some subjects recognized some similarities with Greek writing, example (30) could not be read by any subject in the auditorium. I assume that the interpretative organization condition could not be satisfied here. 1.6.2. On the inferential nature of graphemic

decoding

§11 As has become clear from the foregoing discussion [I, §§ 6 — 10], there is no 'pure' observation/perception of verbal phenomena. The receiver makes inferences. In so doing, (s)he may also add information or modify the observation/perception data in other ways. This may be determined by her/ his knowledge, expectations, motivations, attitudes, beliefs, interests, etc. Here, I cannot discuss these determinants. Nor can I dwell on the specific ways in which the receiver goes beyond the graphemic information that is given. Let me merely raise the question: 'How do inferences relate to letter and word recognition?' The answer to this question will only touch upon two main points: point (a) will be concerned with the more concrete aspects of graphemic parsing and decoding, whereas point (b) pertains to the more abstract levels of hypothesis formation and evaluation which underlie the concrete cognitive processes of point (a). a) Visual perception in reading alphabetical material can be characterized by pauses (called 'eye fixations') as well as by jumps (termed 'saccades' or 'saccadic eye movements'). The eye fixations are either forward or regressive. The saccades intervene between the eye fixations (Carpenter, Just, 1977). It is "believed that many aspects of a perceptual event involve " i m p l i c i t comparisons" (Baars, 1988, 187 and further references therein). In view of

46

Chapter one: On discourse comprehension and inferencing

this "belief', I assume that the saccadic eye movements lead to a comparison of the outwardly observable attributes of letters. This comparison is needed especially when sequentially ordered letters are horizontally split in the middle so that only the upper part or the lower part can be seen. It is also needed when the letters of a word are progressively modified within the left-to-right display or when the final letters of a word are partly covered by a piece of paper. It is even more necessary when a cotext is to be read upside-down or when letters/words are distributed along a line that goes up and down [VI, § 9]. In such cases, graphemic processing, which is often automatic and unconscious, becomes de-automatized and conscious (Baars, 1988, 53 — 54). Comparing the attributes of letters is a precondition for recognizing the patterns of individual capitals, lower-case letters, italicized letters, etc. From a wide variety of ways in which ink marks are presented as stimuli we can infer that they have characteristics in common. The comparison of observable characteristics may also lead us to discover that some letters are identical while others are different. Basically, discovering surface similarities, differences and common features as well as discerning deeper similarities and differences is a matter of inferencing. This becomes the more obvious when the identification of visual configurations of ink marks allows us to assign them to a letter category or word category [IX, § 6]. Still more apparent is the inferential nature of graphemic analysis when the specifically graphological interpretation is at issue. To graphologists the constituents of handwritten texts have particular meanings in the sense that graphologists infer a great deal about the personality of the writer(s) from the outer form of handwritten texts. But as noted in [I, § 6], graphological problems are not our concern here. b) One should also look at letter and word recognition in a more abstract and general way. Then, the graphemic decoding of single letters or the processes involved in word recognition may be seen, inter alia, as the construction and evaluation of hypotheses (Woods, 1980). Similarly, we also construct and evaluate hypotheses when we deal with the details and the totality of pictorial information [IX, § § 2 — 3; § 7]. In a primary stage of graphemic decoding, these hypotheses will be directed to the outwardly observable traits of single letters and to cooccurring information. These hypotheses may differ, to a greater or lesser extent, depending on the tasks to be carried out. For instance, if in trial A a target letter is to be identified within a visually presented display of letters, then the constructed hypotheses will differ from those of trial B in which subjects have to search for a particular target letter occurring within a display of numbers. For any letter in trial A one has to decide whether it differs from or is identical with the target letter. For any mark in trial B one has to discern whether it is a letter or not.

1.6. On processing strategies

47

In the following stages of graphemic decoding, in which reading comprehension comes to the fore, the hypotheses will concern higherlevel information ranging from syntactic information to semantic, pragmatic and other co(n)textual data. As long as the hypotheses are confirmed and corroborated, new hypotheses may be formed in the further reading processes. Each of them should contribute to decoding the graphemic material in a consistent and controllable way. If, however, the hypotheses turn out to be false, then they will have to be refuted and replaced until they are no longer disconfirmed. The main point to be made here is that the construction, evaluation, rejection and reformulation of hypotheses is basically inferential in nature. Obviously, for skilled and advanced readers the details of inference outlined in the aforementioned points (a) and (b) are below the level of awareness. (As will be apparent in [III, § 5], orienting reactions show that inferential links/steps may remain unconscious.) In the discussed points (a) and (b), the details of inference become a matter of awareness when people meet difficulties in graphemic decoding, as is the case with (30), and when they have to find out which conditions are to be fulfilled in order to understand the written/printed texts under analysis. These conditions exceed the level of graphemic decoding proper. For instance, when the marks on the page are part of a secret diplomatic code or when, contrary to the receiver's expectations, the text is to be read from right to left, or when the text is written in Hungarian or in another language which the receiver does not know, or when the text is one of Dotremont's almost indecipherable calligraphic COBRA paintings, etc., then it becomes clear that particular conditions are to be met in order to integrate the stage of graphemic decoding into higher stages of text processing. If these conditions cannot be met, then one must speak of reading without understanding. § 12 The inferential processes which I have just discussed are primarily operative on the microlevel (or low-level) stages of visual information processing. One may wonder how they are connected with the construction of coherence. The following hypothesis delineates these connections: H 3 Recognising the graphemic form of discourse encompasses primary steps in visual perception as well as inferential processing strategies which supply a basis for the construction of coherence. Anyone who is familiar with agraphia, alexia, analphabetism or visual disorders will agree on the significance of H3. However, the impact of H 3 must not be restricted to the microlevel of visual information processing. For instance, if one reads expressionistic poetry in which (the organization of) graphemic information is very important and if one wants to identify higher degrees of coherence, then H 3 must be supplemented by various

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Chapter one: On discourse comprehension and inferencing

hypotheses accounting for the macrolevel (or high-level) stages of information processing. This can also be seen from (31) —(33) in which I anticipate some of the main problems which will be tackled in the following chapters. (31) He ran threw the fields. (32) He saw that the plemb arose on the horizon and shone brightly. (33) Then, he noticed that the trock plicked the drock.

In (31) threw raises a problem of graphemic decoding: threw can be correctly read by saying it aloud. But this translation into sound is largely dependent on the syntactic environment and on the meaning characteristics of (31). Example (32) gives rise to a lexical problem with plemb. Its solution depends on retrieving the information from ILRRR that plemb is not an English word and on inferring from the cotext that plemb occurs in a structural slot which normally is filled by (a noun phrase with) sun (in it). The syntactic functions and the category membership of the non-English words in (33) can be recognized by paying attention to the grammatical structure of (33). This recognition is necessary to figure out whether (33) is a syntactically well-formed cotext. The whole cotext (31) —(33) also raises the higher-level problems of whether coreference relations can be assumed for the iterated pronoun he and whether an overall organization can be recognized for the temporal reference links which are signalled by the adverb then and by the tenses of ran, saw, arose, shone, noticed and plicked. From these (and related) details of (31) —(33) it can be gathered that the low-level processing stages of graphemic decoding need interaction with and integration into the high-level stages of syntactic processing, semantic processing, referential processing, logical processing and action processing, as will be demonstrated in more detail later on. 1.7. On the supplementation

of discourse-directed

inferences

§13 The foregoing sections have demonstrated that inferences are a conditio sine qua non for handling co(n)textual information. Now the question may be raised whether the discourse-directed inferences which I introduced in [I. § 1; § 5] can deal with all the deeper layers of meaning. As already suggested in [I, § 5], the answer is patently no. This is partly due to circumstances which I have treated elsewhere (van de Velde, 1986 b, 1988 c). I return to some of them in chapters seven to nine. As far as these circumstances concern the receiver, it may suffice to note that her/his ways of interpreting are largely determined by her/his personality characteristics. Her/his personality characteristics may be influenced by educational systems, ethical values, religious ideals, ideological assumptions, sociocultural conventions, aesthetic views, and the like. It does not matter

1.7. On the supplementation of discourse-directed inferences

49

here in what ways the receiver's personality characteristics are influenced. What is important is the fact that they can play an immeasurable role in many cases of discourse comprehension. For instance, to put it in very simple terms, a person with predominantly optimistic, toughminded and extravert traits will give signifying responses to (34) which differ deeply from those of a predominantly pessimistic, tenderhearted and introvert individual. (34) Die trunkenen Fluten fallen — die Stunde des sterbenden Blau und der erblassten Korallen um die Insel von Palau. Die trunkenen Fluten enden als Fremdes, nicht dein, nicht mein, sie lassen dir nichts in Händen als der Bilder schweigendes Sein. Die Fluten, die Flammen, die Fragen — und dann auf Asche sehn: „Leben ist Brückenschlagen über Ströme, die vergehen." (Gottfried Benn, Epilog

1949)

Very often, particular receivers fail to understand the verbal messages in the ways in which they are intended by the producers. This may be due to the fact that these receivers read too much of their individual preferences, expectations and value distinctions into the cotexts under consideration [VII, §§5 — 8]. This may also be caused by the fact that these receivers rely on different knowledge sources, that they display disparities in their goals, desires, and plans (van de Velde, 1989 b; 1989 d) or that they are not psychologically prepared for the intended meaning effects, etc. The receiver is not a machine-like, detached or neutral entity (van de Velde, 1989 d; 1991). On the contrary, her/his interpretation is a highly individual achievement. As such, it may display all sorts of individual differences. For instance, if subjects read a cotext, which describes a home, and take the goal and plan perspective of a homebuyer, then their inferences will be partly different from those which are made by readers who bring the goal and plan perspective of a burglar to their interpretation (Gerrig, 1988 and further references therein). Similarly, when an agnostic, a sceptic and a purely rational thinker read passages of the New Testament, their signifying responses will be totally discordant with those of the mystic, the believer and the theologian (van de Velde, 1991). As to the ways in which inferencing itself may be influenced, it is clear that a logician's reading of I am grey like a dove. I do not care too much. A dove is a symbol of peace will be determined by her/his canons of rationality [I, § 4]. These canons will not be fully shared by the emotion-oriented gestalt therapist or by the humanistic psychologist. As a consequence, the intermixture of inferencing and interpretation will unavoidably display individual differences.

50

Chapter one: On discourse comprehension and inferencing

Even in cases in which individuals share the same semantic ILRRR information and make the same ILRRR-related inferences, they may still differ in their (use of) reasoning strategies (Hagert, Waern, 1986, 105 ff.). § 14 In text comprehension, the personality of the producer is also very important. It has been claimed in medicine, psychopathology, humanistic psychology and other disciplines that no maximal/optimal understanding of a producer is possible without intruding into the seclusive spheres of her/his personality and her/his inner psychic world. For instance, in trying to understand (35) in all its intended details, one must have access to the cognitive, affective and conative life of its producer. (35) The Mona Lisa exhibited in the Louvre is not female enough. I suppose it is a mixture of female and male grace. O r is it a disguised man? Da Vinci's painting of St. John hanging near to the Mona Lisa, but less well-known, shows a man who might be a disguised woman. The upward movement of St. John's arm with the fine pointing finger and the whole posture suggest serene female softness. Why should Leonardo not have thought of sexless grace and refinement?

Regarding the producer's cognitive life, if the receiver knows that the producer of (35) subscribes to Freud's view according to which Da Vinci led a sexual life which was largely homosexual in orientation, then the interpretation of (35) differs from the one which is based on the knowledge that the producer is a male chauvinist who thinks that female attraction is fatal to man. Regarding the producer's affective life, if the receiver knows that the producer of (35) feels uncomfortable about the hidden smile of La Gioconda, then his interpretation has to be distinguished from the one in which he assumes that the producer is full of admiration for her female face and posture. Regarding the producer's conative life, if the receiver knows that the motive of the producer of (35) is to show his strictly personal views in (35), then the meaning assignment will differ from the one which relies on the insight that the producer's desire is to provoke the listener/reader by means of (35). §15 The view that understanding involves intrusion into the intentions, reasons, motives, beliefs, attitudes, knowledge, wishes, etc. of the individual producer is not uncommon in the long tradition of the humanities. It still serves, in current writings, as a guide to distinguishing discourse meaning from the addressor's meaning. Regarding this distinction, which has become more prominent under Grice's influence (Avramides, 1989), personality-directed interpretations do not concentrate on what the discourse d¡ means per se but on what the addressor intends to mean by d¡ (van de Yelde, 1986 b; 1988 c; 1991 and

1.7. On the supplementation of discourse-directed inferences

51

further references therein). This comes close to what Lewis Carroll makes his readers realize in their reflections on (36). (36) "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less." (Lewis Carroll, Through the looking-glass, 269)

In this respect, it is worth calling to mind the distinction between descriptive, evaluative and explicative interpretation drawn in the introduction to this book [§§ 14—15]. This distinction is made to account for the fact that the characteristics of interpretation may vary widely depending on the perspectives and orientations which are chosen by those who assign meanings. Explicative interpretation focuses on the following questions: what did the addressor mean by the discourse dj? Why did the producer select the message of d;? Why did the producer impart the information of d;? Why did the producer choose a particular phrasing in dj? Is the particular phrasing of d, suited to the producer's intentions and motives? etc. All these questions may lead us to search for deeper layers of meaning outside language. With respect to these language-external meanings, it may suffice to reflect critically on insights, which psychoanalysis and other psychological approaches to the individual's inner psychic life present, in order to realize that we cannot completely and precisely retrace the mental background activities involved in text production. Descriptive interpretation, on the contrary, accounts for the cotextual information parts, as they are expressed in the verbal texts at hand. Descriptive interpretation is also concerned with the question as to what the receiver does with this cotextual information and how (s)he does it. To make understanding processes as reliable as possible, descriptive interpretation should be taken as a basis for explicative and evaluative interpretation. Evaluative interpretation takes into account sociocultural and subjectdependent values to do justice to the qualities of the verbal text. In so doing, evaluative interpretation may be directed towards the activities/results of descriptive interpretation. In addition, evaluative interpretation can be oriented towards the activities/results of explicative interpretation. No less importantly, evaluative interpretation may concern the combined activities/ results of descriptive and explicative interpretation [VII, §§5 — 10]. In many respects, the activities/results of evaluative interpretation may (be considered to) belong to philosophical/monodisciplinary fields of aesthetics (von Kutschera, 1989 and further references therein). Needless to say, the distinction between descriptive, explicative and evaluative interpretation can have a broader range of application than the strict concerns with verbal cotexts. For instance, it is possible to apply this distinction to our interpretations of our person-internal reality (and its relations with the person-external reality [I, § 3]). In this connection, the following views can be defended: a) that our selfimage results from our descriptive interpretation of our actions and interac-

52

Chapter one: On discourse comprehension and inferencing

tions with others; b) that our self-realization/self-fulfilment is related to our explicative interpretation of our motives, intentions, goals, plans, desires, etc.; c) that our self-esteem may be a matter of our evaluative interpretation; d) that none of these distinct interpretations, however, should be applied in an autonomous way, because, in self-image, self-realization/self-fulfilment and self-esteem, the descriptive, explicative and evaluative facets of self-reflection can always be combined; e) that any individual is free either to base the explicative and/or evaluative perspectives of her/his self-reflection on descriptive self-interpretation or to let explicative and/or evaluative self-reflection affect (and distort) her/his descriptive self-interpretation. With respect to the view expressed in (e), I would like to mention an interesting and dramatic example: the unreconciled conflict between Freud and Jung. The abruption of their friendship relations was mainly due to the fact that their explicative and evaluative (self-)interpretation/(self-)reflection dominated and distorted their descriptive (self-)interpretation/(self-)reflection (see Donn, 1990 for historical data). It is part of the irony of the history of psychoanalysis that the two most prominent pioneers who developed methods of interpreting the depths of the individual's inner psychic life failed to assign a descriptive (self-)interpretation to their own mutually conflicting inner-life constellations. One of the tragic by-products of this failure was that they could not reduce their rivalry to rational proportions [IV, § 17]. § 1 6 Because such a breadth of interest in the intricate domains of the self, as sketched in points (a) — (e) of the foregoing paragraph, would lead us too far from strict concern with verbal cotexts, I concentrate, first of all, on verbal cotexts and return to the interpretation of man's inner psychic life in chapter seven. More specifically, chapters two to six of the present book deal with descriptive interpretation of verbal cotexts. I thus devote primary attention to those factors of comprehension which can be submitted to rational and empirical control. In other words, in these chapters, I am not concerned with the subjective dimensions of discourse reception. On the contrary, I will attempt to comply as much as possible with the norms of scientific investigation proposed in the theory of science (van de Velde, 1972; 1974; 1975). In this attempt, the approach to verbal texts must have recourse to particular regulative principles and/or organization principles. For instance, I rely on the rules of logical inference as far as the logical part of the semanticlogical inferences is concerned [IV, §§ 1 — 13] and as far as the identification of logical (dis)organization is under discussion [IX, §§1—8]. I assume that syntactic inferences are based on controllable knowledge and use of the rules of grammar [II, §§ 1 — 12]. I conjecture that ILRRR inferences have recourse to the controllable knowledge and the use of meaning conditions, and the like, which belong to the standard semantic information of ILRRR [III, §§ 1 — 9]. I presume that action-oriented inferences rely also on this standard semantic information of ILRRR and, in addition, take into account the

1.8. Summary

53

conventions and communicative maxims which hold for/within social contexts [V, §§ 1 - 1 5 ] , The submission to rational and empirical control does not mean that those factors which are mainly of an inferential nature are completely isolated. On the contrary, as far as possible, I defend interactive and integrative views on man, on his language, on his cognitive, affective and conative life as well as on his (social) behaviour. In so doing, I am able to point out where and how inferential factors of discourse comprehension can be related to other influential ingredients of communication and human understanding. In this regard, the seventh chapter shows that discourse-directed inferencing must be supplemented by different interpretative steps which disclose meanings outside language. Insofar as the meanings outside language are meanings inside the producer and concern her/his intentions, the seventh chapter is concerned with explicative interpretation. Evaluative interpretation may be applied to both explicative interpretation and (its co-ordination with) descriptive interpretation. This being the case, the producer-oriented and cotext-oriented interpretations are subjected to judgement and value assignment. This is also shown in chapter seven. The complexities of interpretation become most intriguing when cotextoriented, producer-oriented and other perspectives of the hermeneutic process are subjected to critical reflection. This critical reflection is practised in the eighth chapter. It enables us to have a better view of the limits of interpretation. Above all, it urges us to replace naive realism by relativizing attitudes. The ninth (and final) chapter continues to deal with the intriguing complexities of interpretation: it attempts to account for those subtleties of meaning which are to be discerned by the co-ordination of purely logical inferences with discourse-directed inferences. 1.8. Summary §17 The first chapter introduced some elementary distinctions between cotextual and contextual information. It demonstrated that cotextual information is the primary subject domain of descriptive interpretation. It made descriptive interpretation basic to explicative and evaluative interpretation. The first chapter also provided a general and informal outline of the roles which are characteristic of discourse-directed inferences in descriptive interpretation. The main point was that discourse-directed inferences allow the discourse receiver to identify the information parts in the cotextual data and to relate these information parts to each other. Furthermore, it made the claim that reliance on discourse-directed inferences is responsible for the fact that the interpretative organization condition is met and coherence is constructed. Chapters two to six deal with this claim in detail.

54

Chapter one: On discourse comprehension and inferencing

Some parts of this chapter were devoted to the question of whether the discourse-directed inferences can, if taken on their own, deal with all the deeper layers of meaning. It was assumed that discourse-directed inferences are to be supplemented by purely logical inferences, other mental operations and non-inferential facets of ego-consciousness. It was also claimed that specific inferences (called 'bridging assumptions') have to account for the cotext-external information which is sometimes needed to satisfy the interpretative organization condition and to construct higher degrees of coherence. Chapters seven to nine provide more material to support these assumptions/ claims. I also discussed the view that discourse-directed inferences do not operate arbitrarily but are applied according to different processing strategies. The sketchy elaboration of the ways in which the three processing strategies work will have made it clear that graphemic decoding is affected by inferential factors which go beyond the strictly perceptual stage. In so doing, I provided the reader with a preview of my treatment of discourse-directed inferences. The following chapters add a further broadening of the microlevel (or lowlevel) stages of information processing, along with refinements and specifications of the introductory views outlined so far.

CHAPTER T W O

On syntactic inferencing 2.1.

Introduction

§ 1 For much that is in our inner world we need the knowledge of how things in the outer world connect with one another. We also have to identify/ (re)construct levels/forms/patterns of organization in the things of the outer world. This is particularly the case when we have to deal with the outer world of human natural language. But it also holds true for dealing with other combinations/relations in the products of the human mind which occur outside human natural language: in music, architecture, painting, sculpture, etc. (Hartmann, 1964, 57 — 126). Like written discourse, they have their causal antecedents in intentionality. Unlike red spots on the skin or grains of sand on the road [I, § 1], they are governed by syntax. The concern with their syntax is a conditio sine qua non for discerning most of their levels/forms/ patterns of organization. In human natural language, syntax is wrapped in written or spoken discourse. Written discourse itself displays various levels/forms/patterns of organization. In the first chapter, I dwelt on the patterns of graphemic organization. It was shown that their identification, first of all, requires graphemic decoding. For this reason, I started my observations on discourse processing from the primary processing stage of graphemic decoding. I formulated hypothesis H 3 to account for the low-level stages of reading. In view of hypothesis H 3 , it must be emphasized that it is not sufficient to recognize solely the graphemic information parts. One must also take into account that the domains of graphemic decoding connect closely with the realms of grammar, including syntax, and with (the study of) the deeper meaning characteristics of verbal texts [I, § 12], Accordingly, one must consider the complex facts that letters are grouped into letter strings, that letter strings function as words, that words combine into phrases/clauses, etc. and that words/phrases/clauses, etc. carry meanings in them. In other words, patterns of organization are to be identified at several levels. As a consequence, the forms of organization will differ depending on whether one identifies them at the graphemic, morphological, syntactic, stylistic, semantic, rhetorical or logical level of language processing. In the first chapter, it was also claimed that inferences are indispensable to dealing with the different levels of language processing. More specifically, in

56

Chapter two: On syntactic inferencing

discussing Since Jay always jogs a mile and a half seems like a very short distance to him, it was suggested, amongst other things, that inferences are needed to identify its syntactic constituents, to find out how these syntactic constituents are related to each other and to disclose which syntactic functions (main clause, subordinate clause, subject, etc.) they have. The inferences which are typically involved in syntactic processing and which are based on (knowledge of) the rules of grammar have been called 'syntactic inferences' [I, § 1; § 5; §16]. In the present chapter, I am mainly concerned with the realms of grammar and with the syntactic inferences which are typically involved in them. For convenience, I shall consider the handling of grammatical information parts as a matter of syntactic processing. As grammatical information parts I take the clues of syntactic order, the morphemes of gender, number, tense, etc. as well as the prepositions and conjunctions. Syntactic processing has mainly to do with the identification of syntactic constituents and of their relations/functions. This identification is a precondition for the assignment of meanings to utterances. So, for instance, in the utterance she read the letter to the editor the two different bracketings [she read] [the letter to the editor] and [she read the letter] [to the editor] signal that the main syntactic constituents are differently related and that accordingly two different meanings are to be assigned (Martin, 1987, 14—18). As is clear from this example of ambiguity, the identification of the syntactic constituents and of their relations/functions is not exclusively a matter of syntactic processing. Semantic processing comes into the picture too. That is, since cotexts have meanings, the identification of syntactic constituents and of their relations/functions also has to have recourse to semantic information. So, for instance, semantic information is to contribute to the recognition that he hit the lady with the good heart, he hit the lady with the sensitive lips, he hit the lady with the blue eyes, he hit the lady with the red shoes and he hit the lady with the funny umbrella are not equally ambiguous. The syntactic constituents with the red shoes and with the funny umbrella can either be noun phrase modifiers of the lady or have the adverbial function of denoting the instrument with which the lady was hit. As to the other cotexts stating that he hit the lady, we need a lot of unusual inventive thinking to assign interpretations to them in which the good heart, the sensitive lips and the blue eyes can be used as an instrument to hit a female person. For the moment, I shall not further deal with the necessary interaction of syntactic processing with semantic processing. Nor shall I consider the psychological problem of whether there are typically syntactic processes which are unconscious (Baars, 1988, 12—13; 46). Instead, my aim in the present chapter is to substantiate the claim that the identification of syntactic constituents and of their relations/functions is a matter of making inferences. Some grammarians may feel reluctant to consider syntactic processing as a matter of making inferences (Danes, 1989, 238 — 239). They may reserve

2.2. On the realms of syntax

57

the use of inferences to the intricate cases of semantic processing, logical processing and action processing. They may defend the view that inferences are needed for the interpretation of deeper relations, as for instance in (1), in which the identification of a causal relation is a matter of reasoning reception. (1) There was a tragic car accident. Mary had not seen the traffic lights.

In contrast with this view, the conception of inferencing advocated in the present book has a much wider range of application. It applies to the properties of the surface form as well as to the deeper meaning characteristics of verbal texts. Since the surface form is conditional on syntax, my concern with the surface form must focus attention on syntax and on inferencing which concerns syntax. Because language is manifested in the surface form of syntax, my treatment of cotext-directed inferences starts with an account of syntactic inferencing. This choice, however, does not reflect the real temporal order of the inferences involved in text processing. It would be a mistake to hold the view that in text processing syntactic inferences come first and that ILRRR, semanticlogical, action-oriented and purely logical inferences come much later. All the inferences which I shall consider, work together along the thought dimensions of analytical, sequential and holistic processing. The fact that syntax is treated first in this book should not be misunderstood as a defence of the autonomy of syntax. When human natural language has a communicative function, its syntax cannot be autonomous. Syntax serves then as a means of combining linguistic units whose surface form alterations normally correlate with changes in its meanings and vice versa. Autonomous syntax cannot deal with the intricate correlations of form and meaning which are characteristic of cotexts. That syntax is discussed separately in this chapter, before the meanings of language are systematically accounted for in the following chapters, is due to expository reasons. The separation of syntax and semantics/pragmatics, however, is artificial.

2.2. On the realms of syntax § 2 Syntactic inferences are needed to solve problems, such as for instance the problems of whether at any rate can be identified as a separate syntactic constituent of (2), whether at any rate is a noun phrase modifier or has an adverbial function, whether as we say is a subordinate clause within (2), and so on. Moreover, syntactic inferences have to interact with other inferences [II, § 11] to handle problems, such as: is either the interested influence or the interested influence at any rate the subject of the main clause within (2)? Is the interested influence or the interested influence at any rate more salient to the total information of (2) than other information parts of (2)? Is the interested influence or the interested influence at any rate more important in laying a foundation for

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the comprehension of (2) than other information parts of (2) (see Gernsbacher, 1990)? etc. (2) The interested influence at any rate had, as we say, gone straight to the point. (Dillon, 1978, 8)

Addressing syntax and the related issues of grammar is mostly considered as a matter simpler than concerns with common issues of semantics and pragmatics. If seen from this perspective, one may feel that the considerations of the present chapter are rather overdrawn. This would be a false impression. As will be shown below, there are reasons enough for thorough attention to be paid to particular syntactic problems. For the moment, let me just mention the obvious reason that the interpretations of utterances are to a great extent conditional on the identified syntactic relations/functions, as may become clear from the following example: (3) They threw mama f r o m the train a kiss. She wept. They were all very sad.

In one case of syntactic processing which proceeds until the focal point from the train, it is possible to relate they threw with mama in such a way that mama has the function of the direct object. Alternatively, by processing the whole of text (3), one may identify a kiss as the direct object of thej threw. Then, mama becomes the indirect object of they threw a kiss. Solving such complexities cannot be a matter of perception proper. Therefore, I do not defend the view that text receivers read letter by letter, then syllable by syllable (or morpheme by morpheme), then word by word, then phrase by phrase, and so on. Though such a view offers the prospect of testing under which segmentation conditions incremental reading can take place (Sichelschmidt, Giinther, 1989), I presume that, in standard/normal reading, inferential steps are needed at different stages of language processing and that inferences work in interactive and integrative ways. This interaction and integration become particularly necessary when syntactic expectations conflict with semantic processing. For instance, the readers' normal syntactic expectation is that in active declaratives the inflected verb (phrase) follows the noun (phrase). This syntactic expectation leads them sequentially to process sent as the first inflected verb of the performer sent the flowers. But when this cotext continues with was very pleased, the semantic information carried along with the whole cotext forces them to integrate the additional information, and to re-identify sent as a past participle which is related to the performer (Strohner, 1990, 172 ff and further references therein). With regard to the different stages of language processing, I would recall that the first chapter raised 'What?', 'Where?' and 'How?' questions [I, § 1]. The present chapter deals with these questions in more depth. It directs these questions towards grammatical information parts. It also makes it acceptable that grammatical information parts may, for practical reasons of research, be studied separately.

2.2. On the realms of syntax

59

As far as the 'What?' and 'Where?' questions are concerned, I point out succinctly that discourse processing is dependent on information which can be found in the syntactic cotext. My predominant attention here is directed towards the information about the linear order in which syntactic constituents occur [II, §§5 — 8]. However, I am also concerned with deficient syntactic information [II, § 9] and with the conjecture that syntactic information must be studied in its interaction with other kinds of co(n)textual information [II,

§11].

A more important task of this chapter consists in tackling the 'How?' questions of syntactic processing: How can the interpretative organization condition [I, § 3] be fulfilled for the syntactic cotext? How is information to be derived from the syntactic cotext? How is the derived information to be connected with other co(n)textual data? The answers given to these 'How?' questions converge in the hypothetical view that syntactic inferences must deal with the grammatical information parts. These syntactic inferences have to co-operate closely with other kinds of inference in order to identify the connections of the grammatical information parts with the other co(n)textual information parts [I, § 5; II, § 11]. If they do not co-operate closely enough, then it is impossible to see that the distinct syntactic constituents, as bracketed in (4) — (7), are related in different ways. It is also impossible to discern the repercussions of these different relations on semantic processing (the examples are borrowed from Steedman, 1990). (4) [I want] [to begin to try to write a play] (5) [I want to begin] [to try to write a play] (6) [I want to begin to try] [to write a play] (7) [I want to begin to try to write] [a play]

With respect to the syntactic inferences, the following pressing question arises: what will happen when individuals are not able to solve the problem of how things in the surface form of language are connected with one another [II, § 1]? In the search for an answer to this question one should find cases where syntactic processing is defectively manifested, as is illustrated in the following points (A) —(B): (A) As far as language production is concerned, studies on agrammatism, which is characteristic of Broca's aphasia, reveal not only the patients' failure to use the rules for function words, like prepositions and conjunctions, but also the disorder in their use of pronouns and articles. In addition, Broca's aphasics have considerable difficulties with syntactic cues, like number, case, gender and tense markers. They also display deficits in arranging separate words into syntactic phrases and clauses (Lesser, 1978; Saffran, e. a., 1980).

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(B) As far as language comprehension is concerned, it is important to note that agrammatism also has repercussions upon the reception abilities of Broca's aphasics. Due to their syntactic deficits, Broca's aphasics have to base their comprehension primarily on the semantic information parts which are carried along with the lexical entities of ILRRR occurring in (sequences/sets of) utterances. Since this semantic information about lexical entities of ILRRR has a great need of the means of syntax to become more intelligible, as is clear from the interpretation of (2) and (3), it can be assumed that the syntactic impairments of Broca's aphasics correlate with comprehension disturbances (Schwartz, e. a., 1980; Caramazza, e. a., 1981; Shankweiler, Crain, 1989). In this chapter, I consider data which occur as a consequence of these syntactic disorders. However, before I can come to such issues I must concentrate on the following methodological question: are there practical reasons of research for studying syntactic processing in isolation from other stages of processing? 2.3. On singling out syntactic

processing

§ 3 Of course, I cannot deal with this complex and controversial methodological question in great depth here. After all, it has too many roots in the rich tradition of linguistics, logic, philosophy, psychology, and neuropsychology. I restrict myself to the findings outlined in (a) —(d). One serious admonishment must be recalled here: the findings (a) —(d) which are adduced in favour of a separate treatment of syntactic processing are in no way meant to support ideas on the autonomy of syntax. Apart from the remarks made in [II, § 1], adherence to such ideas would be in conflict with the views on the interactive and integrative functioning of inferences defended in this book. a) There is much experimental work in psycholinguistics which supports the view that normal language users have a particular cognitive capacity for using single syntactic cues, for applying syntactic rules to sequences of words, for identifying syntactically organized constituents as well as for finding out the syntactic relations which hold between them. One can, of course, illustrate this particular cognitive capacity for syntactic processing in different ways. Let me illustrate one way: when one takes the utterance the trock pitched the drock, [I, § 12; VI, § 8], any normal English speaking person will agree that the syntactic rules of English apply. Hence, syntactic constituents like the trock, the trock plicked and the drock can be identified. Accordingly, syntactic functions, like 'subject of and 'object o f , can be assigned. Moreover, syntactic relations pertaining to linear or hierarchical order can be allotted to different

2.3. On singling out syntactic processing

61

descriptive units. In addition, there are sequential constraints: drock trock the plicked the will not be accepted as a syntactically organized sequence of elements. Furthermore, the utterance can be transformed into the passive the drock was pitched bj the trock, into the question did the trock plick the drock? etc. Examples like these and related instances available in Lewis Carroll's writings (1979; 1984) may make it clear that, even if the syntactic characteristics are apparent only on a surface level and carry no deeper meaning, a separate cognitive capacity for syntactic processing may be assumed. b) Other justifications for treating syntax and syntactic processing separately derive from aphasiology and neurolinguistics. On the basis of research in neurology, the view is held that the frontal lobe of the left hemisphere is highly specialized in operating with syntactic organization principles. Patients with lesions in the inferior frontal cortex of the left hemisphere are mostly considered to be Broca's aphasics. They have specific deficits in syntactic processing. With regard to linguistics, selective impairments can be observed in cases involving non-fluent aphasia, like loss of function words and of inflection morphemes (agrammatism), telegraphic style and similar disorders. These point unmistakably to a specific disability for syntactic processing. c) From studies in developmental psycholinguistics we know that the infant starts to use language through one-word-expressions (holophrastic utterances). At the age of about eighteen months the child begins putting two words together. There is still no fully developed syntactic form, where the constituents bear the organized surface characteristics of monolingual grammar. It is only in later phases that the child shows a great propensity to look for surface characteristics bound to the regularities of morphology and morphosyntax. Based on the great amount of data collected on child language development, in Indo-Germanic and non-Indo-Germanic languages, one can be relatively confident in assuming that skills for syntax develop at a later stage than does the child's lexical store (McNeill, 1970; Slobin, 1971; 1985). Not surprisingly, syntactic organization principles which concern the expressive adequacy of connected utterances will only be fully acquired after a much longer period of mental development. Similar observations can be made in the developmental studies of mentally retarded children. Here, specific language teaching programmes cannot be directed to syntactic skills relating to word order, case, gender, tense, etc. before a certain vocabulary age has been reached (Mittler, 1976; Wheldall, 1976). d) Speech shadowing tasks for American English in which subjects are required to recognize and to repeat the separate words of utterances which

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they hear over headphones show that these shadowers are very sensitive to syntactic cues and rules. The worst performances in recognition and repetition tasks occur when the utterances offered have no syntactic structure (Marslen-Wilson, 1980). Of course, these results do not suggest that syntactic organization principles alone provide sufficient means for recognizing and repeating the words or that syntactic organization principles work on their own. The results reported by Marslen-Wilson simply indicate that some sort of syntactic analysis must be carried out by the shadowing subjects whatever the different sources of language processing might be. The findings presented in (a) —(d) are not merely casual but provide students of syntax with reliable evidence. These findings support the claim that practical research considerations, like those concerned with administering syntactic tests, measuring syntactic skills, rating syntactic regularities, teaching and remediating syntactic abilities, etc., may lead syntacticians to look at syntactic processing as a single part of discourse processing.

2.4. From graphemic

cotext to syntactic

cotext

§ 4 If syntactic processing starts from written discourse phenomena, then it is first confronted with their graphemic form [I, §§6 — 12]. So, organizing the visually perceived alphabetic material present in the sequences of utterances is prima facie subject to expectancies of a non-syntactic nature. Maintaining that these expectancies are not dependent on syntax would be a misconception. Let me illustrate this view in the following way: suppose a subject is looking carefully at a screen on which letters are projected one after the other very slowly. In the left-to-right visual processing (s)he may at a certain moment be able to recognize Mary sa. Then, the question can be asked: what next? In answering, (s)he has to anticipate the coming letters in the graphemic string. One of the letters b, c, d, f , g, t, k, I, m, n, p, r, s, t, u, v, u> andj/ may present itself as the candidate expected to follow sa as in sable, sack, saddle, safe, sage, said, sake, salt, same, sane, sap, saraband, sash, satiate, sauce, save, sawn and say. The main point here is that not all the letters mentioned are candidates which can be equally expected to follow. Do the unequal expectancies depend on purely graphemic determinants? The answer is, of course, no. Syntactic devices and rules place a number of crucial constraints on the transition probabilities. So, when one of the aforementioned words beginning with sa is to be selected as an expected candidate to follow Mary, the highest probability will be given to said. This is one of the indicators that analytical letter processing must interact with sequential syntactic processing in order to make well-organized letter and word recognition possible [I, §§ 6—12],

2.4. From graphemic cotext to syntactic cotext

63

In this interaction of analytical and sequential processing, syntax operates as a strongly restricting device. For the purposes of graphemic decoding (and of the related syntactic processing operations) readers make use of their knowledge that syntactically well-formed strings most frequently display a noun phrase + verb phrase structure in active declaratives (represented as NP + VP as in the example the boy has read this book) [II, § 2], This is not to exclude the possibility that they may also utilize the so-called topical word order in which a syntactic constituent which is not the syntactic subject is topicalized/thematized in front position as in this book the boj has read. The topical word order, however, is less frequent and less expected than the canonical NP -f VP order. Thus, on reading a noun phrase or its syntactic equivalent first, subjects may expect to encounter next (the elements of) a well-structured verb phrase. As a consequence, after Mary sa they will suitably complete sa by such letters which effectively yield an inflected verb as part of a verb phrase, like says, said, sat, sank, saves, and so on. Syntacting processing which operates in this way does not and cannot stop at the point of selecting an appropriate inflected verb beginning with sa. This selection depends, in most cases, on a number of other indicators. Above all, this selection is dependent on the receiver's understanding of the semantic and syntactic relations which the completed forms of sa.. have with the surrounding information parts (Moore, Carling, 1982, 75 — 88). Suppose subjects settle on said as a verb candidate as in (8), then its subsequent syntactic environment will be different from that following sank or saved as in (9)-(10): (8) Mary said that she would talk to her husband. (9) Mary sank into the chair with the newspaper to read for an hour. (10) Mary saved me from complete despair by offering me food and shelter.

With respect to the graphemic and syntactic expectancies, the foregoing examples (8) —(10) may sufficiently illustrate: 1) that selecting an inflected verb Vj following a noun phrase NP, is partly dependent on the semantic ILRRR information and the syntactic information provided by NPS; 2) that the subsequent syntactic environment of v, depends to a certain extent on the semantic ILRRR properties and the syntactic properties of v,; 3) that the selection of Vj may be contingent on the semantic ILRRR properties and the syntactic characteristics of the verbal material which follows Vj. These observations indicate clearly that syntax is in close interaction with semantic ILRRR information and therefore restricts the potential combinations of graphemic material. When subjects have to carry out judgement tasks about the orthographic adequacy, the grammaticality and the semantic appropriateness of cotexts, such as Mary sa, then the execution of these metalinguistic tasks requires a close co-operation of those inferential processes which pertain to the surface form of language as well as to its meaning(s)/ communicative function(s). Further evidence of this will be given in the following sections and chapters.

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2.5. Inferences based on and going beyond the knowledge of syntax § 5 Selecting one or more appropriate candidates to follow a specific syntactic category (or part of speech) is not considered to be a complicated matter for human receivers. One may accordingly hold the view that knowing the rules of syntax will be a sufficient prerequisite for selecting the appropriate surrounding material. Both viewpoints are misleading in that they overlook a number of complexities involved here. With respect to these complexities, I surmise that knowledge of the rules of syntax is by no means a sufficient basis for selecting suitably related sequences and handling graphemic material. As suggested before, the question 'What next?' leads far beyond the rules of syntax, because inferencing also is involved. Some experimental tasks concerned with the question 'What next?' suggest that no solutions to linear order problems can be found if the required inferences cannot be made and if it cannot be gathered from the syntactically ordered results what are the repercussions on the semantic order. For instance, suppose that subjects are requested to arrange correctly the syntactic constituents that she could not concentrate, she said, and unfortunately. In this task, it becomes clear that the subjects must be able to foresee the repercussions on the (hierarchical order of) meanings when unfortunately is placed in front position. Ordering the syntactic constituents as well as foreseeing the repercussions of this ordering on the meanings (and the communicative functions) have to do with inferences. I illustrate this view by considering two experimental paradigms designed for agrammatic Broca's aphasics in [II, §§6 — 7]. Most studies of aphasic disorders share the claim that — for practical reasons of research — syntactic processing can be isolated and examined on its own [II, § 2], However, aphasiological research has widely overlooked the inferential processes which are typically involved in applying syntactic knowledge. Though the notions 'inference', 'inferential process', 'inferential strategy', etc. and the related ideas have been disseminated in aphasiology (Caramazza, Zurif, 1976; Bradley, e. a., 1980; Saffran, e. a., 1980) no specific tasks or experiments strictly pertaining to the role of syntactic inferences have been developed so far. 2.5.1. On ordering syntactic

constituents

§ 6 In the following, I make it clear that inferences play an important role in the Broca's aphasics' performance in a specific part of the so-called 'sentence order test' (abbreviated SOT) designed by von Stockert and Bader (1976). In this SOT experiment, 10 Wernicke's aphasics, 10 Broca's aphasics and 10 global aphasics were presented with 30 simple active declaratives one after another. Each of the declaratives was divided into three parts which were

2.5. Inferences based on and going beyond the knowledge of syntax

65

printed on separate cards. Here, I shall take only one example of a simple active declarative in order to illustrate the experimental procedure. One of the three tasks focused on the distinctive role assigned to syntactic and semantic information in the following way: (1) The first arrangement type der Hase ¡schießt ¡den Jäger (the hare/shoots ¡the hunter) is syntactically adequate in German. The initial noun phrase der Hase which is in the nominative case functions as the syntactic subject. The second noun phrase den Jäger follows the verb, is in the accusative and serves as the direct object. But semantic information about hunting which is represented in ILRRR with the lexical items hunter, shoot and hare makes the meaning of this utterance seem odd. (2) In the second arrangement type den Jäger¡schießt¡der Hase the ordering is adequate according to the semantic information represented in ILRRR: Jäger (hunter) can be assigned the role of the agent, whereas Hase {hare) can be taken in the role of the victim. But there is a striking conflict with the syntactic information, because den Jäger which occurs in the common position of the syntactic subject, is morphosyntactically marked as the syntactic object. The noun phrase der Hase which is placed in the common position of the direct object is morphosyntactically signified as the syntactic subject. The aphasics were neither required to speak aloud nor to write. They only had to place the three cards in the order they judged to be the best. I consider here only the main results which could be observed mutatis mutandis for the Broca's aphasics: 52% arranged den Jäger schießt der Hase-, 33% gave the ordering den Jäger der Hase schießt-, 11 % decided on the right syntactic order der Hase schießt den Jäger, 2% took the order schießt der Hase den Jäger and 2% preferred schießt den Jäger der Hase. Though the example treated here is not fully representative, because it is only one of the 30 simple active declaratives, it provides sufficient illustration that inferencing is involved in the way Broca's aphasics arrange the cards. The fact that 85% ordered the noun phrase containing Jäger {hunter) in the first position is due to their application of ILRRR-related inferences: Jäger (hunter) is more salient to the action of shooting when it is in front position. (As will be seen later on, the cover term 'ILRRRrelated inferences' refers to those discourse-directed inferences — ILRRR inferences, semantic-logical inferences and action-oriented inferences — which have the common characteristic that they relate to the semantic information of ILRRR [VI, § 8].) But there is no dissociation between semantic ILRRR information and the way it is used in syntactic organization. The aboutness of the declarative on the shooting action is signified first and foremost by the syntactic subject. The syntactic constituent functioning as the syntactic subject most frequently

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occupies the front position in simple active declaratives. I presume that knowledge about these functional and structural properties of declaratives to a large extent underlies the inferential processes leading to the 85% accuracy in ordering the noun phrase containing Jäger. This presumption is indirectly confirmed by the following side-effect of the SOT experiment. Though not asked to do so, some Broca's aphasics read the utterance aloud spontaneously. But then they completely changed the syntactic information provided producing der Jäger schießt den Hasen, which in fact corresponds to the rules of German syntax. This spontaneous correction of the misleading printed material as well as the arrangement of what goes together best requires not only knowledge of the rules of syntax but invokes inferential processes which are based on that knowledge and which interact with ILRRR-related inferences. 2.5.2. On ordering single words § 7 Since Broca's aphasics are disordered in their use of articles it might be argued that presenting them with well-formed phrases, like den Jäger and der Hase, as in the SOT experiment, has a facilitating effect on their performances. Moreover, it might be regretted that the SOT experiment does not provide us with any insight into the problem of how aphasics deal with the information of different grammatical categories, such as articles, nouns and verbs. It might also be deplored that the SOT experiment does not teach us anything about the ways in which aphasics handle separate inflected forms, etc. Accordingly, a reasonable objection would be that the above results of the SOT experiment lend insufficient support to the role I hypothetically assign to inferences. Granting this objection, let us then take a look at another kind of experimental paradigm which focuses on single words. In the so-called 'sentence anagram task' used by Caramazza, e. a. (1981) separate syntactic elements like it, to, the, gave, the, boy and dog were each presented on a card to Broca's aphasics and had to be arranged in a wellformed utterance. The target sentence was the boy gave it to the dog. Without offering any syntactic cue, the authors got the following results from one Broca's aphasic: (11) Boy gave dog The to the it The boy gave dog To the it The it boy gave dog To the The it boy gave the to dog (Caramazza, e. a., 1981, 340)

2.6. Inferences based on the rules of syntactic ordering

67

After presenting the syntactic cue The boy gave, the experimenters obtained the following ordering from the same patient: (12) The boy gave the dog to it (Caramazza, e. a., 1981, 340)

Here, one may ask the following question: why could the single syntactic elements not be ordered in correspondence with the structural and functional properties of the target utterance? The answer is that solving the positional problems of syntactic material does not only involve the question of 'What next?' but also requires many inferential processes which are based on knowledge of syntax and which interact with ILRRR-related inferences. Since syntactic processing (together with the inferences involved) is disordered in Broca's aphasia the interaction with semantic processing and with ILRRRrelated inferences suffers too. When I summarize the main streams of thought which characterize the aforementioned SOT and anagram tasks I claim that they are concerned with problem solving activities of a very specific type. The aphasics have to make use of constructive thinking processes which are based, amongst other things, on knowledge of the rules of syntax. Roughly speaking, these thinking processes consist in constructing hypotheses which should contribute to solving the problem of how a syntactic constituent is related in its position to one or more other syntactic constituents. It would, however, be an illusion to believe that the aphasics' syntactic processing is not connected with other processing stages and that their thinking processes do not go beyond the limits of syntax. However, despite the interconnections of the processing stages and the blurred limits of syntax, one should not desist from studying syntactic processing in isolation. Because I have shown in [II, § 3] that several practical reasons of research may be adduced for isolating syntactic processing and syntax from other levels/stages of verbal comprehension, I shall deal separately with the thinking processes which are based on the knowledge of the rules of syntax. The following paragraphs show that these thinking processes allow human beings to deal with syntactic ordering [II, § 8], to complement syntactic information [II, § 9] and to solve the problems of syntactic ambiguity [II, § 10]. In the final part of this chapter, I demonstrate that the inferences which make syntactic processing possible must interact with those inferences which are involved in other levels/stages of language processing [II, § 11],

2.6. Inferences based on the rules of syntactic ordering § 8 One may presume that syntactic ordering is the most important syntactic means on which to base syntactic inferences. This presumption is confirmed by comparing dog bites man with man bites dog or by confronting you have enough

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Chapter two: On syntactic inferencing

money with have you enough money. It is also confirmed in Carroll's ways of using language as a vehicle for play as in "Do cats eat bats}" vs. "Do bats eat cats?" or in "/ see what I eat" vs. "I eat what I see", etc. (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, p. 28, 95). In such utterances, the linear order is the main basis for inferring the differences in meaning (Fry, 1977, 9). Sometimes the specific term 'linear order' is replaced by the general notion of 'grammatical structure' (for example in Lyons, 1981, 23). Syntactic ordering does not always correspond to fact ordering (van Dijk, 1980 a, 36). However, it may, in most cases, have clear effects on identifying the chronological order, on finding out the causal connections in the chain of actions, on reconstructing the logical relations and on establishing other inferential links, such as those which concern the information structure of the given-new/topic-comment/theme-rheme entities, etc. (Brown, Yule, 1983). Even when some syntactic indicators are missing, human receivers will still try to base their interpretation on a presumed implicit syntactic ordering. This can be seen in (13) where syntactic information is left out. Nonetheless, it is possible to rely on the linear order (grammatical structure) of the syntactic constituents to fill the gaps. (13) A housewife with a high sense of duty. A perpetuum mobile. Insufficient appreciation.

In general, the role of linear ordering cannot be emphasized enough when problem solving activities must apply to graphemic material. This view can be illustrated by two comparable simple problems relating to arithmetic and English grammar respectively. (14) Given the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and the syntactic operating devices + , —, x , (,). Combine these data in such a way that each number is used once and that the final result equals 4. (15) Given the distorted English content words and function words G. VE, T., SH., .T, H. M in which the points stand for deleted letters. Repair the distortions and with the repaired words construct a well-organized English utterance.

The common problem-solving feature in (14) and (15) is that the human receiver must have recourse to the pertinent knowledge resources to set her/ his inferential heuristics to work. But, in searching for a solution, one may feel that, if taken on their own, these pertinent knowledge resources are not sufficient. They only allow for a reproduction of what one knows about arithmetic and English grammar. In fact, there is also a strong need for productive thinking. To put it differently, no problem solving of (14) and (15) is possible without making inferences. Let me now remind the reader of what I stated in [I, § 3]: a human receiver makes inferences from the very moment that (s)he identifies a particular element of the set of information parts {il5 . . . . , in} and relates it to another particular element of the set of information parts {ji, . . . . , jn}. In solving problem (14), one must start by identifying a particular element of the set of given numbers and by relating it to a particular element of the

2.7. On pure thought syntax

69

set of syntactic devices +, —, x , (,), and continue to find the appropriate linear order until the final result is achieved. In (15), one must begin by identifying a particular element of the set of given letters and by relating it to a particular element of the set of words such as GIVE, TO, SHE, IT, HIM. Then, one must relate the repaired words to the set of syntactic order rules of English and continue until one arrives at a syntactically organized utterance. With respect to (14) and (15), there is conclusive evidence that the identifying and relating operations must take into account the severe constraints of linear ordering. Or to put it in terms of my inferential framework: the rules of syntactic ordering are probably the most important means on which to base syntactic inferences. In addition, syntactic ordering reaches further than the realms of syntax, as can be gathered from comparing the information of she married and got pregnant with the information of she got pregnant and married. 2.7. On pure thought syntax § 9 Syntactic information can to a certain extent be omitted in telegraphic style, holophrastic expressions, and the like. The main question which arises here is: how much of the syntactic information can be left out if comprehension is still to be preserved? Or, formulated otherwise, which syntactic information may be considered to be relevant and which syntactic information may be viewed as redundant? Such questions also relate to stylistics, in which it is claimed that prolixity should be avoided. They pertain to the psychology of language perception, in which it is held that there is much redundancy in the written form of language phenomena (Lindsay, Norman, 1977, 277—278; Baars, 1988). They are of importance to the study of meaning gaps (van de Velde, 1991). For the moment, let us confine our interests to the following question: can syntactic surface phenomena encountered in a human natural language HNL; be converted to a skeleton of single words? If such single words are taken to convey single thoughts, one may then ask whether a pure thought syntax is possible. These and similar questions must be considered if any serious search for cognitive universals in language processing is to be undertaken. In this respect, one must also face the great problem that every human natural language HNLj, HNLj, , HNLn has its own specific syntactic means and that the inferential processes which rely on them must differ accordingly. Since this is not the place for a discussion of the problems of cognitive universals and of different monolingual characteristics related to syntactic processing, let me simply stress what is significant for my present purposes. I summarize my views in the following hypothesis:

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H 4 Sufficient syntactic clues should be supplied in the surface discourse phenomena of a human natural language HNL, to make syntactic inferences and the inferences interacting with them work e f f i c i e n t l y and appropriately. This hypothesis mainly reflects the view that informative discourse (exchange) will not function efficiently and appropriately on the exclusive basis of a skeleton of lexical entities taken from ILRRR. In other words, the interpretative organi2ation condition [I, § 3] cannot be fulfilled for the different stages of discourse processing if the necessary syntactic clues are missing. So, in (investigating) discourse processing, one has to deal with all available information and with the full complexity of interacting inferential processes. However, there is one main exception which is treated below: discourse comprehension can still be achieved if referential connectedness and coherence can make up for the lack of sufficient syntactic clues in defective cohesion [VI, § 4]. In order to control H4 I selected some main lexical entities from discourse fragment (17). They were arranged in the linear sequence of (16) which preserved their positional relations in (17). All further syntactic clues are missing: (16) John girl friend garden party artist take care press frivolity fashion show horse bushes 'event structures' artist exhibition comments.

scandals riding outfit

(17) If John had not prevented his girl friend from going to this garden party she would have had to pose before the conceited artist who was the organizer. Since he was afraid that something unusual would happen he wanted to take care of her in a special way. Now she is glad not to have been involved in the scandals emanating from the party which have been enormously exaggerated by the local press. Some other girls have to pay for their frivolity. At this garden party things did not happen as would be expected at a stylish fashion show. A beautiful girl posed with her horse. The quadruped, however, was frightened and galloped through the bushes. The girl lost her riding outfit. Afterwards 'event structures' were organized. Some female guests wanted to impress the conceited artist still more than they had done before. The whole business became an astonishing exhibition of lack of style. Negative comments could not be avoided.

Examples (16) and (17) were presented to 22 graduate students. Firstly, the students were submitted to a reading examination of (16). They had to write down their interpretation of its telegraphic expressions on a standardized examination paper which they returned after 30 minutes. Nobody assigned an interpretation to (16) which completely corresponded to (17). Secondly, the same subjects were presented with (17). They could read it without any time limit. They also had to offer an interpretation of (17) on a standardized examination paper. Thirdly, each student received again his/her interpretation of (16) and was asked to decide whether the meaning (s)he assigned to (16) should remain

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unchanged. There was no time limit on the control and correction of the interpretations. The ultimate interpretations proposed for (16) were dependent on the information which the students gathered from reading (17) in the second phase. That is to say, all the answers indicated that the skeleton of lexical entities in (16) could only be comprehended sufficiently after reading the complete version (17). The following consequences drawn from the students' performance on (16) and (17) are relevant to the present discussion: (1) linear ordering of lexical material, though important, cannot always provide a sufficient basis for an appropriate meaning assignment; (2) lexical material should be syntactically combined in such a way that syntactic inferences can function as suitable instruments for identifying the syntactic constituents, for relating them to each other and for filling in the missing connections. A simple comparison may clarify my views: single words are like wagons of a train. Wagons are, without a doubt, necessary parts of a train. But to make them function as parts of a train they have to be combined with each other as well as with the engine. Their order with respect to the engine is not entirely random. Similarly, words of ILRRR are indispensable to informative discourse (exchange). But their functioning requires them to be wellordered and combined in accordance with the rules and organization principles of a human natural language HNLj. Syntax fulfils these requirements. Keeping in mind the railway metaphor, the students' interpretation of (17) also made in clear that human receivers normally operate with entities which are more complex than separate words. These more complex entities result from using the syntactic devices, rules and cues characteristic of a human natural language HNL r More complex syntactic entities may be denoted by terms like 'syntagm', 'word group', 'phrase', etc. In this book, I use the term 'syntactic constituent'. In many cases, a single lexical unit of ILRRR or a single syntactic element, like a proform (pro-noun, pro-verb, pro-adverb), can also function as (an equivalent of) a syntactic constituent [VI, §§ 2 — 3]. 2.8. On the inferential nature of syntactic

processing

§ 10 It is quite astonishing that within the fields of linguistics an almost exclusive interest in the notions of 'rule of grammar', 'rule of syntax', and the like, has existed for many decades. So, if linguistics failed to look carefully enough at the inferential elements involved in syntactic processing, then it should come as no surprise that aphasiology as well as many fields of applied linguistics have widely ignored the inferential aspects related to 'rules of syntax'. As I pointed out before and will point out again in further stages of

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this book, any thorough examination of syntactic phenomena has to face problems of inferencing. In order to make it clear that the 'How?' questions which are directed towards the information provided by the graphemic cotext [I, §§ 6 — 12] and by the syntactic cotext [II, §§2 — 9] can be answered only by taking into account the crucial role of inferences, let us look at the syntactic ambiguity which is characteristic of (18). (18)

THENUNSAIDTHEBALLERINATHINKSCURIOUSLYABOUTYOUNGMEN THEBALLERINASAIDTHENUNTHINKSCURIOUSLYABOUTYOUNGMEN

When the reader wants to identify the syntactic constituents in (18) and when (s)he aims at finding out how they are related to each other, (s)he might start with the following tentative steps in both the analytical and sequential processing strategies: (I)

Delimit the graphemic units by extracting the relevant features.

(II)

Group graphemic units together and use blank spaces according to the ILRRR information available about lexical entities.

(III)

Identify the parts of speech to which the graphemically grouped units belong.

(IV)

Examine what inflectional markers and what other grammatical cues are available.

(V)

Scrutinize the positional properties and relations of the graphemically grouped units.

(VI)

Bring the graphemically grouped units together into (more complex) syntactic constituents.

(VII)

Trace the surface structural relations of the (more complex) syntactic constituents.

(VIII) Find out what deeper relations hold within and between the (more complex) syntactic constituents. (IX)

Assign syntactic functions (subject, main clause, etc.) to the (more complex) syntactic constituents.

(X)

Construct hypotheses about the ILRRR characteristics of syntactically combined lexical entities.

The main character of (I) —(X) ist that of inferential heuristics. Though (I) —(X) and the connectable cognitive operations involved in inferential heuristics are not hierarchically ordered, their order is not completely free

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and their organization is not arbitrary. But I cannot dwell on this issue here (Dorner, 1979). I restrict myself to the following point: the inferential steps involved in solving the syntactic problems of (18) may give rise to the identification of the syntactic constituents as exemplified in (19) —(22). The single and double square brackets signify which syntactic constituents are respectively related to each other. Needless to say, (18) can be further analysed into syntactic constituents of a smaller size and their cotext-internal relations can also be identified. (19) [THE NUN SAID] [THE BALLERINA THINKS CURIOUSLY ABOUT YOUNG MEN] (20) [[THE NUN]] [SAID THE BALLERINA] [[THINKS CURIOUSLY ABOUT YOUNG MEN]] (21) [THE BALLERINA SAID] [THE NUN THINKS CURIOUSLY ABOUT YOUNG MEN] (22) [[THE BALLERINA]] [SAID THE NUN] [[THINKS CURIOUSLY ABOUT YOUNG MEN]]

Identifying the syntactic constituents as well as finding out which relations hold within them and between them is a matter of inferencing. In other words, the structural relations exemplified in (19) —(22) result from inferential processes which rely mainly on the strategic steps outlined in (I) —(X). Linguists used to the current methods of grammatical description and representation may object that the inferential approach to grammar/syntax which is advocated here is a mere reduction of everything linguistic to inferencing. Their critical attitudes may look justifiable, if one does not reflect sufficiently on how human beings manage to deal with syntactic information. If, however, one gives sufficient thought to human inferencing within the realms of syntactic processing, as I did above, then it becomes clear that such critical attitudes — if they should occur — would be strongly reminiscent of the time when the autonomy of (the concerns with) grammar was postulated.

2.9. On the interaction of syntactic

inferences

§11 Syntactic inferences cannot work on their own. Depending on the problems at hand they have to take into account information identified by means of other kinds of inference. That is to say that in normal comprehension syntactic inferences need continuous interaction with ILRRR inferences, semantic-logical inferences, and action-oriented inferences. In the following, I will consider seven examples to illustrate the need for this continuous interaction. Example (23) is concerned with normal language (processing), whereas example (24) focuses on disordered speech. Examples (25) and (26) can make it clear that graphemic decoding and other processing

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stages need interacting inferences as well. Example (29) shows that the interaction of syntactic inferences with other inferences is also necessary when graphemic decoding is related to phonological mediation [I, § 8; § 12]. Examples (31 a) — (32 b) are garden-path cotexts in which interaction between syntactic and semantic processing facilitates disambiguation/interpretation. Examples (33) — (34) illustrate that differences in surface syntactic organization correlate with differences in semantic/pragmatic organization, and therefore require interacting inferences. (23) M A R Y SAID THE TOPLESS L A D Y IS AMISS. SHE DID NOT MISS ANYTHING AT ALL. WHAT TOP IS TO BE MISSED IN ORDER TO BE TOPLESS?

This example typed in upper-case letters was presented on a standardized examination paper to twenty-two graduate students. They were asked to read the text and to state the main interpretative organization conditions [I, § 3] which they felt should be satisfied in order to interpret (23) adequately. From their answers it became clear that syntactic inferences must cooperate with inferences which rely on semantic ILRRR information in order to construct meaningful discourse-internal links between TOP, TOPLESS, AMISS, MISS, and TO BE MISSED.

Regardless of the nature of the information needed to supplement the information of the syntactic cotext, all students agreed that syntactic inferences play an important role in identifying the syntactic constituents, in finding out how they are related to each other and in discerning what syntactic functions have to be assigned to them. So, for example, they all agreed that it was necessary, in the first utterance of (23), to answer typical syntactic questions such as: what is the main clause? What is the subject of the main clause? Is MARY SAID the main clause? Or is THE TOPLESS LADY SAID

the main clause? What is the subordinate clause? What is the subject of the subordinate clause? However important the syntactic inferences in the discernment of discourseinternal links, they cannot function on their own and for their own sake. The next example, displaying the characteristic disorders of aphasia, may also serve the purpose of making this view acceptable: (24) I have one or more of them. It's a ... I like them. It must be over there in the ... by the ... but it's not. My ... also made one for some ... that he had been with in the ... as a ... it was before he had his ... most of them are like that. They can also be had from the ... a man has them, many of them, but a new one would be even more of a ... Did you have one when you were with them? You said that you had one from the time that you were at ... No, if that were so, you could not have made so much ... at it all these years. Even then it's not the first new one that I must have been through. (Marshall, 1977, 144)

In line with the strategic steps (I) —(X) of [II, § 10], it is, amongst other things, possible to find out that there are open places in the syntactic surface form of the separate utterances of (24). These open places must be filled with appropriate speech categories. To do so, receivers must take into account the syntactic cotext surrounding the open places.

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75

Syntactic inferences must help receivers to discern that the open places are preceded by definite/indefinite articles, possessive pronouns, adjectival elements, and a preposition. It may then be inferred syntactically that the fillers of the open places must have the structural and functional properties of nouns, noun phrases or their syntactic equivalents. Only with so much ... are there other possibilities left in (24) because so much may also be followed by a preposition {of ...., for ) or by a conjunction (as he did ). Needless to say, these syntactic inferences are unsteady ground on which to base the interpretation of (24). Much more is needed to grasp the local meanings of the adjacent utterances and to arrive at a global interpretation of (24). Because the open places are not filled with the appropriate meanings of lexical material, there is a grievous obstacle to work out how local meanings might contribute to the global meaning of (24) and vice versa. In view of the above considerations, I surmise that syntactic inferences contribute to the recognition of local forms of syntactic organization in (24). But syntactic inferences help us also to see that there is no global grammatical organization (or cohesion [VI, § 4]) in (24). In addition, I conjecture that the relevant semantic connections between the single utterances of (24) are obscured and that there is therefore no way of constructing coherence for (24). As a control of these surmises, I presented twenty-nine graduate students with (24) as a reading comprehension task. They were asked to identify the local meanings/meaning connections of (24) and to write down their global interpretation of (24) on a standardized examination paper. No time limits were imposed. From their answers it became apparent that (24) displays some clues of referential connectedness [VI, §§2—3] in the use of pronouns ( / . . . . my, he his, you you) and that small fragments, if taken on their own, are syntactically organized. But it also became clear that (24) lacks cohesion [VI, § 4], that it is impossible to construct global coherence [VII, § 3] and that one cannot come up with a justified interpretation of (24). From the preceding discussion of (23) and (24) it may be concluded that the predominant or exclusive reliance on syntactic inferences is an unsatisfactory means of constructing coherence. Admittedly, one may object that the lack of global coherence in (24) is due to the fact that (24) is a somewhat longer cotext, for which receivers need much more information than when they interpret a shorter cotext. But what if the inferential heuristic steps (I) —(X) are to apply only to very short cotexts such as (25) and (26)? (25) ORE STABIT FORTIS ARARE PLACET ORE STAT (26) PRSVRYPRFCTMN VRKPTHSPRCPTSTN

The conclusions will be similar to those drawn from the discussion of (23) and (24). To make any receiver see that (25) is an English utterance, syntactic

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inferences must closely co-operate with ILRRR-related inferences. Only then can the problem be solved of how the available graphemic information must be re-spaced to yield (27) [VIII, § 5] (van de Velde, 1988 e): (27) O REST A BIT FOR 'TIS A RARE PLACE TO REST AT

A similar consequence can be drawn from dealing with the graphemic material of (26). To find out that all vowels are missing in (26), which vowels must be inserted and where they must be added, syntactic inferences must interact intimately with the inferences which have recourse to ILRRR information. The result of such an intimate interaction is presented in (28) (van de Velde, 1988 e): (28) PERSEVERE Y E PERFECT MEN EVER KEEP THESE PRECEPTS TEN

From a discussion of (23) —(28) it can be concluded that the merging of form and meaning, as it occurs in cotexts of human natural language, can be disclosed when the different inferential processing stages involved interpenetrate each other. This conclusion is strongly substantiated by considering cotext (29). (29) A Y S K R E E M Y O O S K R E E M W E Y A L S K R E E M F R A Y S K R E E M

In order to make the processing steps (I) — (X) of inferential heuristics [II, §10] work appropriately, it is necessary first of all to relate the phonological elements/groups of (29) to graphemic units. However, relating the phonological elements/groups of (29) to recognizable graphemic units of English (orthography) is dependent on information which is to be gathered from other processing stages (Baars, 1988, 93 — 95). It is only possible to gather this information from other processing stages if the different inferences involved in these processing stages interact. If they interact, then the reorganized version (30) results. (30) I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream

As a sixth piece of evidence for the hypothesis that the interaction of syntactic and semantic inferencing is necessary, let us compare garden-path cotexts, such as (31 a) —(32 b): (31 a) The defendant examined by the lawyer turned out to be unreliable. (31 b) The evidence examined by the lawyer turned out to be unreliable. (32 a) The spy saw the cop with binoculars but the cop didn't see him. (32 b) The spy saw the cop with a revolver but the cop didn't see him.

If we sequentially process (31 a) as far as the focal point examined, then examined can be identified as an inflected verb in the past tense or as a past participle [II, § 2], In (31 b) semantic ILRRR information becomes more important than in (31 a) in co-operating with syntactic information: it is possible to recognize that examined is a past participle only when semantic

2.10. Summary

77

inferencing based on the semantic ILRRR information about evidence interacts with syntactic inferencing. In (32 a), the prepositional phrase with binoculars can be a noun phrase modifier of the cop or it can have the adverbial function of denoting the instrument relating to saw. In (32 b), the receiver can assign the function of a noun phrase modifier to with a revolver only when syntactic inferencing interacts with semantic inferencing (see also Strohner, 1990, 172—179 and further references therein). As a final piece of evidence for the hypothesis that syntactic inferencing, semantic inferencing and action-oriented inferencing must interact, I adduce examples (33) —(34). By comparing (33) with (34) we can discern that (33) is a message (with new information) about the man, whereas (34) is a statement about the cat. Now we can ask: who was the agent? Who was the victim? Did the sharp teeth belong to the agent or to the victim? The answers to these questions and the discernment of the differences in meaning and communicative function between (33) and (34) are dependent on the interaction of syntactic inferencing with semantic inferencing and action-oriented inferencing. (33) It was the man with the sharp teeth who was bitten by the cat. (34) The cat bit the man with the sharp teeth.

Let us leave the realm of syntactic inferencing by attending to the following unusual consideration: "Nothing is less likely to appeal to young women than the opinions of old men on the pill" (Gowers, 1985, 306). Is on the pill syntactically related with old men or with opinions? In what ways is on the pill semantically connected with young women ? Why do opinions of old men on the pill not appeal to young women? Answers to these questions cannot be given if different kinds of inference do not co-operate closely enough.

2.10. Summary § 12 The second chapter defended the view that the user of human natural language not only needs knowledge of grammar rules but that (s)he also needs thinking processes which are based on this knowledge. These thinking processes are syntactic inferences when they have to solve the problems of how grammatical elements can be identified and how they relate to each other. In the first stage, it was demonstrated that syntactic processing can be examined on its own. It was then shown how the syntactic cotext relates to the graphemic cotext and vice versa. In the subsequent stages, I hypothesized that the identification of linear order is, to a great extent, dependent on syntactic inferences. The criterional evidence for this hypothesis was derived from the re-interpretation of neu-

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rolinguistic studies. Here, I dealt with syntactic disorders which are characteristic of Broca's aphasia. The importance of syntactic inferences was also highlighted in other respects: for instance, I addressed the issue of whether pure thought syntax can be realized and whether the identification of deeper syntactic relations can take place without having recourse to syntactic inferences. In the final part, I was also able to show that identifying the discourseinternal relations is not only a matter of syntactic inferences. My brief treatment of the examples (23) —(34) allowed me provisionally to conclude that syntactic inferences must co-operate with inferences which have recourse to semantic ILRRR information. The following chapter will be devoted to a further clarification of this conclusion.

CHAPTER THREE

On semantic inferencing 3.1.

Introduction

§ 1 The things in the outer world (of actualized language) which are combined with one another are not only governed by the organization principles/rules of syntax, their combinations are also determined by the meanings of the separate syntactic constituents [II, § 4]. For instance, the cotext the x jed the then, the £ wed the x is a combination of syntactic constituents. Instead of nouns we find the variables x and whereas the position of the main verbs is taken by the variablesy and w. The grammatical relations holding between these variables are sufficiently specified/marked to make the overall syntactic organization recognizable. However, the lexical meanings of the variables are not sufficiently specified/marked to allow the receiver to identify the other levels/forms of organization. The present chapter is concerned with the levels/forms of organization which are determined by lexical meanings [III, §§3 — 7, § 9]. In so doing, it complements the main strands of thought introduced in the foregoing chapters. As the reader will remember, the 'How?', 'What?' and 'Where?' questions treated in the previous chapters were exclusively directed towards the graphemic cotext and the syntactic cotext. I have demonstrated that the interpretative reception of written texts involves graphemic decoding as well as syntactic processing. However, there is much more to discourse processing than the recognition of letters/letter strings/words/phrases, etc. and than the identification of syntactic constituents/relations/functions. The plausibility of this point may be demonstrated by considering the interpretative reception of examples (1) and (2): (1) ... The mysterious nun, a handsome woman, dressed in the clothes of Saint-Amour, looked at the sphinx-like matron. (2) She seemed to enjoy the mystic immobilism of the devout women in Memling's paintings.

If (1) and (2) are to be interpreted coherently, the identification of the connections between (1) and (2) must run via the referring function of the letter string/syntactic constituent she at the beginning of (2) (Bosch, 1983; 1989; Gernsbacher, 1990, 108 — 161 and further references therein). That is,

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the coherence of (1) —(2) is dependent on the referential connectedness of (1) and (2) [VI, §§ 2 - 3 ] , There is, however, referential ambiguity/vagueness/polyinterpretability in (1) —(2) in the sense that more than one referential interconnection may be ascribed to (1) —(2). For the moment, let us assume that what is said in (1) about the mysterious nun applies also to she in the utterance (2). If so, one may hold the view that the referential connectedness of (1) —(2) is due to the fact that the predicates of (1) and (2) are assigned to one and the same argument [IV, § 6 ; VI, § § 2 - 8 ] , I presume that the syntactic constituent she can have at least five reference functions. Firstly, she can refer to the particular semantic information of the mysterious nun and to its more extensive information, as provided in the apposition a handsome woman and in the participial dressed in the clothes of SaintAmour. Secondly, she can refer to the sphinx-like matron. In both cases, the reader must practise a backward search for referential and semantic connections. In these two cases, referential connectedness between (1) and (2) may be assumed. Thirdly, she may refer to a noun/noun phrase not previously introduced in (1) but which can be identified in the utterances which follow (2). Then, the reader is forced to a forward search for the coreferential entities of she. Fourthly, she may refer to a noun/noun phrase which precedes the cotext of (1). In that case, backward inferencing is necessary. Fifthly, she may denote a female person who has nothing to do with the global semantic information carried along with (1) and its surrounding cotext. In these three cases, (1) and (2), if taken in isolation, do not provide pertinent indications to assume referential connectedness for (1) and (2). Consideration of the (co)referential problems of (1) and (2) makes it sufficiently clear that there is much more involved in comprehending adjacent utterances than the inferential activities of graphemic decoding and syntactic processing. There are a number of denotative meanings in (1) and (2) which are closely related to the letter string/syntactic constituent she. Their detection to a large extent codetermines the establishment of local coherence between (1) and (2). In (local) coherence and in referential connectedness, meaning and (co)reference should not be separated (van de Velde, 1989 b). This is particularly true when one attends specifically to the denotative meanings of language elements, as will be done in the present chapter and, incidentally, in the extensionalist accounts of the fourth and sixth chapter [IV, §§4—8; VI, 2 - 3 ] , Here, I would make the following points: the denotative meanings which are socioculturally determined or conventionalized in other ways, can be shared by the producer and the receiver. These denotative meanings can be part of the collective consciousness and of the individual's cognitive life. However, there are also meanings which — apart from being part of the individual's cognitive life — may belong to her/his affective life and/or to

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81

her/his conative life. This becomes apparent when considering the meanings of words such as beauty, honour, gratitude, morality, honesty, sincerity, respect, love, loyalty, freedom, fairness, and so on. These words carry an emotional load along with them which is representative of an individual's affective life. Moreover, they have connotations which may connect with a person's value systems, desires, wishes, longings, goals, drives, and, as such, are typical of her/his conative life. Meanings which belong specifically and exclusively to the affective, conative and cognitive life of one individual are person-internal meanings. For instance, in "beauty is truth, truth beauty" John Keats conveyed complex constellations of his person-internal meanings concerning the words beauty and truth. These person-internal meanings cannot be completely and precisely identified. Nor can they be fully shared. Nonetheless, they may incidentally allow us to have very limited access to the individual's ego-consciousness. But this very limited access does not diminish the fact that large areas of her/his egoconsciousness remain impenetrable. In this respect, it must be noted that strictly person-internal meanings do not conform to the conception of man as a machine with a specifiable, wellorganized memory store. As will be seen later [III, § 8 ; VII, §§2 — 8], the human inner psychic life is not impartial. Moreover, semantic memory is not always a dispassionate store of meanings, while interpretation, which relates to inner psychic life, is not a set of neutral activities/results. This chapter (and chapters four to six) are predominantly concerned with the denotative meanings which are socioculturally conventionalized and, as such, can be shared by members of the same linguistic community (and by those who have learned the language of that community). In other words, attention is focused on the denotative meanings of cognitive life and on their conceptual organization. The person-internal meanings of affective and conative life are considered only incidentally. They receive more attention in chapter seven. The central problems of the present chapter are: how can the interpretative organization condition be fulfilled for the semantic(-logical) cotext [I, § 3]? How is the necessary information to be derived from the semantic(-logical) cotext? How is the derived information to be connected with other co(n)textual data? The solutions proposed in the present chapter and in chapter four converge in the hypothetical view that two main kinds of inference are needed to deal with the interpretative organization condition, to derive information from the semantic(-logical) cotext, and to connect co(n)textual data: ILRRR inferences and semantic-logical inferences. ILRRR inferences are concerned with the meaning characteristics of lexical entities of ILRRR. Semantic-logical inferences pertain, amongst other things, to the underlying propositions of discourse.

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Semantic-logical processing requires that the meaning characteristics of arguments and predicates can be discerned. For this goal semantic ILRRR information is needed. That is the reason why semantic ILRRR information and ILRRR inferences are treated in this chapter before attention is directed in the next chapter to semantic-logical inferences.

3.2. On singling out semantic

processing

§ 2 In this section, I consider some practical reasons of research which may support the decision to examine semantic processing separately. Concomitantly, the adduced indications (a) —(d) may sustain the claim that it is important to isolate and to study thoroughly the role which ILRRR inferences play in semantic processing. a) Aphasic patients with temporal lesions, especially Wernicke's aphasics, show striking forms of comprehension impairment and low informativeness in language production. Their (re)construction of semantic organization is selectively impaired in a way which contrasts markedly with frontal lesion aphasics, whose semantic processing abilities are much better preserved. b) Another semantic impairment commonly called 'amnesic aphasia' ('nominal aphasia' or 'anomia') relates exclusively to the semantic and referential features of the patients' internal lexicon. These semantic disorders concern the dyadic links word-percept, word-concept, word-referent, and the like. c) In schizophrenia, separate impairments of semantic abilities, thought disorders, and disturbances in denotation are predominant. Discourse failures displayed by schizophrenics do not always spring from their disorders in the use of syntactic organization principles/rules. On the contrary, in most cases, they produce separate utterances with a reasonable degree of syntactic organization (van de Velde, 1992 b). d) One can also find cases where psychotic children, adolescents and adults create neologisms. The new words they bring into existence take on a semantic and referential significance which is completely different from the language of their social environment (Vetter, 1969, 181 — 183; Scharfetter, 1978, 189-190; Shapiro, 1979, 135-138). In these cases, however, syntax is not affected by the neologistic tendencies. Since indications (a) —(d) relate in different ways to the functioning of semantic ILRRR information, it is worthwhile considering in more detail how semantic ILRRR information itself can be characterized. The characterization of semantic ILRRR information is an extremely complex task. Throughout intellectual history, there has always been a funda-

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mental philosophical problem in characterizing 'what it means to know the meanings of language phenomena'. Recent developments in a number of semiotic disciplines have provided us with more sophisticated tools to improve our ability to see 'what it means to know the meanings of language phenomena'. They have made it clear that knowledge of the meanings of language phenomena may include acquaintance/familiarity with the outer/inner world, may involve the assignment of truth values, may concern the logical form of sentence types/utterances, may be dependent on the situations in which language phenomena occur, may relate to possible worlds, etc. For instance, when a person knows the meanings of rebirth, resurrection, reincarnation, and the like, (s)he is familiar with data of the outer/inner world. This knowledge may be involved in the identification of the logical form of This man is the reincarnation of Bertrand Russell and in the assignment of a truth value to its propositional content. This knowledge may also be concerned with situations in which the words rebirth, resurrection and reincarnation occur. It may relate to possible worlds of a person's dreams [VIII, § 2], and so on. The characterization of the knowledge of what these words mean requires the (re)construction of cognitive models in which, inter alia, knowledge of language and knowledge of the reference domains of language are represented in an organized form. However, the knowledge of the meaning of rebirth, resurrection and reincarnation reaches much further than any cognitive model can represent. It may relate to an individual's striving for an intellectual "non omnis moriar". It may concern Christ's words "/ am the resurrection, and the life" (St. John, 11, 25). As such, it may pertain to a person's religious belief in life after death, in Christ's Resurrection and Ascension, in resurrection at the last day (St. John, 11, 24), etc. It may involve conceptions of time in which an entity can have an endless duration or an indefinitely continued existence. It may raise the problem of whether the person's cognitive models concerning rebirth, resurrection and reincarnation are correct [VIII, §§8 — 9]. This problem is not chimerical in view of the fact that many people seem to indulge/take refuge in day-dreaming, wishful thinking, fantasy thinking, illusions about the conditio humana, errors about biological facts, misconceptions about time, unjustified claims about eternal life/eternity, etc. Whatever proposals of semantics, cognitive psychology or artificial intelligence are selected for the characterization of 'what it means to know the meanings of language phenomena', they will be nothing more than mere approximations to the content of actualized language and to the organized outlines of semantic memory. These approximations will never be rich enough to deal with the wealth of meanings which belong to the ego-consciousness of the normal adult language user. The characterization of ILRRR information proposed in the following sections is subject to such restrictions.

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3.3. On ILRRR

information

§ 3 When people read verbal texts they need knowledge of the content words and of the function words (see III, § 7 for this distinction). This knowledge is stored in their mental lexicon (or internal lexicon). A number of views about this knowledge have been proposed (van de Velde, 1986 b; Aitchison, 1987; Marslen-Wilson, 1989 and references therein). In view of the foregoing treatment, let me emphasize that this knowledge concerns, first of all, the outer form of the words: ILRRR information of a literate person includes the knowledge of spelling. Under normal circumstances, adequate alphabetical training will cause letters and letter combinations used in the words of a human natural language HNL, to become part of an individual's memory. That is to say that for literate people knowing a word W; in a human natural language HNL, encompasses the ability to spell it. In current psycholinguistic literature, it is commonly accepted that the internal lexicon for a human natural language HNL, includes knowledge of how graphemic characteristics relate to single words and to their (morpho)phonological patterns. This graphemic information, however, is only a small part of the total information which human memory receives from the many learning processes involved in acquiring knowledge of a human natural language HNL,. To illustrate this, let me simply point to five domains of knowledge which, taken together or separately, are available when a person has learned a word W;: (1) Knowing a word w, may enclose the mental disposition to use appropriately the perceptual, conceptual and emotional information which w, carries along with it; (2) Knowing a word w, may include the ability to assess and to use appropriately the phonetic, phonological, graphemic, morphological, morphosyntactic and syntactic characteristics that belong to Wjj (3) Knowing a word w, may pertain to its pragmatic aspects. Here, it may encompass the capacity to apply information about w, in accordance with tacit or explicit agreements, communicative maxims, sociocultural conventions, intentions, reasons, motives of speech acts, and the like. (4) Knowing a word w, may evoke the overall organization of the internal lexicon so that the interconnections with different cognitive domains can be activated when w, is presented. Because ILRRR includes many cognitive models, the meanings of one word may belong to different cognitive models. For instance, the meanings of rebirth may belong to the cognitive models of time, l i f e , (spiritualJ regeneration, motherhood, heredity, Renaissance, Hinduism, etc.

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(5) Knowing a word w¡ which belongs to a human natural language HNL¡ is conditional on having at one's disposal the standard semantic information shared by normal, fluent users of that human natural language HNL¡. No matter how extensive the five aforementioned domains of knowledge are (see also Fillmore, 1985; Petófi, 1985), they cannot constitute a complete picture of a person's memory for verbal material. In support of this view, I would refer to the immense range of meanings which may have been stored in memory with just one word, say mother. These may be meanings which centre around the concept of having given birth to at least one child. They may be meanings which concern the social roles of a female person who nurtures and raises at least one child. They may be meanings connected with genealogy in that the mother is seen as the closest female ancestor. They may be meanings which are related to one's knowledge of the marital system in which the mother can be no one other than the wife of the father (Lakoff, 1987; 74 ff). They may be meanings of a strictly affective nature. They may be meanings which pertain to a person's value systems, preferences, longings, desires, etc. and relate deeply to her/his conative life. Knowledge of the word mother may also be part of one's knowledge of matriarchal systems. It may concern the connotative meanings of the maternal womb which receive much attention in psychiatry and psychopathology. It may extend to non-literal meanings, as is the case in the utterances philosophy is the mother of all sciences and prudence is the mother of wisdom. Examination of the information about the word mother, as it is stored in memory, reveals that knowledge of language meanings is not to be separated from knowledge of reality. The different knowledge domains of the internal lexicon mentioned in (1) —(5) have previously been denoted by the acronym ILRRR [I, §§ 1—5]. In what follows, this acronym is used as shorthand for the individual memory store of those meanings which are/can be lexicalized. In this respect, I do not conceive of the internal lexicon as a part which has a specific function within a theory of grammar/linguistic competence. The internal lexicon is seen here as that part of an individual's ego-consciousness which includes, inter alia, knowledge of the meanings of words/expressions, knowledge of person-internal/person-external reality as well as knowledge of the relations between all these kinds of knowledge. More specifically, the internal lexicon is considered here to be the cognitively reflected representation of reality. To meet the reader's need for clarity, the notion of 'reality' and the attribute 'cognitively reflected' should receive elementary elucidation. This elucidation is important. It allows me to point to some characteristics of man's semantic memory and of his thinking which differ from machine memory and from the ways in which machines think [I, § 5]. As to reality, it has innumerable facets and there are innumerable interpretations of them. Interpretations of facets of reality are also parts of reality.

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That is, in a non-isolationist conception, reality is to be seen as the whole of the person-internal world and the person-external world. Man (with his egoconsciousness) is part of reality and reality is part of man [I, § 3]. Regarding the attribute 'cognitively reflected', it is clear that man's gift of thinking affords the possibilities of reflecting on the person-external world and on the person-internal world. His thinking is constitutive of and indispensable to the interaction of the person-external world with the personinternal world [I, § 3]. This thinking may be rational and/or religious in nature (van de Velde, 1991). It may also have characteristics of a non-rational and/or non-religious sort [IV, §§ 15—16]. To denote all the characteristics of human thinking which relate to ILRRR, I speak about its 'cognitively reflected' character. Reflecting on the person-internal world is self-reflection. For the purpose of self-reflection, man has the capacity to demarcate what is outside his egoconsciousness (i. e. the person-external world) from what is inside his egoconsciousness (i. e. his person-internal world). What is inside the ego-consciousness of the normal adult homo loquens is, to a great extent, concerned with ILRRR information. ILRRR information is, in several respects, the outcome of cognitively reflected activities. In addition, ILRRR information is also the basis for cognitively reflected activities. As such, ILRRR is not a static, but a dynamic part of man's egoconsciousness. The cognitively reflected character of ILRRR has two main aspects: firstly, person-external reality is reflected in cognition; secondly, in cognition man reflects on person-external reality. Inferences are intrinsic to both aspects. It is due to inferences that person-external reality and person-internal reality interact in ILRRR. In ILRRR, the normal individual has constructed cognitive models of the external world. These cognitive models may be connected in so-called webs/ networks. Within these cognitive models, (s)he may reflect on the external world and on its relations with the inner psychic world. These reflections may also concern the mental and phenomenal reality of language. When they pertain to the non-material world of language meanings they are immensely intricate. Regarding language meanings, the reflections may relate to the widest variety of domains: for instance, to the percepts and concepts which we have at our disposal when we know the meanings of angle [VIII, § 3], orchestra [VIII, § 6], etc.; to the roles/functions, etc. of objects denoted by nouns, such as hammer, flute, etc.; to the cause-effect relations of actions denoted by verbs, such as to stab, to praj, etc. Reflections on language meanings may also pertain to the inextricable interconnections which lexical entities have with the individual's affective life and with her/his conative life, as becomes apparent from the word association experiments first performed by Wundt and later by Jung for the purpose of psychodiagnostic assessment.

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In affective life, language meanings may relate to religious domains, in which the reflective mind may approximate to their spiritual richness or remain at a sceptical distance (van de Velde, 1991). Alternatively, (s)he may be misled by relying on non-appropriate ILRRR information about language meanings which relate to religious domains. Concomitantly, (s)he may be under the illusion of possessing valid and accurate knowledge about the meanings of particular words which relate to religious domains. For instance, a dipsomaniac who has reflected upon the meaningful elements of the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak may erroneously conclude that this cotext is to be interpreted as 'the vodka is all right, but the meat is not sufficiently cooked'. If (s)he is a French-speaking person, (s)he may have the illusion that it is to be translated as 'l'alcool est frelaté, mais la viande est molle'. Or (s)he may infer from this utterance that conative life is in conflict with bodily instincts. Or (s)he may draw the consequence that it is not enough to have good intentions, and so on. Undeniably, these reflections depend on the meanings which are identified in the spirit and in the flesh. The knowledge of these meanings can only be controlled for its validity and accuracy by considering the religious domains to which the words spirit and flesh refer. The meanings of words, such as spirit and flesh, are connected with the intricate relations between person-internal reality and person-external reality. It should come as no surprise that it is very difficult, if not impossible, for any computer to deal with these specific intricate relations. In this respect, there is a well-known anecdote about a computer programme of the fifties and early sixties which was developed to translate from English to Russian and then back. The English cotext was the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. The emerging retranslation read as follows: 'the vodka is good, but the meat is rotten' (Garnham, 1988, 2 6 - 2 7 ; Matlin, 1989, 270; Mérô, 1990, 3 3 - 3 4 ) . The wealth, diversity, flexibility and subtlety of the meanings which belong to ILRRR make it impossible to take ego-consciousness into account in a computer programme which is complete enough to serve as a replica of semantic memory and human interpretation (van de Velde, 1989 d; 1991 and further references therein). ILRRR is not a set of constant cognitive models. Any ILRRR has its own temporality, because its storage/organization of information and its (critical) (self-)reflection take place in the course of time. In this regard, information may be added to the existing memory store; ILRRR may replace stored information by more appropriate knowledge data; ILRRR may reorganize the added/substituted data, and so on. For instance, after reading the pertinent passages in the New Testament (St. Matthew, 26, 41; St. Mark, 14, 38), the dipsomaniac may exchange her/his previous ILRRR information about spirit and flesh by knowledge which is incompatible with vodka and meat (or alcool and viande), because this knowledge relates to co(n)texts about Christ's agony and crucification. By reflecting in cognition on reality, each individual transforms reality. It is person-external reality in particular which is transformed in human reflec-

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tion. As will be seen later, transformations also occur in the individual's interpretation of verbal texts [VII, §7]. The results of these transformations are stored in memory. From these transformation results it can be seen that reality (including the reality of verbal texts) is being adapted to socioculturally determined and private facets of a person's cognitive models. Here, a very important point should be made: whatever transformations of reality a person's cognitive models (as they are represented in ILRRR) have brought about, these cognitive models still preserve certain kinds of organization. The following sections will be concerned with this organization. 3.4. On ILRRR

organisation

§ 4 In exploring the knowledge data of human memory which I denote by ILRRR, immense areas of research must be considered. Cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, neuropsychology, philosophy, semiotics, sociology, cultural anthropology, linguistics, and many other disciplines contribute in different ways to the view that these knowledge data have their own intrinsic organization and that this intrinsic organization is of a conceptual nature. In using the general concept of ILRRR, I take into account the multidisciplinary views on the conceptual organization of semantic information, as they appear from terms such as 'encyclopaedic knowledge', 'semantic memory', 'conceptual memory', 'lexical knowledge', 'thesaurus', 'data base', 'dictionary', 'encyclopaedia', 'commonsense/expert knowledge', 'lexical memory', 'subjective lexicon', 'knowledge of the world', 'common ground', 'shared knowledge', 'background assumptions', 'idealized cognitive model', and the like. Whatever views about semantic memory are defended, the following points need particular attention: any normal adult who has a sufficient mastery of English vocabulary can have a number of percepts which relate to the meanings of concrete nouns. For instance, let us consider a word such as seat. In being asked what seat means, the individual language user may have percepts which pertain to the observable characteristics of a seat in an auditorium [IV, § 7], a seat in an office, a seat on the train, a seat in an aeroplane, and so on. But the individual language user can also have concepts which belong to her/his knowledge about the functions, the use, etc. of the denotata of the word seat. These concepts may concern situations of sitting down or of feeling more comfortable or of filling a room with furniture, etc. As noted before, we may cognitively reflect on (the percepts and concepts of) a word, such as seat, and on many other (related) words. Then, we may realize that a content word "is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged, it is a skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used", as Oliver Wendell Holmes noted pointedly (cited from Kagan, 1989, front page).

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Knowing the meanings of seat and reflecting on them may require, first of all, that one has information which relates to spatial percepts and concepts. This information is gathered around/in percept-concept conglomerates. In this connection, the term 'concept' denotes the intension (or sense) of a word, whereas the term 'percept' has to do (but is not to be equated) with the extralinguistic correlate (or referent, denotatum or extension) of a word. The percept-concept conglomerates can constitute the meaning(s) of a word (see also Petofi, 1985 and references therein). The percept-concept conglomerates are part of person-internal reality, as represented in the individual's ego-consciousness. All knowledge states which concern these percept-concept conglomerates emerge from the interaction between ego-consciousness and person-external reality. In this interaction, man strives to organize what he receives and stores. Most studies on manmachine analogies make this ability and need for organization a central issue. (Evens, 1988; Garnham, 1988 and further references therein). In these views on the organization of stored meanings, a word such as seat can be related to the percept-concept conglomerates which concern chair, stool, bench, throne, etc. It may be connected with percept-concept conglomerates about travelling by means of a vehicle, a train or an aeroplane in which seating accomodation is provided. Or it may pertain to a place where something is located or to a manner of sitting, etc. The totality of this information has particular patterns of organization. Recent multidisciplinary studies which are concerned with the representation of knowledge shed light on the ways in which human thinking provides tools for the conceptual organization of meaningful material (Klix, Hofmann, 1980; Wingfield, Byrnes, 1981; Graesser, 1981; Graesser, Clark, 1985; Sanford, Garrod, 1981; van de Velde, 1986b; Aitchison, 1987; Seegers, e. a., 1987, 51 ff; Marslen-Wilson, 1989; Graesser, Bower, 1990; Mero, 1990; Garnham, 1991). So, for example, some models of human memory represent meaningful material of memory by applying a number of logical inclusion relations. Other proposals use the inferential principle of defining sets by means of their properties. Thus, they construct conceptual categories on the basis of their shared semantic features. Still other proposals represent meaningful material of memory as propositional knowledge which is tied together by logical relations between predicates and arguments. Recent discussions about the tangled relationships between memory and human thinking have substituted the notion of 'category' by the notion of 'prototype' (Lakoff, 1987 and references therein). In fact, the various current conceptions of semantic memory did not inaugurate views on man and his organization of knowledge which went unnoticed in the history of human thought. On the contrary, there is a very long tradition of defining human knowledge in terms of conceptual organization (Eco, 1984, 46 — 86). It does not matter here in what ways the definitional systematization of knowledge developed over the past centuries.

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What is really relevant to the present discussion is that ancient philosophy as well as current research concerned with man-machine analogies, etc. suggest that human thinking has persistent effects on the conceptual organization of meaningful material in memory.

3.5. On the neuropsychological

evidence for ILRRR

organisation

§ 5 It is not realistic to conjecture that human thinking has persistent effects on the organization of meanings in memory if such a conjecture cannot be submitted to empirical control. Nor is it reasonable to hypothesize that inferences rely to a great extent on ILRRR information which is organized in memory if such a hypothesis cannot be substantiated by conclusive evidence. The two following sections address fields of research which support (main facets of) these two surmises. Let me first present some areas of neuropsychology which provide striking evidence for the persistent effects which inferential principles have on the organization of meaningful material. The neuropsychological studies rooted in the Russian tradition of reflexology led many scholars to a more inclusive view on man and semantic memory. In this respect, it is worthwhile referring to one of the most significant contributions (Luria, Vinogradova, 1959). According to both authors there is such a strong organization in the semantic connections of human memory that it affects the vascular component of the orienting reflex. Let me summarize some of the main stages of the experiments they designed: (1) In the first stage, ten normal children of 10 — 15 years were presented with different words. Auditory perception of these words provoked orienting reactions which could be observed both in the contraction of the left finger blood vessels and in the dilatation of the blood vessels in the left part of the skull near the temporal area. After perceiving 15 — 20 words, the subjects became habituated and the orienting reaction faded out. (2) In the second stage, the subjects were asked selectively to attend to the Russian word koschka ('cat') and to press a button with the right hand every time this signal word was presented. The transitional result was that koschka evoked both the motor reaction in the right hand and the vascular reaction in the left finger during 20 to 40 repetitions. (3) In the third stage, attention was directed to the question of whether words related in meaning to koschka would evoke a vascular reaction even in those cases where no motor reaction could be registrated. The main result was that words which had semantic connections with koschka like kotyonok ('kitten'), mysh ('mouse'), sobaka ('dog'), and %hivotnoye ('an-

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imal') provoked a clear vascular reaction, whereas motor reactions were completely absent. This last observation leads us back to the perception strategies for graphemic material which I discussed in [I, §§6 — 12]. Just as the inferential links, which are basic to letter and word recognition may remain below the level of awareness, there are also inferential interconnections within the semantic ILRRR data which do not reach the levels of human conscious thought. In what way are the Luria-Vinogradova findings on the vascular component of the orienting reflex significant for my presumption about the organization of ILRRR? They indicate that close semantic connections outweigh all other characteristics: neutral words unrelated in meaning to koschka as well as words which displayed only some phonetic resemblance to koschka evoked neither a motor reaction nor a vascular orienting reflex. These close semantic connections encompass potential coreference relations in the case of koschka and kotjonok. More importantly, category membership is involved for all words in the sense that koschka, kotjonok, mjsh and sobaka represent related subordinate concepts of the concept which is denoted by %hivotnoye. Lastly, conceptual characteristics based on situational knowledge are involved in the close bond between koschka, mjsh and sobaka. The following point is worth emphasizing: in defending a more inclusive view on man, language, behaviour, cognition and memory, Luria and Vinograndova were able to point out convincingly that the conceptual organization of human memory which I surmised to be the conceptual organization of ILRRR, has clear neuropsychological and neurophysiological correlations.

3.6. On the neurolinguistic evidence for ILRRR

organisation

§ 6 Another kind of evidential support for the conceptual organization of ILRRR may be derived from neurolinguistic research on aphasia. It has often been surmised that some types of aphasia, especially Wernicke's aphasia, may cause diffusion in the conceptual organization of ILRRR. This is reason enough to pose the following fundamental question: is aphasia at the same time a language disorder and a cognitive impairment? This question is highly controversial. Many answers which have been given thus far need further elaboration and experimental control. Regardless of the many uncertainties arising from ongoing disagreements, there are clear indications provided by recent research which suggest that cognitive and linguistic abilities are both impaired in the aphasics' ILRRR. But how far do these impairments go? Are they severe enough to disorder the whole conceptual organization of ILRRR?

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These questions cannot be dealt with in sufficient detail here. To do so, I would have to consider the fact that the aphasics' difficulties in retrieving words, colour terms or names may depend on a number of purely medical causes. Moreover, verbal factors, like word frequency, picturability of words, etc. may have a deep influence on the aphasics' word-finding difficulties. Finally, there are also purely psychological factors, like attention deficits, states of depression, fatigue, stress, and so on which may intervene in a thorough examination of the aphasics' ILRRR. Since an appropriate account of these and other determinants would lead me too far from the present discussion of my assumptions, I shall simply concentrate on those indications which reveal that aphasics display striking remnants of their previously acquired conceptual organization of ILRRR. (1) Naming tasks and related tests often offer indications that part of the conceptual organization is preserved in the aphasics' ILRRR. In many cases of anomia, the aphasic subject cannot name an object or a picture but will instead give a word belonging to the same category as the target word. Examples of such within-category errors are pear instead of apple, lemon instead of banana, sheep instead of goat, horse instead of cow, ankle instead of wrist (Whitaker, 1975; Weniger, e. a., 1977; Lesser, 1978; Stachowiak, 1979). These within-category errors lead me to surmise that the conceptual organization of meaningful material took place during the premorbid phases, that it was to a certain extent fulfilled along category lines and that the category arrangement was not completely lost in the aphasics' misnamings. (2) The fact that conceptual organization relies heavily on category membership is also evidenced in the picture matching tasks and in the picture sorting tasks which were designed by Cohen e. a. (1981). In the picture matching tasks, three pictures and one marked open field were shown on the upper half of a 30 x 20 cm sheet. In the lower half of the sheet 4 objects were depicted. The aphasics had to decide which specific picture out of the lower pictures related most closely to the three upper criterion pictures and thus fitted best the marked open field. In the picture sorting task, aphasics received 80 pictures which they had to sort into three piles. The middle pile was reserved for those cases on which the subjects could not reach a decision. If a decision was possible, then the subject had to put pictures in the left or right pile according to "(1) whether the referents are typically smaller or larger than 1 meter, (2) whether they are typically found indoors or outdoors, (3) whether they are animate or inanimate and (4) whether they are generally pleasant or unpleasant" (Cohen, e. a., 1981, 6).

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The results of both tasks clearly indicate that Broca's aphasics and Wernicke's aphasics (as well as left-hemisphere and right-hemisphere patients) perform much better in matching for category membership than in matching for single features of objects (Cohen, e. a., 1981; Lutz, e. a., 1981). From these empirical findings it may be concluded that categorial ordering is an overriding characteristic of conceptual organization. (3) Though the foregoing considerations (1) and (2) and many other empirical findings (Stachowiak, 1979) sustain the hypothesis that semantic material within human memory is ordered along category lines, it cannot be claimed that categorial ordering is the exclusive inferential principle underlying the organization of ILRRR. The cognitive processes of learning and using concepts (or words) are linked with situations. Accordingly, many associative links in the conceptual organization of ILRRR depend on knowledge of the pertinent situational data. That may explain why an aphasic, on being asked to name a matchstick, erroneously calls it a cigarette or why a grasshopper is misnamed as summer. In such cases, one should not immediately jumb to the surmise that there is a complete lack of organization in ILRRR. Instead, one should carefully concentrate on the question of what types of organization may be presumed. So, for example, when a German-speaking aphasic confronted with an apple misnamed it as a crossbow (Weniger, e. a., 1977; Stachowiak, 1979) one may hypothesize that there must be some propositional organization relating to the Wilhelm Tell story which is responsible for this misnaming. Similarly, when a Dutch aphasic on being presented with a small model of a church reacted instantly by giving the name God (Prins, e. a., 1978), one may suppose that he relied on his propositional organization of ILRRR, which encompassed the churchGod connection. The propositional organization of ILRRR information may also include knowledge data about the function of the object referred to by the word. That is why a rosary elicits the aphasic's answer to pray and why the aphasic's descriptive circumlocutions point to the function of the referents in everyday life situations (Stachowiak, 1979). The above observations indicate that particular criteria of organization are at work which complement the criteria of categorial ordering. In addition, these observations about situationally bound concepts and words may give rise to the conjecture that it would be purely artificial to draw a demarcation line between knowledge of language (meanings) and knowledge of the world. Although it has become fashionable to distinguish between knowledge of (a given) language and knowledge of the world, the artificial nature of such a distinction becomes apparent from a simple question-answering procedure:

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is water a liquid? Is water a gas} Is water a solid? Is a seat a human embryo} Is a surgeon a doctor} Is a violinist a musician? Is a president a politician} Is a teacher a foetus} Thorough reflection may lead the sceptic to the conjecture that the semantic ILRRR information required to respond to these questions cannot be sharply divided into knowledge of (a given) language and knowledge of the world. The conjecture that it is artificial to draw a demarcation line between knowledge of language (meanings) and knowledge of the world is substantiated not only by the fact that the acquisition of concepts which are related to words in our inner world, is situationally bound to the outer world. It is also sustained by the common experience that our semantic information about the word mother reaches much further than our knowledge of language [III, § 3]. It is supported by the evidence of daily life that the percept-concept conglomerates of seat concern language as well as its referential domains in the outer world [III, § 4]. It is substantiated by Jung's word association experiments in which links made between words, such as to stab and knife, show that there is an inextricable interconnection between (knowledge of) language meaning and (knowledge of) the person-internal/person-external reality (Donn, 1990, 113). This inextricable interconnection also suggests itself when we ask ourselves what we know when we know the meaning of water and how we think when we think about the ways in which the referent of water is used. Let us consider some questions which concern the inseparability of knowledge of language (meanings) and knowledge of the world when the word water is (to be) cognitively reflected upon: which possibilities of interaction between person-external reality and person-internal reality are given with the occurrence of (the referent of) water} Which percept-concept conglomerates are available with the word water} Are human beings distinct from other animal beings in the way they deal with the concept of water} To view these questions from a more provocative angle, let me present the reader with the simplified outline of an experiment conducted in line with Pavlov's views by Vatsuro: a chimpanzee called Rafael was trained by the experimenter to use water for the purpose of extinguishing a fire. To do so, he had learned to run water from a tap into a mug. He had also learned to construct a bridge between two rafts: using a bamboo pole he managed to move over the water from one raft to the other. So far so good. On a hot summer day, two rafts were floating on a lake. Rafael was sitting on one of them. On the other raft, which was within Rafael's reach, the experimenter had placed a tap and a mug. Rafael felt very hot, took water from the lake in his hand or in a glass jar and poured it over himself. Secretly, the experimenter approached Rafael's raft and made a fire behind Rafael while showing him some reward which could be reached only if the fire was extinguished. Instead of taking water from the lake to extinguish the fire on his raft, Rafael made a bridge with the bamboo pole, moved over to the

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other raft, ran water from the tap into the mug and returned to extinguish the fire on the first raft (Maruszewski, 1975). From this conduct it may be hypothesized that Rafael had not acquired a general concept of water in the sense that he had not arrived at the knowledge that all sorts of water, wherever and whenever they are used or occur, have the common characteristic of extinguishing a fire. Do small children differ from Rafael in their knowledge about this common characteristic of water? Is it possible that they possess the meaning(s) of water without knowing that water can serve the purpose of extinguishing a fire? These questions as well as the earlier questions may give rise to much debate. I will not answer them. They are too complex, because sociocultural determinants, ontogenetic development and individual differences come into play. Let me merely re-emphasize that, in cognitively reflecting upon the meaning^) of water, we may see that thinking has tangled relationships with perception of the outer world and with meaningful material in the semantic memory of our inner world (Bohm, 1983, 48 — 64; Introduction, § 5). With respect to these tangled relationships, it would be purely artificial to separate knowledge of language (meanings) from knowledge of the world. In ILRRR, knowledge of language meanings and knowledge of the world merge together. The internal representation of this merged knowledge is what I called in [III, § 3] the 'cognitively reflected representation of reality'.

3.7. On the lexicalized counterparts of ILRRR

information

§ 7 Given that memory is primarily a store of meanings, one may specifically ask which meanings are known when a single word w, of a human natural language HNLi, such as water, seat, rosary, church, apple, cat, room, knife, etc., [Ill, § 7], has been acquired. Inversely, are lexical entities in HNL, available for every percept and concept? Or are there percepts and concepts which cannot be lexicalized in HNL;? Are all separate parts of conceptual organization in a one-to-one correspondence with separate lexical entities of HNLi? These and similar questions are relevant not only to semantics but pertain to all fields of science involved in the study of human thought. Roughly speaking, the stock of lexical entities of ILRRR may be divided into content words and function words. Obviously, this is a grossly oversimplified distinction. Since I am not aiming at an exhaustive account of semantics, this distinction may suffice for some of the points to be made. It is supported, inter alia, by the empirical evidence that receivers need more time when they process content words than when they read function words (Graesser, Clark, 1985, 35 and further references therein). Content words have conventional denotative meaning characteristics as well as connotative features and emotional values. Connotative features may

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pertain to conative life, cognitive life and affective life, whereas emotional values relate to affective life. Insofar as content words have conventional denotative meaning characteristics, they belong to the collective consciousness of the members of a linguistic community and to the person-internal reality of those who have learned the language of that linguistic community. Insofar as content words are related, in their connotative features and emotional values, to the strictly private inner-life constellations, they have person-internal meanings. I shall return to the distinction between conventional denotative meanings and person-internal meanings in later sections [III, § 8; IV, § 1; V, §§ 9—11; VI, §§2 — 8; VII, §§3—10], For the moment, it is sufficient to note that content words, in their conventional denotative meanings, constitute a nonclosed class, because words come into being and go out of use according to sociocultural developments and needs or because their meanings change over time. Studies devoted to the conceptual organization of semantic memory are predominantly concerned with the conventional characteristics and the cognitive aspects of content words. I will refer to the conventional characteristics and the cognitive aspects of content words by the term 'standard meanings' [III, §§ 8 - 9 f f ; IV, § 1]. Function words are not part of an open-ended class; they are closed-class lexical entities. Members of this class, such as prepositions and conjunctions, do not increase in number over time. Though function words carry meaning along with them, they serve mainly to bring about syntactic and semantic relations between content words. As such, they have relatively stable connecting functions. Empirical evidence for this grossly oversimplified distinction between content words and function words derives from brain functioning: lesions in the frontal lobe of the left hemisphere cause disturbances in the use of function words, whereas lesions in the temporal and parieto-temporal areas affect comprehension of content words. The distinction between content words and function words has been of practical use in the neurolinguistic study of language disorders and in many fields of (applied) linguistics. This distinction can, amongst other things, be helpful in analysing and describing the syntactic and semantic chaining of utterances. The main problems which arise here are: (1) In what way is the conceptual organization of ILRRR related to lexical entities of a human natural language HNL,? (2) In what way does the conceptual organization of ILRRR which is lexicalized in content words of HNL, make possible the inferential processes involved in interpretative discourse reception? As far as the first question is concerned, any answer should take into account the innumerable mutual relationships and the complicated interactions between person-external reality, ego-consciousness and language.

3.7. On the lexicalized counterparts of ILRRR information

97

For convenience, I assume that meaningful material of memory which is concerned with the concrete denotata of content words can be seen as perceptconcept conglomerates [III, § 4]. On the one hand, the percept-concept conglomerates belong to person-internal reality. On the other hand, they are related to person-external reality. The percept-concept conglomerates also have close connections with language in that they can constitute the meaning^) of a word. When percept-concept conglomerates belong to person-internal reality, they are part of ego-consciousness. But they may also be part of the collective consciousness of the family, the sociocultural group, the religious community, the political party, etc. The individual person's integration into collective consciousness requires that the percept-concept conglomerates of the collectivity be acquired and accepted. Most problems arise from the fact that the content words of language refer to person-internal reality as well as to person-external reality (van de Velde, 1989 d). In the following, I briefly approximate to 'what it means to know the meaning' of the word room [III, §§ 2—3] when this word is taken to denote 'part of a house/apartment/building'. In so doing, I discuss facets of person-external and person-internal reality to which the content word room refers. The person-external reality which is denoted by the word room can be considered simply to be a part of a house/apartment/building which is enclosed by walls, a floor and a ceiling. In that case, the word room refers to a specific enclosed space which can be characterized by its three-sidedness, four-sidedness, five-sidedness, six-sidedness, etc. Here, one may ask whether there are rooms in person-external reality whose sides/side faces are innumerable. The person-internal reality which is denoted by the word room may be seen partly as a set of percept-concept conglomerates which are cognitively reflected in the individual as something which has enclosedness. In this respect, it is common practice to speak about the general concept of 'enclosedness'. The general concept of 'enclosedness' must accompany the conception of space related to room. Spatial thinking about 'room-enclosedness' depends on subordinate concepts like 'upper face', 'base face' and 'side faces'. For each of these subordinate concepts the lexical entities ceiling, floor, and walls are available in ILRRR. In discussing such data, I am fully aware of the fact that there is no such thing as an absolute and generally accepted cognitive model for the word room. Some people may imagine that a room can be spherical, whereas others may think of a prismatic room or of a room with highly irregular faces. No matter what individuals think, within one culture or linguistic community a convergence of cognitive models about room is possible. This possible convergence is basic to the assumption that room, in its socially conventionalized denotative meanings, is not identical with open space, but that the concept of 'enclosedness' may be considered as a central/prototypical characteristic of room.

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I presume that the closely bound percept-concept-word connections directly pertaining to the general concept of 'room-enclosedness' function as stereotypes in our culture. If this were not the case, then it would make no sense to speak about the inside of a room, about perceiving the interior of a room, about entering or leaving a room, etc. The following conditionals (3) —(6) express necessary characteristics subject to the socioculturally conventionalized concept of 'room-enclosedness': (3) If x is a room in a human culture HQ, then it is necessary that x is an enclosed space in HQ; (4) If x is a room in the sense of (3), then x has side faces; (5) If x is a room in the sense of (3), then x has an upper face; (6) If x is a room in the sense of (3), then x has a base face.

In thinking of a room, it is also possible to list a number of contingent characteristics supplementing the stereotypical percept-concept information. Some of them are lexicalized, like chandelier, wallpaper and carpet. Their connections with the percept-concept information of room can be expressed by ( 7 ) - ( 9 ) : (7) If x is a room in HQ, then it is possible that there is a chandelier hanging f r o m the upper face of x; (8) If x is a room in HQ, then it is possible that there is wallpaper on the side faces of x; (9) If x is a room in HQ, then it is possible that there is a carpet on the base face of x.

The whole percept-concept information pertinent to room is more extensive than could be clarified by the foregoing remarks. In addition, there is much percept-concept information which is not lexicalized in a human natural language HNL,. So, for instance, the percept-concept information which concerns the specific space contained in a room has no lexical counterpart in English. Besides, there are spatial concepts concerning the specific distance between the upper face and the base face of a room or between the opposite side faces of a room which have no corresponding lexical entities in English. (The words height and width are connected only with general concepts which, apart from applying to roow-enclosedness, denote distances and dimensions within other spaces as well.) These considerations are also interesting from the viewpoints of bilingualism or plurilingualism. Bilingual and plurilingual people experience that specific percept-concept conglomerates and particular conceptual organization features of their ILRRR can be expressed more appropriately by means of the lexical material of a human natural language HNL, than by means of the lexical material of a human natural language HNL r From the viewpoint(s) of (automatic) translation, this situation makes it necessary to find out whether percept-concept conglomerates which are lexicalized in the source language HNL, can be precisely denoted by lexical elements of the target language HNLj (Papegaaij, Schubert, 1988, 74 ff).

3.8. On standard meanings and private meanings

3.8. On standard meanings and private

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meanings

§ 8 The foregoing considerations lead us to the following problems of discourse reception: which semantic information should have been stored in ILRRR in order to make the inferential processing of discourse work smoothly and efficiently? Should this semantic information be bound to specific lexical entities of a human natural language HNL¡ or can perceptconcept conglomerates reside in ILRRR without having any lexical counterpart? The latter problem relates also to the following questions: can the logical norms/rules of inference be justifiably applied to the interpretation of verbal texts when the receiver resorts to specific semantic ILRRR information? Or are the logical norms/rules of inference inappropriate and inadequate in view of the fact that the semantic regularities of every single natural language are too specific to be handled by the general norms/rules of logic? In answering these questions, one must face the restriction that no definition of room can be offered which, on the one hand, accounts completely for all the empirical data of verbal communication, and, on the other hand, fully meets the requirements of logical inference. If a definition which fully meets the requirements of logical inference were to be offered, then it should belong to an idealized part of ILRRR which must serve as a normative cognitive model for all users of a human natural language HNL,. But then the use of non-literal language (in poetry, etc.) would be inappropriate. Moreover, metaphorical meanings would, in many cases, lead to semantic incompatibilities with the normative cognitive model [VIII, §§6 — 9; IX, § 4]. As to room, such a definition would make it inappropriate and inaccurate to say the universe is the room of eternity and my plea for peace has a place in it. Because idealized and normative ILRRR definitions for room do not really work in common verbal communication, I shall confine myself in [III, § 9] to the formulation of specific conditions under which ILRRR inferences can become operational. In addition, one must also consider the caveat that conditionals such as (3) —(6) must be sharply distinguished from (7) —(9). It is only with respect to (3) —(6) that the necessary characteristics of the socioculturally conventionalized conceptualizations, as they are to be attributed to non-circular and non-spherical rooms in the human culture HC¡, provide a solid basis for the justified use of the norms/rules of logical inference. In cases, such as (7) —(9), on the contrary, much 'room' is left for inventive guesswork, ingenious (re)adjustments, creative connotations, emotional values, etc. With respect to inventive guesswork, ingenious (re)adjustments, creative connotations and emotional values, the standard semantic information may be supplemented by the individual's private knowledge, as it is related to the word meanings of a specific language.

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This private knowledge need not be identical with person-internal meanings, because person-internal meanings concern not only cognitive life, but also extend to affective and conative life. This private knowledge may, in many ways, determine the personal conclusions drawn from the lexical material of a text t¡. In this regard, the disclosure of what particular words mean in the private sphere of the producer/receiver is a precondition for an appropriate understanding of her/his individual inferencing. Private knowledge may relate to a disturbed sense of reality. Let me give a dramatic example: Eva, a schizophrenic patient, used content words, such as suffering, devil, hell, death, love, beauty, anxiety, and the like, in an idiosyncratic way. In this connection, I conjecture that the disclosure of the person-internal meanings conveyed by these content words is a prerequisite to gain a nonsuperficial insight into her ego-consciousness. Empathy and a deep concern for the inner misery of the fellow-human being cannot be achieved without intruding into the other's person-internal meanings (van de Velde, 1992 b). The main point to be made here is the following: if all types of interpretation mentioned in the introduction [§§ 14—15] and in [I, § 15] are to be achieved, then one may not and cannot neglect the private knowledge of an individual. Nor should one disregard the related person-internal meanings. I do not intend to discuss here the various philosophical problems of private language (Martin, 1987 and references therein). Let me only emphasize that private knowledge which concerns person-internal meanings raises uncontrollable problems of subjectivity, idiosyncracy and solipsism. This is because person-internal meanings do not only have to do with conditionals such as (7) —(9), but also relate to an individual's aims, beliefs, desires, wishes, plans, expectations, attitudes, preferences, affections, etc. Let me illustrate this view by a comparison: when I ask my friend who sits at the same table 'is there fruit salad or ice cream in your dish?', I can control whether his answer is true or false, because it refers to person-external reality. But when I ask him to tell me whether the thing contained in his dish conforms to his expectations of a delicious dessert, then his answer will be beyond any control, because it refers to his person-internal reality. What delicious and a delicious dessert mean in/to his person-internal reality cannot be lived anew or be fully shared. Similar remarks on person-internal meanings can be made with respect to utterances which individuals express about their aesthetic, meditative, religious, contemplative or mystic experiences. Accordingly, the utterance I experienced the greatness of the unio mystica at the borders of Wannsee can be understood in its linguistic meanings, but the person-internal meanings of the alien psyche remain uncoverable (van de Velde, 1988 a; 1988 c). In addition, the intention which is behind this utterance is not amenable to any public test. I return to these problems in chapters seven and eight.

3.9. On some conditions of handling ILRRR information

3.9. On some conditions of handling ILRRR

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information

§ 9 If meanings of content words are not impartial, if receivers, while interpreting, transform cotextual information [VII, § 7] and if they rely on person-internal meanings, how can semantic ties between adjacent utterances be discerned objectively? Is it possible to formulate conditions whose fulfilment warrants a non-subjective interpretation of connected discourse? These questions have received much attention in many areas of text research. I return to them throughout this book. As far as these questions pertain exclusively to the internal lexicon, they lead us to multidisciplinary issues which cannot be treated here (van de Velde, 1986 b; Aitchison, 1987; Marslen-Wilson, 1989 and references therein). Nor can I deal with the cheapening and misuse of meanings frequently to be observed in our consumer society. I can only consider the specification of those conditions of meaning connections which are based on the standard semantic information of ILRRR. In so doing, I will summarize essential viewpoints which need main attention when topics of textuality are raised. In the fourth chapter, I address the ways in which semantic-logical inferences use standard semantic information of ILRRR to limit the subjectivity of meaning assignment [IV, §§4 — 13], For the moment, I concentrate on the following question formulated in [III, § 7]: in what way does the conceptual organization of ILRRR which is lexicalized in words of HNL, make possible the inferential processes involved in interpretative discourse reception? The answer to this question is given in H5: H 5 ILRRR inferences can become operative in semantic processing of discourse under the following conditions: iterativity, coreference, inclusion, exclusion, semeioprobability, and (re) adjustment. In what follows, a brief clarification of these conditions is given. I call these conditions 'H 5 conditions'. H 5 conditions must be satisfied to recognize that the utterances He sat down at the table. He sliced the bread with a knife. He spread butter on the bread are semantically tied together. H 5 conditions must also be taken into account to realize that the utterances fohnson-Laird wrote a book on the computer and the mind. West Scrafton is in Yorkshire. I had a conflict with my friend have no semantic contiguity at all. H s conditions (I) —(III) may become particularly important when local meaning connections are to be discerned and when local coherence is to be constructed. H 5 conditions (IV) —(VI) are basic to seeing why local coherence cannot be optimally constructed and why bridging assumptions [I, § 4] are necessary to the optimal establishment of meaningful connections. (I) The condition of iterativity allows lexical entities as well as their semantic ILRRR information to be repeated in the progressive development of

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connected discourse. It is obvious that semantic processing which meets the following H 5 conditions (II) —(III) and (V) —VI) will depend on this iterativity condition. (II) The condition of coreference relates to the iterativity condition in the sense that semantic ILRRR information which is repeated in adjacent utterances is denotationally equivalent or identical. So, for instance, in (10) and (11) the co-operating ILRRR inferences and syntactic inferences offer grounds for the assumption of coreference between the semantic ILRRR information of her room and this enclosed space. Accordingly, a meaningful connection between these two utterances can be constructed: (10) He wanted to see her room in order to find out more about her personality. (11) Maybe this enclosed space would give him an answer to some questions he had been asking himself during the last months.

(III) The condition of inclusion operates on the basis of the necessary characteristics, such as those exemplified in (3) —(6) [III, §7]. For example, the percept-concept conglomerates relating to wall, ceiling and floor constitute iterations of a subset of thé semantic ILRRR information pertaining to room in (12) —(14): (12) He dreamt that he entered the room. On the wall there was a reproduction of the famous painting 'The Bearing of the Cross' by Hieronymus Bosch. (13) She waited a long time in the room. She stared at the ceiling in vain. (14) John entered the room. A dog lay on the floor and looked at him suspiciously.

(IV) The condition of exclusion works in just the opposite way. Here, ILRRR information serves to prevent semantic material that does not belong to the conceptual organization of a specific lexical entity from being connected with that lexical entity. (In current writings, the exclusion condition has been treated under the headings of semantic incompatibility, semantic incongruence, and the like.) For example, the semantic ILRRR information about river, oak and vehicle excludes the semantic ILRRR information about room present in (15) from being iterated in (16) —(18). Accordingly, there is no straightforward semantic or referential connection to be found between (15), on the one hand, and (16) —(18), on the other hand. If a meaningful link is to be made, then the cotext integrativity condition [VI, § 5] and/or the context integrativity condition [IV, § 12] should be met: (15) The room is full of people. (16) The river rises in Saint Quentin. (17) The oak plays a role in many old myths. (18) The vehicle is expensive.

(V) The condition of semeioprobability concerns those cases where it cannot be unequivocally decided whether meaningful material of ILRRR con-

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103

cerning one word should be related to the semantic ILRRR information of the lexical items of the subsequent utterances. For example, if no further hints can be found in the co(n)textual or other data, then there is no compelling ground to accept that room in (19) should be semantically tied to chandelier, wallpaper or carpet in (20) —(22): (19) John entered the room. (20) The chandelier

drew the attention of the visitors.

(21) The wallpaper

looked like a magnified Rorschach test.

(22) The carpet had been cleaned.

(VI) The condition of (re)adjustment operates as an adapting or repairing device. So, for example, given the condition of iterativity as in (23) and in (25) —(26) with respect to room, questions may arise as to whether the relationships established between these utterances should sustain the assignment of a literal meaning to room as in (23). Obviously, on reading (25) and the first line of (26), restoring mechanisms may be set to work resulting in the hypothesis that the concept of 'room-enclosedness', as outlined in [IV, § 7], can no longer be mandatory: (23) The room was full of people. (24) They drank wine while they discussed language disorders and related topics. (25) She wanted to explain how she kept the memories of her late husbands stored in a separate room inside her head. (26) But she was afraid that making room for such a personal revelation could be considered out of place in a room filled with academic discussions.

The H5 conditions of coreference, inclusion and exclusion may be satisfied along the lines of deductive thinking. However, when the cotext integrativity condition [VI, § 5] and the context integrativity condition [IV, § 12] supplement the condition of exclusion, then inductive inferencing will be set to work. The condition of semeioprobability is a matter of inductive thinking. The condition of (re)adjustment can be fulfilled by assigning complementary roles to deductive and inductive thought. In view of the logical problems which arise from the fulfilment of the H5 conditions, it is necessary for H 5 conditions to be supplemented by conditions which concern interpropositional and global meanings. This supplementation is given in [IV, §§4—15], 3.10. On the importance and limits of ILRRR

information

§10 In the present stage of the discussion, the treatment of the H 5 conditions may already have given a slight idea of the significance which is to be attached to the semantic ILRRR information of content words. As will be seen later, semantic ILRRR information is not only basic to ILRRR inferences, it is also

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crucial to the (interaction with) semantic-logical and action-oriented inferences. In addition, those inferences which are based on semantic ILRRR information turn out to have a dominant role in the interaction with syntactic inferences. This is demonstrated in [IV, § 5; VI, § 8] and has been shown in van de Velde, 1984. The importance of semantic ILRRR information is also attested by the fact that content words with their semantic ILRRR information serve as inchoative texts (Eco, 1979). For instance, chajka ('seagull') is a single Russian content word which not only served as the title of Chekhov's first play, but also gave rise to the production of different text types within that play. Similarly, the percept-concept conglomerates carried along with aubade allowed Philip Larkin to write poetically about "waking at four to soundless dark" (Knickerbocker, e. a., 1985, 428) [IV, § 11]. As an additional illustration of the significance which must be attributed to semantic ILRRR information and to the related inferences let me adduce example (27). I leave it to the reader to decide whether or not (s)he can enjoy the funny effects evoked by (27) if (s)he had to dispense with semantic ILRRR information on wife, bishop and blessing. (27) A Marquis at the court of Louis X V had unexpectedly returned f r o m a journey and, on entering his wife's boudoir, found her in the arms of a bishop. A f t e r a moment's hesitation, the Marquis walked calmly to the window, leaned out and began going through the motions of blessing the people in the street. 'What are you doing?' cried the anguished wife. 'Monseigneur is performing my functions', replied the nobleman, 'so I am performing his.' (Koestler, 1967, 185)

To shorten further excursions on the importance of semantic ILRRR information, let me only emphasize the point that the semantic ILRRR information of content words is fundamental to all different types of informative discourse (exchange). In this connection, it is through the study of language disturbances, cognitive impairments, and personality disorders that it can be seen how fundamental the role of semantic ILRRR information really is: for instance, a verbal text displaying the characteristics of amnesic aphasia, such as example (13) in chapter one, prevents receivers from fulfilling the interpretative organization condition [I, § 3]. Similarly, texts produced by Wernicke's aphasics are not fully appropriate in their meanings. The same holds for schizophrenic discourse. In all these cases, the incongruities between the semantic ILRRR information of the text producers and the semantic ILRRR information of the text receivers hamper verbal communication. With respect to the foregoing considerations, it is clear that the aforementioned H5 conditions cannot be (optimally) met in the communicative functioning of texts if semantic ILRRR information is deficient or missing. §11 Before bringing the reflections of the present chapter to an end, one supplementary remark remains to be made: in the preceding sections, semantic

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105

information of ILRRR has been identified with percept-concept conglomerates [III, §§3 — 8]. This identification, however, is a partly misleading simplification, because ILRRR information may encompass meaningful material for which there are concepts, but no conglomerated percepts. This holds particularly true for higher forms of abstraction in scientific thinking as well as for mystic and religious thought. For instance, the abstract concepts which concern the words time and space have no conglomerated percepts, pace our ideals and techniques of measuring. Similarly, religious terms, in particular the name God, have no referents in the domains which are directly accessible to the senses and to reason (van de Velde, 1991). Nor can they relate to perceptual information in the internal lexicon. In texts which express religious thinking, one may find verbal material which has a purely symbolizing function. This purely symbolizing function is exclusively due to the concepts of person-internal reality, in which case the person-internal reality of religious experience need not be restricted to the domains of ego-consciousness (van de Velde, 1991). On the contrary, religious thought may, in its immeasurable potential for spiritual ascent and depth, transcend the limits of ego-consciousness. In view of this transcending capacity, it has been proposed in the psychodisciplines to locate religious concepts in the unconscious strata of our mind (Jung, 1973) (in which there may be collective and culturally determined sediments) or to relegate these religious concepts to man's superconsciousness (Scharfetter, 1980; 1986). Words and expressions, such as God, the Lord, the Almighty, the Divine Power, the Superhuman Power, the high All-seer, the Ultimate Mystery, the Supernatural Existence, the Eternal Intelligence, the Eternal Power, the Perfect, the Absolute, the Immeasurable Love, the Mystery of the Universe, the Numinosum, the Creator of Everything, the Divine Incomprehensibility, and the like, usually refer to concepts which are representative of awe, reverence, worship, meditation, contemplation, etc. The signifying responses which human beings have made to these religious words and expressions vary widely from culture to culture and from period to period: theistic people have drawn or painted images; pious individuals have represented them in wood or stone; theologians have hotly debated the characteristics of the underlying concepts; some authoritarian religions have tabooed the use of words and expressions which refer to God\ some mystics have called God the Nameless or even the Negation of what is perceptible. When religious terms fail to have perceptual counterparts, then one enters the domain of private language and the cavernous depths of person-internal meanings [III, § 8; VI, § 7; VII, §§2 — 4], In that case, the inner-life constellations of religious thought/experience can neither be made accessible nor be precisely retraced. Language is not appropriate to such endeavours. Anyone who thinks otherwise is unwise, as we may gather from Lao Tzu's words: "One who knows does not speak; one who speaks does not know" (Tao Te Ching, 117). The consequence of these considerations is that (the interpretation of) relig-

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ious concepts cannot be empirically controlled or be submitted to standards of rationality. I return to this consequence in [IV, §§ 13 — 17; VI, § 7; VIII, §7]. 3.11.

Summary

§12 The third chapter made some general remarks on the question of how concepts and percepts of human memory are related to lexical entities and to their graphemic form. In some preliminary steps, it was conjectured that the study of semantic material can be separated from the study of other properties of language. In the second stage, it was shown that ILRRR includes different domains of knowledge ranging from graphemic information to the higher levels of abstract conceptualizations. In the third stage, I expressed the hypothetical view that ILRRR has its own intrinsic conceptual organization. Next, I adduced empirical evidence derived from neuropsychology and neurolinguistics in order to sustain this hypothetical view. The fourth stage discussed some of the complexities of the conceptual organization. In addition, it showed what necessary characteristics and what contingent characteristics go together with ILRRR information on a specific lexical entity. The fifth stage sketched some basic conditions which must be considered if ILRRR inferences are to function in semantic processing of discourse. Reflecting on these conditions makes it clear how important semantic ILRRR information really is. It also allowed us to see how little we yet know about semantic ILRRR information when highly abstract modes of thought or religious thinking are at issue. Such reflections also provide preconditions for the treatment of semantic-logical inferences, as will shown in the next chapter.

CHAPTER FOUR

On semantic-logical inferencing 4.1.

Introduction

§ 1 What can be done or should be done with the semantic information of ILRRR is not a completely free enterprise. When human beings are considered as rational creatures, logical rules and norms may be expected to guide/ control their semantic processing. But here is a serious problem: are human beings really completely rational? Or should one accept Jung's view: "Das Irrationale soli und kann nicht ausgerottet werden" (1948, 131)? As will be shown in [IV, § 13], it is not uncommon to find people who take the following line of logically invalid reasoning to be acceptable: if there is anybody who has not sinned, then he throws a stone; and Amananda throws a stone; therefore, Amananda has not sinned. People may have reasons for reasoning according to their purely personal preferences. For instance, on reading that a diplomat was kissing the queen's toes and ankles, under the beautifully covered table, republicans may make the inference that she is unworthy of possessing sovereign power. Monarchists may make the inferences that the diplomat was in the best position to show his deep(!) reverence to the queen and that the queen could do nothing but accept it. Is the republicans' interpretation more (ir)rational than the monarchists'? And is the judgement that Amananda has not sinned irrational for logical reasons, but still acceptable for other reasons? Those who look at person-internal and person-external reality through the rigid scope of logic may defend the view that reason should direct and dominate the mental and physical activities of man. Within this rigid scope, reason has to deny, amongst other things, the impulses of childhood, the content of fantasy, day-dreaming, fiction, and the mystic depth of religious thought. Since these inner-life constellations occur in human beings and even (co)determine interpretation, it would be illusory to defend an idealistic view of man in which he is exclusively and totally rational. Many cases of discourse reception and discourse exchange provide clear counter-examples to the idealistic assumption that human beings are completely rational. So, for instance, the interpretation of particular cotexts has led human beings to the declaration of war or to other representative forms of irrational conduct. Even worse, authoritarian religions which have

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preached love as the first law have lost the serene sense of reasonableness by condemning authors to death and by burning their cotexts [IV, § 17]. It may suffice to note here that recent psychological research on human reasoning (reception) also provides ample evidence for the view that people make inferences in ways which are both logically invalid and irrational (Evans, 1982; 1983; 1989; 1990, Mero, 1990; Garnham, 1991 and further references therein). So, for instance, many people tend to accept the syllogism some A are B; some A are C; therefore, some B are C as a valid argumentation. They do not realize that a simple transposition of this cotext into some doctors are men; some doctors are women; therefore, some men are women makes its logical invalidity obvious. Discourse production too and the (c)overt signifying responses to which it gives rise, provide instances of irrationality. If some instances are not clearly in conflict with rational thinking, it is because producers/interlocutors are clever or diplomatic enough to invent a suitable camouflage. In other cases, some people may save themselves from the criticism of being irrational by giving the message that they are deliberately inconsistent. However, deliberate inconsistency is very often a typical trait of the psychopath's behaviour and a clear indication of her/his unreliability (Cleckley, 1964, 368 — 369). Alternatively, some people may manipulate other minds by means of rhetoric, propaganda or other tricks in which informal fallacies prevail (Elster, 1986; Hawthorn, 1987). It may also occur that people are rational, but that they do not strictly follow the rigid, well-established rules of logic. Then, they may consciously rely on lateral thinking and, in so doing, solve a number of problems which would remain unsolved if they had exclusively and totally stuck to stringent logical reasoning (de Bono, 1987 and further references therein). This is illustrated in the final stage of the present chapter [IV, §§15—16]. Still other cases of (ir)rational thought are subject to dissension and debate. They confirm Goethe's view: " V e r n ü n f t i g e s und Unvernünftiges haben gleichen Widerspruch erleiden". Other mental activities are completely beyond the realms of reason. Some of them are examined in this chapter [IV, § 13; § 17]. Irrespective of the many complexities, violations and restrictions of rational thought, people rate 'reasoning' higher than other mental activities, such as 'solving problems', 'learning', 'remembering', 'planning' and 'imagining' (Rips, 1988, 147 — 148 and further references therein). In the light of these ratings, it is plausible to devote attention to reasoning and to its role in discourse comprehension. Many centuries after Aristotle laid the groundwork for our Western logical systems of today, workers in cognitive science, including text linguists, psychologists and pragmaticians, are still puzzling over the ways in which our gifts of reasoning are put to work in text processing. The present chapter does not tackle all the logical problems arising from text processing. Its first aim is to demonstrate that text processing is based, inter alia, on semantic

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ILRRR information and on norms/rules of logic which have to be applied to this semantic ILRRR information. In the light of this aim, the interaction of ILRRR inferences with syntactic inferences, which has been treated in the preceding chapters, turns out to be only part of the whole inferential processing of discourse. Accordingly, hypotheses H 4 and H 5 , formulated in the second and third chapters need further supplementation. H 4 and H 5 require supplementation particularly when one is interested in finding out what follows from specific utterances or which consequences can be drawn from a whole discourse. This is especially true when it should be decided whether the consequences are drawn in logically valid ways. Certainly, finding out what follows or which consequences can be drawn is closely connected with the identification of local meanings, with the establishment of the links between them, and with the assignment of a global meaning to a discourse. In this chapter, my preoccupation is with the problems of local meanings and their connections as well as with the problems which relate to global meanings. I also consider the problem of how unexpected shifts within the local meanings of human interaction may affect the inferential processes which are basic to the construction of the global meaning of a discourse (exchange) [IV, § 1 5 - 1 6 ] , These interests are derived from the following considerations: interpretation is not only a matter of isolated meanings, which are assigned segment by segment [II, §2], It is also dependent on the creation of connections between isolated meanings. Above all, it is a matter of making isolated/ connected meanings fit into organization patterns. In other words, analytical, sequential and holistic processing strategies have to work together. Regarding the integration of isolated/connected utterance meanings into organization patterns, I introduce the notion of'higher proposition' [IV, § 3]. For the meaning connections, I focus on some interpropositional meaning conditions [IV, §§4—8]. As to the global meanings, I consider some global meaning conditions [IV, §§9—12]. The present chapter aims at placing limits on the subjectivity of meaning assignments. This aim is worth pursuing, because interpretation may be based on standard semantic ILRRR information as well as on private meanings [III, § 8; § 11]. The appropriate way of limiting subjectivity, as defended in this chapter, consists in making the main parts of interpretation amenable to logical analysis, rational control and rational argumentation [IV, § 13]. Any investigation of semantic-logical issues should start from the logical analysis and logical (re)structuring of the cotexts under consideration. In such cases, one is concerned with the following basic 'What?' and 'How?' questions: (1) what are the underlying propositions of utterances u 1; u2, . . . . , u n belonging to a specific discourse?

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(2) how are the underlying propositions to be analysed into their respective predicates and arguments? (3) how are the respective predicates and arguments of these underlying propositions connected in discourse processing? Some terminological clarifications are in order. Inferences related to these basic 'What?' and 'How?' questions are termed 'semantic-logical inferences'. In the combination 'semantic-logical', the first part signifies that inferences are primarily based on the semantic properties and relations of language phenomena. The second part indicates that the instruments of logical inference play a constitutive function in identifying and (re)constructing the relations between language phenomena. Semantic-logical inferences are sometimes 'natural' inferences insofar as they are suggested by 'natural' language [I, § 4]. Then, they contrast with strictly logical inferences (also called 'logical-semantic inferences') which receive attention in chapter nine. (Here, the combination 'logical-semantic' denotes the logical account proper which is mainly directed to the assignment of truth values, to the control of reasoning and to judgements about the validity of argumentation. In the following, the term 'argumentation' is sometimes used to denote logical reasoning. I employ the term 'argument' to denote a logical constituent in a proposition, as will immediately be made clear.) In discussing semantic-logical and logical-semantic issues, the term 'proposition' is of considerable importance. Though commonly used in logic, philosophy, psychology, artificial intelligence, and linguistics, its functions vary greatly (Kintsch, 1988, 165). In dealing with semantic-logical inferences, I shall consider that propositions represent the underlying meanings of utterances. A proposition consists of at least one predicate and one argument. In that case, it is a proposition with a one-place predicate. But a proposition may also have n-place predicates with ordered arguments. Any n-place predicate serves to express the relations which hold between the arguments. For the present expository purposes I need no quantifiers, and no iota-, epsilon- or lambda-operators. In order not to complicate the picture, I refrain from discussing the basic logical/philosophical problems concerned with proper names, definite descriptions, sense and reference, possible worlds, and the like (Martin, 1987 and references therein). This is because, in this book, I am more concerned with the domains of informal logic and with their relations to the realms of text interpretation than with the technicalities of logical/philosophical debates. A final restriction is in order. This chapter does not focus attention on connected categorical expressions which must obey the rules of syllogistic logic. As a consequence, odd cotexts, such as living creatures are innumerable; Pandas are living creatures; therefore, Pandas are innumerable in which the rules of syllogistic logic raise serious problems of logical validity are not considered.

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Since only categorical expressions are the subject of syllogistic logic, the applicability of syllogistic logic to real life situations and to human natural language is very restricted. In fact, syllogisms are unrepresentative forms of (sequences of) connected utterances and coherent texts. Moreover, syllogistic logic lays emphasis on form at the expense of meaning (Moore, 1980). In order to extend the scope of logic beyond the use of categorical expressions, the present chapter draws on some ideas taken from propositional/predicate logic. Although this chapter considers logic as a tool which enables us to control our thinking, it does not deal with psychological influences on erroneous reasoning. So, for instance, it does not take into consideration experimental work on the subject's tendency to accept reasonings as logically valid if they are consistent with or confirm her/his knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, etc. (Evans, 1989).

4.2. On some extrapropositional

problems

§ 2 It goes without saying that semantic-logical and logical-semantic inferences have to play a complementary role (Seuren, 1975, 1979, 1985; van de Velde, 1975, 5 1 - 1 2 7 ; 1981 a, 7 2 - 1 0 0 ; 1989e; van Dijk, 1973, 1 7 - 7 8 ; 1977 a, 11 — 63). This is already clear from the fact that meanings can be accounted for in terms of truth values. The assignment of truth values to propositions is necessary to see whether premisses provide justifying evidence for the conclusion and to judge whether the conclusion is drawn in a logically valid way from the premisses. That is, in drawing conclusions from a cotext q, some truth assumptions should be made about the local propositions of c ; or about the global propositional content of c,. I return to these points in [IV, § 13; VII, § 5]. Before going into the logical analysis and logical (re)structuring of propositions [IV, § 3], I must mention some extrapropositional factors. They determine the truth value of separate propositions and the relations between propositions. Let me start from the following simple active declarative. (1) Lara has a good heart.

Example (1) expresses a judgement. Let us assume that this judgement does not refer to the physiological characteristics of Lara's heart, but that it pertains to her concern with other people, to her helpfulness, her benevolence and other positive qualities of Lara's personality. It is probable that (1) emerged from the evaluative interpretation of Lara's actions. Since this evaluative interpretation must have preceded the production of (1), I call it 'preverbal interpretation'. The preverbal interpretation which gave rise to the production of (1) is part of person-internal reality. The person-internal reality which underlay (1),

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might have been such that the producer had not meant (1) to be a true, but a false statement. In the latter case, (1) conveys irony or sarcasm. If so, then the receiver has to presume that the PRODUCER OF (1) DENIES THAT is the higher proposition into which (1) is to be integrated [VI, § 5]. Person-internal reality is not, in most cases, the object domain of logic. This is due to the fact that concerns with truth values and with the validity of reasoning are, in the extensionalists' conceptions of logic, connected with the direct relations between the denotative meanings of language and the person-external reality. The main problem which arises here is the following: realized cotext phenomena do not directly relate to person-external reality. They come into existence through the text producer's ego-consciousness. As such, they may be coloured by the individual's imagination, wishful thinking, expectations, illusions, hallucinations, delusions, self-deception, etc. For instance, when a male person is in love with Lara, then his preverbal interpretation may have led him to express (1) as a true statement about Lara's helpfulness, benevolence, etc. Those people, however, who have experienced Lara's hard-heartedness will consider (1) in their ego-consciousness to be false in its reference to the positive qualities of Lara's personality. The truth value of a single proposition has repercussions on the whole cotext of argumentation. Depending on whether (1) is true or false, cotext (1*), into which (1) is integrated [VI, § 5], is logically valid or invalid. To continue the preceding reflections on (irrationality [IV, § 1], I may now raise the problem of whether the logically valid reading of (1*) is a case of rational thought or of irrational fantasy thinking. (1*) People who have a good heart should be kissed on their toes and on their ankles. These people deserve deep reverence. Lara has a good heart. Therefore, Lara deserves deep reverence and should be kissed on her toes and on her ankles.

The conflicting assignments of truth values which may emerge from person-internal reality (or ego-consciousness) are not, in most cases, of main concern to extensionalist logicians. For this reason, I abandon the areas of person-internal reality, at this stage of the discussion (van de Velde, 1988 a; 1988 c; 1989 b; 1991). In the present chapter, I confine myself to a semantic-logical account which starts by paraphrasing the extrapropositional modal qualifications of (1) as follows: (2) I INFORM you that Lara has a good heart. (3) I TELL you that Lara has a good heart.

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(4) I LET you KNOW that Lara has a good heart.

In paraphrases (2) —(4), it is assumed that the producer of (1) has committed himself/herself to the truth of (1). Such an assumption has already been called the 'commitment view' [I, § 1]. According to this view, the subsequent cotext of (2) —(4) should not contain any expressions which contradict the modal qualifications of (2) —(4). That is, it would be a breach in epistemic commitment (Lyons, 1981, 190) to bring out the messages (2*) —(4*). (2*) I INFORM you that Lara has a good heart, but I do not believe it. (3*) I TELL you that Lara has a good heart, but I do not believe it. (4*) I LET you KNOW that Lara has a good heart, but I do not believe it.

From these remarks on epistemic commitment it is clear that modal qualifications, such as I INFORM you, I TELL you, I LET you KNOW, are very important for the study of connected meanings. I shall not dwell further on epistemic commitment (van de Velde, 1989 d; 1991). I would, however, emphasize that paraphrases (2) —(4) show that INFORM, TELL and LET KNOW function as higher predicates of (1). They are three-place predicates. As can be seen from representations (2 a) —(4 a), their third argument is itself the propositional content. In (2 a) —(4 a) the predicates are written in upper-case letters. The arguments are written in lower-case letters. They follow the predicates and are placed between brackets: (2 a) INFORM (I, you, Lara has a good heart) (3 a) TELL (I, you, Lara has a good heart) (4 a) LET KNOW (I, you, Lara has a good heart)

Examples as (2 a) —(4 a) can be found mutatis mutandis in the tradition of generative semantics or semantic syntax (Lakoff, 1971, 1972; McCawley, 1972; Seuren, 1974, 1975). It need not concern us here how generative semanticists made use of paraphrase, lexical decomposition, meaning postulates and similar heuristic means in order to discern and to represent the syntactic —semantic characteristics of utterances (van de Velde, 1975). Suffice it to say that their heuristic techniques have contributed to making more in-depth analyses of separate utterances possible. Without intending to conform completely to their heuristic techniques and to the related representation formats, I use the following paragraphs to investigate which meaningful (semantic, referential and logical) connections can be identified in sequences of utterances. In so doing, I go somewhat deeper into the basic 'What?' and 'How?' questions (1) —(3) formulated in [IV, § 1].

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4.3. On predicate assignment and some intrapropositional

problems

§ 3 The meaningful connections between utterances are, to a great extent, dependent on the detectable underlying propositions and on their interrelationships. The detectable underlying propositions themselves raise many problems. I call them 'intrapropositional problems'. No attempt is made here to give an exhaustive account of the intrapropositional problems. If it were, an extensive discussion should be opened on a number of unsettled questions, such as just which parts of the analysed utterances have to be taken as predicates, which constituents function as arguments, etc. Regarding (1), it may suffice to note that its propositional content consists in the one-place predicate HAS A GOOD HEART which is assigned to the argument Lara. But, as will be seen immediately and in later stages of this book, this logical analysis of (1) does not, on its own, provide us with a sufficient guarantee for a fully justified interpretation of (1). Let me now illustrate that there are different ways of assigning the roles of predicate and argument to elements of language. To this end, I adduce the restructured versions (6) —(9). They all pertain to the simple utterance (5). In (6) and (7) two-place predicates are assigned to (5), whereas (8) and (9) contain one-place predicates. (5) George is the father of John (6) IS IDENTICAL WITH (George, father of John) (7) IS THE FATHER OF (George, John) (8) GEORGE IS THE FATHER OF (John) (9) IS THE FATHER OF JOHN (George)

Predicate assignment as treated in (6) —(9) is still incomplete. As already suggested in [IV, § 2], utterances and their underlying propositions carry with them so-called 'propositional attitudes'. Propositional attitudes concern the fact that addressors use utterances to express/suggest/indicate knowledge, opinions, beliefs, attitudes, doubts, uncertainties, etc. Such mental states/ processes can be represented by higher predicates qualifying an utterance, such as (5), or its underlying propositions (6) —(9). One may call the propositional attitudes expressed by predicates 'higher predicates', as I did in the discussion of (2) —(4). In current writings, the terms 'attitudinal qualifications', 'hypersentences', 'higher propositions', 'modal qualifications', etc. are used as synonyms of the term 'higher predicates'. In fact, these terms denote higher propositions because, in all the cases treated below, the higher predicates must have at least one argument that is connected with them. In examples (10) —(18), I take performatives, such as INFORM, ASSERT and QUESTION as well as modal verbs, such as KNOW, BELIEVE, DOUBT, DENY, CONFIRM, and ACCEPT to illustrate the attitudinal qualifications

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115

which may be attributed to (5) —(9). The examples given, however, do not repeat the different intrapropositional (re)structurings (6) —(9). For the sake of simplicity and brevity, I will treat (5) as an un(re)structured propositional content open to these attitudinal qualifications. (10) I N F O R M (I, you, George is the father of John) (11) A S S E R T (I, George is the father of John) (12) Q U E S T I O N (I, George is the father of John) (13) K N O W (I, George is the father of John) (14) B E L I E V E (I, George is the father of John) (15) D O U B T (I, George is the father of John) (16) D E N Y (I, George is the father of John) (17) CONFIRM (I, George is the father of John) (18) A C C E P T (I, George is the father of John)

The attention which should be paid to higher predicates cannot be made sufficiently clear in the following. For the moment, it may suffice to emphasi2e that it is necessary to specify the different attitudinal qualifications, since they determine the ways in which semantic-logical inferences are or can be made. Firstly, higher predicates affect the assignment of a truth value to the propositional content they qualify: so, for example, when KNOW, CONFIRM, ASSERT, and ACCEPT function as higher predicates of (5), then there are rational grounds to consider (5) as true. However, if DENY is a qualifying higher predicate of (5), then it may reasonably be accepted that (5) is not true. From DOUBT (5), QUESTION (5) and BELIEVE (5) it cannot be unequivocally decided whether (5) is true or false. Secondly, the determining role which higher predicates play in semanticlogical inferences lies in their displaying the same consequences as in (11), (13), (17) and (18) which all entail (14) or in their leading to contradictions as between (16), on the one hand, and (17) —(18), on the other hand. In (10) —(18), I left unspecified the spatio-temporal predicates which also have their impact on the semantic-logical account of the underlying propositions and their attitudinal qualifications: so, for instance, what a person KNOWS, BELIEVES, etc. at a specific moment m; need not be identical with what that same person KNEW, BELIEVED, etc. at previous moments m a , m b , ..., m h or WILL KNOW, WILL BELIEVE, at later moments m|, m k , ..., m„. Similarly, the content of a person's knowledge, belief, etc. may change and therefore has to be qualified differently depending on the distinct locations of that person. For instance, being in jail, in church, in hospital, in the graveyard or in an auditorium may have different repercussions on a person's knowledge, beliefs, etc. I will not deal here with further excursions extending to the impact which higher predicates have on semantic-logical inferences. Nor shall I examine the factors which may determine the selection of appropriate higher predi-

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cates. It is sufficient to note here that (the impact of) higher predicates need(s) further investigation. This may become clear from using the respective higher propositions the Cretan liar DENIES and the lying mathematician DENIES in the Cretan liar denies that all Cretans are liars and in the lying mathematician denies that statistics are like a bikini. In the following, I do not consider such complex problems. I give only a tentative and informal account of the main conditions which ought to be satisfied in order to make semantic-logical inferences function appropriately. In so doing, I distinguish, on the one hand, four conditions which make interpropositional meaning assignment possible [IV, §§5 — 8] and, on the other hand, three conditions which allow the assignment of global meanings [IV, § § 9 — 12]. This distinction is drawn mainly for practical reasons and does not mean to imply that these seven conditions should not be considered in close co-partnership.

4.4. On some conditions of interpropositional

meanings

§ 4 Semantic, referential and logical connections may exist between adjacent propositions. In such cases, interpropositional meaning assignment must take place on a local level of discourse. Accordingly, the local coherence which must be constructed concerns the sequential structure of utterances. In this respect, I formulate the following hypothesis: H 6 Semantic-logical inferences can become operative in the assignment of interpropositional meanings under the following conditions: argument identity, predicate identity; argument overlap, and predicate overlap. In [IV, §§ 5 —8] I illustrate the four conditions mentioned in H 6 . One small warning is in order here: the discussion in [IV, §§ 5 — 8] is based on the extensionality views in logic. Accordingly, the meaning of language expressions is considered to be contingent on what they refer to in person-external reality. The illustrations of H 6 show that semantic-logical inferences must interact with ILRRR inferences and syntactic inferences. In [IV, § 9] it is suggested in what non-arbitrary ways semantic-logical inferences render close co-operation between analytical, sequential and holistic processing strategies possible. 4.4.1. On the argument identity

condition

§ 5 The first condition to be met is termed the 'argument identity condition'. It can be formulated roughly as follows: if sequences of utterances occur and if their underlying propositions include referentially identical arguments, then there are some semantic-logical grounds on which one can base the construction of interpropositional meanings. So, for example, in (19) —(25) the young

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woman, she and her refer as arguments to an identical female individual, whereas the male colloquium participant, he, him, and his denote the same male individual. (19) The young woman wanted to say goodbye to the male colloquium participant. (20) She took her papers and descended the stairs. (21) When she stood before him he was absolutely desperate. (22) All day he had observed her, thinking that she looked as if she were wrapped in mystery. (23) Now it appeared that she had to leave abruptly. (24) He could not guess the reasons for her unforeseen departure. (25) He regretted that particular problems of miscommunication or non-communication could not be solved by guesswork.

As far as outwardly observable discourse phenomena are concerned, human discourse processors can make syntactic inferences and, in so doing, rely, first of all, on their knowledge of syntactic devices, rules and cues concerning concord, as in (26). Following these lines of syntactic inferencing, they can find clues to solve the problem of inferring which arguments are the same, such as la grosse fille and elle, on the one hand, and un enfant élevé che£ des paysans d' Yvetot and le, on the other hand. (26) La grosse fille avait un enfant élevé chez des paysans d'Yvetot. Elle ne le voyait pas une fois l'an. (Maupassant, Boule de Suif, 50)

Finding out whether arguments are identical in their referring function involves more than just syntactic inferences. It is highly dependent on the interaction of semantic-logical inferences with syntactic inferences and ILRRR inferences. But the interaction of syntactic, ILRRR and semantic-logical inferences need not always lead to successful/perfect tripartite co-operation. ILRRR inferences co-operating with semantic-logical and action-oriented inferences may assume a dominant role when, because of disordered language, syntactic inferences fail to be optimally operative, as in (27) (27) Vois, voir ... achète ballon ... rouge ... m'amuser ... content monter en haut ... après ici ... content ... ballon alors couché ... hélas ici ... ballon ... cassé ... ou ... chais pas quoi ... alors ... ici ... rien ... mystère ... et pleure parce que ballon ... cassé pi ... pleure. (Tissot, Mounin, Lhermite, 1973, 94)

The dominant role of the inferences which have recourse to semantic ILRRR information also becomes clear in cases such as (28) —(29). Here, exclusive reliance on syntactic inferences would lead the receiver astray, because the (morpho)syntactic means of concord do not apply to les bourgeois and ça, on the one hand, or to les vieilles, ça and son, on the other hand. As a consequence, (s)he must detect the referentially identical arguments in (28) —(29) by relying predominantly on semantic-logical inferences and on ILRRR inferences. (28) Les bourgeois c'est comme les cochons Plus ça devient vieux, plus ça devient bête. (Jacques Brel)

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(29) c'est pas qu'elle tienne tant à la vie mais les vieilles ça a des manies ça aime son fauteuil et son lit même si le monde s'arrête ici. (Michel Sardou)

Irrespective of the predominant role of semantic-logical and ILRRR inferences, syntactic inferences are still important. For instance, they serve the aim of making the receiver discern that, by having the grammatical function of referring to objects, ça in (28) conveys the producer's denigrating attitude towards les bourgeois. In (29), one may search for similar effects which are grammatically evoked by ça. 4.4.2. On the predicate

identity

condition

§ 6 The second condition whose satisfaction codetermines the construction of meaningful connections between utterances is termed the 'predicate identity condition'. Roughly speaking, this condition amounts to the following: if sequences of utterances occur and if their underlying propositions comprise predicates denoting identical properties to be assigned to their respective arguments, then there are some semantic-logical grounds on which to base the construction of interpropositional meanings. So, for instance, in (30) —(33) the predicates SPEAK, USE ONE'S VOICE, PRODUCE SOUNDS, and UTTER WORDS may be taken to refer to the same properties involved in the delivery of speech. Moreover, all these referentially identical properties apply to one and the same argument expressed by she: (30) She spoke through the microphone. (31) She used her voice. (32) She produced sounds. (33) She uttered words.

Predicates designating activities, events, situations, etc. may vary, whereas arguments denoting agents are more often kept identical in discourse which describes actions. The interaction of semantic-logical inferences with ILRRR inferences is very important in judging whether the predicates applying to those arguments which are hypothesized to be referentially identical, are compatible. For, if it appears from the reliance on ILRRR inferences that the predicates are discordant, then the argument identity condition cannot serve as a basis for the assignment of interpropositional meaning relations. For instance, with respect to examples (30) — (33), in she uttered words and she did not use her voice there can be no argument identity for she, because the predicates UTTERED WORDS and DID NOT USE HER VOICE are incompatible. Semantic and referential incompatibilities, however, can be neutralized in cases of so-called addressor's meaning or speaker's meaning. Here, it is not important what the utterances mean per se but what the discourse producer

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119

intends to mean by uttering them (Hórmann, 1978; Clark, 1978; Gibbs, 1982). Then, a non-literal meaning should be assigned in order to identify the effects of metaphors, irony, sarcasm, antithesis, etc. (Sperber, Wilson, 1986). 4.4.3. On the argument overlap

condition

§ 7 The third condition may be termed the 'argument overlap condition'. It states that if sequences of utterances occur and if their underlying propositions encompass arguments whose semantic ILRRR characteristics partly coincide, then some semantic-logical grounds are available for constructing interpropositional relationships. In order to illustrate this condition let me take the argument auditorium in (35) and search for its semantic ILRRR characteristics which partly cover those of other arguments. The concept of 'spatial enclosedness' which is characteristic of auditorium as (part of) a building [III, § 7], taken together with the perceptual information on the acoustic qualities of an auditorium and with knowledge about the functions of an auditorium is responsible for the argument overlap of auditorium with room, microphone, seat, etc. It thus offers grounds for the semantic-logical connections illustrated in (34) by the straight lines. They all are operative beyond the boundaries of the separate utterances in (35): (34) auditorium auditorium auditorium

room microphone seat [III, § 4]

(35) The auditorium was well-suited f o r a lecture about the ecology of mind. There was plenty of room. None the less, all the seats were taken. A lady spoke through the microphone. She sketched the problems which the industrialization of the Western world had raised.

4.4.4. On the predicate

overlap

condition

§ 8 The fourth condition to be satisfied is termed the 'predicate overlap condition'. It runs as follows: if sequences of utterances occur and if their underlying propositions comprise predicates which partly overlap in their semantic ILRRR characteristics, then there are some semantic-logical grounds on which to base the construction of interpropositional meanings. In order to illustrate this condition I select utterances (36) —(37). Because the predicate NOT POSSIBLE TO MAKE COMPREHEND overlaps with the predicate CANNOT BE DEMONSTRATED IN A RATIONAL WAY, semanticlogical connections between (36) and (37) may be assumed. (36) It is not possible f o r Ivan to make Irina comprehend that he will not come. (37) Some decisions cannot be demonstrated in a rational way.

One small remark is to be made with respect to [IV, § § 4 — 8] and [III, § 9]: the H 6 conditions which concern semantic-logical connections relate very closely to the H 5 conditions which have to do with lexical-semantic ties:

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the H 6 conditions of argument identity and predicate identity are completely related to the H 5 condition of coreference, whereas the H 6 conditions of argument overlap and predicate overlap are partly related to the H 5 condition of inclusion. The fulfilment of both the H 5 conditions and the H 6 conditions is of utmost importance for discerning semantic, referential and logical connections between particular segments of cotexts [III, § 1; IV, §§ 2—3; VI, §§2-8], 4.5. On some global meaning

conditions

§ 9 The preceding paragraphs [IV, §§4—8] support the view that semanticlogical inferences enable analytical processing strategies to identify the single propositions underlying individual utterances. Analytical processing strategies can also break down the single propositions into their predicates and arguments. Furthermore, the same paragraphs suggest that semantic-logical inferences allow sequential processing strategies to trace the ways in which the linearly structured utterances and their underlying propositions are combined. In this respect, semantic-logical inferences make it possible for sequential processing strategies to identify where predicates are identical or overlap and where arguments are identical or overlap. It should be emphasized that analytical and sequential processing strategies have to co-operate very closely in deriving information from the semanticlogical) cotext. In this co-operation, they should not be concerned solely with local characteristics of adjacent utterances and their underlying propositions. Local adjacency of underlying propositions is not an exclusive ground on which to base the construction of coherence. There are cases where the whole discourse is concerned and where one must surmise a global meaning. Then, the single propositions underlying the sequentially ordered utterances can be considered as parts which must be integrated into an organized whole [VI, §§ 1 — 8]. These parts are not equally important, as is clear from memory research (Meyer, 1975). Consequently, the hierarchical relations of underlying propositions belonging to the integral discourse under analysis are at issue. In such cases, close co-operation between holistic processing strategies and analytical and sequential processing strategies comes into play. Regarding the global meaning of discourse, the following hypothesis can be formulated: H7 Semantic-logical inferences can become operative in the assignment of a global meaning to a discourse under the following conditions: consequence consistency, topic compatibility, and context integrativity. The following paragraphs [IV, §§ 10—12], shall illustrate how the conditions mentioned in H7 can be fulfilled. The H7 conditions are referred to as

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'global meaning conditions'. They are important in complementing those conditions which solely concern the local connections between propositions, and in leading the reader to the recognition that textuality is dependent upon the integration of sequentially connected information parts.

4.5.1. On the consequence consistency condition § 1 0 The first global meaning condition may be termed the 'consequence consistency condition'. It runs as follows: if sequences of utterances occur and if their underlying propositions allow us to draw consequences f r o m them, then the whole set of consequences relevant to the interpretation of the integral discourse under analysis should contain no internal contradictions. If, however, internal contradictions arise, then (re)adjustment possibilities should be considered, until the assignment of non-conflicting meanings can be achieved [III, § 9], In illustrating the consequence consistency condition, I would first illustrate what consequences can be drawn f r o m a given discourse fragment. W i t h this in mind, let us look at (38): (38) If John had not prevented his girl friend from going to the garden party, she would have had to pose before the conceited artist who was the organizer. Since he was afraid that something unusual would happen he wanted to take care of her in a special way. Now she is glad not to have been involved in the scandals emanating from the party which have been enormously exaggerated by the local press. Some other girls have to pay for their frivolity. At this garden party things did not happen as would be expected at a stylish fashion show. A beautiful girl posed with her horse. The quadruped, however, was frightened and galopped through the bushes. The girl lost her riding outfit. Afterwards 'event structures' were organized. Some female guests wanted to impress the conceited artist still more than they had done before. The whole business became an astonishing exhibition of lack of style. Negative comments could not be avoided.

Leaving aside a number of intriguing questions and assuming the higher proposition THE WRITER STATES THAT (38), one is entitled to draw the necessary consequences (39) —(45): (39) John's girl friend was not present at the garden party. (40) John's girl friend was not blamed by the local press. (41) A horse was present at the garden party. (42) An artist was present at the garden party. (43) John's girl friend did not pose before the artist. (44) Other girls participated in the garden party. (45) Events that occurred were not as bad as presented by the local press.

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The whole discourse fragment (38) also contains implicit messages which cannot be deduced with the same logical stringency as demonstrated in (39) —(45). Here, inductive guesses, like those exemplified in (46) —(52), have to be made: (46) Presumably the artist was practising an eccentric type of voyeurism. (47) Presumably the girl was sitting on the horse when she was posing. (48) Presumably some people from the local press were observing what was going on at the garden party from behind the bushes. (49) Presumably most girls present at the garden party posed before the artist. (50) Presumably the horse had been frightened by the girls dancing around. (51) Presumably the artist and the girls did not behave decently. (52) Presumably the 'event structures' were organized to provoke indignation on the part of the journalists looking from behind the bushes.

Obviously, the whole set of consequences pertaining to (38) is much more extensive than could be shown by illustrations (39) —(52). However, since my aim is only to clarify the consequence consistency condition, this highly reduced exemplification may do for the moment. It allows me to conclude provisionally that the deductively and inductively drawn consequences (39) —(52) do not display any internal contradiction. Therefore, the global meaning of (38) can be (re)constructed consistently. At this stage of the discussion, a supplementary remark should be made. The examination of whether the consequence consistency condition is satisfied can also serve as a suitable means of identifying disorders of thinking. Disorders of thinking may be considered as characteristic of schizophrenia. If so, then the recognition of contradictions in the consequences which flow from a psychiatric patient's text may complement other criteria of psychopathology and, as such, provide certain indications which make the psychodiagnostic assessment of schizophrenia (a little) more reliable (van de Velde, 1992 b). 4.5.2. On the topic compatibility

condition

§11 The second global meaning condition may be termed the 'topic compatibility condition'. Informally stated, this condition amounts to the following: if sequences of utterances occur and if their underlying propositions have their own local topics, then these local topics should be (made) compatible with the global topic of discourse. The global topic of discourse is denoted in current literature by terms like 'gist', 'upshot', 'common denominator', 'point', 'global meaning', 'aboutness of discourse', etc. I shall not pursue the many debates on the notion of 'topic'. Let me simply take the factual evidence that normally the overall

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semantic information of connected discourse can be interpretatively reduced to an appropriate macroproposition, a general argument or a common predicate. The outcome of this interpretative reduction of semantic discourse information is what is called the 'global topic'. Obviously, the global topic conceived of in this way ought not to be considered identical with the title. Titles may have other communicative functions than just informing the reader about the global topic of discourse (Hellwig, 1982; Hoek, 1980). This is, for instance, the case in the poem mentioned earlier Aubade, in which the morning atmosphere evoked by the title is but an introduction to the global topic of the poet's mourning about the inevitability of death [III, § 10]. The global topic of a text is very important: if it cannot be identified, we may fail to establish those lines/degrees of coherence which are necessary conditions for an appropriate understanding of the text (see also Bransford, Johnson, 1972; van de Velde, 1986b, 5 2 - 5 7 ; [VI, § 7]). It goes without saying that assigning a global topic to a set of sequentially connected utterances is, in most cases, the result of rather intuitive operations. For some operations, mainly concerned with deletion, generalization, and construction, the studies of van Dijk (1977 b; 1980 a) proposed macrorules. These macrorules are not examined here, because their specific aim is not to spell out the compatibility conditions which local topics and the global topic should meet. Here, I can only illustrate, by means of a summarized story concerned with events of World War II, that local topics are compatibly connected with respect to the global topic. (53) The Czech dog At a Red Cross rally in New York an American lady meets a Czech physician. (He had been flown out of his country, which was occupied by Germany during World War II. He is in America to secure the transport of supplies for the Czech Underground.) She observes that he is ill at ease, and suggests that they should leave together. He escorts her home, and at the door she invites him in. She tries to engage him in conversation about the terrible war conditions in Czechoslovakia, but in his different actions (shrugging his shoulders, hesitantly looking at her, and the like) he shows a certain reticence to respond. Then, her dog, a beautiful collie, enters the room. It ignores its mistress and goes to the visitor, who strokes it. The lady remarks upon this, and he replies that he appreciates her efforts to be friendly, but that it is of no use: "Each of us has his own circle of experience into which no one else can enter." The lady demurs, and says that she is not sure that this is always true. The Czech explains that in his recent past he has seen himself changed from a secure, respected doctor to a victim of German aggression, that his sister and his wife have been misused, violated and humiliated. She agrees that these brutalities, are outside her experience but expresses a wish to understand. He attempts to explain himself by referring to the dog and begins to tell her of a dog in Czechoslovakia The man had been sent with a secret message to a partisan in the Underground. At the outset of his trip he had been stopped by a German patrol. The soldiers had knocked him about. He had, amongst other things, to beg on his knees and to slobber after his bit of bread which they had thrown into the mud. Then, he could continue his journey. For

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The story The C^ech dog is too long to be quoted here (but see van de Velde, 1989 b, 215 — 217 for the complete version). The preceding summary may serve to illustrate that the topic compatibility condition can be satisfied: a) The global topic of (53) (and of the story within the story) is made up of the argument dog and the predicate CZECH. It is a coincidence that this global topic is identical with the title of the story. b) The main predicate CZECH and the main argument dog, which is to be connected with CZECH, are introduced in the first and third paragraph respectively. c) The events, states, emotions and actions constituting the local topics of the subsequent paragraphs can be considered to be completely coextensive with the global topic denoted by the main predicate CZECH and the main argument dog. d) The final utterance of (53) re-emphasizes both the main predicate CZECH and the main argument dog. It thus constitutes the ultimate compatible reinstatement of the global topic. 4.5.3. On the context integrativity

condition

§12 The third global meaning condition is termed the 'context integrativity condition'. It is related to the global meaning of discourse in the following way: if sequences of utterances occur and if their underlying propositions allow the receiver to draw consequences from them, then it should be possible for these consequences to be integrated into the information derivable from the context. In recent multidisciplinary research on verbal communication there is hardly any notion which is more elusive to definitive systematization than 'context'. Maybe this is the reason why the notion of 'context' is often used in rather dissipated or mixed metaphorical ways. Entering into the hetero-

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geneous views on 'context' and discussing the related problems would require a booklength exposition (Parret, 1980; Eikmeyer, Rieser, 1981; Clark, Carlson, 1981; Petofi, 1981 a; Levinson, 1983; Sperber, Wilson, 1986; Dascal, Weizman, 1987; Baars, 1988; Strohner, 1990 and further references therein). For the practical purposes of illustrating the context integrativity condition, I assume that 'context' is any information which is not explicitly expressed in the discourse d). but which may co-occur with the production/reception of d; or may be called up or hypothetically (re)constructed to serve the interpretation of dj [I, § 2], The different kinds of context are not examined here [V, §§ 6 — 13]. It may suffice to say that the number of contexts for any verbal message in dj is potentially infinite in the sense that all imaginable information can be adduced to fit interpretative efforts with respect to dj. Moreover, if we consider the wider perspectives of interpretation, any change in context may create new information (Baars, 1988, 182). In order to illustrate that it should be possible to integrate consequences drawn from single passages into the contextual information and be confirmed and corroborated by the total context, I extract the following fragments from The C^ech dog in their original order [IV, § 11]. (54) She had been noticing him sitting in the corner, half-hidden by a fern. (W. G. Hardy, The C^ech dog, p. 109) (55) It was no easier to talk when they were in her living-room. (W. G. Hardy, The C\ech dog, p. 109) (56) 'I suppose we, here in America, must seem — untouched,' she murmured, thinking of the meeting they had left and noticing h o w alive his face was now. 'Yet some of us would like to understand.' (W. G. Hardy, The C^ech dog, p. 110) (57) 'But about the dog. I was travelling, you comprehend, between dusk and dawn. It was in the early morning, in a w o o d e d part of my country where I had made myself a hidingplace, that it smelled me out. I cursed it. I flung sticks at it. But dogs know. It came crawling back to me, its tail between its legs, its eyes pleading. I ought to have kicked it away. We Czechs, you must understand, have been left only one possession — the will not to give in. We dare not have any other — except hate. So I ought to have kicked it, brutally, so that it would not come back. But it was lost and homeless and starving and did not comprehend why. It had done no wrong. I could not kick it. I said to myself: "Cannot a Czech peasant have a d o g with him?" (W. G. Hardy, The Ct^ech dog, p. 111 — 112)

Passages (54) —(57) cannot be interpreted appropriately as long as their inferences are not integrated into the contextual information relating to those facets of World War II which are relevant to the point of view of the Czech physician who is telling the whole story in (53). Moreover, on a higher-order level of comprehension, the semantic-logical inferences made from (54) —(57) should also combine into the whole emotional context dealing with relationships between human beings and dogs, and with the (failure in) understanding of a fellow-human being.

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4.6. On controlling human thinking § 1 3 The preceding account of semantic-logical inferences is far from exhaustive. For instance, I did not examine the issue that the underlying propositions of discourse vary in order of importance and that semanticlogical inferences serve the function of weighing them. I did not deal sufficiently with the consequences which are drawn from the combinations of underlying propositions or from the global propositional content of discourse. In other words, I could not pay sufficient attention to the cumulative conclusion(s) which can be drawn from a long series of logical steps. I also neglected to specify in what respects the so-called 'logical inferences' differ from the so-called 'natural inferences' and in what respects they converge (van de Velde, 1989 e). Furthermore, I disregarded the ways in which semantic-logical inferences are bound to the rules and norms of standard logic. In the final stages of this chapter [IV, §§ 13 — 16], I cannot make up for all these omissions. I shall demonstrate only that the inferential approach advocated in the present chapter may serve as a tool to control man's interpretative endeavours. To this end, let us consider (58): (58) And the scribes and Pharisees brought unto him a woman taken in adultery; and when they had set her in the midst, They say unto him, Master, this woman was taken in adultery, in the very act. Now Moses in the law commanded us, that such should be stoned: but what sayest thou? This they said, tempting him, that they might have to accuse him. But Jesus stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the ground, as though he heard them not. So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her. And again he stooped down, and wrote on the ground. And they which heard it, being convicted by their own conscience, went out one by one, beginning at the eldest, even unto the last. St. John 8, 3 —9 (The italics are mine)

A justifiable semantic-logical account of He that is without sin amongyou, let him first cast a stone at her may start from the following paraphrase: if there is anybody amongyou who has not sinned, then let him first cast a stone at her. A rough semantic-logical analysis of this paraphrase allows us to represent Christ's words in propositional logic. To show this, let 'p' symbolize there is somebody amongyou who has sinned. Then, ' I p' in which ' l' designates the logical negation, stands for there is somebody amongyou who has not sinned. Let 'q' be a formal representation of let him first cast a stone at her. The logical connective '—>' can signalize the i f . . . then relation. The underlying logical structure of Christ's words may now be approximately represented in propositional logic as ( I p —• q). This formal representation and the further remarks do not aim to suggest that propositional calculus can satisfactorily account for the meanings (and temporal reference) of human natural language (van de Velde, 1975, 97 ff; Lyons, 1981, 119 ff.). The subsequent information parts of (58) denote that no one among the accusers did cast a stone at the woman. Accordingly, the formula ( I p —• q)

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may be roughly extended as follows: [(~~1 p —• q) A I q]. To this extended formula the modus tollens rule applies such that [( I p —• q) A I q] —• I I p. In view of the fact that I p' stands for there is somebody amongyou who has not sinned, the logical formula I p' is to be read as there is not anybody amongyou who has not sinned. In the history of Christianity it has been concluded that their going out one by one without throwing any stones was an unequivocal indication that the accusers were sinners. This conclusion conforms to the lines of argumentation outlined before. In the exegetic endeavours of (58) it has not been of great interest whether their going out one by one was caused exclusively by their being convicted by their own conscience. It has not been a matter of serious discussion what the syntactic constituent convicted by their own conscience might have referred to. N o thorough investigation was made of what degrees of subjectivity, sociocultural determinism, conformist tendencies, etc. might have affected their own conscience, etc. N o r did any question receive a convincing answer about what all the other people w h o were taught by Jesus at that very moment and in the same location might have thought or done. Did they find everything said and done by Jesus sufficiently clear? Were then no further questions asked? Did they do nothing in order to acquire more precise information about what Jesus meant by stooping down, by writing on the ground and by what he said to the "scribes and Pharisees"? Suppose for a moment that someone had tried to "tempf' Jesus more than the "scribes and Pharisees" did and that (s)he actually threw a stone at the woman. What would follow from the new version of (58)? The new version of (58) would be formally represented as follows: [( I p —• q) A q]. The majority of people (including authoritarian exegists) would probably judge the casting of a stone as an indication that the stone thrower had not sinned. That he might not have been convicted by his own conscience or that other inner-life constellations might have caused his action of throwing a stone would probably remain out of consideration. However, nothing at all follows f r o m [( I p —• q) A q]. It is tempting to ask conventionally pious people what they would conclude from the person's action of casting a stone. In fact, I played this casuistic game several times. Most people felt puzzled and unsure. But after some hesitation they decided that from this action it is to be concluded that the stone thrower must have been in a state of immaculate sinlessness. From their answers and the discussions which incidentally ensued it became apparent that many human beings do not think in a purely rational and strictly logical way [IV, § 1], moreover that they deem their inferencing to be acceptable for reasons which cannot be made compatible with the rules/norms of standard logic. The above casuistic exercise is important not only in order to see how people may deceive themselves in their interpretations [VIII, 1—9]. It can

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also illustrate that semantic-logical inferences may contribute to controlling interpretative illusion and derailment of thought. Such control is particularly important and necessary because human natural language can easily be misused in diverse sorts of invalid thinking (van de Velde, 1986 b, 97 — 106). § 1 4 Let me also return here to what is said in [IV § 12] about the context integrativity condition. In this light, the casuistic considerations devoted to (58) may suggest that a purely rational and strictly logical approach to the symbolism and parables of the Gospels may miss a number of interpretative dimensions. More specifically, if one does not integrate (58) into the pertinent sociocultural and historical contexts, many meanings may remain uncovered. Worse than that, the question of how (58) relates to the religious fundaments of human conduct may lose its spiritual and ethical appeal. With the extension of the perspectives of interpretation to the context integrativity condition, the possibilities of meaning assignment may increase enormously. This has made biblical writings the object of endless exegetic endeavours. So, for instance, if one brings (58) into the whole tradition of mystic thought, characteristic of the East and the West, then numerous interpretations which are quite different from the institutionalized biblical exegesis may emerge. They may, even if they meet with the disapproval of orthodox catholicism, at least confirm the relevance of the context integrativity condition. The role of the context, in its widest sense, is also relevant if one aims at finding out whether the underlying propositions of (59) —(71) make sense, whether they are true or false, whether they are plausible, whether they are tenable, whether they can be objectively tested, etc. Before calling up any context, one must subject (59) —(71) to a semanticlogical analysis, as is illustrated in [IV, § § 2 — 3]. It is only by doing so that it can be seen how (59) —(71) should be analysed into their respective predicates and arguments, as has been illustrated for (5) in (6) —(9). When this is done, then it is also possible to figure out whether identity relations are to be assumed, whether the predicate HAS THE PROPERTY OF BEING is to be assigned to the main argument or whether other logical relations (such as 'element o f or 'subset o f ) should be conjectured. (59) Psychoanalysis is the disease for what it pretends to be the cure. (Koestler, 1976, 89) (60) Philosophy is the systematic abuse of a terminology specially invented for that purpose. (Koestler, 1976, 89) (61) Every decoding is another encoding. (Lodge, 1984, 25, 194, 282) (62) Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man. Communism is the reverse, (adapted f r o m Koestler, 1976, 92) (63) Marriage is the sacred straitjacket of social organization. (64) Academic endeavour is the tailoring of research problems to suit the scholarly talent, (adapted f r o m de Bono, 1977, 5) (65) Religion is just our values. (Cupitt, 1984, 273)

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(66) Information is the religion of the modern world. (Lodge, 1984, 196) (67) Language is the net that holds thought trapped within a particular culture. (Lodge, 1984, 141) (68) Science is the neutral art. (Koestler, 1967, 196) (69) Imperialism of the mind is the ultimate imperialism. (Cohen, 1985, 11) (70) Philosophy today is an in-game played by clever players for their o w n ends or rather for the game's own end. (adapted f r o m de Bono, 1980, 52) (71) The barrier of language is sometimes a blessed barrier, which only lets pass what is good. (Forster, 1959, 172)

It cannot be emphasized enough that the controlling function of semanticlogical inferences must be taken into account. In so doing, one can judge whether (connected) utterances are instances of what may be called "straight" or "crooked thinking' (Thouless, 1936/1974). In order to come to this judgement, one must also determine which role a single proposition plays in the global structure of an argumentation [IV, § 2] (Kopperschmidt, 1985 and references therein). This judgement is particularly necessary when argumentation is seen in a dialectical-dialogical perspective (van Eemeren, Grotendorst, 1984), because then the proponent and the opponent must act alternately as a rational judge. Above all, such a judgement is a precondition for the optimal discernment of whether one is under an illusion while handling connected meanings [VIII, § 1 — 10]. 4.7. On some limits of logic in

interpretation

§15 In the final sections of this chapter, two important points have to be made: firstly, logic may have the last and the highest word as a control of thinking in interpretation [IV, § 13], but that does not mean that logic is the only tool of thinking (to be) used in interpretation; secondly, the assumption that logic stands for rational thinking does not imply that all rational thinking requires only logic or is to be identified with logic. Investigation of these two points makes it necessary to consider some limits (in the use) of logic. To this end, I bring the following story to the reader's attention: one day, a prisoner is given the message that he has a chance to become free. However, the jail director who tells him about this chance is a dishonest man with sadistic inclinations. He wants to play a trick on the prisoner. To give the prisoner the mistaken belief/illusion [VIII, §§ i — 9] that he can become a free man, the jail director proposes to play the following game: two very small pieces of paper will be put into a bowler hat. One is white, the other is black. The prisoner has to be blindfolded during the preparation of the game. He may take out one piece of paper. If it is a white one, then he will be free. If not, then he should stay much longer in prison than stated in the verdict. The prisoner agrees to the director's terms. However, he is badly blindfolded by the director's assistant and so is

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able to observe that the director drops two pieces of black paper into the bowler hat. Here, the question arises as to which kind of logic the prisoner can apply to become free. He can set his critical reflection to work and make objections against the director's cheating, but then the director will also criticize him for having surreptiously looked at the preparatory activities. As to the game itself, no rule of logic can serve the prisoner's purposes. Whatever piece of paper he chooses, it will inevitably be black. Accordingly, his chances of immediate freedom will be lost. Is logic the only tool of thinking available to the prisoner to deal interpretatively with the problem situation? Can the prisoner act rationally without following the rules of logic alone? He can and he does. He chooses one small piece of paper from the bowler hat. Without looking at it, he starts coughing strongly. He keeps his fist with the paper in it before his mouth. He continues coughing. Then, he makes the small paper disappear in his mouth and swallows it. When he opens his hand there is no paper in it any more. He pretends that it must have fallen in his sleeve or in his shoe or on the ground. The director and his assistant start searching, but nothing can be found. Then, the prisoner suggests the following way out of the difficulty: the small piece of paper left in the hat can be decisive. If it is black, then the prisoner must have chosen the white one and therefore must be set free. If it is white, then the prisoner must have selected the black one and accordingly should stay longer in prison. The director has to agree to these terms. Otherwise, he would show himself to have been dishonest. What is highly remarkable in this bizarre story is this: the rigid rules of bivalent logic (which amount to accepting either 'p' or 'not p') are not the only tool for solving the prisoner's problem. They play their most pertinent role only after the main part of the solution has already been reached. Logic can thus serve in reaching the final conclusion and to control whether this final conclusion is validly drawn. In the steps which precede the final conclusion, the inferential steps used are instances of imagination, inventiveness or non-rigid, highly ingenious thinking which are necessarily complemented by logic. As can be seen from the above story, logic is not the only tool of thinking (to be) used in interpretation. In addition, it turns out that not all rational thinking requires logic alone or is to be identified with logic. The prisoner is inventive in transcending the limits of logic without being irrational. He practises lateral thinking (de Bono, 1987). In the end, he comes to a conclusion which does not conflict with logic. §16 I now return to the above two points, made at the beginning of [IV, §15], and consider their repercussions on the specific realms of language interpretation. To do so, may I invite the reader carefully to read the following conversation?

4.8. O n some restraints of rationality (72) A

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How do you get d o w n f r o m an elephant?

B

There is a problem which precedes your problem: how is one to get on an elephant?

A

Let us then start with getting on an elephant.

B

A s far as I am concerned, this is not and cannot be a problem at all, because I do not want to get on any elephant.

A

But suppose you are in Thailand and the tourist guides strongly urge you to sit on an elephant.

B

I am afraid of heights. So, I would refuse to sit on it.

A

A l l right, then just imagine that you are sitting on an elephant, because it is the only way to save your life.

B

Should I then come down to lose my life?

A

Please, appeal to your imagination.

B

In my imagination I see no problem at all. There is no elephant in it.

A

Then, please think of someone else w h o wants to get down f r o m an elephant.

B

If you want to know what I think about someone else getting down f r o m an elephant, I presume that he will use a ladder.

A

Nonsense, one does not get d o w n f r o m an elephant but f r o m a goose.

B

How funny!

The discourse exchange (72) shows that the interlocutors A and B are rational. But are they completely rational [IV, § 1]? Or is one interlocutor, say A, less rational than the other? A thinks of the less probable meaning of down ('bird's under-plumage'), whereas B has not thought of abandoning the familiar meaning of to get down. Here, the following general problem arises: can the assignment of the more frequent, more obvious and more familiar meaning claim to be more rational than the interpretation in which the less frequent, less obvious and less familiar meaning is preferred? Is an interpretation about which almost nobody has ever thought less rational? If so, then every flash of insight, every serendipity effect and every eureka experience would have to be deemed less rational than the familiar ways of looking at things. No rational person will probably go as far as to deem the unusual, unexpected, inventive and imaginative trains of human thought to be less rational than the unimaginative, uninventive, expected or usual lines of thinking. Instead, (s)he will recognize that the logic of high-probability and necessity thinking does not always provide absolutely incontestable solutions, that logic has its own limits in interpretation and that rational thought is not exclusively a matter of logic. 4.8. On some restraints of

rationality

§ 17 A realistic approach to human interpretation cannot disregard the restraints of rationality. It should be noted that the restraints of rationality reach much further, of course, than the realms of language meaning. However,

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it cannot be the aim of the following considerations to deal with those mathematical(-logical), economical and psychological areas of research in which rationality is shown to be limited (Mero, 1990, 165 — 174). It may suffice to suggest some main reservations regarding the exclusive and total supremacy of reason. Though these reservations may seem unusual and unexpected in the light of the laudatio of logic which has been the main tenet of [IV, §§ 1 — 14], they are not inconsistent with the relativizing attitudes towards the total supremacy of reason which I would like to defend. Rational thinking is restricted for several reasons. I will consider only two of them: firstly there are domains of human spirituality in which a strictly rational account of meaning would impoverish rather than enrich the interpretative dimensions. For instance, if (73) is analysed, (re)structured and controlled according to the logical methods and the standards of rationality used in this chapter [IV, §§ 1 — 14] and advocated for the semantic-logical account of (59) —(71), then its main point of religious thinking will be missed. (73) The individual is the temple of God. The temple of G o d is not a petrified sign of religious thought though cathedrals may lead us to think otherwise. Individual religious experience is not necessarily dependent upon perceptible signs in w o o d and stone.

Secondly, rational thinking is restricted in that it cannot rely on an eternal, absolute, ultimate and universal measure/criterion of rationality. It is subject to man's interactions with ever-changing intellectual and environmental factors. Moreover, it is also a function of man's disposition for change and of his need for adjustment to his surroundings. For instance, in ancient Greece and in the American South of Lincoln's time slavery was considered to be rational, whereas it is not in our current conception of ethics and human rights (Stout, 1990). The individual's ways of rational thinking are susceptible to cultural and sociohistorical determination. However, the cultural and sociohistorical determinants are not constant over time. That is the reason why the simple mantras of reasonableness which have been summed up in (74), need not be shared by all cultures and civilizations of all times. Nor should the meanings of socially useful, morally good, aesthetically enjoyable, desirable, pleasurable, obnoxious and mistake be identical in all the individuals' ILRRR and in their reflections on rationality. As a consequence, (74) means something different to any reflecting reasonable person. Concomitantly, (74) cannot have a compelling argumentation force for all people of all times and all places. (74) It is reasonable to defend what is socially useful, morally good and aesthetically enjoyable. It is also in line with reason to strive for what is desirable and pleasurable. It is rational to avoid what is obnoxious and to stop making the same mistakes.

Different meanings will particularly be assigned to (74) when the descriptive, explicative and evaluative perspectives of interpretation are taken into

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consideration. Moreover, the different interpretations of (74) reflect inequalities in the individuals' cognitive, affective and conative lives. These inequalities not only have a negative effect on reciprocal understanding, they may even hamper rational control. This is not the appropriate place for discussing the negative repercussions which differences in the interactants' inner psychic lives may have on their mutual understanding (van de Velde, 1988 c; 1991). For the moment, let me return briefly to the introduction of this chapter in which the point was made that the rigid normative scope of logic compels reason to deny those innerlife constellations which are not and cannot be representative of reason, such as instinctual needs, impulses of childhood, fantasy, day-dreaming, fiction, etc. According to psychoanalytical interpretation based on the pleasure principle, man is an animal being with a collection of drives and instinctual needs. But man does not live as an individual on his own. Man has to take into account that there are fellow-human beings. Since the dawn of history, living together with others has required several sorts of social contract. Accordingly, man has to conform to the reality principle which teaches that his drives and instinctual needs are to be subjugated to societal conventions, prescriptions, law and order (Freud, 1927; Marcuse, 1987). In psychoanalytical views, individual repression is the main result of this subjugation. With respect to these psychoanalytical views, the following question can be asked: is individual repression rational? Though the answer is debatable, individual repression seems to be rational as society increasingly claims that its own organization systems are compulsory and that the individual has to adjust her/his personal drives/instincts to them. If so, many problems can be raised. Dealing with these problems is in itself a good exercise in critical reflection and an appeal to the control function of logic in interpretation [IV, §§13-14], Let us now look at some cultural and sociohistorical facets of determination and ask ourselves what is the rationality in, behind and underneath the modes of thought involved: is the equation between 'socially useful', 'normal' and 'good' a rational standard? Is it more rational to evaluate the individual according to her/his ability to produce socially useful things than to base a judgement on her/his private imagination and on her/his freedom from repression of instinctual needs? Are those psychoanalysts who defend the individual's adjustment to cultural and sociohistorical determinants on the right track when they claim that there is nothing irrational "which does not give some comfort provided it is shared by a group" (Fromm, 1973, 33)? Our critical reflection on cultural and sociohistorical data can also be directed towards problems which predominantly concern person-external reality: what are the rational criteria for judging the best societal institutions, the division of labour, etc.? What is the rational exercise of authority? Are

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power and domination rational? Are the motives for war or aggression against another ethnic/social group, a nation, etc. ever rational? Was there any rationality in the burning of witches, in the inquisition, in the Crusades, etc.? Are concentration and labour camps, punitive expeditions, terror(ism), etc. signs of human reason? Are abortion, sterilisation, etc. rational solutions to the problem of overpopulation? Is there a rational basis for what is called the "race to destruction" (Chomsky, 1986)? Is the extermination of those who are the weakest and of those who are socially not useful in any sense rational? Whatever reasonable answers are given, there will always be people who reject them for reasons which they deem reasonable. Let us also consider some other questions which pertain more to personinternal reality: what is the role of reason in an aesthetic experience (von Kutschera, 1989)? Is the role of reason in an aesthetic experience to be replaced by imagination and sensuousness (Marcuse, 1987, 172 ff)? Has reason a role to play when self-reflection turns into listening to the voice of conscience? Is the feeling of guilt (ir)rational (van de Velde, 1988 c, 148 ff)? Is it reasonable to believe that washing rituals or other cleansing ceremonies can produce the effect of inner purity? Can a person feel fully free(d) from her/his sense of guilt by argumentation? Can the sense of guilt be rationalized as a fear of being found out, criticized or punished (Fromm, 1973, 90 ff)? Can a person's reactions to guilt still be brought in line with reason when they lead her/him to self-humiliation, self-flagellation or other means of atonement? Are the ideas, which we have about the ways in which a civilized or educated or moral being should live, of a rational nature? Is it rational to think that " m o r a l i t y seems to be a g i f t like intelligence" (Jung, 1973, 76)? Is intraverted and/or extraverted destruction rational? Is aggression against the fellow-human being for the sake of self-protection or self-realization a rational conduct? Is introjected aggressiveness amenable to rational thought? What is the rationality for self-exaltation by means of competitiveness? Is there a lack of rational thinking when people find reasons to worship images of God in wood or stone? Have they lost a sense of reasonableness when they assign characteristics to God, such as 'OMNIPOTENT', 'OMNISCIENT', 'OMNIPRESENT', and the like, whereas a moment's reflection may bring them to realize that they cannot know the denotata for which they use the word God [III, §§ 11]? Or does immeasurable awe lead them to ascribe these characteristics to God? Are there reasonable grounds to equate 'what is reasonable'' with 'what is p e r f e c f , with 'what is ideaF or with 'what is absolute'? Because the majority of the questions and problems raised here with respect to (the restraints of) rationality, may relate to the interpretation of verbal texts in the most unexpected ways, it would have been unrealistic to ignore them. The number of these problems and questions can be augmented in many ways. The solutions and answers provide more challenges and provocations to rationality than can be dealt with in any consentaneous way. To achieve a consensus would require the highest measure/criterion/standard of rationality. Is such a measure/criterion/standard available or ever attainable?

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Since Greek philosophy, reason has been regarded as an instrument used to subjugate, to master and to order (into categories). The Enlightenment brought reason to its highest triumphs. Its triumphs justified its tyranny; and its tyranny sustained its triumphs. However, one may ask whether its tyranny has an ultimate justification. The tyranny of reason can be subjected to the distorting effects of irrational passions, as Freud taught modern man. However, the tyranny of reason can also be exerted in the severest totalitarian sense possible. In this case, the concept of rational thinking can be extended to so many provinces that the boundaries of 'what is rational1 can easily become confused with the estimation of 'what is possible' and with the judgement of 'what is necessary. As a consequence, a borderless (mis)use can be made of rationality. The following anecdote may illustrate that the triumphalism of reason cannot disregard debatable decisions, erroneous beliefs or unjust(ified) judgements: two refugees arrive in a Western country. They are married. Soon after their arrival, the husband gets a professorship. His wife is a doctor in medicine and applies for a job in a local hospital. There are several male applicants too. Though she has the best qualifications, she is not appointed. The reasoning goes roughly as follows: the male doctor in medicine who is selected has a family with three children to support. Earning a livelihood is absolutely necessary for him. His appointment to the medical job allows him to do what is necessary for his family. (Here, we find a good example of confounding 'what is necessary' with 'what is rational.) The female doctor, on the contrary, has a husband who is well paid in his job. The refugees have no children. It is possible for them to satisfy their needs without her getting the job. (Here, we see an instance of blurring the borders between 'what is possible' with 'what is rational.) Moreover, there are administrative problems, because the couple is not naturalized. In addition, the female doctor is older than the male candidate and must therefore be paid more. From the trains of thought sketched in the above anecdote it can be seen that the triumph of reason can be turned into the triumph of those who reason and that the reasons for using a specific reasoning/rationality are not always completely incontestable. In addition, experimental work on performance in logical thinking has shown that there is a fundamental human tendency to accept as logically valid that inferred information which specifically confirms the subjects' own knowledge, beliefs and attitudes (Evans, 1989, 41 ff). Because of this confirmation bias, subjects do not critically reflect at all on the problem of whether the conclusions they draw result from strictly rational strategies. In view of the above considerations, cautiousness, an open mind, relativizing attitudes and scepticism are not misplaced [VIII, §§ 1—9]. In the end, a much wider scope is needed to deal with the non-absolute authoritarianism of reason (van de Velde, 1991).

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Summary

§ 1 8 The fourth chapter offered an account of the ways in which semantic processing relies on semantic-logical inferences and gradually emerges into logical processing. The first stage outlined the manner in which the meanings of a proposition underlying an utterance depend on the semantic ILRRR characteristics of its predicate(s) and arguments and on the (re)structuring of the intrapropositional relations. In this respect, I demonstrated that a justified interpretation also has to take into account the higher propositional attitudes which may be attributed to a proposition. In the following stage, attention was directed towards the semantic and referential relations which may exist between the underlying propositions of discourse. Here, I made a distinction between the sequentially manifested interpropositional cases of coreference and the local meanings of discourse, on the one hand, and its global meaning, on the other hand. As far as the interpropositional relations are concerned, I offered a tentative and informal account of the main conditions which should be fulfilled in order to make semantic-logical inferences operate beyond the boundaries of single utterances. The further stages of this chapter dealt with the conditions which must be met if the semantic-logical inferences are to lead the receiver to the assignment of global meanings. In addition, I considered the question of how semanticlogical inferences can serve the aims of controlling human thinking. The scope of this chapter was widened by exploring some limits which logic has to face when its rigid prescriptions, rules and norms cannot be relied on in order to provide solutions to unusual interpretation problems. I also discussed some restraints of rationality which have to be considered when we look at some facets of interpretation, at some interrelations of the individual person with the social context and at some infirm grounds of social decisions. Regarding the global meanings, particular interest was devoted to the role of the context. This interest brings us in the fifth chapter to those inferences which have a much wider range of applicability, because they relate to the action context as well as to the pragmatic and social context. Moreover, the considerations which have been devoted to some limits of logic and to some restraints of rationality may lead us to see that semantic-logical inferences need co-operation with and complementation by action-oriented inferences.

CHAPTER FIVE

On action-oriented inferencing 5.1.

Introduction

§ 1 The ego cogitans discussed in the fourth chapter is also an ego agens, as is shown in this chapter. This ego agens can be considered as the producer of meaning or as the receiver of meaning. The present chapter is particularly concerned with the ego agens as the producer of meaning and with discerning the meaning(s) of her/his action(s). Most meanings of inner psychic life, language and communication are related to human action. The meanings of human action are interconnected with knowledge (Davis, 1979, 60 ff; Gallistel, 1980, 3 3 5 - 3 9 4 ) and with evaluation (Lewis, 1946). As such, they pertain to man's cognitive life. But they also have to do with man's affective life and conative life. In the light of these considerations, the interpretation of human action is a prerequisite to deal better with the meanings of man's inner psychic life. In addition, actions receive their meaning(s) from their relevance to our interactions with others (Gross, 1987, 37 ff). So, the study of produceroriented interpretation and of verbal communication cannot and should not ignore human actions. Human actions have an enormous importance in the communicative functioning of verbal texts. This is, amongst other things, because most verbal texts denote/describe actions, induce physical/mental actions in their receivers or allow the receivers hypothetically to reconstruct actions. For instance, a letter of my friend may be an action description in that it carefully imparts which actions he carried out to prepare his trip to Urbino. It may induce actions in that he asks me to go to the university library and to collect two specific books for him. It may also lead me to reconstruct hypothetically the actions which my friend had performed before/in conceiving and writing the letter, before/in taking it to the post office or to a post box, etc. [V, §11]. Last but not least, the text of the letter may lead me to reflect on the motive(s), reason(s), volitional aspect(s), desire(s), goal(s), plan(s), intention(s) or other inner-life constellations which caused my friend's actions of writing the letter. It is as plain as a pikestaff that the discernment/reconstruction of the (causes of the) actions which relate to verbal texts is of utmost significance in making the optimal/maximal interpretation of these texts possible and in ensuring a better understanding of their producers.

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Interpretation of human action, like any other interpretation, may be seen as a descriptive, an explicative or an evaluative practice [Introduction, § 14; I, § 15]. When it is seen as a descriptive undertaking, it is restricted to the observable fac(e)ts of bodily movements. From the moment that it is seen as an explicative and/or evaluative entreprise, attention should be paid to the problems arising from the consideration that human action is more than the observable fac(e)ts of bodily movements. In being more than the observable fac(e)ts of bodily movements, human action is connected with ego-consciousness, i. e. with the various inner-life constellations involved in the antecedents/precipitating circumstances of action. In that case, human action may be explicatively interpreted by directing attention towards the preceding cognitive, affective and conative states of the person who carries out the action. For instance, the actions of throwing a stone at a person, of signing our name, of spitting in a person's face, of caressing a person's cheek, of kissing a person's feet, and the like, have mental background activities [V, § 2, c] whose discernment codetermines the explicative interpretation of these actions. The explicative interpretation of the person's action(s) should concentrate on the question of why the person acts as (s)he does. This 'Why?' question may be answered in causalistic and teleological/functionalistic explanations. Causalistic explanations take the inner-life constellations of the agent as causes of her/his actions. Teleological explanations, on the contrary, consider the goals which the agent wants to achieve in carrying out specific actions. Functionalistic explanations concentrate on the functions which actions have in producing effects on the receiver and/or on person-external, non-material reality. With respect to these explanations, the agent may be supposed to have (had) interests, motives, intentions, desires, emotions, wishes, reasons, drives, etc. (Louch, 1966; Langford, 1971; Davis, 1979). They all belong to her/his ego-consciousness. As to the relations between human action and ego-consciousness, two competing approaches can be distinguished: on the one hand, the fact that mental events/states/operations underlie human actions has been systematically disregarded; on the other hand, it has been claimed that human actions originate from mental events/states/operations. The former views are physiological/mechanistic/behaviouristic in orientation. The latter are psychological/mentalistic/cognitivistic. None of these competing views will be my main concern in this chapter. It may suffice to make the point that, in most cases, a consequent search for an answer to the explicative question as to why a person acts the way (s)he does inevitably ends up in a maze of mysteries. Chapter seven deals extensively with this point. Insofar as it is more than the observable fac(e)ts of bodily movements, human action may also be evaluatively interpreted. We may rely on our values and accordingly judge a person's actions. We may have positive or negative attitudes towards the actions which we observe. We may like/agree

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with or dislike/disagree with the actions, because they do or do not fit our plans, opinions, preferences, beliefs, interests, etc. We may hold the view that individuals are causally and morally responsible for their actions and for the consequences of their actions. Concomitantly, we may judge the meanings and even the (unforeseen) consequences of their actions from the responsibilities we assume they have for their actions. This chapter is concerned with the descriptive interpretation of actions. Isolating the descriptive interpretation of actions from the explicative and evaluative interpretation is an artificial undertaking. To make it a less artificial undertaking, I shall devote particular attention to the producer as the ego agens. In close connection with it, I shall also consider the difficulties, which the receiver has to face in dealing with a producer-oriented interpretation of actions. This is because actions, at the time of their performance, have not only antecedents in ego-consciousness, but also consequences which pertain to person-internal reality (and to person-external reality). For the moment, let us consider only the consequences in order to account for Goethe's view: "Der A.usgang gibt den Taten ihre Titel". The antecedents are discussed in [V, § 2, §§ 8 - 1 2 ; VII, §§ 2 - 4 ; VIII, §§ 6 - 8 ] ) . In most cases, the interpretation of actions is inevitably concerned with (moral) judgement of the consequences. For instance, this may be the case when a boxer knocks another down, when a soldier shoots a fellow-human being, when a terrorist places a bomb, when warders torture a prisoner, when two parties place their signature under a contract, etc. A very interesting example, in which the interpretation of actions is concerned with their consequences, can be found in a masterpiece of medieval literature, the Flemish animal epic Vanden Vos Rejnaerde. In this poetic text, the fox acts as a human being. The consequences of Reynaerd's actions reveal most humorously the stupidities of animals acting as human creatures in the social roles/ classes of medieval society. From these examples it can be seen that the consequences of human action are part of its meaning(s) and (can) become the object of evaluative and explicative interpretation. The descriptive perspectives, however, may be isolated from the evaluative and explicative perspectives for methodological reasons. All the aforementioned aspects of action interpretation cannot be the subject of the present chapter. Nor can the present chapter tackle the problem of how (moral) judgement relates to both the actions and their interconnections with a person's inner psychic life. Otherwise, many issues of moral and legal philosophy concerning human responsibility as well as main issues of psychology, philosophy (of language) and decision theory would have to be discussed (Brand, Walton, 1976 and references therein). I shall concentrate on the meaning of human action as far as it relates to the meaning of language. The meaning of language and its cotexts, however, is embedded in various other meanings of a contextual nature. Many meanings of a contextual nature

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may illustrate the saying that actions speak louder than words. A thorough account of such illustrations requires (a combination of) descriptive, explicative and evaluative interpretation. The explicative and evaluative perspectives of action interpretation and the sectors of ego-consciousness which are involved in them are examined in greater depth in chapter seven. In the preceding chapters, I have discussed different kinds of inference which play a major role in accounting for the graphemic cotext, the syntactic cotext and the semantic-logical cotext. I have also clarified some aspects of their indispensable interaction. Semantic-logical, syntactic and I L R R R inferences are not the only inferences which are operative in discourse processing and they are not limited to the previously mentioned aspects of interaction. They also require interaction with a fourth important kind of inference pertaining to ego agens, which I term 'action-oriented inferences' [V, § 3], Action-oriented inferences have the most extensive domain of application. They concern three kinds of context: the pragmatic context, the action context, and the social context. The social context encompasses all other kinds of context and cotext. As a consequence, extending the scope of interest to the social context leads to the following situation: the wider the range of contexts the more their elements increase in number and complexity and the more elusory they are to the grasp of scientific scrutiny. This fifth chapter necessarily confronts the reader with some of these elusory elements. However, I shall attempt not lo lose my grasp on too many elements of the social context. The study of action is a g o o d means of accounting for most elements of the social context relating to discourse reception. Therefore, I shall concentrate on those questions which concern the fundamental role which action plays in the cotexts and contexts of discourse. The account of action given below can only be fragmentary and informal. This is an unavoidable consequence of the fact that the 'How?' questions which are of concern for the present issues, notably how action plays its fundamental role in inferential processing of discourse and how action is related to temporality, intentionality, causation and to other domains, is still a matter of multidisciplinary debate. For this reason, I do not review the disparate literature on action but simply highlight some main inferential aspects which verbal, coverbal and non-verbal actions display or render possible in discourse processing. At the same time, I emphasize the need for their interaction. I shall also concentrate on the antecedents in ego-consciousness which determine human actions. Finally, I deal with the hypothetical reconstruction of those actions which are not verbally expressed.

5.2. On action and its related inferences

5.2. On action and its related

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inferences

§ 2 Before examining these issues, some notes on the notion of 'action' are appropriate. The notion of 'action' has evoked a great deal of interest especially in the fields of philosophy, sociology, psychology, economics, ethology, logic, linguistics, physics and artificial intelligence. The arousal of a multidisciplinary interest in action is quite understandable in view of the fact that human actions may be considered to be both mental and physical, that human actions are basic ingredients of social life, that human actions relate to personal/social responsibilities, that human actions have moral consequences, etc. For instance, when we read the cotext the surgeon removed the cancerous uterus of the young pregnant woman (Davis, 1979, 63), we may realize that the surgeon's actions have meanings which belong to an immense inferential field: we may construct hypotheses about the doctor's reasons for carrying out the surgical actions; in reflecting on these reasons, we may realize that his actions become intelligible to us. However, we may also realize what the consequences of his actions mean: the removal of the uterus not only caused the death of a healthy foetus, but also the woman's permanent infertility. Nevertheless, it is a necessary surgical intervention to save the woman's life. The surgeon's mental and physical actions relate to his professional and moral responsibilities. In some respects, they can be made morally questionable or condemnable. In other respects, they can be condoned, etc. From this example it can be seen that human action is basically different from action in physics. In the following, the notion of 'action' is not used in the same senses as in physics. The reason is straightforward: when we compare the cotext the yellow billiard ball hit the red billiard ball with the verbal text fohn mistook Bill's bald head for a billiard ball and hit it with his cue, we may infer several differences in action meaning. Let me confine myself to the following difference: in the former cotext the meaning of the action verb hit exclusively concerns two material objects which are governed by the physical law of action and reaction. In the latter example, however, hit not only concerns the physical characteristics of action, but also relates most closely to the mental characteristics of two human beings. These mental characteristics may range from volition, intentionality, motivation, etc., on one side of the interaction, to feeling the victim of aggression, experiencing pain, feeling humiliated, etc. on the other side. In particular, understanding the mental characteristics which underlie, give rise to, go together with or result from the performance of actions is a prerequisite for an optimal/maximal interpretation of the verbally denoted/described actions. In this regard, I presume that — in concerns with (inner psychic) life, language, and communication — the notion of 'action' has a meaning which requires an agent who may be supposed to be conscious of what (s)he does. In so doing, my views on human action are in sharp contrast with the mechanistic views

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on man defended in purely positivistic (physiological or physicalistic) psychology. Here, it is worthwhile returning to [V, § 1] where it was noted that actions have antecedents in ego-consciousness. Generally speaking, these antecedents are mainly connected with (self-)knowledge und assignment of values. In the end, the free decision as to whether and when a conscious action is or is not performed depends upon evaluation. Evaluation is conditional, amongst other things, on what we know about what happened in the past, on what we know about what is desirable/ avoidable, on what we know about what is to happen in the future, etc. In other words, the performance of an action is determined by comparing and weighing the values which are involved. If actions are not habitual, not instinctive or not ritual, then it may be asked what their justifications are. Then, one is concerned with accessing the agent's self-knowledge about her/his initiative(s), motive(s), reason(s), volitional aspect(s), desire(s), etc. It may also be important to reflect on the details of a person's argumentation which is to justify her/his actions or to render them acceptable. Reflecting in this way on the meanings of actions is particularly important when the philosophical problems of justification, causation, purposiveness, functionality, and the like, are under discussion. As an example of philosophical discussion, I mention only the problem of causation. This problem is as old as the beginning of human history. In this regard, Goethe's words "Im Anfang war die Tat" are misleading. The reason is this: before any action is performed, there are causal antecedents. It is therefore quite normal that human beings (should) think in terms of causation in order to comprehend (their) actions or to make these actions comprehensible. When their actions are wrong, subject to negative evaluation or to disapproval, etc., they tend to place the causes of these actions outside their own 'self so that their personal responsibility is not at issue. The old mythical message of the book Genesis is a typical illustration of this tendency: "Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat? And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat. And the Lord God said unto the woman. What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat." (Genesis, 3, 11). In most philosophical views on causation it is assumed that there are unobservable mental events/states/operations which cause observable actions to occur. That is, the causation of action is assessed to a specific content of ego-consciousness. This assessment may raise the difficulties of a regressus ad infinitum, because each time a specific mental event is assumed to cause a specific (verbal) action, one may ask what is the cause of this specific mental event. In so doing, one may realize that the hypothetical reconstruction of the whole chain of causes is an endless enterprise. When attempting to find the ultimate cause of an individual's action, one must accept that there is too much missing to come to a definitive answer. The assumption of hidden

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causes in the unconscious means moving backwards to more obscurity. If one has to retrace the causal factors of individual action, along psychoanalytical trains of thought, in instinctual needs/drives and in their unconscious repression which starts during the infantile stages of the individual's historiography, then the door is too often open to speculations. In this chapter, I conjecture that human actions have the following characteristics in common: they have their own underlying inner-life constellations in the agent (intentions, motives, justifications, etc.); they produce the effect of change in person-external/person-internal reality; the effect of change is a matter of temporality in the sense that actions take place in time, may recur at certain intervals or may continue during a certain period. When verbal texts describe/denote actions, these common characteristics are not always explicitly expressed. The notion of 'action' has a very broad range of denotation in the study of verbal texts. This is due to the fact that the production and reception of verbal texts are actions, that verbal texts are illocutionary/perlocutionary acts, that verbal texts contain actions of reformulation (Giilich, Kotschi, 1987 and references therein), that verbal texts denote actions, that verbal texts comprise instructions of how actions are to be carried out (Grosse, 1976; Dixon, 1987), that verbal texts of a narrative nature cannot dispense with the description of actions (Segre, 1988 and references therein), and so on. Actions can be actions with or without words. Actions without words may be outwardly unobservable mental activities which underlie a person's conduct or which determine a person's inhibitions to act or which occur as a covert signifying response to any stimulus. However, they may also be outwardly observable actions which occur in gestures, in conscious changes of facial expression, in adaptations of posture, in silent blinking or making eye contact, and so on (Noth, 1990, 387—481 and further references therein). Actions without words do not always co-occur with verbal actions. If they do not, we still have to infer information from them. For instance, when driving on the motorway (it is important that) we continually make actionoriented inferences on the basis of the actions without words performed by the other drivers. In so doing, we hypothesize what intentions the other drivers have. We may guess, anticipate and (attempt to) avoid the catastrophic consequences of their dangerous actions, and so on. Regarding actions with words, it is clear that words such as verba actionis, nomina agentis and nomina actionis denote actions. However, actions can also be denoted or suggested in other ways: for instance, the Gestapo can refer to the (immoral) actions of many people [V, § 6]; continuous tenses in the active voice signal action processes (Davis, 1979, 4); terms, such as 'interpretation', 'science', etc., can refer, inter alia, to various mental activities and to the results of these activities. Words can also induce or hinder actions as in orders, commands, requests, prohibitions, etc. In normal cases, readers construct mental models/plans of

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the actions to be performed. These mental model/plans result from the directions given in cotexts. The performance of the actions is largely dependent on the reader's abilities to construct appropriate mental models/ plans. If the reader's mental plans/models are inappropriate, then the pertinent actions are usually executed inefficiently, unmethodically or even wrongly. In this regard, the linear order (or grammatical structure) of the cotexts is important [II, §§4—9] for the interaction of syntactic inferences with actionoriented inferences. Cotexts in which high-level information comes first are more easily understood and the requested actions are more appropriately executed than in those cases in which high-level information is given at the end of the cotext. For instance, the cotext to make a house draw a square and put a triangle on top is less demanding, because the high-level information to make a bouse occurs in initial position. In contrast, the cotext draw a square and put a triangle on top to make a house is more difficult to understand, because the high-level information to make a house occurs in final position (Dixon, 1987). With respect to orders, commands, requests, prohibitions, etc., philosophy of language and especially speech act theory have given rise to a number of developments which have focused attention on actions with words. Most of these developments have branched out into pragmatics. In pragmatics, main attention has been devoted to intentional doings with words as well as to their communicative functions in social contexts and in verbal cotexts (Burkhardt, 1990 and further references therein). Notions like 'intention', 'intentional doing', 'intentional causation of human behaviour', 'action', 'speech act', 'action context', 'appropriateness of (linguistic) action', 'successfulness of action with words', 'communicative function', 'felicity conditions', etc. are commonly reserved for pragmatic and philosophical studies, whereas 'meaning' and 'reference' remain basic concepts of semantics (van Dijk, 1980). Moreover, it has been assumed that aspects of language in use pertain to so-called 'pragmatic meaning' and that investigations of 'pragmatic meaning' supplement (conventional) semantic studies (Leech, 1983; Levinson, 1983; Allan, 1986; Sperber, Wilson, 1986; Green, 1989; Strohner, 1990). Action-oriented inferences account for the pragmatic and semantic aspects of the following basic conjecture: actions have meaning(s) and readers/ observers can assign meaning(s) to actions. So, for instance, in the co(n)text of (58) [IV, § 13] the casting of a stone has a particular culturally determined meaning and readers/observers can attribute a meaning to it. Or when a cotext describes dervish dancing, then the activities involved express meanings which are particularly accessible to those who belong to the Muslim subculture in which this performance occurs. But apart from the culturally determined meanings, actions may also relate to meanings of the purely personal world. If so, then action-oriented inferences have an important function for the discernment of the agent's person-internal meanings: from the (verbally

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denoted) actions we can inductively make inferences about the agent's cognitive, affective and conative life. As is already clear from the foregoing, the interpretation of actions can be approached from two perspectives: on the one hand, one can relate the meaning(s) of an individual's (non-)verbal actions to internal factors/causes (intentions, motives, reasons, justifications, desires, etc.); on the other hand, one can relate the meaning(s) of (non-)verbal actions to external factors/ causes (situations, states of affairs, events, etc.). In the following, I attempt to combine these two perspectives. To this end, let me first make the following clarifying points: a) I take the notion of 'action' to denote mainly the manifested way(s) of an agent's 'consciously' doing something. 'Conscious' actions can be expressed verbally in the cotext of discourse. They are termed 'discourseinternal actions' or 'cotextually expressed actions' [V, §§4—5]. The attribute 'conscious' and the adverb 'consciously' occurring in the preceding elucidation of the notion of 'action' are very important. They signal that for any human action the agent is or can be (made) ''conscious' of what (s)he does. Accordingly, the individual can reflect on her/his action, on its antecedents and on its consequences as well as on the personal responsibility for the planning and performance of her/his action. The attribute 'conscious' and the adverb 'consciously' are not used in the above clarification to exclude automatized or habituated actions which may occur in riding a bicycle, typing a text, etc. Nor are they employed to disregard uncontrolled actions, such as the Hatter's biting "a large piece out of his teacup instead of the bread-and-butter" (Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, p. 147) [IX, § 4]. b) Conscious actions can also co-occur with discourse production and/or reception. They are denoted by the term 'contextually performed actions' [V, § § 6 - 7 ] . c) Mental events/states/operations can be taken to underlie/give rise to cotextually expressed and contextually performed actions. I consider these mental entities as hidden activities arising from the energy of ego-consciousness. I use the term 'mental background activities' to denote the hidden inner-life constellations which cause cotextually expressed and contextually performed actions. Some mental background activities are called 'cognitive background activities' [V, §§8—10]. These cognitive background activities are supplemented by aspects of man's affective and conative life. I refer to these supplementing aspects by the terms 'affective background activities' and 'conative background activities'. d) It may also be the case that conscious actions are neither cotextually expressed nor contextually performed. They then have to be hypothesized by the discourse receiver(s) in order to make discourse meaningful. I call them 'hypothetically reconstructed actions' [V, §§ 11 — 14],

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e) Inferences directed to or based on the kinds of action mentioned in (a) —(d) can be considered 'action-oriented inferences'. From reflecting on (a) — (d) it becomes clear that the notion of 'action' and its related concepts/conceptions pertain to most areas of research on man and on his cognitive, affective and conative life. The present book cannot cover all these areas. I confine myself to dealing with the following hypothesis: Hs Action-oriented inferences contribute in the most inclusive way to the construction of coherence by identifying links within/between/beyond the cotextual and contextual information parts of discourse. 5.3. On the need for action-oriented

inferences

§ 3 Before dealing with the details of action processing, the following questions should be raised: if information about action words (nomina actionis, nomina agentis and action verbs) or about words which refer to actions, such as Gestapo, science, etc. is available in ILRRR, why is it that ILRRR inferences cannot completely deal with the meanings of actions and, more particularly, why should action-oriented inferences be distinguished from ILRRR inferences? The answer is straightforward: because the semantic information concerning temporality, causality, and intentionality cannot be discerned without thorough attention to actions. In paying thorough attention to actions, actionoriented inferences are needed. The following utterances (1) —(3) may serve to illustrate this view: (1) A n eccentric lady had put her poodle into her washing machine. (2) She claimed compensation f r o m the firm. (3) The user's manual did not provide the warning that dogs should not be washed in the machine.

No coherence can be established for (1) —(3) if the temporal relations are not identified: putting the poodle in the washing machine must precede the claim for compensation, whereas the claim for compensation will probably have been made after the user's manual has been consulted. Moreover, it is necessary to make bridging assumptions about the causal relations holding for (1) —(3): it is probable that the dog died because of the washing activities; it may be assumed that its death caused the lady's claim for compensation; it may also be conjectured that it was the absence of a warning in the user's manual which caused the lady's indignation; it was probably her indignation which gave rise to the intent to use this absence of a warning as a legal ground on which to base her claim for compensation. As to the cognitive, affective and conative background activities, it is clear that the lady must have had specific thoughts in putting the poodle into the

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washing machine, that she probably regretted its death and that she must have had specific aims, wishes, desires, etc. in claiming compensation. If a high degree of coherence is to be constructed for (1) —(3), then these cognitive, affective and conative background activities have to be identified and related to each other. Such relations cannot be established without thorough attention to the actions which have been denoted by (1) —(3) or which can be hypothetically reconstructed from (1) —(3). To this end action-oriented inferences are needed. Action-oriented inferences may allow us to go far beyond the information that is given in the action(s) described. So, for instance, they may lead us to construct hypotheses about the conative, affective and cognitive background activities of those who carry out the actions described in: "... et venerunt, non propter Jesum tantum, sed ut La^arum viderent, quem suscitavit a mortuis" (St. John, 12, 9: "and they came not for Jesus' sake only, but that they might see Lazarus also, whom he had raised from the dead"). We may feel that this text conveys an implicit message about the conative background activities of those who "came". When we construct hypotheses about the intentions, motives, reasons or other mental background activities of those who "came", we (must) rely on action-oriented inferences. Similarly, we (must) also rely on action-oriented inferences when we hypothetically reconstruct the Czech's reason(s) for killing the dog that had saved his life [IV, § 11]. This hypothetical reconstruction, in turn, is necessary for the development of interpretative elaborations about the Czech's motivational and moral conflicts. These interpretative elaborations are needed to make his actions more intelligible to us. They may enable us to judge his moral responsibility for stifling the dog. Action-oriented inferences are also needed to gather the information from Brigitte stepped on the brake that stepped has nothing to do with 'walking', 'going a short distance', 'performing a dance' or 'measuring a distance by stepping', but relates to the schema/frame/scenario/script of DRIVING A CAR. Moreover, when this cotext continues with and the car stopped, we may infer that temporal and cause-effect relations hold between both clauses. When Brigitte stepped on the brake is extended by to avoid a small hedgehog sitting on the road, we may make inferences about Brigitte's intentionality. When Brigitte stepped on the brake continues with the clause because she was too tired to continue driving, we may infer that a causal relation obtains between the two clauses. In all these continuations it may become clear that the action of stepping on the brake is not only due to muscular contractions in Brigitte's leg, but is also related to other bodily movements which resulted from her inner-life constellations. Dealing with these bodily movements, with their underlying inner-life constellations and with their relations to temporality, intentionality and causality requires action-oriented inferences. One additional consideration should be mentioned. In dealing with the question of what conduct is normal/sane or abnormal/insane/pathological, the study of action and a reliance on action-oriented inferences are of great

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importance. It can be observed that the motor behaviour and the action planning of certain fellow-human beings display deviances from what is accepted as 'normal' within a specific sociocultural context at a specific time. For instance, some psychiatric patients make grimaces, carry out strange movements, are in a state of hyperkinesis, run against walls, etc. They may also describe in verbal texts the deviances which occur in their actions. In all such cases, the study of (co)verbal actions can be basic to psychodiagnostic assessment (van de Velde, 1992 b). 5.4. Action-oriented

inferences made from cotextually expressed

actions

5.4.1. Inferences oriented to local actions § 4 The assignment of meanings to actions is often precarious. This is largely due to the fact that actions — apart from the legal, logical, moral and sociocultural codes — are not governed by rules, norms or conventions. For instance, when a verbal text describes the action of a person running to the station, one cannot be certain what this action means (van de Velde, 1988 b, 304 ff). Does it mean that he is aware of being late for an appointment at the railway station? Does he want to catch a train? Is he being chased by the police? Does he run for fun? Does he intend to break the conformist tendencies of walking people? Does he like to experience the effect of a higher pulse rate? etc. None of the meanings assigned to the action of running to the station can rely on a specific rule, norm or convention. Things become more complicated the more the actions (described) (should) serve as a basis to make inferences about the agent's cognitive, affective and conative life. For instance, can we derive from a sower's moving his arm the information that he knows, expects or hopes that the seeds which he scatters on the soil will grow? Can we infer from a person's running away that (s)he is afraid? Does it follow from a person's throwing a saucer that (s)he is angry? Can we gather from the victim's turning the other cheek the information that (s)he is a Christian who always tries to forgive? Are these questions idle? Do they provide the sources for scepticism about the possibility of uncovering something about somebody's inner goings-on? I return to these questions in chapter seven. Things become less complicated when there are specific rules, norms or conventions which govern actions. For instance, when the cotextually expressed actions specify that a person puts his car in first gear, removes his foot from the clutch, presses the accelerator, etc. and that this is done, because there is a change from the red to the green traffic light, then these actions are governed by the specific rules of the Highway Code. Any interpretation of these actions must take these rules into account. But even then the assignment of meanings will be confronted with uncertainties about his motivations for driving a car, about his aims in travelling, about his prefer-

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ences, etc. In this regard, an interpretative elaboration of someone's passing the traffic lights requires an enormously long chain of inferences in which many steps cannot be exhaustively and accurately identified. Let me continue now with a further clarification of how actions can be cotextually expressed and what consequences can be drawn from them. I take an action context in which two persons are walking in the fields and one of them utters (4): (4) The farmer is ploughing.

In addressing the hearer, the speaker asserts what (s)he infers from the directly observed actions performed by an agent who is turning over the earth. But inferring from directly observed actions is not the subject of [V, §§4—5], The main points to be made are that an agent's actions are expressed verbally in (4) and that the receiver can make action-oriented inferences from them, as is illustrated in (5) —(11). Consequences (7) —(8) concern temporality. Consequence (10) is concerned with the cause-effect chain of actions and consequence (6) pertains to the cognitive and conative background activities of the agent. (5) Probably the action of ploughing is a partial manifestation of several action sequences. (6) Probably the agent (farmer) has thoughts, intentions, desires, reasons, motives, goals, etc. in turning over the earth. (7) Probably ploughing is taking place after manure has been spread. (8) Probably the farmer will sow some days later, after having finished ploughing. (9) Probably the work of turning over the soil has a social function within the series of actions which serve to provide the population with food. (10) Probably the land will no longer lie fallow. (11) Ploughing is one of the preconditions for harvesting.

It is possible to comment extensively on the interpretations of (4): so for instance, it may be noted that the farmer is a nomen agentis which denotes someone who cultivates, that the farmer is not used in a generic sense in (4), that the farmer refers exclusively to the individual agent whom the two walkers observe, etc. Moreover, consequences (5) —(11) can be augmented in various ways depending on how many specifications are required: which changes does the farmer want to bring about? Which person-internal and personexternal causes may be assumed for the farmer's ploughing? Which specific actions does the farmer perform during ploughing? etc. None of these possibilities of further commenting on (4) will be considered. Instead, with respect to (5) —(11), I would ask the following: to what kinds of deed are action-oriented inferences directed? Action-oriented inferences, such as those leading to (5) —(11), are directed towards local actions. In other

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cases, treated below, they are directed towards global actions (macro-actions) or they operate in both local and global direction. No matter whether action-oriented inferences are locally and/or globally directed, they still need interaction with ILRRR inferences as well as with syntactic and semantic-logical inferences. They also require supplementary hints which are inferentially derived from contextually performed actions. 5.4.2.

Inferences oriented to global actions

§ 5 If action-oriented inferences made from cotextually expressed actions are globally directed, then characteristics pertaining to sequences of actions, to hierarchically ordered actions, to actions constituting a macro-action, etc. come to the fore. Attempts at finding coherence in an action description discourse have to take into consideration not only the local connections but also the global relations holding between the various actions described. Let me illustrate this view by reconsidering (53) mentioned in chapter four. In that example of discourse, heterogeneous actions were cotextually expressed in the story told by the Czech physician. They allow the reader to make action-oriented inferences on a local level in the same sense as illustrated in (5) —(11). For example, when the storyteller utters I was stopped by a patrol the reader may locally infer that soldiers met the storyteller on his way, that they forbade his passage, that he had to obey their orders, that they temporarily prevented him from executing his plans, etc. Such local action-oriented inferences lead the reader only to the construction of local action coherence. Local coherence construction and local meaning assignment must be complemented by action-oriented inferences directed to higher-order actions or to global action schemata. So, for instance, BEING STOPPED BY A PATROL, BEING KNOCKED ABOUT BY SOLDIERS, BEGGING ON ONE'S KNEES, SLOBBERING AFTER ONE'S BIT OF BREAD, TRAVELLING BETWEEN DUSK AND DAWN, MAKING ONESELF A HIDING-PLACE, CRAWLING ALONG A DITCH, PASSING THROUGH A CORDON OF SENTRIES are cotextually expressed local actions of (53) [IV, §11]. They can be linked into a coherent whole by taking into account the global action schema of GETTING A MESSAGE THROUGH IN WARTIME which in (53) is a subschema of BEING ACTIVE IN THE UNDERGROUND. I surmise that action-oriented inferences made from cotextually expressed actions cannot function adequately if the locally drawn consequences are not integrated into inferential steps leading to global action interpretation [IV, § 12; VI, § 5]. This is well illustrated in the final part of (53) [IV, § 11] where the female interlocutor does not achieve a global action interpretation of the Czech's story. On the contrary, she focuses exclusively on the local actions pertaining to the dog's fortune, worries about her own dog, does not see how the Czech's intentions/motives/actions (must) fit into higher action schemata and reacts inappropriately to his global speech act.

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Here, the question may be raised as to how far integration into global schemata of action should go. For instance, for (53) [IV, § 11] national(istic), social, moral or legal schemata may be considered. With respect to nationalistic) schemata, it may be asked whether the Czech physician is compelled to get a message through. Is his decision to resist German aggression a matter of autonomy or free will? Is there any coercion to be active in the underground? Is his decision to engage in underground activities based on rational criteria [IV, § 1; § 17]? Is his action of killing an animal that saved his life morally right/wrong? In what ways and to what extent is he morally responsible for the action of stifling the dog? H o w can we hypothetically reconstruct the Czech's motivational and moral conflicts? Is killing the dog an indication of his lack of gratitude? Dealing with these questions requires more global schemata than the global action schemata of GETTING A MESSAGE THROUGH IN WARTIME and BEING ACTIVE IN THE UNDERGROUND. Ultimately, dealing with these questions may make us realize that we cannot completely and precisely account for the meaning(s) of action(s) [IV, § 6; VII, § § 8 - 9 ; VIII, § 7; § IX, § 7].

5.5. Action-oriented inferences made from contextually performed actions § 6 As I mentioned in [V, § 2], conscious actions can co-occur with discourse production and/or discourse reception. In line with current sociological approaches to discourse analysis (Corsaro, 1981), one can consider such actions as belonging to the social context of discourse. The term 'social context' has been used in different senses. It relates to (recent views on) social setting, to (beliefs about) culture, to socioculturally determined values, interests, norms and attitudes, to (opinions on) communicative style in social interchange, to (assumptions about) the roles and obligations of participants in social behaviour, etc. Whatever the viewpoints on social context may be, one cannot ignore them, since studies on communicative processes in social contexts have pointed out that any restriction to strictly linguistic and/or purely psychological perspectives fails to capture main interpretative dimensions. Some main interpretative dimensions depend on the characteristics of the action context. Action contexts, however, can be appropriately interpreted only by integrating them into the social context of discourse (exchange) [IV, § 12; VI, § 5]. Such integration, for instance, is necessary better to comprehend why Freud, before emigrating from Austria, in 1938, was requested to sign a Gestapo document in which he had to attest to have been properly treated. Notwithstanding the false statements occurring in the document, he agreed to sign, but wrote the following note under his signature "Ich kann die Gestapo jedem aufs beste empfehlen" (Donn, 1990, 46). To discern the acerbic irony/ sarcasm of this added note, one should integrate this action context into the

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hostile social context in which Jewish families had to live in Vienna after the Anschluß. Action contexts include, in the first place, those outwardly observable action data which co-occur with the use of language. Actions co-occurring with discourse production and/or reception are mainly manifested in face-toface communication, as in conversations, interviews, debates and dialogues. They are actions without words which may complement (or incidentally substitute) actions with words [V, § 2, § 7]. These actions without words deliver important non-verbal cues for making inferences, as can be seen both in the dramaturgical perspective and in everyday life circumstances (Goffman, 1971; Chaika, 1982). The following discussion will cover only one type of the social discourse processes, viz. conversation. In some directions of ethnomethodology (cognitive sociology) attempts have been made to spell out particular characteristics of conversation, such as opening, sequencing, closing, repair and turn-taking (Sudnow, 1972; Sacks, Schegloff, Jefferson, 1974; Schegloff, Jefferson, Sacks, 1977; Schenkein, 1978). Some of these attempts have been further developed in linguistics and its neighbouring disciplines (Labov, Fanshel, 1977; Franck, 1980; Chaika, 1982; Fritz, 1982; Gumperz, 1982; Stubbs, 1983; Levinson, 1983; Sperber, Wilson, 1986; Green, 1989). I cannot review all the different approaches. I illustrate only my own views on the inferences made from contextually performed actions. In so doing, I return to example (53) which I discussed in chapter four. § 7 In the complete version of (53), the actions co-occurring with the interlocutors' discourse production and reception are representative illustrations of contextually performed actions. List (12) —(18) provides some examples of inferences which the interlocutors (can) make from the contextually performed actions. ( 1 2 ) B e f o r e the f e m a l e c o a g e n t takes a first t u r n in the discourse exchange she is already able to i n f e r i n f o r m a t i o n f r o m the actions o f the p e o p l e present at the Red C r o s s rally and f r o m the w a y the Czech v i s i t o r distances himself f r o m the actions o f these people. ( 1 3 ) F r o m the Czech's simple n o d d i n g a n d f r o m his facial expressions the female c o a g e n t infers that there m u s t be reasons w h y he does n o t w a n t t o h a v e the c o m m u n i c a t i v e contact she wishes. ( 1 4 ) F r o m the Czech's a t t e n t i v e actions t o w a r d s her dog's b e h a v i o u r the female c o a g e n t d r a w s the c o n s e q u e n c e that he likes dogs. ( 1 5 ) F r o m the w h o l e social setting the Czech v i s i t o r can i n f e r that being s o m e o n e ' s guest i n v o l v e s s o m e social o b l i g a t i o n s and that it is i m p o l i t e n o t to m a k e c o n v e r s a t i o n w i t h the hostess if she is t r y i n g t o d o so. ( 1 6 ) F r o m her leaning into a c o m f o r t a b l e chair c o - o c c u r r i n g w i t h her dismissal o f his expressed v i e w s ("/ am not sure that this is always true") the Czech m a y c o n c l u d e that the f e m a l e c o a g e n t feels at ease in disagreeing w i t h her guest. ( 1 7 ) F r o m the s h r u g g i n g o f his s h o u l d e r s the f e m a l e c o a g e n t m a y surmise that he feels i n d i f f e r e n t t o her v e r b a l i n t e r v e n t i o n .

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153

(18) From his looking around in her room, f r o m his attention to her dog and f r o m his hesistantly looking at her the female coagent may suppose that he feels too uncomfortable to tell her about the bad experiences in war time.

In summary, the examples presented in (12) —(18) serve to illustrate that the social context of verbal and coverbal actions should not be disregarded. In the communicative functioning of discourse, the action-oriented inferences made from cotextually expressed actions do not work on their own but cooperate closely with action-oriented inferences made from contextually performed actions. The description of verbal and coverbal actions in (19) can illustrate that, to understand the local meanings and the global content, receivers have to make action-oriented inferences which concern the cotextually expressed actions. But they also have to infer information from the actions performed in the contexts evoked by (19). (19) A tiny man addressed an elderly woman in a crowded square a follows: "Have you seen a policeman in this town?" The woman answered that she had not noticed any in the last three hours. Suddenly, the man raised his left arm, pointed to a street lamp and exclaimed: "Look, there is one. He is admiring the lamp." The woman looked carefully, but did not see any policeman. Unexpectedly, she felt that her handbag was grabbed f r o m her right arm. She moved f o r w a r d to fetch it, but fell over a small dog. In the meantime her interlocutor had disappeared in the crowd.

From the inferences which concern the co-operation of cotextually expressed and contextually performed actions, it can be conjectured that the woman mistook the interlocutor's first verbal action in (19) as a request for help/information. However, in the subsequent fragments of (19) it turns out that he had intentions/goals/plans which differed from what the woman expected. In fact, the interlocutor deliberately misled the elderly woman. By having made false assumptions about the man's inner-life constellations and by having been totally absorbed in the man's (co)verbal actions she became an easy victim of robbery. 5.6. On mental background activities and action

co(n)texts

§ 8 In the foregoing paragraphs [V, §§4—7], I have assumed that action co(n)texts are an integrative part of human communication. However, not much attention was paid to the cognitive, affective and conative background activities which cause/give rise to/underlie the cotextually expressed and contextually performed actions or go together with/result from them. This is a partial neglect for which the following paragraphs [V, §§8—12] will attempt to make up. The reason is straightforward: to understand the actions described/denoted/hypothetically reconstructed, we have also to make inferences about the inner-life constellations of the agents. This can clearly be

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seen from (19). In hearing her interlocutor say that the policeman is admiring the lamp, the woman assumes that this tiny man intends to be witty. In feeling sympathetic to this intention and in being co-operative, she looks at the lamp. Of course, she expects to see a policeman. This expectation and the intention, which she assumes to be in the interlocutor, are inner-life constellations. The cognitive, affective and conative background activities are part of the pragmatic context. They determine which speech act is performed in a specific discourse d, and what effects the discourse d, has on its receiver(s). Included among such cognitive, affective and conative background activities are, inter alia, intentions, motivations, reasons, wishes, desires, beliefs, opinions, convictions, preferences, expectations and other psychological variables (van de Velde, 1988 c). The major difficulty arising here is that, in most cases, the psychological variables, which are the (causal) antecedents of human actions, are hidden and/or not uncoverable at all (van de Velde, 1988 c). However, sometimes we are able to retrace inductively the cognitive, conative and affective background activities even if they are not explicitly stated. These retraced mental variables are then a major part of explicative interpretation [VII, §§2-5], For the present, I can mention only some aspects bound to or co-occurring with the (presumed) cognitive, affective and conative background activities. To do so, I deal with expectations. They relate closely to inductive inference and to the complementary roles which induction and deduction have to play in inferential processing of discourse (van de Velde, 1978; 1981 a; 1981 b). Expectations are also basic to directions which (verbal) interactions may take. For instance, as (19) shows, it is because of the woman's erroneous expectations about the interlocutor's intended meanings that she becomes the victim of robbery. Inversely, the robber's expectations about the woman's lack of suspicion, etc. are satisfied. The influences which expectations exert on the individual's mental/physical activities, on social behaviour and on action-oriented inferences can hardly be overemphasized. However, a great deal remains to be done in order to find out in what subtle and complex ways expectations affect the receiver's comprehension of discourse (Dillon, 1978, 142 ff; Eco, 1979; Tannen, 1979; Bisanz, 1982; Rihs-Middel, 1982; Haberlandt, 1982; Fitzgerald, 1984 and references therein). I cannot undertake an examination of the many difficulties and deficiencies in investigating the role of expectations. I surmise that these difficulties and deficiencies arise mainly from the fact that, in most cases of the individual's mental/physical activities and in social behaviour, the expectations are not explicitly expressed. As such, they are not amenable to controllable observation. Nor can they be submitted to any other research method that completely complies with the norms and standards of science (van de Velde, 1972 b; 1974; 1975). So, for example, reliance on a person's reports about

5.7. On expectations and knowledge schemata

155

introspective data and similar techniques will fail, because, in many cases, human (co)agents do not realize themselves exactly which expectations they actually have (or had) and/or how these expectations intermittently change(d) and/or how they can be manipulated, etc. Sometimes, inner-life constellations which relate to expectations are inaccessible to introspection, because they are (partly or wholly) unconscious or because the (co)agent has no gift of self-analysis. Further difficulties arise, because expectations are tied to a wide variety of psychological factors: an individual's educational level, experience, attention, sensitivity, intelligence, semantic memory, etc. have a bearing on her/his expectations. It is an arduous task to interpret all these psychological factors adequately. For these and related reasons it is not feasible here to propose a scientifically well-founded approach to the important role which expectations play. I confine myself in the following sections to the relations between expectations, schema-based knowledge and verbal texts [V, §§9 — 10]. I also argue that expectations play a role in the hypothetical reconstruction of actions which are not expressed verbally [V, §§11 — 12], 5.7. On expectations and knowledge

schemata

§ 9 Expectations are intermingled with (the interpretation of) actions. For instance, the jail director acts under the expectation that the prisoner will not discover the deceptive trickery [IV, § 15]. The Czech physician kills the dog because of his expectation that it will betray him [IV, §11]. The elderly woman is misled because she expects that the tiny man intends to be witty [V, § 7]. In all these cases, expectations have repercussions on actions (and on their interpretations). The important role of expectations becomes also apparent when correct/ appropriate anticipations/predictions are to be made, when future actions are to be planned, controlled, etc. Game tactics, strategies of war, economic planning, etc. illustrate the ways in which expectations are intermixed with (the interpretation of) actions. When individual/collective illusions or disappointments occur, they may often be caused by the fact that plans, tactics, strategies and prognoses relate to incorrect/unjustified expectations. A good illustration of the role which expectations play in (the interpretation of) actions can be found in the following anecdote: logicians and philosophers of language hold a conference on presupposition. During a free afternoon, they visit a museum of military systems. At a certain moment, one logician inspects a suit of armour and unexpectedly lifts up its visor. From the depth of the suit of armour there is the sound of a low voice saying: "I regret that I have no name and that I cannot act, but I really exist". The funny effect of this anecdote is due to the expectation that an inanimate suit of armour

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will not speak. Moreover, there is the expectation that a suit of armour will not argue with the logician on the issue of existential presupposition. As appears from interpreting this simple anecdote, expectations are bound to the knowledge domains of the discourse receiver. The questions which are of crucial importance here can be formulated as follows: in what way do the discourse receiver's expectations emerge from her/his knowledge domains? How can knowledge sources provided by discourse reception relate to her/ his expectations? The answers to these questions, which cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence have proposed thus far, are still in need of further elaboration and refinement. Nevertheless, they provide promising leads for future research (Baars, 1988; Garnham, 1988; 1991 and further references therein). I shall deal with them only as far as expectations have connections with knowledge of actions and knowledge of action contexts. The basic assumption which the proposals of cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence share is that knowledge of actions as well as knowledge of action contexts is organized in memory. This organized knowledge can be represented in semantic networks (Garnham, 1988, 35 — 45), in schemata (Rumelhart, 1980), in frames (Minsky, 1975), in scripts (Schank, Abelson, 1977), in scenarios (Sanford, Garrod, 1981) in memory organization packets or MOPs (Lytinen, Schank, 1982) in generic knowledge structures of GKSs (Graesser, Clark, 1985), etc. So, for instance, knowledge of actions and knowledge of action contexts which may be or are activated/mobilized by the predicate PLOUGHING belong to schemata of agricultural actions [V, § 4]. Similarly, the actions and action contexts of TRAVELLING BY TRAIN, EATING IN A RESTAURANT, GOING TO THE MOVIES, ATTENDING A LECTURE, BARGAINING, VISITING A DOCTOR, etc. pertain to schemata. In my view, schema-based knowledge is characteristic of the ILRRR organization treated in chapter three [III, §§ 3 — 7]. On the basis of the organized ILRRR information it is normal to expect that the characteristics INANIMATE, HAVING NO ABILITY TO ACT, UNABLE TO SPEAK, etc. will be confirmed in reading a text about a suit of armour and its functions in medieval military actions. One of the main ideas in schema theory is that the knowledge represented in the schema provides the basis for raising a number of expectations linked with subschemata. So, for instance, if knowledge of the human face is activated as a schema, then an expectation-driven processing may start to evoke subschemata concerned with the mouth, the nose, the eye, the ear, and so on. Similarly, if the schema of BEING ACTIVE IN THE UNDERGROUND is activated, as is the case in (53) [IV, § 11], expectation-driven processing may lead to a subschema, like GETTING A MESSAGE THROUGH IN WARTIME which, in turn, may activate other subschemata, like TRAVELLING BETWEEN DUSK AND DAWN, MAKING ONESELF A HIDING-PLACE, PASSING THROUGH A CORDON OF SOLDIERS, etc. These subschemata

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may also lead the receiver to expectation-driven information about the motives of a member of the underground, about the techniques (s)he uses, about the precautions (s)he takes, and so on. Thus, processing a particular discourse o n BEING ACTIVE IN THE UNDERGROUND p r e s u m e s the selection of

appropriate subschemata and the evaluation of how well they fit with the actions described. Schema-based knowledge about the organization of actions is basic to the identification of action errors (which, in several respects, are comparable with speech errors). For instance, let us suppose that we read the cotext Instead of opening a tin of Kit-E-Kat, I opened a tin of peaches and I offered my cat highly flavoured sweet pulp and juice. In the sequential processing of this cotext, we may realize that the expectation-driven information which is evoked by KitE-Kat and by the CAT FEEDING schema is disconfirmed. From this disconfirmation we may make the inference that an action error must have occurred (Baars, 1988, 57 and further references therein). Similarly, a person who wakes up early and gets ready for work, may realize that her/his expectations and routine activities are wrong, because (s)he has to take into account the schema-based knowledge about HAVING A HOLIDAY (Baars, 1988, 81). § 10

Some important remarks are appropriate here. Firstly, knowing the

s u b s c h e m a t a of GETTING A MESSAGE THROUGH IN WARTIME d o e s n o t

preclude several free variations from being allowed on the part of the author. In other words, there is still room for imagination and inventive thinking within the realms of various knowledge (sub)schemata. So, the author is free to add different details to the conventional knowledge (sub)schemata or to change existing knowledge (sub)schemata in other ways or even to create new knowledge (sub)schemata. For example, in (53) of chapter four the author introduces the situations of TRAVELLING WITH A DOG, FEELING IN DANGER WITH A DOG, BEING SMELLED OUT FROM ONE'S HIDINGPLACE BY A DOG, SHARING ONE'S BIT OF BREAD WITH A DOG a n d BEING SAVED BY A DOG'S GROWLING w h i c h , in fact, d o n o t c o n s t i t u t e

the prototypical expectation-driven subschemata of GETTING A MESSAGE THROUGH IN WARTIME.

Secondly, free variations on existing knowledge (sub)schemata are also likely to occur on the part of the discourse receiver. This is the case, for instance, when the clues which are provided by the author are insufficient for the discourse receiver to find the pertinent knowledge (sub)schemata (Rumelhart, 1980). This is also the case when the discourse receiver's own pertinent prior knowledge turns out to be semantically incongruent with the information supplied by the author (van de Velde, 1988 c). Roughly speaking, the receiver's free variations on existing knowledge (sub)schemata may be a representative part of the transformations which (s)he carries out during the interpretation of the cotext [VII, §§7 — 8].

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Thirdly, the discourse receivers may differ greatly in their interpretations of a particular discourse depending on the attitudes which they have towards either the actions described in the discourse or those performed in the action contexts. These attitudes themselves are closely connected with a person's beliefs (Fishbein, Ajzen, 1975; Ajzen, Fishbein, 1980) and with the expectations evoked by her/his (pertinent) prior knowledge. Limitations on knowledge may have unfavourable repercussions on the discourse receivers' expectations, may lead to biased attitudes and may hamper interpretations accordingly. Fourthly, as to the (biased) attitudes which people have, it is an illusion to believe that values can be completely eliminated from the interpretation activities/results. With respect to values, man is not a neutral machine-like processor (van de Velde, 1989 d; 1991). It is unrealistic to ignore this lack of neutrality, as many cognitive scientists seem to do. It is naive quixotism to combat the unfortunate practice that people let value judgements infiltrate their discernment of meanings so that they unintentionally transform the pristine, original content of the message [VII, § 7]. Only critical (self-)reflection and a sound sense of scepticism may serve to separate the factual content from the outcome of evaluative interpretation. However, most people do not realize that they are not impartial in their critical (self-)reflection or that they are not able to be sufficiently distant/neutral observers/judges of their (action) interpretations. Fifthly, expectations may also depend on/arise from the knowledge of syntactic regularities, such as the knowledge that the first verb in a declarative English sentence is most frequently the main verb [II, §§4—8]. This knowledge is responsible for the receiver's psychological fixedness. For instance, most readers are fixated by expecting sailed to be the main verb in the ship sailed past the harbour sank. In other words, the expectation of encountering an inflected main verb after the noun phrase the ship does not allow of sufficient flexibility to consider sailed as a past participle (Baars, 1988, 143 and further references therein). Sixthly the fact that readers differ in their interpretations is often dependent on the type of discourse they are confronted with. So, for instance, readers may feel inclined to find more in literary discourse and in religious cotexts than the pertinent knowledge (sub)schemata allow. This holds true in the interpretation of allegories, metaphors, symbolism of poetry, and so on (van de Velde, 1988 c; 1988 e; 1991). In literary discourse, the factual and the fictitious cannot be fenced within the frontiers of knowledge (sub)schemata. Here, room is required for unpredictable lines of inference instigated by free creativity with the use of language elements.

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5.8. On hypothetically reconstructed actions and free interpretation §11 Free room for the unexpected inferential lines of free creativity and inventive thought is usually required when the actions are neither cotextually expressed nor contextually performed. As a concequence, interpretative elaborations are then needed to fill the meaning gaps (van de Velde, 1988 d; 1989 f; [VII, § 1 - 1 1 ] ) . Omission of detailed data about the action cotext and the action context can be due to the author's goal of suggesting a special sphere of gloom, uncertainty, indecision, etc. Alternatively, it may be connected with the author's deliberate appeal to the reader's imagination and inventiveness. For instance, in the final part of (53) of chapter four there are several actions which are not denoted: the interlocutors did not say good-bye, they did not shake hands, no conventional wishes or polite formulas were exchanged, etc. The absence of such action data has particular meanings. It is the receiver who has to develop interpretative elaborations in order to make up for what is left unexpressed. In this regard, let us now consider the question of which action-oriented inferences can be made when the actions are neither cotextually expressed nor contextually performed. To this end, I adduce example (20). (20) Her letter came to him like a springtime sonata.

In (20) no action is explicity expressed: letter is not a conscious agent and therefore has no cognitive, affective and conative background activities; came is not used as an inflected verb denoting an action; springtime sonata does not refer to the physical and mental acts of composing and playing the music. Thus, if action-oriented inferences are to apply, then they have to be made in an indirect appeal to the rather unpredictable resources of a person's receptive creativity. So, for instance, (20) may make the receiver reflect upon the depth and richness of Beethoven's sonatas. It may cause the receiver to cogitate about Pater's dictum that "all arts aspire to the condition of music". In the widening perspectives towards other arts, (20) may also evoke in the receiver an association with Rodin's sculpture of the Eternal Springtime. It may make the receiver think of Botticelli's painting La Primavera in the Galleria Uffizi in Florence. Or it may call to mind pieces of classical music dealing with springtime, with other seasons, with the spirit of nature, and so on. Often such receptive activities are subsumed under the general heading of so-called 'free interpretation'. Whatever the reflections on these issues may lead to, free interpretation will, first of all, have its own limitations in the material basis from which it starts. Moreover, it is also restricted by the pertinent prior knowledge of the receiver and by the total inferential field which relates this knowledge with the text under consideration. That is to say that the reader's free interpretation of the actions which may be involved in (20) is not without limits. Here, one

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may think of Goethe's view: "In der Beschränkung %eigt sich erst der Meister und das Gesetz nur kann uns Freiheit geben" which may be paraphrased as follows: " The test of the master of interpretation lies in the limitations and it is the law alone that provides us with freedom". The limitations which any master of interpretation will have to face can be considered here only with respect to actions. The actions which can or must be reconstructed hypothetically from (20) are bound not only to the inferences discussed in this book, but also to their interaction as well as to the knowledge (sub)schemata that are pertinent to (20). So, for instance, if one assumes that the higher proposition THE WRITER OF (20) AFFIRMS THAT holds for (20), then the following hypothetically reconstructed actions (or their underlying cognitive, affective and conative background activities) referred to in consequences (21) —(34) may be considered to lie within the admissible limitations of free interpretation: (21) Some female person must have written a verbal message for a male person. (22) Some female person must have sent that verbal message to a male person by post. (23) Some male person must have received the verbal message written and sent by the female person. (24) The female person will probably have used an instrument to write on the sheet(s) of paper. (25) The female person will probably have moved her arm and hand in writing down the utterances. (26) The female sender will probably have put the sheet(s) of paper into an envelope. (27) The female sender or someone else will probably have taken the letter to the post office or to a post box. (28) A postman will probably have put the letter into the letter box of the male receiver. (29) The male receiver will probably have read the letter with great satisfaction. (30) The male receiver will probably have heard a springtime sonata a long or short time before he read the letter. (31) The springtime sonata will probably have produced positive aesthetic effects on the male receiver. (32) The male receiver will probably have thought of the positive aesthetic effects he experienced with the springtime sonata when he read the letter sent by the female person. (33) The male receiver may probably have thought of the fact that springtime has the specific effect of bringing new life in nature. (34) The male receiver may probably have felt that the letter sent by the female person has a springtime-like effect on his own emotionality and intellectual creativity.

Needless to say that a number of additional inferences can be made depending on the receiver's hypothesizing various ways of CONCEIVING A LETTER, WRITING A LETTER, SENDING A LETTER, ENJOYING A SO-

NATA, etc. which all differ from those conjectured in (21) —(34). For instance, it may also be the case that the female person attentively prepared the

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formulation of her letter, that she dictated her letter, because she was illiterate or suffered from agraphia, that a go-between delivered the letter, that the receiver of the letter was in jail during winter time, that the letter opened horizons of rebirth [III, § 2] and freedom to him, and so on. All these possibilities of free interpretation cannot be my concern here. Let us, instead, return to (21)-(34). Consequences (21) —(34) have in common with (5) —(11) that they may serve the function of adding the necessary information to desultory utterances so that, in the end, the interpretative organization condition can be fulfilled [I, § 3] and coherence can be constructed for these desultory utterances. This will be shown in [VI, §§ 5 — 6], For the moment, it may suffice to note that the continuation of (20) in His feelings changed when he read what was written in the left-hand corner of the envelope needs at least the meaning addition suggested by (26). It is only by having recourse to (26) and to its related meaning conjectures that the combined utterances can be made globally coherent. Consequences (21) —(34) are not drawn from cotextually expressed actions. On the contrary, it is the knowledge schema of SENDING A LETTER that evokes expectations concerning subschemata of related actions and action contexts. These evoked expectations give rise to the consequences exemplified in (21)-(28). Similarly, knowledge schemata of MUSIC EXPRESSING SPRINGTIME SOUNDS or of a SEASON BRINGING NEW LIFE IN NATURE can activate expectations which suggest consequences such as (31) —(34). Here, a crucial role of expectations comes to the fore: the expectations evoked by knowledge (sub)schemata are basic to the hypothetical reconstruction of actions and action contexts. In this respect, two main surmises are in order: in the first place, hypothetically reconstructed actions cannot exist without the preconditions of pertinent semantic ILRRR information being fulfilled. In the second place, the discourse receiver can do more with words in the hypothetical reconstruction of actions and action contexts the more developed her/his pertinent semantic ILRRR information is. To make these two surmises acceptable and clear, I adduce example (35). (35) The Prince, travelling through his domains, noticed a man in the cheering crowd w h o bore a striking resemblance to himself. He beckoned him over and asked: "Was your mother ever employed in my palace?" "No, Sire," the man replied. "But my father was." (Koestler, 1976, 84)

In interpreting (35), the need for action-oriented inferences becomes obvious [V, § 3]. Firstly, the relations of temporality, causality, intentionality cannot be identified in (35) when action-oriented inferences are dispensed with. Secondly, one may recognize that a hypothetical reconstruction of actions is necessary in order to assign a global meaning to (35). Thirdly, one may come to accept the surmise that without the semantic ILRRR information which is pertinent to the action cotext and action context of (35) it would be quite impossible to comprehend (35). Fourthly, one may experience the

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progressive reading of (35) as triggering off expectations. The more developed the reader's pertinent semantic ILRRR information the more expectations may emerge during the progressive discourse processing of (35) and the more the reader can do with the information parts of (35). For instance, the pertinent semantic ILRRR information that feudal lords sometimes had extramarital children is a sufficient knowledge source to expect the Prince's question "Wasyour mother ever employed in my palace?'. If the reader, however, has the additional knowledge that feudal ladies were discriminatorily deprived from having sex outside marriage by being physically forced into chastitybelts, etc., (s)he can do more with the unexpected answer the disconcerted Prince has to deal with. §12 A number of important remarks should be made on the topics under discussion here. They have to do with the general problem that the interpretation of (verbalized) human action leads the inquiring mind to penetrate into the most complex conundrums of the individual's inner psychic life. These conundrums are presented in chapter seven. For the moment, let me address the following points. Firstly, it should be emphasized that so-called 'free interpretation' is not a specificum linked exclusively with the hypothetical reconstruction of actions. However, free interpretation is more immanent to the hypothetical reconstruction of actions than it is to the processing of cotextually expressed and contextually performed actions. Secondly, it should be noted that possessing knowledge (sub)schemata is not a sufficient guarantee for the hypothetical reconstruction of actions. One has to face problems, such as how the knowledge (sub)schemata pertinent to the verbal message under analysis are to be selected and used, on what criterion indications these selections and uses of knowledge (sub)schemata can be based, etc. These are problematic issues which so far have not been resolved by commensurate psychological accounts and by sufficient empirical evidence. Needless to say, the supply of the arguments required to justify the selection and uses of knowledge (sub)schemata and to back the free interpretation is not arbitrary but a prospect delineated by "Bescbrank,ung' ("limitation"). Thirdly, it should be stressed that the hypothetical reconstruction of actions faces additional complications not yet met in the interpretation of cotextually expressed or contextually performed actions. One of them concerns the fact that the difficulties increase as the actions and action contexts become less retraceable. To illustrate this point, let us compare (4) and (20). With respect to (4), one can fairly well presume what actions are executed in PLOUGHING and one can also hypothesize which cognitive, conative and affective background activities give rise to/underlie the farmer's PLOUGHING. As a matter of fact, they are, to a certain extent, supplied along with the knowledge (sub)schemata of agricultural actions. In contrast to (4), there is no directly

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available, specifically action-oriented information in (20) for the hypothetical reconstruction of the main actions, action contexts, and related cognitive, conative and affective background activities. As a consequence of these difficulties, the reader is forced to add groups of hypotheses to the limited cotextual information of (20). This kind of inferential processing may ultimately lead the receiver to (excessive) interpretative elaborations of (20) (Labov, Fanshel, 1977; Bellert, 1980; Cicourel, 1980; Langleben, 1981; 1983; van de Velde, 1981a; 1988 c; 1988 d and [VI, §6; VII, §§ 1 - 1 0 ] ) . For such interpretative elaborations it may reasonably be asked whether they correspond or are detrimental to the original intentions of the author (Clark, 1977; 1978; Hórmann, 1978; 1980; van de Velde 1981a, 101-110). As to the original intentions and the related cognitive, conative and affective background activities, we have to face the problem that there are no general laws nor law-like regularities to which we can resort in order to make the explicative interpretations of an individual's actions possible and reliable. To put it in more general terms, there is no Newtonian or Einsteinian science of man which offers us a successful penetration into the intricacies of man's inner microcosmos. Nor will there ever be a Galileo to specify which inner-life constellations move man to action and a Róntgen to X-ray what is/goes on in man's psyche. That is to say that the (causal) antecedents of human actions cannot be accurately and completely retraced. As a consequence, the possibilities of judging (the responsibilities of) the actions which individuals carry out are restricted (if not hindered). This consequence constitutes a continuous crux for criminology and judicial/legal proceedings. These and kindred considerations on the irretraceability of person-internal (facets of) meanings anticipate some views set out in chapter seven. A final remark concerns the interpretation of actions which can only belong to dreams, surrealistic world views, transcendental/mystic experience, spiritualistic or occult exercises, hypnotic states, literary fictionality, and the like. They all have in common that they are often incompatible with normal semantic ILRRR information [III, §§1 — 11], For instance, our semantic ILRRR information about a lifeless body and a corpse includes the knowledge that inanimate human beings lack mobility, vigour, etc. As a consequence, they cannot behave like conscious agents. Moreover, we know that it is not a normal action to kick a lifeless human being. Contrary to this semantic ILRRR information, (36) describes actions in which ILRRR-based expectations are not fulfilled. (36) She jumped over the fence. Then, she saw the lifeless body. She kicked it brutally. But the corpse raised the arm and said: "I still exist". Then, the alarm clock rang. Lucrezia w o k e up and started worrying about this peculiar dream.

As becomes clear from the final part of (36), the main meaning incompatibilities of (36) arise from a description of actions which occur in a dream. Do (descriptions of) actions in dreams need interpretation? The answer of

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psychoanalysis is in the positive. As appears from the letters of Freud to Jung (Hannah, 1982, 103 and further references therein) and from their monographs, the interpretation of dreams is the "via regia" to psychotherapy [VIII, § 2], In line with these psychoanalytic views, an attempt may be made to interpret (36). However, problems then arise as to which symbolic meanings are to be assigned to the actions ofjumping over the fence and kicking a lifeless body. What do the actions of the corpse symbolize? What do all these actions reveal about the inner-life constellations of the producer of (36)? Since we have no access to the private associations of the producer of (36), any psychoanalyst will claim that it is impossible to interpret the dream fragment expressed in (36). That is to say that the person-internal meanings conveyed by the actions described in (36) remain irretraceable. 5.9. Summary §13 In the fifth chapter, it was demonstrated that the interpretation of human action is a main prerequisite for understanding verbal cotexts, communicative contexts and the inner-life constellations which underlie/determine them. On the one hand, I discussed some broader perspectives which are required in order to study the complexities of human action. On the other hand, I argued that the identification of meaning connections between sequentially ordered utterances cannot take place in appropriate ways if inferences are not oriented to the denoted local actions and to the global actions of discourse. After some preliminary remarks on the notion of 'action', I dealt with the different roles which action may fulfil in discourse as well as in its wider contexts. In this respect, I drew a distinction between action-oriented inferences which are made from the cotextually expressed actions and actionoriented inferences which are made from the contextually performed actions. I also claimed that interaction between these kinds of action-oriented inferences is necessary. In addition, I argued that action-oriented inferences are needed to complement the co-operation of syntactic, ILRRR and semanticlogical inferences and that the relations of causality, temporality and intentionality must be disclosed. In the following stage, main attention was directed towards the pragmatic context. Here, I dwelt on the cognitive, conative and affective background activities which cause/give rise to/underlie discourse-internal actions or cooccur with action contexts. From the different cognitive, conative and affective background activities, I selected expectation. I pointed out that the expectations of the receiver are intertwined with her/his beliefs, attitudes and knowledge schemata. They are also determined by the type of discourse with which the receiver is confronted.

5.9. Summary

165

I demonstrated that the role of expectation is of extreme importance in providing hypothetical reconstructions of such actions which are neither cotextually expressed nor performed in action contexts. The last stage of this chapter was aimed at outlining the crucial significance which knowledge schemata have for action-oriented inferences as well as for controlling and constraining free interpretation. In being concerned with knowledge schemata, I raised the issue of organization. Organization is not only characteristic of the knowledge stored in semantic memory (or ILRRR) [III, § § 3 — 8] which people put to work in their text interpretation [III, § § 9 — 11; IV, §§1 — 12]. Organization is also characteristic of the information which is available in verbal cotexts and in coverbal contexts. Text receivers have to identify the surface organization and the deep organization of co(n)texts. The next chapter will be devoted to (the identification of) these levels/forms of organization.

CHAPTER SIX

Inferencing towards text organization 6.1.

Introduction

§ 1 It is a venerable implicit/explicit hypothesis of most philosophical/ psychological studies on man that he has a fundamental need to practise selforganization and to identify organization in things outside the self. This fundamental need appears to govern human action, perception and various cognitive skills (Mackay, 1987). Basically, it concerns the individual's macrocoherence [I § 3] as well as the material things which are to be integrated into it. Intellectual history in general and the history of science in particular provide impressive confirmation of the human striving for organization. So, for instance, the views on 'cosmos' in ancient Greece are characteristic of the human need for organization. Even twentieth century artistic 'free' expression has its own organization. Three examples may suffice: firstly, if we look carefully at Composition 1912— 13 by Piet Mondriaan (Kròller Miiller museum, Otterlo, Holland), we notice a very specific sense of order; secondly, if we are puzzled by surrealistic painting, its inventive and ingenious style is not an exception to or a conflict with the human need for organization. No knowledgeable person will critize René Magritte for having disordered our sense of and our need for organization. Thirdly, paintings by the COBRA group, even if they are considered as instances of wild and undisciplined painting, display organization. Our interpretation of them must allow us to identify what is specific in their organization. Human natural language possesses an intrinsic organization: it is organized in abstracto as a system of "¿angue"/"competence" which underlies verbal behaviour. It is also organized in concreto when it is used by human beings in "la parole"¡"performance". Linguistics developed methods to deal with the different forms/levels of organization which characterize (the use of) human natural language (van de Velde, 1971; 1972 a; 1973). The present chapter gives an account of those forms/levels of organization which are basic to syntactic, semantic and referential processing. The rhetorical and stylistic organization of texts are not considered (Mann, Thompson, 1988; Nòth, 1990, 338 — 345 and further references therein). Forms/levels of organization may, first of all, concern relations 'within' the information parts of verbal texts. They can, for instance, be identified in

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the phenomena of composition, derivation and inflexion. (In the structural methods of linguistics, these relations were mostly considered to belong to 'paradigmatic' organization.) Secondly, the forms/levels of organization may also concern relations 'between' information parts of verbal texts. They can, for instance, be identified in the syntactic, semantic, referential, logical and action-oriented chaining of (sequences of) utterances. (In the structural methods of linguistics, these relations are regarded to belong to 'syntagmatic' organization.) Thirdly, the forms/levels of organization may pertain to the functions which the language used has in communication. In this case, the relations which can be identified go 'beyond' the strictly verbal information parts. (Here, it has become common practice to speak about 'pragmatic' organization.) It is possible to integrate the language-oriented and communication-oriented views on organization into more comprehensive views on general systems theory (van de Velde, 1970). There are no well-delineated limits to such integration tendencies. For example, they may concern domains of artificial intelligence and cognitive science (Strohner, 1990 and further references therein). They may also be directed towards broader semiological approaches to verbal and non-verbal texts (Petofi, 1987; 1990; Noth, 1990 and further references therein). The present chapter does not deal with such possibilities of integrating discipline-specific views on organization into broader fields of research. It is concerned only with those aspects of text organization in which inferences play a major role. In [I, § 3], it was claimed that inferences are made from the very moment that a particular element of the set of information parts {i;, . . . i n } is identified by the receiver and is related to a particular element of the set of information parts {ji, . . . . , jn}. This claim is of crucial importance to the identification of referential organization, to the recognition of syntactic organization and to the construction of the different levels/degrees of coherence. In the introduction to this book [§ 13], it was also claimed that the identification of the forms/levels of organization which are characteristic of verbal texts is a prerequisite/precondition to making text interpretation a justified or plausible practice. The present chapter attempts to demonstrate the soundness of these two claims. More specifically, it shows that inferences are indispensable to the identification of particular forms/levels of organization. It also demonstrates that language disorders and cognitive impairments hamper the interactive and integrative functioning of inferences. As a consequence of these disturbances, particular forms/levels of organization cannot be identified, coherence cannot be constructed and language understanding is impeded. The preceding chapters were devoted to the different kinds of inference. In other words, those chapters were concerned with specifying the syntactic, ILRRR, semantic-logical and action-oriented inferences as well as with illustrating how these inferences are involved in descriptive text interpretation.

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In these respects, I showed that normal discourse processing requires the interactive and integrative functioning of these inferences. In due continuation of these main strands of thought, the present chapter demonstrates that the interactive and integrative functioning of syntactic, ILRRR, semantic-logical and action-oriented inferences can become operative by combining analytical, sequential, and holistic processing strategies. More importantly, it reveals that the combined processing strategies are needed for the discernment of the referential, syntactic and semantic organization. To this end, I show that decompositional operations are basic to analytical and sequential processing strategies, whereas (re)compositional operations play a predominant part in holistic processing strategies. In the following, verbal texts are viewed from three main perspectives of human inferencing which I call: 1) the 'within-perspective', 2) the 'betweenperspective', and 3) the 'beyond-perspective'. In so doing, more evidence is adduced for the conjecture that man strives to organize the information which he receives (stores and/or produces). Various instances of this characteristic have already been seen [I, § § 3 - 4 ; II, § § 5 - 8 ; III, § § 3 - 6 ; IV, §§ 4 - 1 2 ; V, §§ 4—10]. It has also been made clear that the satisfaction of the interpretative organization condition [I, § 3] is interconnected with the identification of the relations within/between/beyond the cotextual information. This chapter demonstrates that the identification of cotext-internal relations is of major importance to the construction of the low-level coherence. I also argue that low-level coherence is indispensable to descriptive text interpretation. Moreover, I hypothesize that low-level coherence is conditional on those inferences which rely on semantic ILRRR information. The present chapter shows in particular that man's striving (and need) for organization is essential to the higher stages of information processing which concern referential connectedness, cohesion and low-level coherence. The next chapter will be concerned with the organization of pragmatic information and with high-level coherence.

6.2. On referential

connectedness

§ 2 First of all, verbal texts are approached from the 'within-perspective' and the 'between-perspective'. To this end, I start with the syntactic, semantic and referential processing of the surface form of example (1) which is a fragment of The Creech dog summarized in [IV, § 11]. (1) He was well-bred. He picked up the cue without visible surprise. At her own door she hesitated, and then, stirred by sympathy, and at the same time interested in what kept this man taut and withdrawn, she asked him in ... (W. G. Hardy, The C\ech dog)

The decompositional operations of analytical processing which become effective within example (1) allow the receiver, amongst other things, to

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divide the text up into its constitutive segments. As far as the surface form is concerned, these constitutive segments may be syntactic constituents, such as verb phrases, noun phrases, prepositional phrases, and so on. The decomposition of the syntactic surface form of the text operates through syntactic inferences interacting with ILRRR, semantic-logical and action-oriented inferences. The syntactic constituents can be further broken down into smaller segments, including function words, inflection morphemes, etc. I do not concern myself with a full decomposition of example (1) into its constitutive segments, with all the atomising methods which can be applied to the syntactic constituents and with all the roles of the relevant syntactic inferences [II, §§ 3 — 10]. For the sake of illustration, I confine myself to the decomposition of example (1) into segments which are syntagmatic substitutes for other segments, such as the personal pronoun he and its inflected form him. Why select these substituting pronominal segments he and him} The reason is straightforward: in most texts, substituting pronominal segments, such as he and him, are basic to the organization of text expression and to the organization of text content (Harweg, 1968; 1978). Moreover, the nominal segments for which he and him are syntagmatic substitutes carry along with them denotative meanings. The identification of these denotative meanings is a precondition for identifying/(re)constructing the person-external reality (the states of affairs, the action context, etc.) to which the text under analysis refers. It should not come as a surprise that the anaphoric relations which are made possible by segments such as he and him constitute main issues in linguistics, artificial intelligence, psycholinguistics and logic (Sichelschmidt, Günther, 1989; Gernsbacher, 1990, 1 0 8 - 1 6 1 ; Habel, Rickheit, 1990 and further references therein). They continue to give rise to various difficulties in machine translation systems (Papegaaij, Schubert, 1988, 37 ff). As to the specific roles which the anaphoric/cataphoric pronouns fulfil in example (1), the following remarks can be made. (1) In example (1), the pronominal segments he and him replace the nominal segment this man. In the prior discourse of example (1), he and him are substitutes for a Creech combined with the participial newly come to New York. In the posterior discourse of example (1), he and him as well as their postcedents and antecedents satisfy the iterativity condition [III, §9](2) In the connecting and iterating role, he and him as well as the nominal segments which they replace can refer to one and the same argument [IV, § 6], As an analytical convenience, I assume that substituting and substituted segments which refer to one and the same argument, satisfy the coreference condition [III, § 9]. The pronominal segments he and him as

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well as a C^ech, a physician, this man, etc. meet the coreference condition throughout the whole text The C^ech dog. (3) With respect to the text content of The C^ech dog, the pronominal segments he and him are the carriers of the meanings expressed by the coreferential nominal segments which they replace. In other words, the substituting pronouns, if taken on their own, do not introduce new semantic information. On the contrary, in only focusing on their surface form, one can conceive of substituting pronouns as carriers of attenuated semantic information (see also Bosch 1983; 1989) or as almost meaningless elements (Papegaaij, Schubert, 1988, 37, 50 ff). English personal pronouns have only the semantic features human vs. non-human, male vs. female, (fe)male vs. neutral or singular vs. plural. They become richer in semantic content by fulfilling their anaphoric roles in the referential chain of a cotext, as is the case in The C^ech dog. I term the sequentially ordered utterances whose substituting and substituted segments denote identical arguments 'referentially connected utterances' or 'referentially connected texts'. The referential organization which ensues from referential chaining, is called 'referential connectedness'. Referential connectedness can be constituted by explicit mention of referents or by evoking situations which can only be appropriately understood by relying on a schema/script/frame/scenario (Sanford, Garrod, 1981). For instance, the different entities which are explicitly mentioned in (2) are explicitly iterated in (3). It does not require very much processing effort to identify the referential connectedness of (2) and (3). (2) He gave Gabriele a small present. (3) She accepted it f r o m him with great pleasure.

In contradistinction to (2) —(3), there is only an implicit mention of a hammer in (4) so that hammer is not repeated/replaced in (5). Action-oriented inferences are needed for the hypothetical reconstruction of those actions in which John held a hammer in his hand, moved his arm to make the hammer hit the tacks, etc. [V, § 11 — 12]. To deal with this hypothetical reconstruction of such actions, we have to rely on the schema/script/frame/scenario of NAILING BOARDS TOGETHER. In such a schema/script/frame/scenario the knowledge of a particular situation may be activated where an agent needs a specific instrument to perform the actions of NAILING BOARDS TOGETHER. It is part of the receiver's interpretative elaboration [VI, § 6] to add to (4) the meaning hypothesis that this instrument is a hammer. (4) Because John was a very unpractical academic, he tried to nail the thin boards together with tacks. (5) Suddenly, he hit his nail, dropped the hammer on his left foot and they all fell on his right foot.

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The second clause of (5) is rather unusual, if not unnatural. It may produce processing difficulties because of the pronominal anaphora expressed by tbej. The interpretative elaboration which is needed to relate (4) to (5) does not allow us to identify only one anaphoric referent for they. It is part of the intricacies of anaphoric/cataphoric coreference that personal pronouns in the plural can cause quite unexpected problems. For instance, they in (5) can grammatically refer back to the thin hoards and to tacks. If we make the bridging assumption that John's actions denoted and implicitly mentioned in (4) are (partly) successful, then they may also refer to the thin boards (partly) nailed together with tacks. That is, the referential connectedness of (4) —(5), which is mainly dependent on the coreference relations between John, he and his, does not warrant our discernment of all the cases of argument identity [IV, § 5] in (4) —(5). As a consequence, referential ambiguity and vagueness cannot be avoided. Referential ambiguity and vagueness can give rise to problems for which it is very difficult to find a satisfactory solution. A very good example is enigma (6) —(7) in which the receiver is not given enough semantic information about the referent of it. (6) It belongs to a whole in visual perception, but it decreases in size while the whole grows. (7) What is it?

In order to check whether the interpretative organization condition [I, § 3] can be fulfilled for (6) —(7), I asked many linguists at several conferences to solve the riddle (6) —(7). So far, all their overt signifying responses to (6) —(7) have confirmed the hypotheses that the interpretative organization condition cannot be fulfilled for (6) —(7). In other words, no linguist could suggest an interpretative elaboration of (6) —(7) which led her/him to a satisfactory answer to (7)? Referential ambiguity and vagueness not only give rise to riddles, they can also produce funny effects. For instance, in the cotext if the baby does not thrive on raw milk, boil it (Gowers, 1985, 191) the iterativity condition [III, § 9], the argument identity condition [IV, § 5] and the coreference condition [III, § 9] are met. However, it can anaphorically refer to raw milk and to the baby. How is the receiver to deal with this cotext? How can misunderstanding be avoided? Reliance on semantic ILRRR information can provide a way out of the processing difficulties and prevent the receiver from carrying out wrong actions. At the end of this section, I return to cotext (1). With respect to cotext (1), the discernment of the semantic ILRRR information carried along with the substituting and substituted segments and the reliance on this semantic ILRRR information are the main prerequisites for finding out in what ways the integral cotextual information of (1) and of The C^ech dog is referentially connected.

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6.3. On conference § 3 No matter how many nominal segments are replaced by pronouns, the syntactic, referential, logical, action-oriented and semantic chaining of the constitutive segments of juxtaposed utterances is primarily dependent on the coreference condition [III, § 9]. This becomes clear from comparing example (1) with example (8): (8) The Pope of Rome looked at the poor people of Brazil. He was the winner of the Wimbledon final. He was the first man to land on the moon. He defended the economic views of OPEC.

From the comparison between (1) and (8) one may conclude that (1) is referentially connected, whereas (8) is not. A receiver who possesses semantic ILRRR information about the Pope of Rome and who can interpret what is propounded in the separate constitutive segments of (8) will certainly refuse to accept coreference between the identified segment the Pope of Rome and the posterior iterations of he. This was confirmed in a listening comprehension task given to 37 graduate students on two occasions with a two week interval. All subjects agreed that the decomposition of (8) into its separate utterances and their constitutive segments made them recognize these separate utterances as syntactically organized parts. But they also maintained in the two sessions that the combination of these utterances did not conform to any global syntactic, referential, logical, action-oriented and semantic organization pattern. In the light of these answers, it is worthwhile attending to the question whether it is possible to make the utterances of (8) referentially connected. I conjecture that this is possible and that (8) can thus be transformed into an example which displays a level/degree of coherence which is specifically bound to referential connectedness. To control this conjecture, I introduced a different group of 45 graduate students to the main problems of referential connectedness. After this introduction, I confronted them with a reading comprehension task of the two utterances (9) and (10). They were asked whether (9) and (10) were referentially connected, and, if they answered in the negative, by what organizing steps (9) and (10) could be made referentially connected. Their answers had to be written on standardized examination papers. No time limits were imposed. After I had completely and carefully inspected all the answers, the subjects were given the opportunity to defend their views orally in a one hour session. (9) The Pope of Rome looked at the poor people of Brazil. (10) He was the winner of the Wimbledon final.

From the answers and from the discussion it appeared that desultory utterances can be made referentially connected when the interpretative organization condition [I, § 3] is satisfied. This satisfaction may be brought

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about by adding cotextual information or by calling up contextual information and by integrating the referentially unconnected utterances into this co(n)textual information. In the following, I first discuss the addition of cotextual information. This added cotextual information results from (re)compositional operations. More specifically, in the (re)composed cotextual information, as is illustrated in (11), a higher/global organization pattern of reference is provided such that the Pope of Rome, he and the winner of the Wimbledon final can denote one and the same argument: (11) The pope of Rome looked at the poor people of Brazil. He did not like this view. He remembered the dream in which he was together with rich people who celebrated his first victory. He felt, they all admired the way he had beaten McEnroe. Everybody had applauded. He was the winner of the Wimbledon final. He was sure he would give all the money he got for his victory to the poor people of Brazil. Now, his dream had a dramatic relevance ...

To find out whether the constitutive segments of (9), (10), and (11) are referentially connected, one must, first and foremost, discern their single denotative meanings and the denotative meaning connections. I illustrate this task in the following points (a) and (b): a) Decompositional operations disclose what semantic ILRRR information is carried along with the Pope of Rome and with the winner of the Wimbledon final. As far as the Pope of Rome is concerned, this disclosure may, amongst other things, provide semantic ILRRR information such as 'male adult human being having the ability to act', 'Head of the Roman Catholic Church at time tj', 'n*h successor of Peter who followed the vocation of continuing the work of Jesus Christ', 'infallible person in matters of Catholic belief, etc. As far as the winner of the Wimbledon final is concerned, the decomposition of its semantic ILRRR information may, amongst other things, disclose the following denotative meaning characteristics: 'male adult human being having the ability to act', 'the world's best tennis player at time t;', 'nf h successor of the yearly victor of the most famous tennis game', 'fallible person in matters of Catholic belief, etc. (For the denotative meaning of tennis player the property 'adult' may be seen as 'having the ability to act on the court as an adult'.) If was in (10) means WAS IDENTICAL WITH AT TIME tj and if the activities denoted in (9) by the predicate LOOKED AT THE POOR PEOPLE OF BRAZIL are ascribed to the Pope of Rome at time tj, then he, the Pope of Rome, and the winner of the Wimbledon final cannot denote identical arguments in the utterances (9) and (10). b) (Re)Compositional operations also come into play. They may serve the function of determining whether the constitutive segments of juxtaposed utterances can/cannot be made referentially connected. They are also

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needed in order to meet the interpretative organization condition [I, § 3] when the juxtaposed utterances are at first glance desultory. In such cases, the receiver strives not only to disclose the denotative (and other) meanings, but, as illustrated in (11), (s)he also attempts to relate them to each other and to make them conform to a higher/global referential organization pattern. In (11), the decomposed meaning characteristic 'male adult human being having the ability to act' is crucial to (re)compose referential links between the separate utterances (9) and (10). Due to the (re)compositional operations which result in the added referential links of (11), the arguments the Pope of Rome, he and the winner of the Wimbledon final can be made coreferential and the predicates ascribed to these arguments become compatible with each other [IV, §§4 — 8]. From the preceding remarks, (a) and (b), it appears that decompositional and (re)compositional operations must combine. In this combination, (re)compositional operations can lead the receiver to integrate the remaining referentially disconnected segments of (8) into a referentially organized text. This need not be illustrated here [VI, § 5]. It should suffice to note that the primary organization of referential connectedness is indispensable to the recognition of cohesion and to the construction of coherence.

6.4. On cohesion § 4 I now turn to the questions of whether the referential connectedness of juxtaposed utterances functions on its own or whether it is complemented by other levels/forms of organization. In this paragraph, I argue that in normal discourse production and reception referential connectedness is complemented by syntactic organization. Later on, I demonstrate that referential connectedness and syntactic organization are complemented by and must coordinate with other levels/forms of organization. Here, an important caveat must be borne in mind. The syntactic organization of text expression can be either partly or fully realized. If it is fully realized, I conceive of it as cohesion. If it is only partly realized, I call it 'defective cohesion' or 'defectively realized cohesion'. I first consider defective cohesion. When language serves as a means of communication, the characteristics of its form do not stand on their own. They must have correlates in the referential and semantic domains. That is the reason why, in text interpretation, defective cohesion (as well as fully realized cohesion) needs co-operation with referential connectedness and with coherence. This becomes particularly apparent in those cases in which defectively cohesive discourse fragments must be inferentially processed as in the examples of telegraphic style and in other instances

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of so-called pure thought syntax [II, § 8]. This also becomes clear from (12) and (13) in which parts of syntactic organization are missing: (12) He a thief. Impossible. The suspected person never there. He in hospital. He operation. This man honest. (13) John ... girl friend ... garden party ... artist ... take care ... scandals ... press ... frivolity ... fashion show ... horse ... bushes ... riding outfit ... 'event structures' ... artist ... exhibition ... comments.

Example (13) can be recognized as a referentially unconnected sequence of words. I hypothesize that (13) cannot be fully comprehended without taking into consideration the referentially connected and coherent examples (17) and (38) cited in [II, § 9; IV, § 10]. As to the example (12), again one can see that there is no complete syntactic organization. But (12) is a referentially connected fragment, because he occurring in the initial position of (12) refers forward to and is coreferential with the suspected person, he and this man. Owing to the referential connectedness of (12), lines of coherence can be established. As a corollary/consequence, defective cohesion can co-operate with referential connectedness and with established lines of coherence. Accordingly, (12) can be understood, as was confirmed in an interpretation task of (12) given to 28 graduate students. In this interpretation task, the students had to write down a paraphrase of (12) which was as close as possible to the local and interconnected meanings of (12). No time limits were imposed. From all the answers it was apparent that syntactic organization need not always be fully realized in order to make a verbal message comprehensible. That is, referential connectedness and coherence are more important than cohesion. The same group of subjects were also given example (13). They were again requested to write a paraphrase and to make explicit the local meanings and the meaning connections they discerned in reading example (13). No one could suggest a fully justified interpretation. Moreover, the proposed local and interconnected meanings were incompatible with those of the full text expression of examples (17) and (38) cited in [II, § 9; IV, § 10]. A comparison of the results of the two interpretation tasks reveals that (12) can satisfy on its own the interpretative organization condition [I, § 3], whereas (13) cannot. In its truncated form, (13) lacks the organization levels of cohesion, referential connectedness and coherence. Accordingly, the combined decompositional and (re)compositional operations cannot be appropriately set to work in interpreting (13). In contradistinction, (12) can be the object of combined decompositional and (re)compositional operations. Their complementary roles become particularly clear in those cases where a fully syntactically organized text is to be (re)composed/interpreted as in (14): (14) John suspected that he was a thief. However, it turned out that this was impossible. His father knew the suspected person well. Moreover, John realized that the suspected person

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because he had been in hospital for ten weeks and because he an operation when the theft was committed. For John's father man was honest, though he looked rather suspicious with his black moustache.

With respect to (14), one may ask: what syntactic markers make (14) a restored version of (12) and by what syntactic means can (14) be recognized as fully organized syntactic surface material? I shall not examine either question extensively. I single out only a few indicators of syntactic organization. In (14), the syntactic organization signals are the conjunctions that, because, though, the combinators however, moreover, the prepositions for, with, the indicators of time a long time, never, for ten weeks, and the indicators of place there, in hospital. Other syntactic markers which serve as syntactic organization signals are provided by the consequent use of the tense forms, by the linear order of the single utterances, which correspond to the ordering of (12), etc. As noted before, in cases of full-fledged syntactic organization one can speak about a 'cohesive text' or about a text displaying 'cohesion'. In using the notion 'cohesion', I do not want to get involved in technical and theoretical quandaries or in discussions on terminological issues (Gutwinsky, 1976; Halliday, Hasan, 1976; Enkvist, 1978; Reinhart, 1980; Beaugrande, Dressier, 1981; Brown, Yule, 1983; Charolles, 1983 a; Stubbs, 1983; Hatakeyama, Petófi, Sózer, 1985/1989). I conceive of cohesion as an error-free realization of the intrinsic regularities which together constitute the overall grammatically organized surface form of a verbal text t¡. Example (14) displays cohesion. Its comprehensibility is due to the co-operation of its cohesion, its coherence and its referential connectedness. One main caveat remains appropriate: the conception of cohesion which is proposed here should not distract the reader from the drawback that all the necessary and sufficient conditions of cohesion are not yet known. The surface organization of texts differs from language to language and for most languages text grammars have not been written. As far as the recognition of cohesion in the preceding examples is concerned, the following additional remark is to be made: if a typical text processing perspective is taken, then it may seem as if the recognition of cohesion is exclusively dependent on the combined processing strategies. In this perspective, however, the material basis to which the combined processing strategies must apply, should not be neglected. The recognition of cohesion is, first of all, a matter of the manifested language material. Accordingly, the receiver's combined decompositional and (re)compositional operations are restricted by the verbal surface form. No matter how much inventive thinking is invested in decomposing and (re)composing the cotextual information of the surface form, the receiver can recognize cohesion only when the global syntactic organization is apparently actualized in the juxtaposed utterances. When insufficient cotextual information is available, as in example (15), the

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combined processing strategies cannot make up for the missing syntactic segments. If this is the case, hypothesis H4 is fully confirmed [II, § 9; § 11]. (15) I have one or more of them. It's a ... I like them. It must be over there ... but it's not. My ... also made one for some ... that he had been with it was before he had his ... most of them are like that. They can also be a man has them, many of them, but a new one would be even more of a one when you were with them?

in the ... by the in the ... as a ... had from the ... ... Did you have

Example (15) is the "protocol of an aphasic patient's spontaneous speech" (Marshall, 1977, 144). I claim that, in contrast to (14), example (15) lacks cohesion, referential connectedness and coherence. To restore the defective cohesion, syntactic inferences must identify the open places. To fill the open places, syntactic inferences must interact with the other kinds of inference so that segments can be embedded carrying semantic ILRRR information along with them [II, § 11],

6.5. On the cotext integrativity

condition

§ 5 As has been demonstrated in earlier parts of this book, the identification of the syntactic constituents and of their local meanings/meaning connections is basic to discerning meaning organization. In the following, I propose a conception of meaning organization which serves to supplement the views introduced in [III, § 9; IV, §§4—15; VI, § 2]. I conceive of the discernment of meaning organization as an integration of cotextual information into higher/global patterns of organization. In this respect, it is important to emphasize that the intrinsic coherence of a text concerns the entirety of its cotextual connections. For instance, the sequentially ordered utterances (16) —(18), if taken on their own, are intrinsically incoherent. But their integration into the higher/global referential organization pattern provided by (19) makes the entire combination (16) —(19) a coherent whole. Similarly, the local meanings carried along with the utterances (16) —(19) can be integrated into the higher/global level of metathematic organization provided by (20): (16) John is a maniac. (17) There is no furniture in my room. (18) The academics talk about acid rain. (19) All these utterances were written on a blackboard. (20) So, one can always integrate desultory utterances into a higher organization pattern.

Possibilities of integrating segments of a text t, into a higher/global organization pattern may be afforded by the cotext at different stages of text processing: at the beginning, before/after any single utterance, in the middle of a cotext, at the end of a cotext, and so on.

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The higher/global organization pattern may also be a narrative frame into which single subtexts have to be incorporated, as is the case with Decameron or with the collection of Panchatantra (Segre, 1988, 32). Or it may be that the possibilities of integration are afforded by the main topic of the cotext (Giora, 1985) or by the motif-structure(s) or event-structure(s) of the cotext (Langleben, 1985). I do not discuss all these possibilities of cotext integration here. I would only illustrate the possibility that the referentially unconnected example (8) can be integrated into a referentially connected and intrinsically coherent cotext. To this end, sufficient cotextual information is made available at the beginning of (21). Then, the interpretative organization condition [I, § 3] can be met: (21) Last night I had an Ovidian dream. The Pope of Rome was miraculously metamorphosed into different persons all acting differently at different times and in different places. So it turned out that the Pope of Rome saw the poor people of Brazil. He was the winner of the Wimbledon final. He was the first man to land on the moon. He defended the economic views of OPEC.

Providing the possibility of integrating segments of a text t; into a higher/ global organization pattern, as illustrated in (21), displays intriguing facets of what I call the 'cotext integrativity condition'. The cotext integrativity condition cannot be met completely through the analytical and sequential processing strategies because they are restricted to the discernment of the relations within and between the segments of cotextual information. Holistic processing strategies, on the contrary, are concerned with bringing together all the different co(n)textual information parts into an organized whole. In so doing, holistic processing strategies must incorporate all the congeries of analytical and sequential processing strategies. In such cases, holistic processing strategies are pre-eminently suited to meeting the cotext integrativity condition.

6.6. On interpretative

elaboration and coherence

§ 6 Let us now consider the 'beyond-perspective' announced in [VI, § 1]. The 'beyond-perspective' is particularly necessary when the 'within-perspective' and the 'between-perspective' discussed in [VI, §§2 — 5] do not provide sufficient data on which to base the construction of coherence. In the 'beyond-perspective', receivers rely on various knowledge sources to construct an interpretative elaboration (Graesser, Clark, 1985). This has already been illustrated in (4) —(5) of [VI, §2], Attempts at elaborating on cotextual meanings have been denoted by the inclusive term 'elaboration theory' (Strohner, 1990, 129, 221 ff). Let me give a simple example of the potential for interpretative elaboration by discussing (22) —(24):

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(22) Christ is alive in those who believe in Him. (23) His love is stronger than death. (24) That is the real sense of resurrection, (after Robinson, 1967)

To make (22) —(24) a referentially connected cotext, that must be taken to refer backward to the global meaning carried along with (22) —(23). However, what is stated in (22) —(23)? What information is to be added to (22) and to (23) in order to make them cohere with (24)? To deal with (22)-(24) appropriately, the receiver must inferentially add the information of (25) — (30) to (22)-(24). (25) Christ must have died. (26) Christ must have been put into a grave. (27) Christ must have risen from the grave. (28) Some individuals believe that Christ rose from the grave. (29) The belief mentioned in (28) is equivalent with the belief in resurrection. (30) Some individuals believe that Christ is not dead.

The elaborations suggested by (25) —(30) can be extended and augmented in many ways, as can be learnt from biblical exegesis and Christian theology. Moreover, it is possible to connect (22) — (24) with passages from the Gospels which concern the concept of 'life'. So, for instance, the words of Christ Himself "/ am the way, the truth and the life" (St. John, 14, 6) may be connected with "Christ is alive", with "His love" which "is stronger than death" and with "the real sense of resurrection". It is also possible to search for other intertextual relations with kindred religious writings of the Christian tradition, such as the Acts of the Apostles, the Epistles of Paul the Apostle to the Romans, Corinthians, etc. When kindred religious texts are related to (22) —(24) interpretative elaboration is inevitable. In such cases, however, free connotations and associations can easily interfere with the sincere efforts to keep interpretative elaboration a stringent and optimally/maximally controllable enterprise [V, §§ 11 — 12; VII, §§ 8 — 10]. There is an enormous drawback connected with the interpretative elaborations of religious texts in that they are used as a basis for exercitia spiritualia and that religious people do not ponder too much on the pitfalls, failings and traps which may occur in them/co-occur with them. In their view, religious meanings are not to be made the object of rational investigation [IV, §§ 15 — 17; VIII, § 8]. With regard to the cotext (22) —(24), they may claim that its complex symbolic meanings relate to the central images of Christianity, that they concern the religious concept of 'life' and that this religious concept of 'life' belongs to spiritual domains which do not require a critical mind. It is an intrinsic property of religious reflection, contemplation and meditation on spiritual domains that they allow of many

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non-literal readings and of an uncontrollable freedom in interpretative elaboration (van de Velde, 1991). This property may give rise to vexed questions. I shall return to them later [VII, §§ 7 - 1 0 ; VIII, § § 7 - 8 ] , Cotext (22) —(24) can be integrated into various cotexts of the Gospels and biblical scholarship. Here, the following problem can be raised: what happens when we deliberately isolate a cotext from its (intertextual) relations with other cotexts? Is contextual information then to be called up in order to ensure/permit interpretative elaboration? To tackle these problems, let us consider (31)-(33): (31) He opened the door. (32) A few pieces of clothing were strewn about. (33) He caught the fish in his net (cited from Reinhart, 1980, 163).

Examples (31), (32) and (33) denote actions, amongst other things. Accordingly, their interpretation requires action-oriented inferences [V, §§ 1 — 12]. For instance, (31) may give rise to inferences such as: probably the male person exerted force forwards (or backwards) with his arm; probably there were mental background activities which caused the exertion of the male person's arm; probably the opening of the door was not the result of an automatic, unintentional or unwanted exertion of the male person's body (Ginet, 1990), etc. Notwithstanding the fact that action-oriented inferences (in interaction with other inferences) are made in order to interpret (31), (32) and (33), progressive reading will, at first glance, lead us to recognize (31), (32) and (33) as desultory utterances. Nonetheless, I claim that the 'beyond-perspective' makes it possible to construct local and global coherence for (31) —(33) if (31) and (33) are accepted as referentially connected utterances and if (32) can be integrated into this referential connectedness. To control my presumption, I gave a reading comprehension task to 33 graduate students. They were asked whether they could construct coherence for the sequence of utterances (31) —(33) and which operations were required to the construction of coherence. No time limits were imposed and the answers had to be written on standardized examination papers. From all the answers it became apparent that local and global coherence could be constructed for (31) —(33) if contextual information was called up and if, on the basis of this called-up contextual information, the separate utterances were each integrated into higher/global patterns of organization. Regarding the action context, some students went beyond (31) —(33) by imagining a situation in which the main character, who opened the door, etc. was a married man. He must have suspected a certain male person of paying secret visits to his wife during his absence. He planned to return home at an unexpected moment to find out whether his suspicion was right. On opening the door, he could take the suspected person in flagrante delicto.

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Concerning the pragmatic context, it is impossible to ' retrace from (31) —(33) the intentions/motives which led the producer to express (31) —(33). Consequently, the subjects were concerned only with the intentions/motives of the male person to whom the pronoun he refers in (31) and in (33). Some subjects surmised that by opening the door the main character had the intention of finding out what had happened in the room/house/ apartment/building. They also supposed that the disorder in the room/house/ apartment/building was not restricted to the clothes strewn about, but that an aquarium had fallen down and a fish lay on the floor. Then, the main character intended to save the life of the fish. He did not pick up the fish with his hands, but succeeded in catching the fish in his net. As to the social context, no subject reconstructed the social situations of text production/reception into which (31) —(33) is to be embedded. All subjects confined themselves to the information parts of (31) —(33) and to the possible knowledge domains of social life with which these information parts could be connected. Some students called up their knowledge about a social context in which one agent had the social role of a detective. The other person was probably someone who had seriously violated the social rules, laws, obligations, conventions, and the like. Some subjects thought that the other must have been a thief, a fugitive, etc. caught by the detective. On the basis of the contextual information, which the subjects called up, they could set the (re)compositional operations of holistic processing to work so that each separate utterance could be integrated into a higher/global pattern of organization. Thus, lines of local coherence resulted from the addition of deductively and inductively inferred information to each single utterance. Example (34) illustrates one summarized version of an interpretative elaboration. It may serve as a re-encoded cotext. This re-encoded cotext is basic to all further elaborations which take contextual information into account. (34) HE OPENED THE DOOR. [Probably he had moved his arm/hand/head/feet.] [Probably he had touched the door.] [The door was no longer closed.] [The door was opened far enough to allow the main character to look into or get into the room/apartment/building/ house.] A FEW PIECES OF CLOTHING WERE STREWN ABOUT. [That was what the main character observed on looking into the room/apartment/building/house.] [Some person(s) must have strewn the pieces of clothing about.] [Probably the main character was happy that opening the door enabled him to see some characteristics of the room/apartment/building/house.] HE CAUGHT THE FISH IN HIS NET. [The main character was sure of having caught the wanted entity/person.] [The net planned out in the mind of the main character/the material net turned out to be an efficient means for catching the wanted entity/person.]

In (34) the separate utterances (31) —(33) are presented in capitals, whereas the inferentially added information is written between square brackets. The inferred propositions between the square brackets can be multiplied, as is suggested by the line of dots. The interpretative elaboration in (34) illustrates the points I made in [III, § 7] on the conceptual organization of semantic ILRRR information. It is

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obvious that the word door in (31) and (34) may evoke the superordinate concept of 'spatial enclosedness'. I claim that the concept of 'spatial enclosedness' is needed to assign local meanings to (31), (32) and (33), as may become clear from considering (35) —(37): (35) If there is no spatial enclosedness, then there can be no side faces to which a door normally belongs. (36) If there is no spatial enclosedness, then there can be no base face on which something can incidentally have been strewn about. (37) If there is no spatial enclosedness, then it is impossible to look into or to get into a room/ apartment/house/building by opening the door.

The following consequences flow from (35) — (37) and the above discussion: firstly, without the conceptual organization which concerns the general concept of 'spatial enclosedness', as it is cognitively reflected in ILRRR, it would be impossible to construct the interpretative elaboration (34). Secondly, semantic ILRRR information and the ILRRR-related inferences are fundamental to the construction of coherence which has been made explicit in (34) [VI, § 8], Careful inspectation of the interpretative elaboration in (34) also illustrates the points made in [V, §§ 1 — 12] on the crucial importance of action-oriented inferences. Some actions are cotextually expressed in (31) —(33) by the inflected action verbs opened, were strewn about and caught. From them a number of action-oriented inferences can be made, as is clear from the interpolated propositions of (34). In addition to the cotextually expressed actions, one must also consider the fact that some actions must be reconstructed hypothetically [V, §§ 11 — 12]. For instance, the following problems may be raised: what actions were carried out when the pieces of clothing were strewn about? What actions were performed when he caught the fish in his net? Solving these problems requires the hypothetical reconstruction of actions. In this respect, it was apparent from the students' answers that the contextual information, which they called up, can serve the aims of the hypothetical reconstruction of actions. One main remark is still appropriate. The interpretative elaboration (34) is far from being complete [VII, §§ 1 — 10], In fact, it is a very rough summary of some of the student's attempts to meet the interpretative organization condition [I, § 3]. As such, it may illustrate that the students' striving for meaning is conditional on their endeavours to find/impose organization within/between/beyond the cotextual information parts they are confronted with. Finding/imposing organization is an indispensable part of the construction of coherence. Coherence, in its own right, is indispensable to descriptive text interpretation.

6.7. On the indispensability of coherence

6.7. On the indispensability

183

of coherence

§ 7 The discussion of the previous section not only suggests the crucial importance of semantic ILRRR information and its conceptual organization, it also leads me to hypothesize that coherence is a conditio sine qua non for interpreting the cotext: H 9 If coherence cannot be constructed for the juxtaposed utterances ux, u2, u3, ..., un occurring in a human natural language HNLit then the justified descriptive interpretation of U\, u2, un cannot be achieved. In recent writings on textlinguistic and related issues (Bellert, 1970; 1972; Conte, 1988; 1989; Hobbs, 1978; 1983; Langleben, 1983; Lundquist, 1980; 1983; Fritz, 1982; Brown, Yule, 1983; Stubbs, 1983; Charolles, 1983 a; 1983 b; 1989; den Uyl, 1983; Gernsbacher, 1990; Graesser, Clark, 1985; Hatakeyama, Petofi, Sozer, 1985/1989; Hellwig, 1983; Heydrich, e. a., 1989; Lehrer, 1984; Margolis, 1984; Mross, 1990; Myers, e. a., 1986; Neubauer, 1983; Samet, Schank, 1984; Strohner, Rickheit, 1988; Strohner, 1990; Papegaaij, Schubert, 1988; Patry, Nespoulos, 1990; van de Velde, 1981 a - 1 9 9 1 ; Ziff, 1984) the role to be ascribed to coherence has been a matter of increasing interest. The hypothesis H 9 conforms to these publications. In addition, it emphasizes the quintessence of coherence in its most extreme form. A first confirmation of H 9 may be found in connection with the retention capacity of aphasics. In cases where aphasics display pro-active inhibition, they cannot understand the subsequent segments of the discourse they are confronted with. In cases of retro-active inhibition, aphasics are unable to comprehend segments of the prior discourse they received (Luria, 1976, 214 ff). These empirical findings indicate that analytical, sequential and holistic processing strategies must combine. Memory disturbances can hamper a smooth combination of these processing strategies and prevent people from executing the inferential processes needed to construct coherence. Concomitantly, they fail to comprehend the juxtaposed utterances they are confronted with. A second support for H 9 can be observed in the comprehension disabilities of sensory aphasics. Although sensory aphasics may identify syntactic relations within a text t, (Luria, 1976, 176ff, 201) and therefore be successful at identifying some organizational features of cohesion, their semantic ILRRR information is disordered and the interaction of the related inferential processes is deficient. Therefore, coherence cannot be constructed. Consequently, these patients display only a very limited understanding of single words. As a third corroboration for H 9 I would refer to uncontrolled associations which occur in aphasics' perception and reproduction of discourse. In such cases, their attention deviates from the propositional content expressed in a text t, to thoughts which are totally irrelevant. So, for instance, "on hearing the story "The Hen and the Golden Eggs" such a patient readily slips into irrelevant

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stereotypes "egg ... market ... trade" and so on ..." (Luria, 1976, 219). Within the framework outlined in this book, one can presume that these uncontrolled associations have disturbing effects on the interactive and integrative functioning of inferences. As a consequence, these uncontrolled associations hamper the construction of coherence and thus impoverish or even hinder language comprehension. As a fourth piece of evidence for the hypothesis that coherence is indispensable, let me turn the reader's attention from the cases of disordered language comprehension to a text of the Upanishads\ (38) The Soul is Brahman, the Eternal. It is made of consciousness and mind: it is made of life and vision. It is made of the earth and the waters: It is made of air and space. It is made of light and darkness: It is made of desire and peace. It is made of anger and love: It is made of virtue and vice. It is made of all that is near: It is made of all that is afar. It is made of all. (Watts, 1978, 65)

The reader may feel puzzled by the question as to what the single words or phrases denote and what relations can be identified between these words. For instance, what is denoted by the Soul, Brahman and the Eternal and how are these words related to each other? Is there an identity relation between the Soul and the Eternal? Is the property of BEING THE ETERNAL to be attributed to the Soul? Or is the Soul 'an element of the Eternal? For convenience, let us assume that it refers in all the utterances of (38) to the Soul. Here, the following problems of referential connectedness and coherence arise: if it is impossible to find out precisely to what the argument the Soul refers, how then can the referentially identical arguments which are iterated eleven times by the proform it [IV, § 5], be sensibly combined with the predicates [IV, § 8]? How are the single utterances of (38) and their underlying propositions to be connected? If the reader of (38) is not able to deal with these problems, then the local coherence cannot be established. Nor can the global coherence of (38) be constructed. Accordingly, a justified descriptive interpretation of the utterances of (38) is unattainable. Example (38) is also interesting in the following way: it illustrates that the inferential steps which are involved in identifying cohesion and referential connectedness do not necessarily guarantee that global coherence can be constructed. This is because it may happen that the required semantic ILRRR information is not available to the receiver such that the inferences which are specifically related to ILRRR cannot establish the links within/between/ beyond the co(n)textual information [VI, § 8]. As a supplementary indication which may support claims about the importance of coherence, let me refer to a particular reading task. In this task, subjects are requested to read aloud cotexts in which one important word is replaced by an inappropriate word. In the performance of this task, subjects often spontaneously modify the formulation of the final part of the cotext in which the replaced word occurs. This side-effect can be considered in the following way: the subjects' modification of the formulation indicates their

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need for semantic organization. This need for semantic organization manifests itself in their tendency to preserve/establish lines of coherence (Strohner, 1990, 154—156 and further references therein). The preceding considerations supporting H5 and the considerations of the previous sections suggest that coherence is indispensable to descriptive text interpretation. Coherence is a necessary condition for maximal/optimal intelligibility/understanding: if coherence cannot be constructed for a specific cotext, then this cotext cannot be optimally/maximally understood. However, the reverse (of H9) does not necessarily hold true. That is, if coherence can be constructed for juxtaposed utterances, then there is no guarantee or necessity that they are optimally/maximally intelligible/understood. For instance, it is possible to establish some degrees of coherence for (39), but its deep understanding raises a number of problems. (39) Then said he. Unto what is the kingdom of God like? and whereunto shall I resemble it? It is like a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and cast into his garden; and it grew, and waxed a great tree; and the fowls of the air lodged in the branches of it. (St. Luke, 13, 1 8 - 1 9 )

I would also add the following important caveat; hypothesis H9 does not mean that u t , u2, u3, , un, in being separate utterances, cannot be the subject of a justified descriptive interpretation. For instance, it is possible to assign a justified descriptive interpretation to (40), to (41), to (42), and to (43). (40) They all went to the cinema. (41) Anna swam all the time. (42) John sat in a Zeppelin. (43) George made a bonfire.

However, it is not justified to consider these utterances together as a coherent cotext with a well-ordered progressive distribution of information and a global meaning. Our schema-based ILRRR information about going to the cinema does not include the actions of swimming, flying in an airship and making a bonfire. If Anna, John and George are members of the same set of persons denoted by they, then (41) cannot be related to (40); moreover, (42) cannot be connected with (41) and (40). Nor can (43) be linked with the preceding utterances (40) —(42). As seen before, one has to call up a special context for (40) —(43) [IV, § 12] or to add cotextual information to (40) —(43) [VI, § 5] in order to integrate (40) — (43) into an acceptable global organization pattern and to make this sequence of utterances maximally/optimally intelligible within a coherent whole. A final comment on H9 is still necessary: the construction of coherence is not only a matter of (justified) descriptive interpretation. Explicative interpretation needs consideration and exploration too, if one wants to deal with the intentional facets of meaning which are outside the cotext [Introduction,

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§ 14; I, § 15]. Then, it is important for the receiver to identify the intention which causes/gives rise to/underlies/goes together with the production of a cotext. If this identification is successful, then the receiver may construct high-level coherence [VII, §§3 — 4]. But success in constructing high-level coherence is not easy to achieve, as will be seen in chapter seven. For the time being, let me briefly illustrate the main difficulty by adducing examples (44)-(45). (44) In my head, there is a whole orchestra playing. (45) But my mouth can make only one instrument audible.

As to the high-level coherence of (44) —(45), it may be conjectured that the producer intended to express the embarassment of being unable to convey completely what was in her/his ego-consciousness. Or one may surmise that the producer wanted to aggrandize her/his self-image. Or one may suppose that the producer aimed to use (44) —(45) as an excuse for not having said what needed to be said, etc. Whatever meanings may be assigned to (44) — (45), as long as it is impossible to identify precisely and completely the intention which causes/gives rise to/underlies/goes together with (44) —(45), there will be some layers of significance which cannot be fully understood.

6.8. On the indispensability

of ILRRR-related

inferences

§ 8 The main question arising from the discussion of the empirical evidence adduced to support H 9 is this: what inferences are indispensable to the construction of coherence? In close connection with this question, it may also be asked what specific inferential basis is most important for the descriptive interpretation of verbal texts. Both questions are answered in this section. As has already been suggested in [II, § 5, § 10; IV, § 5; VI, §§ 2 — 3], the syntactic inferences have a minor role in comparison to the ILRRR, semanticlogical and action-oriented inferences. This suggestion is closely linked with the fact that, in many cases, cohesion is a level of organization which is between the hammer of referential connectedness and the anvil of coherence. It may happen that texts are cohesive, that the syntactic inferences are working, but that the receiver cannot recognize the total referential connectedness and cannot identify the global coherence. This situation may obtain with scientific discourse treating esoteric subjects and with texts about mystic/ religious topics. If the recognition of cohesion does not completely co-operate with the identification of referential connectedness and with the construction of coherence, then comprehension cannot fully succeed. The discussion of (38) may, to a certain extent, confirm this view. The limited role of syntactic inferences may also be illustrated in example (46). In this example, the recognition of cohesion is conditional on syntactic inferences. But since the inferences which relate to semantic ILRRR infor-

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mation are not fully operational, it is impossible to construct coherence for (46) and to understand (46): (46) The trock plicked the drock. Then, the drock flintered the pluppy ploop. Then, the pluppy ploop doozed the plippy plap. After all, they were plimpy.

In the course of this book, it has been shown that ILRRR inferences as well as semantic-logical and action-oriented inferences must relate to semantic ILRRR information. When their relatedness to semantic ILRRR information is their common characteristic, they are referred to by the term 'ILRRRrelated inferences'. I conjecture that the ILRRR-related inferences are indispensable to the construction of coherence. For instance, when the ILRRR-related inferences cannot work for the Soul, Brahman and the Eternal, example (38) cannot be understood in its full spiritual/mystic richness. Here, I venture on the following surmise: if the ILRRR-related inferences of both the producer and the receiver do not sufficiently coincide or converge, then there is no way of successfully sharing coherence (see also Moore, Carling, 1988). This surmise is dramatically supported by the distorted discourse interaction between normal people and schizophrenics, on the one hand, or between normal people and sensory aphasics, on the other hand, (van de Velde, 1984). It is also indirectly sustained by the situations in which prophets, wise men, poets, philosophers and men of great talent/intellect did not have all the ILRRR-related inferences in common with their disciples, followers, admirers, etc. and consequently were not fully understood. So, for instance, what Jesus Christ taught about the kingdom of God, what Lao Tzu imparted about the spirit of the valley, what Rilke symbolized in the word angel, what Newton and Kant conveyed about heaven and what Einstein expressed about space and time could not completely converge with the ILRRR-related inferences of their contemporaries. Their messages are still the subject of endless debates. Within the scope of the present chapter, it is plausible to note the following: the conjecture that ILRRR-related inferences are much more important to coherence and comprehension than syntactic inferences is supported by the reading comprehension task and the listening comprehension tasks concerning (8) [VI, § 3]: all the subjects agreed that — interestingly enough — their judgements on the defective cohesion of (8) did not depend on their knowledge and use of grammar rules or on syntactic inferences. On the contrary, they insisted on the point that their judgements on the defective cohesion of (8) depended on the pertinent semantic ILRRR information about the activities which can be ascribed to the Pope of Rome. That is to say that, in such cases, the ILRRR-related inferences outweigh the syntactic inferences. The higher significance of ILRRR-related inferences is also strikingly attested by the fact that they may interact integratively to have an organizing and harmonizing effect when the syntactic inferences fail to work appropriately, as is the case with (47):

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(47) Vois-voir ... achète ballon ... rouge ... m'amuser ... content monter en haut ... après ici ... content ... ballon alors couché ... hélas ici ... ballon ... cassé ... ou ... chais pas quoi ... alors ... ici ... rien ... mystère ... et pleure parce que ballon ... cassé pi ... pleure. (Tissot, Mounin, Lhermitte, 1973, 94)

Example (47) is a text produced by an agrammatic Broca's aphasie in which only partial syntactic organization is actualized. I claim that semantic ILRRRinformation and the ILRRR-related inferences provide a reliable basis for restoring the lines of coherence which are disharmonized by the defectively realized cohesion phenomena of (47). In order to control this claim, I presented (47) to twenty-nine graduate students as a reading comprehension task. Moreover, they were asked to judge whether (47) was cohesive, coherent and (maximally/optimally) intelligible. They knew French quite well. No time limits were imposed. Their answers had to be written on standardized examination papers. As I expected, all subjects agreed that there was defective cohesion in (47). Despite this defective cohesion, they could establish lines of local coherence between the semantic ILRRR information of ballon, m'amuser, monter en haut and content, on the one hand, and between ballon ... cassé and pleure, on the other hand. Owing to these lines of local coherence, they decided that (47) was to a certain extent intelligible. The results of this reading comprehension task and the above discussion support my conjecture that ILRRR-related inferences are indispensable to the construction of coherence. Because, as has been seen before, coherence is an irreplaceable and central part of descriptive text interpretation, it may be concluded that the descriptive interpretation of verbal texts must find its most important basis in the use of ILRRR-related inferences.

6.9.

Summary

§ 9 The sixth chapter started with the general hypothesis that it is a fundamental trait of man to organize information inside and outside the self. The purpose of the preceding sections was to specify and to control this hypothesis. To this end, they tackled the problem of how human receivers deal with the information of verbal texts. It turned out that it is necessary for human receivers to identify or to impose organization within/between/ beyond the information parts of verbal texts. That is, the general hypothesis formulated at the beginning of this chapter can be considered as solid: different levels/forms of organization can be recognized in or imposed on verbal texts at different stages of text processing. The different stages of text processing (and the inferences involved) must work in interactive and integrative ways when graphemic, syntactic, semantic, referential, action-oriented and logical characteristics of (48) are all to be organized together.

6.9. Summary this (48) If

189

take is

shall flying I

really never

to it

To establish the local organization of (48), one has to identify its letters/ letter strings/words through the left-to-right scan [I, § 9]. Example (48), however, raises problems for sequential processing because its letters/letter strings/words are not distributed along the same horizontal line. When analytical processing and sequential processing co-operate they have to proceed along a line that goes up and down. The result of this undulating reading is: If this is flying I shall never really take to it. To arrive at a global organization of (48), one has to practise holistic processing and to satisfy the co(n)text integrativity condition [IV, § 12; VI, §5]. In so doing, one must take into consideration the cotext surrounding (48) in A. A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh (p. 93). One can then make the bridging assumption that (48) is Piglet's jerkily expressed thought when he is in the kangaroo's "pocket" as it leaps. One may assume that the line which goes up and down in (48) suggests in a playful way that, while thinking, Piglet experiences the kangaroo's jumps. The sixth chapter addressed different levels/forms of organization in successive steps. In the first step, I considered the organization of the referential connectedness. It was demonstrated that its recognition is based on the combined analytical, sequential and holistic processing strategies. In the second step, I dwelt on the surface syntactic forms of organization, as they are actualized in cohesion. In this respect, it turned out that analytical, sequential and holistic processing must become fully merged to recognize overall error-free forms of cohesion and to restore defectively realized forms of cohesion. In the third step, I was concerned with the view that verbal texts which are characterized by their referential connectedness and by their cohesion cannot be justifiably interpreted until it has been discerned how their interconnected meanings determine their comprehensibility. I specified how the combined analytical, sequential and holistic processing strategies are involved in the disclosure of meaning connections. I also showed that interconnected meanings must be integrated into higher/global forms of organization. In the fourth step, I took the discernment of meanings and their connections as a basic processing stage to achieve the third level of organization which I termed 'coherence'. I was particularly concerned with that kind of coherence which is intrinsic to verbal texts. But it also became clear that coherence is really the result of constructive thinking processes. In this respect, I suggested that coherence should be sharply distinguished from cohesion. Cohesion is exclusively bound to the material form of text expression. That is, if cohesion is not apparently actualized in the verbal material at hand, it cannot be recognized. In contradistinction, if coherence cannot be established in the

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first confrontation with the verbal material, it can still be constructed by going beyond the cotextual information given. In the fifth step, I demonstrated that coherence is much more important than cohesion in that it is indispensable to descriptive text interpretation. But it was also claimed that the construction of coherence does not guarantee that texts become fully intelligible or are completely understood. In the sixth step, I argued that ILRRR-related inferences outweigh syntactic inferences, that ILRRR-related inferences are really indispensable to the construction of coherence and that ILRRR-related inferences provide the most important basis for the descriptive interpretation of verbal texts. The attention devoted to the indispensable role which coherence plays in descriptive interpretation should be extended to the even more important role which coherence plays in explicative interpretation. In so doing, the distinction between low-level coherence and high-level coherence should be considered. The next chapter will be concerned with this distinction and with its repercussions on the study of interpretative elaboration.

CHAPTER SEVEN

On interpretative elaboration 7.1.

Introduction

§ 1 The preceding chapters have laid the inferential groundwork for the assignment of meanings to verbal cotexts. However, some major problems arise from the fact that meaning can always be complemented and sometimes must be complemented. The present chapter shows that various complications are connected with these major problems. The potential/necessary complementation of meaning is caused, amongst other things, by the fact that the cotext is either not meaningful enough in itself or cannot be made meaningful enough. In this respect, I refer the reader to the examples of disordered language use given in the foregoing chapters. In fact, these disordered cotexts are not meaningful enough. In addition, they cannot be made meaningful enough, because they are full of gaps which cannot be appropriately filled with meaning. But also non-disordered language use needs meaning complementation. For instance, in breast is best the information load should be increased if this cotext is to be integrated into co(n)texts about paediatrics and breast-feeding or into restaurant co(n)texts about eating breast of duck/turkey or into co(n)texts of home decoration which relate to the chimney breast (van de Velde, 1991). The potential/necessary complementation of meaning may also be caused by circumstances which are outside the cotext. Some of them are in the producer. For instance, the producer may be held responsible for the implicit mention of referents [VI, § 2], the deliberate lack of clarity, the careless phrasing, the hermetically closed modes of expression, and the like. It may also be the case that the producer deliberately leaves it to the receiver to add information to the cotext. For instance, Helmut Heissenbüttel wrote a series of very short texts which convey critical considerations, ironical meanings, and the like. These texts explicitly invite the reader to reflect on the meanings which can (or should) be added in that they close more than twenty times with the same formulation: "Darüber wäre wohl viel noch sagen" (Heissenbüttel, 1980,26 ff). The potential/necessary complementation of meaning may also be caused by the fact that the receiver has special ingenuity or unbridled inventiveness in calling up new communicative contexts to enrich her/his interpretation or that the receiver has particular needs, motives, reasons, etc. for extending the

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number and the range of meaning hypotheses. In this respect, I refer the reader to examples (3) —(6) and (14) in [I, § 3] in which receivers may feel prompted to go far beyond the cotextual information given. Often, literary critics, theologians, psychiatrists and various workers in the humanities happen to use their imagination for mistaken exegetic purposes and, as such, go too far beyond the information given in the texts with which they are concerned (van de Velde, 1988 c; 1991). The present chapter attempts to demonstrate that there is much meaning outside the cotext. Part of this cotext-external meaning is in the producer. Part of it is also in the receiver. To deal with these parts of cotext-external meaning, it is necessary to consider somewhat more closely the practice of meaning conveyance and the practice of meaning assignment. That is, the study of meaning must be seen specifically from the perspectives of interpersonal communication. Accordingly, pragmatic-functionalistic vistas receive much attention in the following sections. 7.2. On the two sides of interpersonal

communication

§ 2 The foregoing chapters examined some technicalities concerning the role of human thinking in text processing. However, they gave an account only of the descriptive perspectives of interpretation. As a consequence, many meanings have not been identified. These meanings may concern the (causal) antecedents in ego-consciousness/precipitating circumstances of cotexts as well as the diverse effects which cotexts have on their different receivers. In view of these unidentified meanings, it should be emphasized that the descriptive perspectives of interpretation constitute too poor a picture of signification and communication. In fact, descriptive interpretation has not dealt with the question of how the producer's preverbal interpretation of person-external and person-internal reality may have determined the formulation of her/his cotext. Furthermore, descriptive interpretation has not completely accounted for the relations between human intentionality and (verbal) action (Gustafson, 1985; Searle, 1989). Descriptive interpretation has also disregarded the psychic richness and depth of lyrical verse. Finally, descriptive interpretation has ignored all judgemental activities involved in verbal communication. The kind of descriptive interpretation which has been discussed in earlier parts of this book needs much elaboration. The need for elaboration is partly due to the fact that meanings are dependent on the signs of the cotext and on the ways in which they are connected. For instance, the connected signs if I am telling a lie, then I am not the author of this book must be complemented by the proposition I am the author of this book in order to draw the consequence I am not telling a lie [I, §§2—4]. Similarly, the meaning of Brigitie's husband always drinks too much beer before driving. Then, he does not know when to brake can be complemented. We

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can make various inferences. Some of them add meaning to the cotext. So, for instance, we may make an interpretative elaboration which includes the information that it is wrong to drink too much beer before driving a car, that Brigitte's husband is a dangerous driver, that he displays a grievous lack of responsibility, and so on. Interpretative elaborations and meaning complementations are also needed, because informative discourse exchange is a matter of negotiation between the communication participants (Trosborg, 1989; Strohner, 1990 and further references therein). The negotiators are, on the one side, the producer and, on the other side, the receiver. As long as linguistics, logic and all other disciplines concerned with meaning concentrate exclusively on the description of the 'vehicle'/'medium'/'conduit' which is used in communication and, in so doing, neglect the interactants/interlocutors as well as their negotiations, there will remain a huge void on two important sides of the interpersonal communication process (van de Velde, 1988 a; 1988 c; 1991). On the side of the producer, it may be asked why (s)he selected specific meanings, why (s)he imparted these meanings, why (s)he preferred specific formulations or why (s)he chose specific outward characteristics of the 'vehicle'/'medium'/'conduit' to convey meanings. These questions are basic to any explicative interpretation of self-reflecting and self-reporting poetry, as may become clear when one attempts to assign meanings to the examples (1) —(3). (1) Während ich stehe, fallt der Schatten hin Morgensonne entwirft die erste Zeichnung blühn ist ein tödliches Geschäft ich habe mich einverstanden erklärt ich lebe. (Helmut Heissenbüttel, Einfache

Sät^e)

(2) Je me'n allais, les poings dans mes poches crevées. Mon paletot aussi devenait idéal. J'allais sous le ciel, Muse! et j'étais ton féal: Oh! là là, que d'amours splendides j'ai rêvées! Mon unique culotte avait un large trou. Petit-Poucet Rêveur, j'égrenais dans ma course Des rimes. Mon auberge était à la Grande-Ourse. — Mes étoiles au ciel avaient un doux frou-frou. (Arthur Rimbaud, fragment from Fantaisie, Ma bohème) (3) I struck the board, and cry'd, 'No more; I will abroad.' What shall I ever sigh and pine? My lines and life are free; free as the road, Loose as the winde, as large as store. Shall I be still in suit? Have I no harvest but a thorn To let me bloud, and not restore What I have lost with cordial fruit? (George Herbert, fragment from The Collar)

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Examples (1) —(3) comprise the pronominal forms ich, mich,je, mes, mon, ma, I, my, and me which signal that the respective producers refer to their ego-consciousness. Here, the following questions can be raised: what are the (causal) antecedents in ego-consciousness of the producers of (1), (2), and (3)? Which precipitating circumstances are to be assumed for an optimal/ maximal interpretation of (1), (2) and (3)? Which preverbal interpretations caused the authors to write (1), (2) and (3)? What is meant by (1), (2), and (3)? To which specific domains of their inner psychic worlds do the respective authors refer? What was on the mind and/or in the heart of the respective producers? All the possible answers to these questions must inevitably consider the fact that meaning is not only in the cotext, but is also in its producer. It is one of the main preconditions for an appropriate interpersonal communication that the receiver deals with the cotext-internal and producer-internal meanings. This is true not only for (1), (2), and (3), i. e. when literary communication takes place; it also holds when a successful negotiation about meanings is basic to face-to-face communication. 7.3. On low-level and high-level

coherence

§ 3 When the view that meaning is also in the producer is accepted, what are the repercussions of this view upon the study of coherence? I have claimed before that in order to understand a cotext the primary task is to identify its local meanings, to discern the connections between its local meanings and to integrate the connected information parts of adjacent utterances into its global meaning. The meaning connections between adjacent utterances can be termed 'local coherence'. The entire organization of the cotext content can be denoted by the term 'global coherence' (but see also van Dijk, 1985; Ferrara, 1985). The range of local coherence and global coherence may be rather restricted. For instance, it may occur that local coherence and global coherence are not overtly signalled. Local coherence and global coherence cannot then be constructed in the ways which have been considered in the foregoing chapters. How is the receiver then to make up for what is missing about local coherence and global coherence? The answer is straightforward: the receiver cannot but elaborate inferentially on the cotextual information available. In constructing inferential elaborations, the receiver has to address cotext-external information parts and to find out how they connect with the cotext. In this regard, it should be emphasized that the construction of local coherence and global coherence, though indispensable to descriptive interpretation, is not the only precondition for achieving an optimal/maximal degree of interpretation. In fact, local coherence and global coherence can only constitute low-level degrees of coherence. Low-level degrees of coherence, in turn, are only to be seen as content characteristics of the communi-

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cation channel and they do not/cannot directly concern the other meanings which may be part of the interpersonal communication. Low-level coherence concerns predominantly the propositional content of the cotext. But since cotexts are mostly written to serve the purposes/goals/ plans of their producers, it becomes necessary to examine in which ways these purposes/goals/plans determine the communicative force of the cotexts. For instance, it may have been the purpose/goal/plan of the producer to recommend something to the receiver or to convince the receiver of something or to cause feelings of inappropriateness in the receiver or to produce aesthetic effects, and the like. To deal with these facets of the producer's meaning, it is necessary to look at the organization of the verbal communication activities from the pragmatic-functionalistic perspective (van de Velde, 1988 a; 1988 c; 1991). The organization of these verbal communication activities results from the receiver's concentrating on the information which is inside the cotext, from elaborating on this cotextual information and from having recourse to information which is outside the cotext. When all these facets of cotext-internal and cotext-external information become organized within the pragmaticfunctionalistic perspectives of verbal communication, it is appropriate to speak about 'high-level coherence'. To establish high-level coherence, it is inevitable that local coherence and global coherence are integrated into the meanings which are assumed to be in the person of the producer. As far as producer-oriented interpretation is concerned, one main point is to be made here: the construction of high-level coherence is, to a great extent, based on the assumption that the producer abides by the Gricean co-operative principle. If that is the case, her/his cotext may be assumed to conform to four communicative maxims which I mention here in an adapted form and in an oversimplified way: the maxim of quantity ('make your cotext informative'); the maxim of quality ('make your cotext true'); the maxim of relation ('make your cotext relevant'); the maxim of manner ('make your cotext clear'). In view of these four communicative maxims, high-level coherence is not so much a function of low-level coherence. It is a function of the producer's willingness to adhere to these communicative maxims. It is also a function of the receiver's capacity to infer that the producer does or does not disregard these maxims and to infer why this is so (Green, 1989, 87 ff). The construction of high-level coherence belongs in the main to explicative interpretation, whereas the construction of low-level coherence belongs to descriptive interpretation. In most cases, the construction of high-level coherence can integrate the establishment of low-level coherence. As will be seen later, the low-level and high-level degrees of coherence can either separately or jointly become the object of evaluative interpretation. To demonstrate that the distinction between low-level coherence and highlevel coherence is necessary in discussing the issues of meaning, meaning conveyance and meaning assignment, I adduce example (4):

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A s a lover I am on a seesaw. Sometimes I feel very happy. Sometimes I feel very unhappy because there are too many responsibilities and risks involved.

B

W h y do you think you feel this way?

A

L o v e is endlessly limited.

B

I do not see your point. I think that love is endlessly unlimited.

Example (4) can illustrate that verbal communication may concern the inner-life constellations of the interlocutors. The exchange of person-internal meanings is a conditio sine qua non to reduce the distance between their inner-life constellations. This meaning exchange requires reciprocal meaning assignment to their respectively produced cotexts. As noted before, this reciprocal meaning assigment does not consider only what is in the cotext. So, the construction of low-level coherence cannot provide all the necessary tools to deal with what is meant by the producer. To deal with what is meant by the producer, high-level coherence is required. As to (4), I would make the following point: interlocutor B can only construct high-level coherence for A's cotextual turns when B is able to intrude far enough into those inner-life constellations which cause A's cotexts, which underlie A's cotexts, which give rise to A's cotexts, which go together with A's cotexts or which are suggested/explicitly stated in A's cotexts. A's inner-life constellations which typically concern her/his message(s), are (chrono)logically prior to the production of her/his cotext(s). In order to intrude into A's inner-life constellations and to achieve an explicative interpretation, specific questions must be answered: why does A bring her/his reflections on her/his inner psychic life to the attention of B? Why does A speak about the responsibilities and the risks of a lover? Why does A symbolize her/his feelings by speaking about a seesaw? Why does A speak about the endless limitations of love? From attempting to answer these questions it can become clear that interpersonal understanding of A's person-internal meanings includes much more than understanding the cotext which A produces. As will be seen later [VII, § 4], there are no fully reliable and no justifiable ways of dealing with cotextexternal information of a person-internal nature (see also van de Velde, 1988 a; 1988 c; 1991).

7.4. On producer-oriented

explicative

interpretation

§ 4 Meanings which are in the person of the producer can be highly enigmatic. This is because they belong to the cryptogram of her/his egoconsciousness. This is not the place to discuss the basic dimensions of an individual's ego-consciousness and to examine the ways in which they determine (the production of) person-internal meanings (van de Velde, 1988 a; 1988 c; 1991 and references therein). It should suffice to assume that the

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producer's person-internal meanings are concerned with her/his intentions. These intentions may, amongst other things, be influenced by the producer's attitudes and beliefs. For the receiver it is necessary to know these attitudes and beliefs in order to approximate to the intentions which underlie the producer's introspective self-reports. Occasionally, the receiver knows enough about the inner psychic life of the producer to make some guesses about the precipitating circumstances which led the producer to express her/his intentions. It may also happen that the receiver has such a deep concern for the producer that (s)he can have partial access to the intricacies of the producer's intentions. Or it may be that the receiver's emotional involvement in what the producer does leads her/ him to intensify her/his interests in the producer's inner psychic life and, as a result, can improve the partial intrusion into the producer's person-internal meanings. In most cases, however, it is unavoidable that, if one aims at retracing the chain of causes and forces which led a person to produce a particular cotext c,, then one embarks on an endless enterprise (Grunig, Grunig, 1985). In other words, the causalistic approach to meaning and to explicative interpretation is an unended quest. Explicative interpretation is first of all concerned with intentions which are explicity expressed. But these intentions may be feigned. Or it may happen that, for reasons of politeness, considerateness, self-interest, etc., people hide their real intentions. For instance, if (5) is addressed by a man to an attractive lady whom he meets for the first time at a party, then it is impossible to retrace precisely from (5) to what extent it is the intention of the producer to serve his self-interests and to what extent he wants to be benevolent to the receiver. (5) I want to help you and serve your interests in any way possible.

When interpretation concerns the producer's intentions, reasons and motives, then there is a high probability that much meaning remains uncovered. In literary art, authors are often reluctant to contribute directly to the identification of their intentions: Gabriele D'Annunzio declared that at the time of writing his text he knew what he intended to say, whereas at the time of being asked about it he said only God knew. James Joyce, instead of solving the puzzles of Ulysses, stated that he put so many enigmas in it to keep the professors busy for centuries over what he meant and to ensure his immortality. Leo Tolstoy made the point that an explication of what he had intended to express in War and Peace would have forced him to rewrite the book completely. The author of the anagrams which were studied by Ferdinand De Saussure refused to impart anything about the motives for using these covert structures (Langleben, 1985 and references therein). Explicative interpretation is very complicated in that it also has to concentrate on those intentions, reasons and motives which are anterior to the explicit expression of the cotext c r The intentions, reasons and motives which

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are anterior to the explicit expression of the cotext q are connected, amongst other things, with the producer's preverbal interpretation. The producer's preverbal interpretation may include all kinds of cognitive, affective and conative antecedents which may have crossed her/his mind and which may have led her/him to deliver them in the cotext C;. These antecedents belong to the producer's ego-consciousness. Ego-consciousness itself raises so many perplexing problems for cognitive science that cognitive science has not much to say about it (Garnham, 1991, 53, 118; van de Velde, 1991). In this regard, the relations between the preverbal interpretation, the intentions, reasons and motives for externalizing the preverbal interpretation, and its expression in language remain for the most part mysterious. Any attempt to identify them leads one to realize how much meaning cannot be made accessible or is left unretraceable, as is suggested in the following lines of verse: (6) Could mortal lip divine The undeveloped Freight Of a delivered syllable 'Twould crumble with the weight. (Emily Dickinson)

The main methodological difficulty in dealing with the producer's preverbal interpretation and with her/his related intentions, reasons and motives is this: the receiver has to make the detour of interpreting the explicitly expressed intentions, reasons and motives first and then has to hint at the inner-life constellations which have preceded them and caused them to appear. For instance, in interpreting example (7), the receiver cannot be sure about the producer's preverbal interpretation. Was it the producer's intention not to hurt the receiver? Did the producer want to prevent the receiver from feeling inappropriate? Did the producer have the motive of protecting himself/herself from criticism? Did the producer intend to indulge in sphinx-like noncommitment? Or did the producer want to hide her/his ego-weakness? (7) I want to hide those meanings which could be misused.

From the perspectives of logic and general methodology, one must consider the caveat that the logically invalid post hoc ergo propter hoc can easily lead receivers to false or unjustified bridging assumptions [I, § 4]. It is not because a person expresses (8) that one is justified in making the inference that (s)he really intends to accept the existence of supernatural (possibly sexless) creatures and to be in a love relationship with one of them. In addition, if the receiver makes the bridging assumptions that the producer of (8) is in need of emotional warmth, searches for soul-solidarity, and the like, there is no conclusive evidence for these bridging assumptions either. (8) I want to believe in angels and to be in love with one of them.

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Other difficulties arise from the fact that the producer may lack sufficient insight into her/his inner psychic life and/or may not be (fully) conscious of her/his preverbal interpretation and/or may not possess the capacity of appropriately expressing what goes on in her/his intrapersonal world, and so on. Still more difficulties are to be faced when meanings are to be assigned to indirect speech acts (Murphy, 1990 and further references therein). This can be illustrated with (9), which I may have uttered to a friend on entering his room: (9) The music is too loud.

From the descriptive perspective of interpretation, (9) may be taken as the direct report of my auditory perception. From the explicative perspectives of interpretation, however, things become more complicated. It may be asked why I uttered (9). Did I intend to draw my friend's attention to my auditory perception? Did I want to make him feel that the very loud music may be disturbing to the neighbours? Did I convey the meaning that I do not like very loud music at all? Did I use (9) as an indirect speech act in order to lead my friend to switch the radio off? Or did I use (9) as one preparatory step towards achieving the goal of increasing my friend's sensitivity to soft music? None of these questions can be definitively answered if one has to rely on the information of (9) alone. The difficulties arising from examples (5) and (7) —(9) may definitely hamper explicative interpretation. As a consequence, they may also hinder or impoverish the evaluative activities which concern the outcome of explicative interpretation. Ultimately, serious misunderstandings may be unavoidable (Blum-Kulka, Weizman, 1988 and references therein). Before turning to other subject domains, two additional remarks on producer-oriented explicative interpretation are to be made: firstly, (the construction of) high-level coherence is of greater importance for interpersonal understanding than (the establishment of) low-level coherence (van de Velde, 1988 c); secondly, it may happen that (the construction of) high-level coherence codetermines or harmonizes (the establishment of) low-level coherence. One example may suffice: let us suppose that any inappropriateness of expression, as in solecisms, malapropisms, speech errors, ungrammaticalities, spoonerisms or other oddities, to some extent hampers the establishment of low-level coherence (and accordingly has negative effects on descriptive interpretation). Let us also suppose that — notwithstanding the inappropriateness of expression — the receiver understands what the producer means by it didn't bother me in the sleast that you hissed all my mystery lectures. Let us finally suppose that this cotext is part of a longer tirade in which the professor of history complains about the student's lack of interest and thereby produces some other slips of the tongue. As long as the student understands what is meant by the history professor, high-level coherence can be constructed. If

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this is the case, then the high-level processes of understanding what the producer means may have a positive influence on the (re)construction of lowlevel coherence and even play a repairing role in understanding the details of the distorted cotext. 7.5. On receiver-oriented

evaluative

interpretation

§ 5 Let me now come to the other side of interpersonal communication announced in [VII, § 2]: the side of the receiver. Accounts of interpretation are unfinished as long as one cannot completely deal with the effects which the cotext c, has on the receiver and as long as the signifying responses which the receiver gives to the cotext c, are open to change. The effects which the written cotext has on the receiver range from the realms of the nervous impulses involved in visual perception to the inferential steps which are needed for graphemic decoding [I, §§6—13] and to all the discourse-directed inferences [II, §§2 — 9 — VI, §§2 — 9] which lead her/him to make (c)overt signifying responses to the cotextual information under consideration. The receiver's signifying responses do not stop at the stage of descriptively handling the cotextual information. The receiver may have many motives or grounds for continuing with her/his interpretative activities. Here, I single out one of them: the motive to evaluate. As is well-known, receivers have their own beliefs, value systems, attitudes, and the like. Moreover, they may be influenced by sociocultural stereotypes as well as by other factors of their social environment. When social and personal influences play a role in handling cotextual information, value distinctions and value judgements may extend the realms of descriptive interpretation. Receivers may then achieve various sorts of evaluative interpretation. Evaluative interpretation is an exegetic practice in which the purely personal role of the receiver is apparent. The personality traits of the receiver can even make evaluative interpretation anything but reasoning reception. Moreover, racial, religious, political, ideological, nationalistic and other prejudices as well as kinship biases and a variety of extremisms or fanaticisms may affect the receiver's signifying response(s). In view of these factors, it is unjustified to think of the receiver as a neutral processor (van de Velde, 1989 d; 1991). Within the scope of the present book, it is noteworthy that evaluative interpretation may concern either (the outcome of) descriptive interpretation or (the result of) explicative interpretation. In the former case, evaluative interpretation is directed towards (the construction of) low-level coherence. In the latter, it is concerned with (the construction of) high-level coherence. However, evaluative interpretation may also have to do with the combination of descriptive and explicative interpretation (see also Petofi, 1985). Let me now illustrate these viewpoints by a short discussion of example (10):

7.5. On receiver-oriented evaluative interpretation

201

(10) Vegetarianism is an injurious and unhealthy practice. For, if all people were vegetarians, the economy would be seriously affected, and many people would be thrown out of work. (Rescher, 1964, 82)

The descriptive interpretation of (10) is the primary task to be fulfilled. It can take place along the lines set out in the previous chapters. But one should not disregard the fact that descriptive interpretation cannot be practised as a purely isolated set of activities. In assigning a descriptive interpretation to (10), one should also make assumptions about the ways in which the truth value of its propositional content may be determined by modal qualifications such as THE PRODUCER OF (10) AFFIRMS THAT (10), THE PRODUCER OF (10) DENIES THAT (10), THE PRODUCER OF (10) DOUBTS WHETHER (10). Such assumptions concern the epistemic commitment of the producer (ranging from her/his pertinent knowledge to her/his pertinent beliefs, attitudes, convictions, opinions, intentions, reasons, motives, etc.) and accordingly lead the receiver also to consider the complexities of explicative interpretation. The evaluative interpretation which concerns (the outcome of) descriptive interpretation may be directed towards/based on the identified global propositional content of (10) as well as towards/on its disclosed local propositions. If the evaluative interpretation of (10) is directed towards/based on its global propositional content, then one cannot but criticize (10) in that it does not provide conclusive evidence for what it states, and is, moreover, a logically invalid cotext. If the evaluative interpretation concerns the local propositions of (10), then the receiver may agree or disagree with the proposition that vegetarianism is an injurious practice; (s)he may like or dislike the idea that vegetarianism is an unhealthy practice-, (s)he may approve or disapprove of the negative consequences which vegetarianism has on the economic system, on employment, etc. The explicative interpretation of (10) may, amongst other things, address the questions of what the producer of (10) had in mind, whether (s)he intended to express her/his beliefs or her/his doubts, whether (10) is meant as a sincere or deceitful message, whether the producer of (10) intended to persuade people of the disadvantages and bad consequences which flow from vegetarianism, etc. When evaluative interpretation concerns (the outcome of) explicative interpretation, then it may deal with intentions which can hypothetically be ascribed to the producer. For instance, one may ascribe to the producer of (10) the intention that (s)he wanted to persuade people to eat only meat; one may assume that the producer intended to increase the profits of the local butcher, and so on. Any of these intentions ascribed to the producer may then become the object of evaluative interpretation. If the receiver does not like the local butcher, then her/his assumption that the producer intended to

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increase the local butcher's profits will probably cause a negative evaluation of this intention. If the receiver does not enjoy eating meat, then the assumption that the producer wanted to persuade her/him to eat it exclusively will probably provoke a negative evaluation of the producer's intention, reason or motive. Very often, people evaluate cotexts from the exclusive angle of the (presumed) explicative interpretation. The catch-phrase is then: " You know why (s)he said or did sol". The content of what (s)he said or did is then mostly disregarded. As noted before, evaluative interpretation may also be directed towards the combination of (the outcome of) descriptive and explicative interpretation. In such cases, evaluative interpretation may, in the first stage, provide a judgement on whether the descriptively disclosed global propositional content of (10) is or is not a logically valid argumentation. If (10) is qualified as a logically invalid argumentation, then the evaluative interpretation may, in the next stage, concern the producer's motive, intention or reason for using the logically invalid argumentum ad consequential! in (10). If, with respect to explicative interpretation, one adds the bridging assumption that the producer of (10) deliberately chose an informal fallacy in order to mislead the receiver(s), then one may deeply disapprove of this deliberate trickery or one may blame the producer for intentionally misleading people, etc. Many things may go wrong with evaluating cotext-oriented and produceroriented interpretations. One of the errors may be that people will apply evaluative interpretation exclusively to the emotions which they have towards/ about the producer as a person. What the producer really expresses in the cotext will then become, to a certain extent, insignificant. Sympathy, friendship, love or the opposite feelings will guide then the receiver's judgemental activities. Most people do not realize how deeply their meaning assignments are affected by evaluative components and how much these evaluative components themselves are determined or even (mis)guided by factors which do not belong to strictly cotext-internal features. For instance, if cotext (10) is publicly propounded by a fat, badly dressed, bald old man, the receiver's evaluation will, in most cases, differ greatly from her/his evaluation of (10) if it is uttered by an attractive, slender, elegantly dressed young lady. The advertising practice in which good-looking, well-known or famous persons are presented as producers of appealing cotexts can teach us that receivers are sometimes cleverly manipulated into evaluating beyond the cotext meaning proper. It can also occur that receivers evaluate differently depending on whether they are or are not emotionally involved/engaged in the topic which is under discussion. So, for instance, a vegetarian will differ in her/his evaluative response to (10) from a non-vegetarian.

7.6. On some problem areas of literary evaluation

7.6. On some problem areas of literary

203

evaluation

§ 6 The receiver's evaluative (mis)responses to the (combined) descriptive and explicative facets of interpretation can, of course, be controlled and constrained by reliance on the pertinent norms/rules of logic. As regards (10), knowledge of logic affords the possibility of showing that the unfavourable consequences which are mentioned in (10) have no relevance or do not provide conclusive evidence for the justification of the thesis that vegetarianism is an injurious and unhealthy practice. Here, it should be emphasi2ed that, if any methodologically justified judgemental response is to be made to (10), then it can be based on the logic-oriented canons of rationality. The logic-oriented canons of rationality are not always shared and followed in ways which one would reasonably expect. For instance, people may purposefully select such personal(ity-bound) premisses which provide a vindication/backing for their preconceived conclusions: the cotext the good is personal pleasure may be used as a premiss to the conclusions of the hedonist, whereas the good is activity which befits the welfare of the fellow-human being may be a directive of rational conduct for the altruist. Similarly, the racist, the nationalist, the fascist, the opportunist, the imperialist, the communist, etc. can (ab)use logic to serve their private goals and plans. Even worse, anybody can arrogantly behave as if the dictates of the reasonable depend exclusively on her/his own (ways of) argumentation [IV, §§ 15 — 17]. With respect to (the judgement of) value-quality, the following gnawing problem arises: the practice of evaluative interpretation cannot always be founded on clear-cut norms/rules of logic. For instance, when religious cotexts become the object of evaluation [IV, § 17; VIII, § 8], then there are good reasons to doubt whether a purely logical account can evaluatively deal with the deeper layers of meaning. Doubts may also be raised when evaluation concerns the aesthetic dimension (von Kutschera, 1989). The degree of dissension which one meets here is representative of a failure to rely on purely rational thought. In some respects, beauty and art can be deemed to appeal to the senses (Marcuse, 1987, 172 ff). If so, then judgement of aesthetic values is intermixed with private taste, personal pleasure and joy. Is there then any aesthetic truth or any truth condition to back up aesthetic judgement and to justify evaluative interpretation of art and beauty? The consistent and commonly accepted application of unequivocal judgemental criteria is rather exceptional. There may even be a lack of noncontroversial criteria of judgement. This is largely the case in literary evaluation. For instance, what can lead a person justifiably to judge whether particular fragments of language constitute very good poetry or whether they are mediocre literature or whether they are only instances of ornamented language? This question pertains to more general problem areas, such as those mentioned in (11) —(13):

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(11) Is there really poetic language? (12) Is there really poetic meaning? (13) Is there really a special kind of coherence for the language used in literary works of art?

Problem areas (11) —(13) are mentioned here because they are fundamental to any evaluative interpretation of literary texts. Evaluative interpretation is probably most permanent and pervasive in the study of poetic cotexts. Terms such as 'poetry', 'poet', and the like, are already evaluatively loaded (Kayser, 1971, 16; Jones, 1986, 5). Evaluative interpretation, as it is practised in many literary studies, is directed towards the combination of descriptive interpretation with explicative interpretation. In this respect, it is worthwhile considering some fundamental problem areas of literary evaluation, such as (11) —(13). It is only by considering these fundamental problem areas that some conditions can be fulfilled justifiably to distinguish poetic cotexts from non-literary discourse. Regarding the fundamental problem area 'is there really poetic language?', it is often the case that the outer form of the language used in poems is characterized by degrees of deviation from the rules of ordinary language. There is a sort of institutionalized consensus on the issues that poetry has a higher degree of patterning, that poetry is more highly structured or that poetry has special forms/levels of organization. There is also general agreement on the viewpoints that poetry is often regimented into verbal schemes or that it has a particular lineation/representation in print or that it resists automatized/stereotyped/familiarized modes of expression, etc. (see also van de Velde, 1988 c and further references therain). With respect to the fundamental problem area 'is there really poetic meaning?', it is claimed that the language used in poems has an unlimited interpretability or an extremely rich potential for associations and suggestions. It is also generally assumed that the power of poems lies in their transpositions between semantic fields, as can be seen in the occurrence of metaphors, metonymy, etc. It is also accepted that poems comprise elevations of significance or that they differ from casual language in their departures from rational categories. It can also be observed that meanings in poems are distinct owing to the obscurity of the symbols used or to abstruse images, references, and so on. It is also recognized that the meanings conveyed by the poet are not emotionally neutral, that they may reflect a superb vision, a great depth of inner and outer world experience, and rich resources to affect the receiver's ego-consciousness (van de Velde, 1988 c; 1988 e; 1991). As to the fundamental problem area 'is there really a special kind of coherence for the language used in literary works of art?', two divergent claims are possible: on the one hand, one may defend the view that coherence exigencies of literary texts are less rigid. It may even be held that literary texts seem incoherent at first sight: futurist prose, surrealist poetry, and stream-of-consciousness prose are prototypical examples (Segre, 1988, 30).

7.6. On some problem areas of literary evaluation

205

On the other hand, it may be claimed that poetic language has a heightened concentration of meaning for which extra degrees/levels of coherence can be (re)constructed. They may concern thematized subjects, such as Woman as muse, la femme fatale, the condition of Man, Oedipus, Faust, etc. They may also be specifically connected with poetically-used images, such as the knight in shining armour, the tryst, the harvest, the fortified prison, the eye as the entry for love, and so on. They may also pertain to intertextual relations. Probably the extra degrees/levels of coherence make most lyrical verse literature more difficult to interpret in its conveyed meanings than is the case with most narrative prose literature. For instance, it is hard explicatively to retrace the specifics of the producers' inner psychic lives from the iconic coherence which characterizes (14) and (15) in their prison/watertower imagery. (14) Quand la pluie étalant ses immenses trainees D'une vaste prison imite les barreaux, Et qu'un peuple muet d'infâmes araignées Vient tendre ses filets au fond de nos cerveaux (Charles Baudelaire, fragment of Spleen) (15) J'aimerais dire que la pluie nous ligotait de ses cordes, qu'elle dressait autour de nous les murs de son château d'eau. (Michel Leiris)

In concentrating on the explicative interpretation of (14) —(15), one should consider the fact that literary evaluation may often take forms in which the caveats mentioned in [VII, §§ 2—5] are disregarded. Literary evaluation may then start from the assumption that it is possible for the receiver to re-enact/ relive the inner-life constellations, the preverbal interpretation, and the related meanings as they supposedly underlie the cotext (see also Nôth, 1990, 334 ff and further references therein). Under this assumption, evaluation may typically concern this re-enactment. Needless to say that, in the light of the above outlined restrictions of explicative interpretation, this kind of literary evaluation bases its judgements on what cannot be precisely and completely identified. I shall not further deal with the problem areas of literary evaluation (van de Velde, 1988 c; 1991). I will concentrate only on the following three considerations: firstly, that interpretation transforms the meaning of the cotext [VII, § 7]; secondly, that most changes in the cotext meaning consist specifically in meaning complementations [VII, §8]; thirdly, that the meaning complementations must be judged on their justification and on their plausibility [VII, § 9],

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7.7. On meaning transformation § 7 When a cotext is processed, its discerned meaning is not identical with the meaning which is intrinsic to its original version. It is a generally accepted view of psychology that any interpretation of what our senses gather from the outside world is a modification of the outside world. The interpretation of verbal texts, which are part of the outside world, is no exception. Before I explore this view, let me clarify the expression 'the meaning which is intrinsic to the original version of a cotext'. Of course, this is a particular manner of speaking and of abstracting from difficulties. This manner of speaking may misleadingly suggest that the container view and the nondeficit view are beyond debate [I, § 1]. However, they are not. I cannot tackle the problems involved in this manner of speaking (van de Velde, 1989 d; 1991). I would merely state that the phrase 'the meaning which is intrinsic to the original version of a cotext' denotes the significatum ('signifié' or 'signified') of the cotext. In view of the preceding considerations, there is no further need to demonstrate that the significatum does not exist on its own and for its own sake. That is, any meaning which is intrinsic to a cotext is there to be discerned and its discernment makes it the product/result of interpretation. In fact, the Receiver's discernment of the cotext meaning becomes her/his (silent) (re)production of a new cotext (see also Rickheit, Strohner, 1985, 61—63 and references therein). This way of looking at meaning assignment is now familiar in the formulation: "every decoding is another encoding (Lodge, 1984, 25, 194, 282). In this regard, it is even hypothesized by psycholinguists that readers recode the cotext in such a way that they (tend to) forget its verbatim form (Gernsbacher, 1990, 74—75 and further references therein). For convenience of expression, however, let us assume that it is appropriate to speak of the content which is carried by a cotext as 'the meaning which is intrinsic to the original version of a cotext'. It may also be called 'cotextinternal meaning'. If the discerned meaning(s) were to remain identical with the meaning which is intrinsic to the original version of a cotext, how then could it be explained that different human receivers, being active at different times and in different places, arrive at quite different interpretations of the same cotext C|? Take, for instance, the world of Christianity over many centuries. The innumerable interpretations of New Testament texts probably form the most prominent examples of meaning transformations (Kermode, 1979; van de Velde, 1991). In the light of this situation, it is possible to consider Christian theology as variations on its religious texts (Schreiter, 1985, 80 ff). Or take the Islam world for which there is no mono-interpretability of Koranic texts. In the Middle Ages, there were mystics who defended the view that the Koran had seven, seventy or seven hundred layers of interpretation (Russell, 1984, 418 — 419). Or take the Torah, for which medieval and Renaissance

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cabbalists already defended the view that it was amenable to infinite readings (Eco, 1990 b, 51). In these views on the multiplicity of meanings, it has to be accepted that any single interpretation of cotext c, cannot contain the same meanings as the interpretations of q which precede or follow it and that every single interpretation of c, transforms the semantic (and pragmatic) material which is intrinsic to the original version of c r In fact, these views on meaning malleability have repercussions upon every interpretative enterprise. Let me demonstrate this in connection with the interpretation of (16). (16) Mohammed is the greatest prophet.

One may claim that the meaning of (16) has been an invariant semantic datum throughout the whole of Mohammedan history. But is the meaning of (16) really invariant? Any unbiased examination can point to the contrary. If one assumes that the producer of (16) AFFIRMS THAT (16), then at least readings (17) —(25) are acceptable: (17) Mohammed is identical with the greatest prophet. (18) Mohammed has the property of being the greatest prophet. (19) Mohammed has the property of being superior to other prophets in the actual world. (20) Mohammed is a specimen of what it means to be the greatest prophet. (21) Mohammed is a member of the class/set of greatest prophets who lived in different possible worlds. (22) Mohammed has the property of being superior to other prophets (but outside the Islamic world it must be left undecided whether he has the property of being superior to other prophets). (23) Mohammed has the property of being superior to other prophets at the time of his life (but before that time and after his death there may have been greater prophets). (24) Mohammed has the property of being the greatest person in matters of prophecy (but not in non-prophetic matters). (25) A set of characteristics can be stated for Mohammed which individuate only him as the greatest man among all prophets.

For readings (17) —(25) one may observe that their meanings are not quite identical. They only approximate to the meaning of (16). That is, any interpretation of (16) which is presented in a paraphrase or in other (even more) circumlocutionary forms is an approximating transformation of the meaning which is intrinsic to the original version of (16). It is an almost intolerable thought that meaning, once it has found expression in a verbal cotext, is doomed to be transformed by the receiver for whom this meaning is destined. Even worse, the risks of meaning transformation are much greater in those cases in which receivers process cotext meanings which were not destined/intended for them at all. The potentiality

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of meaning transformation will also increase when receivers do not sufficiently attend to the cotext or when they consciously resist its meaning effects. Most people become acutely aware of the fact that meaning assignment leads receivers to meaning transformation only when they control the ways in which misinterpretations of the source language give rise to erroneous translations into the target language. Then, many confirmations of the catchphrase traduttore traditore may be observed. One striking example is the schoolboy's misinterpretation of das ächtende Kind ('the groaning child' in Goethe's well-known ballad Erlkönig;) as 'the eighteenth child' (German: das achtzehnte Kind). Here, erroneous translation reveals that there is a transformation (and misinterpretation) of the source language. (26) Dem Vater grauset's; er reitet geschwind, Er hält in Armen das ächzende Kind, Erreicht den Hof mit Mühe und Not; In seinen Armen das Kind war tot.

Acute awareness of translation errors should not make us less alert to the fact that meaning transformation pervades every communicative use of language. However, it is noticed mostly only after it has caused misunderstanding, conflicts or deception. Meaning transformation may be clevery suggested to the receiver, as illustrated in (27). When (27) is integrated into the cotext of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the soldiers' reply can only mean that the gardeners disappeared. The Queen, however, transforms this meaning into 'the gardeners are beheaded'. (27) "Are their heads off?" shouted the Queen. "Their heads are gone, if it please your Majesty!" the soldiers shouted in reply. "That's right!" shouted the Queen. (Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures

in Wonderland, p. 110).

A discussion of (26) and (27) reveals that caution in matters of meaning (assignment) is necessary. Moreover, critical reflection on what/how we interpret as well as on the results of our interpretation should serve as a safeguard against interpretative illusions and self-deception [VIII, §§ 1 — 10], Meaning transformation also raises specific problems for the psychologist's study of human reasoning. In fact, it deeply affects all experimental paradigms designed to investigate the working of our minds. To realize that these specific problems are really insurmountable, it may be sufficient to reflect thoroughly on the following main issue: how do subjects interpret/understand reasoning or problem-solving task(s)? Because they transform the meaning which is intrinsic to the original version of the cotext of the task(s), there is an unavoidable risk that they misinterpret/misunderstand the premisses, forget (parts of) them, call to mind irrelevant considerations (Johnson-Laird, 1986, 40) or experience inappropriate associations/connotations while reading them.

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In all these cases, uncontrollable variables affect in hidden ways the results of empirical research on human thinking. From the almost intolerable thought that meaning is doomed to be transformed by the receiver flows also the practical consequence that, in all concerns with interpretation, the roles, the responsibilities and the risks of the receiver should not be disregarded. Nor should the important part which the receiver's inferencing plays in meaning transformation be ignored. If the details of the receiver's inferencing are made explicit, then it is possible to control (and, if necessary, to correct/adjust) the activities and the results of her/his interpretation. This is particularly the case when metaphors are interpreted [IX, § 7]. 7.8. On meaning

complementation

§ 8 Meaning transformation can impoverish the meaning which is intrinsic to the original version of the cotext as well as enrich it. In the following, I will be concerned only with cases of meaning enrichment which ensue from meaning transformations. Meaning complementation is a typical aspect of verbal communication. This is because most communicative activities leave meaning gaps which are to be filled by the communication participants. Gap-filling is a main prerequisite of the participants' co-operation (Dascal, Weizman, 1987; van de Velde, 1988 c; 1989 f; 1991). For various reasons, most communication participants do not like too much redundancy and over-determinedness. Stylisticians also disapprove of verbosity and circumlocution. There is a high risk that, if producers take these dislikes/disapprovals too much into account, they may be led to provide the receiver with too little information in the cotexts. I would refer here to the sections [II, §§ 8 —11; V, § 13; VI, § 3 — 8] in which it was suggested that syntactic and semantic information cannot be left out in an arbitrary way. If cotexts provide too little information, then gap-filling is a particular representative of the general tendency to meet the interpretative organization condition [I, § 3]. As such, gap-filling may contribute to many kinds of gestalt formation. In the following, I illustrate gap-filling only for those cases in which utterances are to be related to each other or are to be made coherent. When two or more utterances are to be related to each other and/or to their communicative contexts, then the identification of these relations is, in a certain sense, an instance of gap-filling or gap-bridging. Inferences must then be made to identify those meaning gaps which have to filled/bridged. In this respect, it may be assumed that the interpretative and communicative effects are conditional on the receiver's capacity/practice of inferential elaboration. Let me adduce cotexts (28), (29), (30) and (31) to illustrate these views.

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(28) If I make a mistake, then I am the present President of the United States. But I am a person w h o has no political power at all.

If the modal qualification 'the writer of (28) AFFIRMS THAT' is assumed for (28), then the consequence can be drawn from (28) that I make no mistake. This consequence is due to the ways in which the separate underlying propositions of (28) are related to each other. The identification of these relations includes, amongst other things, the fact that the receiver must inferentially complement the meaning of (28). This complementation can lean heavily on ILRRR-related inferences [VI, § 8] and can lead the receiver to the intermediate assumption that a person who has no political power at all cannot be the President of the United States. On the basis of this intermediate assumption (s)he may follow the logical rule of modus tollens and, in accordance with the trains of thought outlined in [I, § 4], conclude that I make no mistake. This conclusion is part of the total inferential elaboration which concerns (28). The inferential elaboration of (28) is a logically austere enterprise. Now, it is also worthwhile considering cotexts to which no rigid rules of logic apply. Are meaning complementations then necessary? It is my basic assumption that they are still necessary, at least if the receiver strives to identify meaning connections, to construct coherence and to achieve an optimal/maximal degree of interpretation. Examples (29) —(31) may make this basic assumption plausible. (29) I do not tell lies. I am the greatest prophet. (30) You are a defender of value-free practices in scholarship and science. You are a naive person. (31) He believes in imagination. He must feel unsatisfied with everyday life.

In (29), (30) and (31), there are meaning gaps. The interpretative and communicative effects of each example are contingent on the receiver's capacity for/practice in filling/bridging the meaning gaps. But filling/bridging these meaning gaps differs, in one main respect, from the inferential elaboration which applies to (28): there is not the same compelling stringency as in (28). In the multidisciplinary discussions of meaning complementation, it has become customary to denote this difference in compelling stringency by terms such as 'conventional implicature', 'conversational implicature', 'presupposition', 'invited inference', 'pragmatic inference', and the like. Apart from the logic-oriented reference domains of 'presupposition', these terms signify the rather free modes of thinking which are used in the receiver's inferential elaboration. As noted before, I use the cover term 'bridging assumption' to refer to the rather free inferential processes which fill/bridge the meaning gaps occurring between adjacent utterances [I, § 4]. Bridging assumptions do not necessarily follow from the cotext under consideration. On the contrary,

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they are, to a great extent, based on semantic ILRRR information and they can claim only some degrees of plausibility and probability. Let us accept that 'I AFFIRM THAT' is the modal qualification of (29) —(31). The two adjacent utterances of (29) need the bridging assumption that the greatest prophets do not tell lies. The interpretation of (30) is also conditional on inferential elaboration. Its two utterances can be sensibly related to each other, if one adds the information that there is a high probability among people who defend value-free practices in scholarship and science that they belong to the set of naive persons. As to (31), it can be (made) a coherent (and sensible/intelligible) cotext by presuming that a person needs a compensation for feeling unsatisfied with everyday life and that this compensation can be found in imagination. I need not demonstrate here that the risks of extending the meaning assignments can easily become very high. Let me venture on the following hypothesis: the more the explicative and evaluative perspectives of interpretation come into play the more the extensibility of meaning assignments is enhanced and the more mysterious the intrinsic/conveyed/assigned meanings become (van de Velde, 1988 a). Regarding the explicative interpretation of (29), it can be assumed that the producer of (29) is not a prophet himself. Then, it may be surmised that the producer intended to criticize the prophetic facets of religious leadership and the rigid orthodoxies which go with them. One can continue to search for the ironical effects of (29) by examining whether and in which respects the producer meant the opposite of what is expressed in (29). One can also claim that (29) implicitly discards the apodictic style of prophets. The extensibility of readings can still be enhanced when one assumes that it was the greatest prophet himself who expressed (29); that he did so because he had been severely criticized for having foretold events which had never occurred; that he wanted overtly to anticipate potential disapproval; that he had particular motives/reasons to manifest the overplaying of his ego-weakness (or to reveal his manic elation, etc.); or that he intended to make his audience realize how strong his self-assurance was, and the like. I need not show here that explicative interpretation can also be multiplied for examples (30) and (31). Suffice it to say that the multiplication of meanings, though highly inconvenient as a transformation of the meaning which is intrinsic to the original version of the cotext, is particularly striking when explicative interpretation becomes the subject of literary criticism and psychiatry (van de Velde, 1988 c). As to evaluative interpretation, one may add the meanings to (29) that the proposition I am the greatest prophet does not provide any justifying evidence for I do not tell lies, that in matters of prophecy there is no clear-cut distinction between what is true and what is false, that texts of prophets may cause the illusion of correct/orthodox interpretation [VIII, § 8], that prophets should not be trusted, that religions which defend the absolute trustworthiness of

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their prophets are a mockery of free intelligence or an assault on a person's critical faculties, and so on. To shorten the possible extensions of meaning assignment to (29), I repeat what was set out in chapters four and five, in particular that interpretation is not a matter of arbitrariness but rather a prospect delineated by limitation [V, § 12]. The more the delineated austerity of logical inference (which largely characterizes descriptive interpretation) decreases (in explicative and evaluative interpretation), the more the degrees of arbitrariness increase. Apart from that, one should consider the caveat that there are religious and mystic cotexts for which it holds true that the austerity of logical inference cannot lead the receiver to fully controllable and justified interpretations [VIII, § 8],

7.9. On the justification

and plausibility

of meaning

complementation

§ 9 From [VII, § § 7 - 8 ] and from [V, § § 1 1 - 1 2 ] it can be seen that it is necessary to draw a sharp distinction between justified enrichments of meaning and interpretative elaborations for which no justification can be given. A thorough concern with the justification of interpretation is necessary to control and to constrain unbridled interpretative elaborations of the cotextinternal meaning. Here, I assume that an interpretation is justified when it is in accordance with the norms/rules of logic and with the interactively functioning syntactic and ILRRR-related inferences. For instance, in interpreting (16) in [I, § 4] and (28) in [VII, § 8], the meaning complementation that I do not make a mistake is justified by the logical rule of modus tollens and by the interacting syntactic and ILRRR-related inferences. Similarly, under the assumption that THE PRODUCER OF (32) AFFIRMS THAT (32), it is justified to add to (32) the meaning that Bertrand Russell had an official appointment at Cambridge University (before he was dismissed), that Bertrand Russell was removed from his post at Cambridge University, that Bertrand Russell had not met with sufficient tolerance for his views on pacifism at Cambridge University, that Bertrand Russell did not stop making his views public, and the like (see Ryan, 1988 for historical data). (32) Cambridge University dismissed Bertrand Russell f o r his pacifism. But he went on defending his views in other ways.

As can be seen, these meaning complementations are arrived at by making inferences from (32). What would be unjustified in complementing the meaning of (32)? The answer is straightforward: anything that is not based on the cotext and on the inferences which concern language and logic. For instance, when people assign to (32) the additional meaning that Bertrand Russell was an egotistic fanatic, that Bertrand Russell was denounced as a traitor, that Bertrand Russell was completely isolated at the time of his

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dismissal, and the like, then these complementations are unjustified. However, in the light of the receiver's private semantic ILRRR information, some degrees of plausibility may be attributed to these meaning complementations. Here, I assume that an interpretative elaboration is plausible when it is supported by the empirical evidence of the cotext under consideration, by the reference domains denoted by the cotext and/or by the contexts (which are called up for the purpose of interpretation). For instance, it is plausible to infer from (17) —(19) in chapter one that the scientific director's actions concerned female animals of all sorts [I, §4]. Similarly, there is much plausibility in deriving from (17) in chapter two and from (38) in chapter four the information that the artist's actions gave rise to negative judgements in the local press [II, § 9; IV, § 10], At this stage of the discussion, we arrive at one of the most crucial conundrums of interpretation, viz. that the plausibility of meaning additions is not a matter of dealing strictly with the cotext proper. Very often, receivers rely strongly on cotext-external information in order to enrich the meanings of the cotext. This is particularly the case in the explicative and evaluative interpretation of poetry. Let us consider example (33) to tackle the plausibility problems. (33) Our unspoken assumptions have the force of revelation. How else could we know that whoever is the first of us to seek assent and votes in a rich democracy will be the last of us and have killed our language? Meanwhile, if we miss the sight of a fish we heard jumping and then see its ripples, that means one more of us is dying somewhere. (Seamus Heaney, fragment of From the Land of the Unspoken)

The title of Heaney's poem and its cotext meanings connect closely with the remarks I want to make about unidentified meanings and about meaning complementations. It also fits well into the view advocated in [VII, § 10], notably that interpretation does not come to an end as long as the receiver's signifying responses to the cotext are open to change and, accordingly, can modify its meanings. As to the descriptive interpretation of (33), one may ask the following: which information parts of the cotext are accessible to the reader? There are only written verbal information parts. They are finite. Their interpretations, however, may be infinite. Let us reflect on these views for the reference domains of (33). Is the cotext of Seamus Heaney sufficiently referential? If so, to what does it precisely refer? Does it refer to things which are left unclear for private reasons? Is (33) a meditation upon the human condition or upon fragments of man's history in the United Kingdom? Is there any reference to disillusionment for those who miss the sight of a fish?

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In fact, no fully reliable descriptive interpretation of (33) and its reference domains is possible. On the one hand, this is caused by the fact that the interpretative organization condition cannot be fully met [I, § 3]. This being the case, it is possible that the poet's addition of sufficient co(n)textual information (by commenting on his cotext, etc.) can have a compensatory effect so that, in the end, local and global coherence can be constructed. In this respect, it is to be regretted that we have no illuminating comment by the poet on (33). On the other hand, this may also be caused by the general complication that literature, in saying something, says something else (Riffaterre, 1978, 17). If so, then there is no real remedy to the intellectual complaint that poetic language has a rich potential for misleading its receiver [VII, § 6]. Here, we must modestly accept the limits of our interpretative skills and efforts [VIII, § § 1 - 9 ] . If one cannot demonstrate that a particular descriptive interpretation of a cotext C; is plausible (or justified), how then can the explicative and evaluative interpretations of the cotext c, be reliably achieved and substantiated? As I have shown elsewhere, this question is in no way chimerical or superfluous (van de Velde, 1988 c; 1991). Explicative and evaluative interpretations which cannot be based on (any evidence of) descriptive interpretation may easily be seen as castles in the air. When descriptive interpretation cannot be optimal/maximal, there may also be much missing meaning within other perspectives of interpretation. It is legitimate to say that, if meaning remains unidentified anywhere, it is in the explicative account of the poet's person-internal meanings and in the evaluative account of both the cotext-internal and the person-internal meanings.

7.10. On the incompletenessfinfiniteness of interpretation § 1 0 The preceding sections have touched upon two main tenets of all hermeneutic enterprises which concern language and its users. Firstly, that interpretation is never a complete account of what is in the cotext and in its producer. Secondly, that interpretation is never finished as long as the receiver's signifying responses to the cotext-internal and person-internal meanings are open to change. In this regard, interpretations of verbal texts provide instances of unlimited semiosis (see also Eco, 1990 b). The problems arising here become increasingly intricate as the lapse of time between the production of the written cotext and its reception increases. From our knowledge of the outside world and the people in it at the present time it is hardly possible to recover the poet's preverbal interpretation [VII, § 4] of the outside world and the people in it at the time when he wrote (34): (34) How often, amid those overflowing streets, Have I gone forward with the crowd, and said Unto myself, "The face of every one That passes by me is a mystery" (William Wordsworth)

7.11. Summary

215

Though we can construct lines of local coherence based on those overflowing streets, the crowd, and every one that passes by me, we cannot achieve a (re)construction of the high-level coherence of (34). In which way does (34) refer to the author's preverbal interpretation? Is this preverbal interpretation concerned with Wordsworth's "dreamlike derealization" or with his "horror of city l i f e " (Rzepka, 1986, 41, 259 and references therein)? Which references to Wordsworth's affective, cognitive and affective life as well as to his interpersonal relations can be uncovered from (34)? The answers to such questions are inevitably linked with disappointment and/or intellectual dissatisfaction. This is not due to the inferential tools which we use, but to the fact that they cannot entirely make up for what is not completely and not explicitly expressed in the cotexts under consideration. Furthermore, there is also the inconvenience that no norms or general rules can be given which precisely guide/govern the rational decision as to where and when the interpretative elaboration of a particular cotext q must come to an end. To put it differently, in (34) as in most other poetic cotexts, there is too much missing to meet the interpretative organization condition [I, § 3] (van de Velde, 1988 c; 1991). I shall examine the incompleteness of interpretation more extensively in the discussion of interpretative illusions [VIII, §§1-10]. The preceding sections have only given a slight idea of the enormous complexities which go together with interpretation and interpretative elaboration. Twentieth-century scholarship can confirm the dimensions of these complexities. For instance, logicians and theorists of science have complained about the lack of precision and of transparency which clings to natural language cotexts. Semioticians and linguists have pointed to the arbitrariness of the language signs. Philosophers (of language) have launched the idea that the intentional facets of verbal actions are immensely intricate and, as such, remain largely irretrievable. Social and cognitive scientists have extensively discussed the extensibility of meaning possibilities in social interaction as well as in analogies of the man-machine domains. Psychiatrists have complained about the fact that realized language does not allow them to retrace precisely what is in its producer's inner psychic life. Pragmaticians have, nolens volens, indulged in the limitations of twentieth-century hermeneutic/exegetic endeavours. Their interpretative endeavours to complement language meaning by directing their interests towards the communicative situations in which language is used provide more grounds than ever for the assumption that much meaning remains undiscerned in matters of verbal communication.

7.11.

Summary

§11 The seventh chapter did not give an account of all the scholarly attestations of the incompleteness/infiniteness of interpretation [VII, § 10], Instead, it focused attention on the fact that there is much meaning outside

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language. This cotext-external meaning became the subject of produceroriented explicative interpretation. It was also submitted to a receiver-oriented evaluative interpretation. The seventh chapter raised some fundamental issues which concern the interpretation of literary texts. In this respect, it widened the scope of the present book to problem areas which concern (the combination of) descriptive interpretation, explicative interpretation and evaluative interpretation. Chapter seven also addressed the difficulties/problems which arise from the fact that the human brain transforms the information which it receives. More specifically, it demonstrated that every meaning assignment is a transformation of the meaning which is intrinsic to the original version of the cotext. From the possible transformations of the meaning which is intrinsic to the original version of the cotext, the enrichment of meanings was selected for discussion. In this regard, the following question can be raised: can it be bad to enrich the meanings of a cotext? The answer which I proposed in this chapter is simple and straightforward: some enrichments of meaning are not bad since they can be justified by the inferential tools proposed in the present book. Other enrichments of meaning, however, can be bad in that they lack the required justification or in that the empirical evidence to substantiate their degrees of plausibility is missing. If the practice of discourse processing ignores this simple and straightforward answer, it can be rich in arbitrariness but also be poor in accuracy. The next chapter will suggest that in matters of interpretation it is sometimes extremely difficult to draw a non-illusory boundary between arbitrariness and accuracy.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Interpretation, inferencing and illusion 8.1.

Introduction

§ 1 In various activities/results of interpretation, the receiver may (too) easily be led to the impression of having completely and correctly understood the message of language phenomena. Thorough control of interpretation activities/results and sufficient critical reflection on their justification may often show that the person who assigns meaning(s) to a verbal text is (partly or wholly) the victim of self-deception and/or illusion. Intellectual history displays a wide variety of interpretative illusions. For instance, at the time when Galileo introduced scientific thinking into the Western world, most scholars were under the illusion that all 'Why?' questions of scientific explanation found an irrefutable answer in the Bible. Even the views on the cognateness and differences of languages were based on the Bible (van de Velde, 1964; 1966). In this "climate of opinion" (van de Velde, 1980 and further references therein), Galileo had to face not only the authoritarian religious orthodoxy which took offence at his discovery that the earth moves round the sun. He also had to confront his findings with those of scholars who used their concept(ion)s of rationality [IV, § 17] and their mastery of logic to demonstrate that he could not be right in claiming that two bodies of unequal weight fall to the earth at an equal velocity. In later developments of physics however, it turned out that authoritarian orthodox theologians, inflexible biblical exegetes and those scholars, who employed scholastic logic to oppose to Galileo's views, were the victims of illusion. In most cases, the identification of illusion(s) results from modes of thinking in which doubt is an incentive for the exercise of empirical and rational control. The present chapter deals with doubt as an incentive for the control of interpretation activities/results. In this way, we shall arrive at a relativizing attitude in which it will be claimed that interpretation is never complete and that it is never absolutely correct. This relativizing attitude also leads us to see that, in matters of text interpretation, the incompleteness, indeterminacy and lack of absolute correctness are sources of illusion. More specifically, I attempt to show that — in spite of rational thinking — text interpretation may be subject to pitfalls, failings and traps. Critical reflection, directed in this chapter towards several areas of meaning conveyance, meaning assignment and meaning exchange, is very closely

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connected with ideas put forward in chapter seven. The following questions illustrate this close connection: was it nationalistic self-deception to denounce Bertrand Russell as a traitor, because he uncompromisingly defended pacifism [VII, § 9]? Is it an illusion to hold that the New Testament can be justifiably interpreted [VII, § 7]? Is it (un)realistic to maintain that the meaning of Mohammed is the greatest prophet is an invariant semantic datum [VII, § 7]? Is it fallacious to believe that prophets do not tell lies [VII, § 9]? Chapter eight continues the critical consideration of the views on the justification and plausibility of interpretation defended in chapter seven [VII, § 9]. It also dwells further on meaning gaps and on the infiniteness of attempts to fill them. Last but not least, chapter eight returns to the interpersonal character of communicative language acts. In this respect, it opens some expansionist vistas on text interpretation and on text-transcendent semiosis in that it is concerned with communicative acts which are not "dominantlyverbaF (Petofi, 1990, 208). In so doing, chapter eight fits well into the broadening scope of this book which initially concentrated on the cotext, but has gradually proceeded to encompass more and more cotext-external elements and factors. This chapter is rather unusual in its playful approach to areas of interpretation which do not normally raise doubt or scepticism. The humorous illustrations given are meant as a joyful reward to the reader for her/his tenacity in following my thoughts until this chapter. However, the frivolous overlay of several sections should not obscure the serious character of the philosophical/methodological (by)thoughts which are under the rather amusing cover. More specifically, it should not distract the reader from my implicit insistence on critical thinking. Much has been written in linguistics, philosophy, logic and psycholinguistics about (multiple) ambiguity, vagueness, polysemy, and the like. However, very little has been said about the illusory facets of language interpretation. Here, I would make the following point: it is a scholarly self-deception to ignore the illusory facets of language interpretation. Moreover, it would be a clear indication of philosophical/methodological naivety and intellectual blindness not to realize that our interpretation abilities are rather limited and prone to error. This chapter brings some limits of our interpretation abilities and some aspects of our proneness to error to the attention of those who may erroneously believe that human beings have the cognitive skills to deal perfectly with interpretation problems. It illustrates that interpretation can, in some respects, be compared with moving round in a labyrinth without ever finding the absolutely right way out. Any person who naively believes (s)he has found the absolutely right way out, may err. In the best case, (s)he may realize that, after sufficient control, 'facets' of reality can be seen which (s)he did not notice before, but which compel her/him to reconsider her/his erroneous beliefs about the exegetic practice. In this chapter, I assume that we know only 'facets' of reality (including the reality of our interpretation of reality [III, § 3]). I also assume that what

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we know may result from illusory 'facets' of our interpretation of reality. For instance, some people may have conceptual schemes of person-external reality which are based on the illusion that we do not change our position when we stand still [VIII, § 3]. In one culture, people believe that the religious ritual of pouring water over a woman's head makes that person become the child of God, whereas in another culture it is believed that the same ritual has the effect of cursing the person with infertility [VIII, § 6]. Some people may have cognitive models in which the words white and black mistakenly refer to colours [VIII, § 9], Still other people may erroneously believe that dreams contain indications about the future. They may even allow these dreams to influence their decisions. In a comparable vein, psychoanalysis has taken dreams as a basis for assigning interpretations to the individual's personinternal reality and for finding out more about "what is there in thee, Man, that can be known?" (Coleridge) [VIII, § 2]. Others have recourse to horoscopes, attribute credibility to truth-tellers or take refuge in charlatanism instead of relying on a thoroughgoing medical diagnosis. Many more instances can be adduced which may confirm the old saying that the world wants to be deceived. However, my concern with interpretation should not develop into a moralizing enterprise. To avoid a moralizing stance, I do not intend to deal with too many sorts of (self-)deception. Nor shall I tackle the multiple misconceptions about (person-internal and person-external) reality which relate, in one way or the other, to illusions (van de Velde, 1991).

8.2. On some illusory facets of dream interpretation § 2 Interpretation is basic to all mental and physical activities. This holds true for all parts of our person-internal reality, including dreams, as well as for all parts of person-external reality. The main problems which arise here can be formulated as follows: 'What is real?', 'What is interpreted as real?' and 'What seems to be real?' The solution to these problems depends on critical reflection. In handling these problems, we may wonder and ponder on 'What are the limits of interpretation?', 'What is the role of imagination?', 'What part does whimsical speculation play in semiosis?' and 'What are visionary/my stic/contemplative/meditative experiences in interpretation?'. To make these preliminary considerations more intriguing, let me refer to the ancient rich tradition of Chinese thinking: in the tradition of Tao it is said that the sage Chuang Tzu had a dream. In this dream he was a butterfly. The dream led him to puzzle about 'What is real?', 'What is interpreted as real?' and 'What seems to be real?'. He did not arrive at a completely convincing solution/answer. This should come as no surprise when we consider the following line of thinking: If his dream is part of reality, then the sage must be a butterfly in that part of reality. If reality is everything

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except Chuang Tzu's dream, then he must be the human person called Chuang Tzu who has to disregard the reality of his having had a dream. But did his dream then no longer exist? Disregarding the part of reality in which the dream occurs does not affect the existence/existential status of the dream. Since dreams exist and can be experienced in the person-internal world, they are part of reality. However, dreams are most intriguing objects of interpretation in that they may blur the lines of demarcation between person-internal reality and person-external reality. The story of Chuang Tzu shows, amongst other things, that it is extremely difficult to distinguish between 'what is real', 'what is interpreted as real' and 'what seems to be real'. The lack of distinction between 'what is real', 'what is interpreted as real' and 'what seems to be real', which is characteristic of dreams, can become relevant to the (re)organization of co(n)textual information. For instance, as shown in [VI, § 3, § 6], the introduction of a dream world permits the transformation of a sequence of desultory utterances into a cohesive, referentially connected and coherent text. Moreover, texts which display pure nonsense, absurdities or blatant incompatibilities with our semantic ILRRR information can still be turned into sensible and semantically organized messages by assuming/considering that they describe dreams [V, § 12; IX, §§1-8]Dreams are interesting as semiotic texts which have their own very complex symbols. Their symbols are not only very complex; they are also extremely cryptic. Moreover, they hide a great deal of irrationality [IV, § 17]. Consequently, they cannot be completely and precisely interpreted with rational means. Popular books about dreams and psychoanalysis have not developed a code of symbols for a precise and complete decoding of dreams and for a thorough control of the meanings assigned to them. Irrespective of the highly disputable and unreliable character of dream interpretation, dreams become of importance to the discourse sciences from the moment that they are reproduced from memory in verbal texts. This is the reason why they must receive attention in a book on (the relations between) text interpretation (and thinking). Here, an additional problem of interpretation arises: before dreams are reproduced from memory in verbal texts, they must have gone through the preverbal interpretation [VII, § 4] of the person who reports her/his dreams. As a consequence, they may have already undergone complex transformations. In addition, the reporter may fail precisely and completely to retrieve/ reproduce the details of her/his dream. Her/his retrieval/reproduction may be (partly of wholly) impeded because of her/his prudishness, shame, sense of self-protection, and the like. Other problems arise, because dreams are mostly relegated to the 'unconscious'. It is difficult to accept that 'what is in the unconscious inner psychic life' can be precisely and completely identified by the 'conscious inner psychic life'.

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The above problems, which relate to the interpretation of person-internal and person-external reality, may make the reader acutely aware of the risks and complications of illusion. The risks and complications of illusion comprise an enormously extended field. This field may extend still further when the notion of 'dream' is enlarged to encompass also states of mind/mental activities in which an individual is not asleep, but is deeply involved in day-dreaming, fantasy thinking, hallucination, and the like. Dreamlike states of mind/mental activities may concern the aspirations, desires, wishes, expectations, etc. of conative life. Some of the dreams which are experienced when awake, such as the dream which Martin Luther King publicly expressed in 1963, represent high ideals of mankind. Some dreams, however, are of a less noble and a less peaceful nature. They may even have been horrible. The Roman emperor Nero is said to have had such dreams. Some Nazi leaders must also have been prey to such horrible dreams. There is lack of clarity about the use of the notion of 'dream'. For instance, a popular-love song may praise the loved one for making a 'dream' come true. Here, the notion of 'dream' concerns a person-internal and personexternal reality which is totally different from that of Nero or of other diabolic rulers. Literary works may make use of the notion of 'dream' to create various forms of fiction. For instance, Lewis Carroll placed the adventures of Alice in a "wonderful dream" in which the border between 'what is real', 'what is interpreted as real' and 'what seems to be real' becomes blurred [IX, §§ 1 — 8], Psychological studies on creative thinking sometimes refer to the notion of 'dream' as a state of mind/mental activity in which solutions to problems are unexpectedly found. For instance, Kekule von Stradonitz had a 'dream' in which he was suddenly sure of having seen the solution to his chemical problems with benzene in the form of a ring. The assyriologist Hermann Hilprecht had a dream in which a priest took him to the temple and told him how to decipher inscriptions on rings. For the English author Alfred Lord Tennyson it was not unusual to have a dream in which he saw in advance the passages of poetry he planned to write. The lack of clarity about the notion of 'dream' may be due to the absence of a sharp distinction between 'what is real', 'what is interpreted as real' and 'what seems to be real'. As long as the absence of such a sharp distinction is not harmful for the individual and for her/his social environment (including her/his co-agents, interlocutors, interpersonal relationships, etc.), it goes mostly unnoticed. If it becomes (noticed as) harmful for the individual, there is a tendency to regard it as a mental disorder for which psychiatry provides a battery of clinical terms centring around the concept of 'delusion'. Let us now examine kinds of illusion which are most intimately connected with the interpretation of verbal texts which report dreams. I mean the reports of dreams which are taken as a basis and a tool to intrude interpretatively into the person-internal reality of another human being. The spiritual fathers of this intrusion practice, Freud and Jung, agreed one day to interpret

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each other's dreams. After having heard the reported text of Freud's dream, Jung insisted on knowing more details about Freud's inner psychic life and about the private associations which Freud could relate to his dream. However, Freud was probably suspicious of succumbing to Jung's criticism. It may also be supposed that for the sake of self-protection, for saving face and for keeping his most cherished views unaffected by any thorough control, Freud refused to fulfil Jung's request. It will for ever be impossible precisely and completely to unravel the preverbal interpretation [VII, § 4] which led Freud to express (1) (1) Ich kann doch meine Autorität nicht aufs Spiel setzen.

It is also impossible precisely and completely to retrace the effects which Freud's refusal and his explicit motivation in (1) produced on the inner-life constellations of Jung. From Jung's autobiographical writings we can derive only the information that he must have had a covert signifying response to (1) which can approximately be paraphrased as (2): (2) In diesem Augenblick hast du deine Autorität gerade verloren.

In a later stage of this psychoanalytic interaction, Jung told the dream he had selected for analysis. In response, Freud wanted to know more details about the inner psychic life of Jung and about the private associations which Jung could relate to the reported dream. It is unclear which inner-life constellations determined/caused Jung's (c)overt signifying responses to Freud's request. Did Jung, at that moment, intend to control (and to falsify) Freud's views? Did Jung want to find out what happens to the interpretation of a dream if the analysand is not cooperative and/or insincere? Or did he have other motives? Jung's mental background activities [V, § 2] can only be reconstructed hypothetically. They belong to the preverbal interpretations [VII, § 4] which preceded any of Jung's overt signifying responses to Freud's requests. The reflections set out in (3) exemplify one possible preverbal interpretation of Jung. (3) I am much younger than Freud and less famous in the field. I would not like to lose Freud's friendship and support by refusing to tell him about my inner psychic life. I should not keep silent about the associations which can be related to my dream. Instead of provoking Freud or of making him feel suspicious, inappropriate, etc., I prefer to tell him a lie.

It may be hypothesized that the preverbal interpretation (3) led Jung to be insincere in reporting about his inner-life constellations. The insincerity itself may have been based on illusions: firstly, on the illusion that the interaction with Freud was a decisive power struggle; secondly, on the illusion that the best strategy for escaping from Freud's penetrating procedures would be to tell him a lie; thirdly, on the illusion that Freud would not practise critical reflection on details of self-interpretation; and fourthly, on the illusion that a white lie was not in conflict with the ethics of science and with the intellectual search for truth.

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The foregoing anecdote is not pure fiction. If we attribute credibility to Jung's autobiographic writings, this anecdote describes real historical data (Hannah, 1982, 104ff and references therein). Jung really told Freud a lie. By this incident of insincerity, the man who wrote an acerbic and provocative book about illusion (Freud, 1927) was himself (made) the victim of two illusions: firstly, that his authority would be kept intact if he could hide parts of his inner psychic life; secondly, that the total report of Jung's inner psychic life related to his dream was trustworthy.

8.3. On some illusory facets of interpreting

spatial data

§ 3 The reader may object that Freud's first illusion was a case of selfdeception and that his second illusion was a matter of being deceived. The reader may further argue that Freud's misfortune of being deceived by the best like-minded friend he had at that time was due to the bad intention of his interlocutor. The reader may also suggest that Freud's self-deception was a normal outcome of his inclination/care to (over)protect his self-image and his views. Are illusions always caused by the interlocutor's bad intention(s) or deceptive trickery? Are they due to our inclination/desire to (over)protect ourselves and our views? What happens in verbal interaction when a person has no bad intention(s) and does not wish to trick her/his co-agent(s)? What effects are produced on others when a person's (inhibitions to carry out) (verbal) actions are not caused by her/his motivation to (over)protect her/his selfimage and her/his views? To deal with these questions, I would like to confront the reader with an anecdote about the practice of interpreting spatial data. One day, a teacher found himself before a very uninterested audience. Because he had to teach the basic concepts of geometry, he tried to intensify the attention of his audience in a rather unusual way. He drew fig. 1 on the blackboard. In the first step, he made it clear that fig. 1 represented a human creature. In the next step, he asked the following question: "What does this figure have between the two legs?' On hearing the teacher's question, some pupils started smiling. Some blushed. Some looked rather annoyed. But no one provided the teacher with an overt signifying response. Their smiling, blushing or looking annoyed, however, revealed that they had reacted with a covert signifying response to the information provided by the teacher. It is probable that, in interpreting the teacher's text, the pupils had experienced a certain prudishness or false shame of speaking about their interpretations in public. (Fig. 1 see page 224.) In the following step, the teacher started asking questions about intersecting lines, such as: " What interpretation can be assigned to the space which is partlj

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o Fig.l

enclosed between the two intersecting lower lines offig. /?" He also drew two circles within fig. 1. He used full lines, as is illustrated in fig. 2. In each of the sectors, he wrote a single letter. Then, he asked: "What do we call the space which is denoted by the letter a?" N o pupil came up with the answer which was intended by the teacher. Finally, the teacher asked: " What do the spaces denoted by the letters a, b, c, d, e, f and g have in common?"

The answer which the teacher intended to receive depended on activating the geometrical concept of an 'angle'. Although he had had no bad intentions, the communication was not successful and illusions could not be avoided: on one side, the teacher had the illusion that his unusual activation of a concept would produce the intended effects in his audience; on the other side, the pupils had the illusion that the teacher intended to be humorous in a vulgar way. Because it is the teacher who asked the unusual questions about fig. 1 he may be held responsible for misleading his audience. That was the way one pupil saw it. To match the intention to mislead which he erroneously assumed to be in the teacher's mind, this pupil wanted to play a trick on the teacher himself. To this end, he produced text (4). (4) If you allow me to ask a question about intersecting lines, please suppose that the little human creature of fig. 1 is a man who is standing on a mountain in Switzerland. He moves his arm in the direction of the sun when it rises in the east. The little man remains in the

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same place all day pointing to the sun with the same arm. When a line is drawn f r o m the man's arm to the rising sun and to the setting sun where will these t w o lines intersect?

The problem raised by (4) is very intriguing in that most people are subject to illusion in attempting to solve it. To begin with, they misleadingly think that they have understood the problem. This can be seen by controlling their answers to questions (5) and (6). (5) Is the man's position changed in the course of the day? (6) Did the sun remain in the same position during the day?

Most people will answer in the negative to (5) and (6). To the pupil's surprise and enjoyment, the teacher too was not attentive enough to identify the deeper layers of significance (and misleading trickery) of (5) and (6). Since the earth/globe moves, the mountain and the little man on top of it change their position too, whereas the sun remains in the same position all day. If the solution to the problem raised by (4) is based on the view that the man remained in the same position and/or that the sun changed its position, then it is an impressive illustration of an illusion. With regard to the problem of (bad) intention(s) raised at the beginning of this section, the difference between the illusion caused by (4) and the illusion caused by the teacher's questions about fig. 1 is clear. In (4) it is the producer's bad intention to make the receiver the victim of an illusion. In contradistinction, the teacher's questions about fig. 1 did not arise from any bad intention. On the contrary, they aimed at simplicity in order to avoid any misunderstanding or illusion.

8.4. On some illusory facets of interpreting deictic data § 4 It may be objected that in the above anecdote in [VIII, § 3] the good or bad intentions constitute only one aspect of meaning conveyance/assignment, but that, in addition, one should also consider the aspect of how a problem/question is formulated. Regarding the formulation, it may be argued that the teacher's question and the pupil's puzzle are misleading. It may then be claimed that if a non-ambiguous, sufficiently clear and specific enough question/puzzle had been presented, it would not have produced the effect of illusion. To deal with this objection, let us consider a communicative situation in which a professor of language philosophy wants to practise a lively way of transmitting information on deictic data to his audience. To this end, he asks question (7) while raising his forefinger. (7) What do Eskimos do with this finger?

Here, it may be asked: is this question non-ambiguous, sufficiently clear and specific enough? I assume that members of the audience take the total

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communicative act of raising the forefinger and of expressing (7) as providing them with non-ambiguous, sufficiently clear and specific enough information. Probably they do not mistake the referent of the syntactic constituent this finger for a bogus entity. On the contrary, they do consider it as a terminal part of the hand with which actions can be carried out [IX, § 2]. In so doing, they may hypothesize that question (7) concerns cross-cultural differences or common features between Eskimo conduct and Western-style behaviour, etc. Suppose that (8) is given as an answer to (7). (8) They point to the place where they can find fish.

The professor may now refute answer (8) and, as a better substitute, offer answer (9). In comparing (8) with (9), it turns out from (8) that (7) was not interpreted in a way which corresponded with the professor's intention(s). In fact, all the members of the audience who thought of answers which differ from (9) were under the illusion of having correctly understood the intended meaning of (7). More specifically, they had the illusion that this finger had referential connections with the Eskimos. (9) They do not do anything at all with this finger because it is my finger.

The conclusion from discussing (7) —(9) is very simple, but cogent: even a non-ambiguous, sufficiently clear and specific enough question which is produced as a multimedial text may lead receivers into the illusion of having rightly identified the deictic data and of having understood the cotext in which deixis occurs. This conclusion brings us to another anecdote in which a professor of logic who happens to be an intellectualist illusionist takes an open handkerchief in both his hands and holds it up before his audience. After the production of (10), he folds the handkerchief and then asks the following question: " What is in this handkerchief ?" (10) If there were an invisible x in this handkerchief, then this handkerchief would look empty; now this handkerchief, as all of you can see, looks empty. Therefore, ?

It need not be demonstrated that the production of (10), the gestures of holding up and of folding the handkerchief as well as the professor's question are non-ambiguous, sufficiently clear and specific enough. Nonetheless, one would be under an illusion if one were to believe that the answers to the professor's question are always found in logically valid ways. Many answers provide evidence for the conjecture that, in solving problems, people often have the illusion of having followed the lines of a logically valid argumentation and of having validly arrived at a solution/conclusion. Here, I cannot return to the issue of invalid inferencing [IV, §§ 13 — 17], If the reader is (still) reluctant to accept that human thinking is subject to logical invalidity, then (s)he should consider the psychological experiments conducted by Wason (1983 and further references therein) which provide striking indications of invalid thinking. In addition, (s)he should pay thorough attention to the evidence for errors in reasoning given by Evans (1989).

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8.5. On some illusory facets of interpreting unimedial data § 5 The production of (7) while raising the forefinger constitutes a multimedial text. One may claim that — in view of (9) — the gesture of raising the forefinger does not completely co-ordinate with all the information parts of (7). With respect to the information parts of (7), it may be conjectured that the receiver's focus is on the Eskimos. As such, the receiver considers (7) above all as a question about the Eskimos (and their actions). The receiver does not discern that the producer's focus is on the phrase (with) this finger and on the gesture of raising the forefinger. As a consequence, the receiver does not realize that (7) is not primarily an information-seeking question about the denotatum of (with) this finger. It may be argued that it is quite unusual that the gesture of raising the forefinger becomes the dominant part in the semiotic process, as is apparent in (9), and that because of this unexpected dominant role of the gesture it was possible to mislead the audience. One may then defend the view that a unimedial text will not give rise to illusion. In a similar vein, one may claim that the logician's gestures of holding and folding the handkerchief are part of multimedial communication. One may also assume that the logician's gestures, like many other illusionist gestures, distract from the verbal information of (10) and from the risk of invalid argumentation related to (10). For this and related reasons, it could also be objected that the production of a unimedial text would not cause any interpretative illusion (or fallacy in thinking). Let me first discuss this objection for a spoken unimedial text. To do so, I would tell another anecdote: one day, two politicians, Helmut and Egon, meet each other at a party. Egon is more intelligent than Helmut and likes to solve puzzles. He also feels enormously gratified when his interlocutor cannot find a solution to his puzzles. To experience again the unbeatable feeling of gratification, he presents Helmut with the following puzzle. (11) He is the son of my father and he is not my brother. Who is he?

Helmut is really puzzled and feels himself once more a little bit humiliated by Egon. However, he is forced to admit reluctantly that he cannot solve the problem of (11). Then, in a shriek of laughter, Egon expresses (12). (12) How simple it is! It is me!

Nine days later, both politicians speak with a leading Russian politician. Helmut is eager to find out whether the Russian politician is able to solve the puzzle to which he himself could not find a solution. While the three men stand close to each other Helmut confronts the Russian politician with (11) whereupon he immediately receives the answer: "How simple it is! It is jouY' Helmut is totally perplexed by the quick, almost automatic answer. But

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suddenly he feels the triumph of the winner and exclaims: "No, wrong! It is not that simple! It is not me! It is my colleague EgonV Needless to say, inferencing is needed to understand (11) and to find an appropriate solution to it. This is sufficiently demonstrated in the foregoing chapters and need not concern us here. Let me simply confine myself to the consideration that — in view of Helmut's verbal behaviour — a unimedial text may still give rise to the illusion of having rightly understood. Let me now also consider the objection that a unimedial text does not give rise to illusion by addressing the unimedial written text (13) which is carved in a wooden bench in an Oxford park [II, § 11]. (13) ORE STABIT FORTIS A R A R E PLACET ORE STAT

The first step in interpreting (13) consists in constructing the hypothesis that it is written in Latin. Syntactic inferences [II, §§1 — 11] allow the identification of some grammatical cues so that syntactic constituents, such as STABIT FORTIS and ARARE PLACET, can be identified as Latin phrases. However, it turns out that, in considering (13) as a Latin cotext, the totality of organization levels/forms cannot be established. There is still much missing with respect to the levels of semantic processing, logical processing, and action processing. People who hypothesize that (13) is a Latin text are under an illusion. In fact, (13) is a well-formed English text. This can be seen when (13) is respaced to the effect that (14) is produced. (14) O REST A BIT FOR 'TIS IS A RARE PLACE TO REST AT

The illusion which accompanies the preliminary interpretation steps of (13) is, to a certain extent, comparable with the illusion of the person who believes that the stick which is immersed into the clear water is bent, whereas the expert knows that it is not. It can also be compared with the illusions caused by fig. 3. With respect to fig. 3, one may think to be right in claiming that lines a and b differ in length from lines c and d, whereas appropriate empirical control may show that they do not. (Fig.3 see page 229.) The lines of fig. 3 present different stimuli in the visual field. In this presentation, however, what they have in common is that they give rise to illusion in the non-knowledgeable or unattuned/unprepared person. From such an illusion we can learn that 'what is real' needs an interpretation which in turn requires appropriate control. If there is no appropriate control, we may be under an illusion which is comparable with that of the English gentleman who did not know German and never thought of checking what the rural Bavarian hotel-keeper meant by the note which he left on the guest's car: "Familie Braun ivisch you a good fart."

8.6. On the illusion of interpersonal/(cross-)cultural unterstanding

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