Philosophy Colloquium: Guillermo del Pinal (UMass Amherst)

Meaning-driven ‘ungrammaticality’, the semantics-pragmatics interface and the `spontaneous logicality of language’

There is a class of expressions which are perceived as `ungrammatical' not because they are syntactically ill-formed but because they have interpretations which are informationally trivial. Triviality-driven unacceptability is a widespread phenomenon: it constrains the distribution of determiners, modals, attitude verbs, exhaustifiers, and various other kinds of logical terms. At the same time, many superficial tautologies and contradictions---pre-theoretically, the most obvious cases of trivial expressions---are judged to be perfectly acceptable. In this talk, I will discuss two promising ways of modeling triviality-driven unacceptability without over-generating 'ungrammaticality' judgments. One approach is based on the `Logicality hypothesis' that the language system includes a deductive-inferential system that automatically identifies and filters out expressions with trivial interpretations. The other approach downplays Logicality and tries instead to reduce triviality-driven unacceptability to familiar kinds of pragmatic infelicities. I present a Logicality-based approach according to which the computational system that checks for trivialities runs on `modulated logical forms'---a level of representation where all content-based terms and variables are subject to meaning-modulation operations—and try to show that this Logicality-based approach is superior to the most promising attempts to treat triviality-driven unacceptability as a species of pragmatic infelicity. This result suggests that our purely linguistic and logical competences are deeply intertwined, and sheds new light on the division of labor between syntax, semantics and pragmatics.