Syntax-Pragmatics Interface

The goal of this book is to develop a programmatic tool called individuation which roughly works as a theory of prominence in language. To make the idea of individuation more concrete, I use it as a linguistic feature in the present implementation of the programme. The linguistic elements which are more individuated contain more information than others (paradigmatically) and are more prominent than their syntagmatic neighbours. There are some tools in a language which are used by the speakers to make any linguistic element more individuated, therefore, more prominent. Emphasizers, demonstratives and classifiers are some of them. The theoretical approach taken in this book follows Nicolas Ruwet and his hermeneutic way of studying linguistics. This approach not only considers the grammatical aspect of a linguistic study but also accounts for the psychological aspects of a communication, a speaker, and a hearer, as these appear in a linguist's consciousness. I relate Ruwet's work with Indian study of meaning and philosophy of language, viz., with Bhartrhari's sphota theory. Meaning is understood from the words on the basis of their manifestation as objects of the sense of hearing. Based on this idea of Bhartrhari, the present work places the hearer in a very important position in a linguistic theory. Therefore, the grammatical properties of what is said are not determined from something present in the formal object but in the generosity of a patient listener who takes on board the linguistic as well as social context of an act of speaking. A generous listener decides which constituent of a sentence will become input for an acceptance-interpretation process in a larger context. This move of shifting the focus to a hearer makes the language free from the (structuralist) clutches of society. Bhartrhari's 'whole over part' view of language which is supported in this work is opposite to the traditional structuralist as well as recent Minimalist position. In both these theories, the smaller constituents are accepted for interpretation as soon they are formed and a total view of the larger construction is thus obstructed. Cognition is based in those accounts on parts of a construction. I have shown in the chapter 4 of the book that actual cognition does not happen by parts. One of the main aims of the book is to work towards a more explanatory account of cognition. Chapter 1 introduces the subject matters of the book. Chapter 2 is the first empirical chapter based on the data from Bangla DP structure. The chapter starts with the two competing functions of the classifiers -- quantification and individuation. Though, a good amount of time has been spent on the issue of the classifiers of Bangla; nonetheless, the other prenominal categories such as quantifiers, quantifying adjectives, demonstratives and some other words denoting vagueness of meaning have been analyzed in this chapter. In the course of discussion of the data, this chapter works out the characteristics of some of the important Bangla quantifiers as well as some adjectives behaving like quantifiers, which are referred to as Quantifying Adjectives (QAs), and analyzes their occurrence and non-occurrence with the most individualised classifier /Ta/. Some of the notorious vague words, whose formal analysis has never been made part of the standard accounts of the Bangla nominal, are discussed in this chapter. Their overall place and relevance in the individuation program are discussed using a hierarchical partitioning of the set of DPs, following the Silverstein hierarchy. A special note on a peculiar classifier /Tuku/ ends the discussion. Finally, in the concluding remarks of the chapter, I propose that in a language like Bangla with no overt determiner, the function of the D is largely taken over by the classifier /Ta/. Chapter 4 is the other major empirical chapter based on the analysis of data from Bangla imperfective, perfective and conditional participles. The important finding of the chapter is the complementary distribution of these three participles in a particular reading where one action follows the other. Perfective is found in all tenses with coreferential subject, conditional is found in present and future in general and in habitual past with non-coreferential subject, and imperfective is observed only in past with non-coreferential subject except with habitual aspect. Blocking has taken a central place in writing this chapter. Observations in at least three parts of this chapter exemplify blocking among various non-finite participles. One is the blocking of imperfective form in cause-effect sense by locative gerund form, the second is the blocking by the perfective participle of the conditional participle with coreferential subject in sequential events reading and the last is the non-use of the imperfective form in habitual past with the same sequential event reading as a result of the availability of the conditional participle for that purpose. Finally, another important point of the chapter is the switch-reference analysis of the non-finite participles, resulting in a decision to treat the perfective participle as an A'-anaphor and the imperfective as an A'-pronominal. Between these two empirical chapters, the third chapter clarifies my actual standpoint from which the work has been done. The main theme of the book is to establish speakers' freedom to assign meaning to an utterance in a conversation. This chapter brings out the tension between upward projectionism and the speakers' right to modulate what s/he wishes to say. Language becomes the property of a society if a grammar depends only on projectionism and compositionality for the interpretation of an utterance. In order to liberate language from the clutches of a society, I propose a comprehension-maximizing listener who processes the utterance as uttered by the speaker and takes the decision of how large a constituent will be given to the pragmatics interface for the interpretation of the intended meaning. I revive Bhartrhari's listener-centred cognition of speech as a bridge to relate Generative grammarian's revival of the old theory of Generalized Transformation in Minimalism abandoning DS with the paradigmatic hermeneutic approach of Ruwet applied for text analysis. The paradigm shift from the formal Paninian model to the user-focused listener-based Bhartrharian type of grammar and connecting it to the formal syntactic analysis to the pragmatics interface study will help the linguists to solve many unasked as well as unanswered questions. The book is a humble footstep towards that 'substantivist' linguistics. Chapter 5 discusses some of the residual issues left by the other chapters. The first of them is an asymmetry in the distribution of the non-finite participles which has been found in the fourth chapter, viz., perfective participle in one hand and imperfective and conditional in the other side. With the repetitive use of the participles as noticed in the language, the distribution is different, viz., two aspectual participles in one side and conditional participle at the other side. Discussing this in the section following, a tentative account is offered for this asymmetry maintaining a basic distinction between aspectual and non-aspectual participles in the mind of the speakers as well as the listeners. There is an attempt to connect individuation devices with the mental representation of language reviewing the idea of Heim's File semantics. A subsection here deals with the mental space idea developed by Fauconnier and its connection to the representation of tenses. Cutrer following Fauconnier represented three major tenses in mental space.