A Study Of Utterance Interpretation Based On Default Semantics

Since language is popularly defined as a tool for communication, the interpretation of meaning is crucial for successful communication. Different linguists have proposed various theories of meaning to describe and analyze how language works in natural language conversations. Paul Grice's implicature theory, Sperber and Wilson's relevance theory and Kent Bach's impliciture theory all advocate rule-governed or principle-governed inferential strategies. True that those theories have huge explanatory capacity and have gained dominance over others, but they have been under serious attack from anti-inferentialists who favor automatic, unreflective and default interpretation of utterances. The dispute between inferentialism and anti-inferentialism remains unsettled for decades.This thesis introduces a default-based approach to utterance interpretation, namely, Default Semantics (DS), formally proposed by Kasia M. Jaszczolt in her so entitled book in 2005. Jaszczolt takes"act of communication"as the object of study, and the corresponding"merger representation"as the bearer of truth-condition contributed by different sources of information that operate on an equal footing. DS deals with primary meaning or salient meaning, free from the syntactic constraints to which explicatures are subjected. Though many extant theories, to some extent, show"default"characteristics, such as Stephen Levinson's GCI, Asher and Lascarides's SDRT, Kent Bach's"default reasoning"and Fran?ois Recanati's automatic enrichment, DS proves to be the most explicit and systematic theory on default interpretation of utterance.This thesis agrees that DS is a mature theory on utterance interpretation and it presents various advantages over traditional inferential approaches. Theoretical analysis is made to pin down the drawbacks of traditional models and to highlight the merits of DS. An experiment is implemented on Chinese discourses to testify its compatibility with DS. By doing so, the author calls for attention to the default feature of language, tries to confirm the Parsimony of Levels principle and shows that"default"is not merely related to language but also the human cognition architecture. In other words, human beings are capable of and good at "jumping to conclusions"and taking shortcuts in normal conditions, when circumstances do not stop them from doing so. Only in this way can a theory of meaning mirror the speed and efficiency of human communication. Default is the true picture of utterance interpretation.This thesis is organized as follows: Chapter 1 is the introduction part, including the research object, methods, goals, and the significance; Chapter 2 reviews theories of both the traditional models and DS; Chapter 3 contrasts the two camps and points out their drawbacks and merits; Chapter 4 expounds on DS, including primary meaning, general principle, sources of information, algorithm and application; Chapter 5 is a tentative study of Chinese discourses in terms of default interpretation, demonstrating DS'explanatory capacity of and compatibility with the Chinese language; Chapter 6 concludes the thesis, points out limitations of the research and gives advice for possible future prospects.