Procedural Information Encoded by Linguistic Expressions : Advantages of Procedural Analysis

This article, first, discusses various types of contributions of linguistic expressions to the interpretation of the utterances including the expressions under the classification and the framework of Wilson and Sperber (1993). We have to deal with issues on two different levels: the conceptual/procedural distinction of the meaning encoded by linguistic expressions and the contribution to the truth conditions (i.e. truth conditional or non-truth-conditional) of the utterance including the expressions. Therefore, linguistic expressions are, in principle, classified into four types: conceptual and truth-conditional expressions contributing to the proposition expressed, conceptual and non-truth-conditional expressions contributing to the higher-level explicature, procedural and truth-conditional expressions constraining on the proposition expressed, and procedural and non-truth conditional expressions constraining on the implicature of the utterance. Second, procedural accounts are superior to discourse accounts in terms of analyzing the meaning of discourse connectives. In the discourse accounts, discourse connectives contribute to the coherent relation of the two linguistic units (cf. Schourup (1999: 204)); therefore, it cannot fully explain the discourse-initial use of discourse connectives such as so and after all. However, this can be explicated by procedural accounts in which discourse connectives encode the constraint on the inference involved in utterance interpretation. In addition, procedural accounts enable us to explain the subtle differences of the meaning encoded by discourse connectives: i.e. the differences of meaning between but, nevertheless or however, between so and therefore, or between because and after all. The procedural account is convincing as this article reviews, and the definition of procedure seems to have been expanded and applied into various kinds of linguistic research. However, the expansion of its definition should not make the procedural account itself complicated and far-fetched