Ad hoc concepts, affective attitude and epistemic stance

Ad hoc concepts, affective attitude and epistemic stance Manuel Padilla Cruz Universidad de Sevilla, Spain Abstract In relevance-theoretic pragmatics the lower-level or first-order explicature is a propositional form resulting from a series of inferential developments of a logical form. It amounts to the message the speaker communicates explicitly. The higher-level or second-order explicature is a description of the speech act that the speaker performs, her affective attitude towards what she says or her epistemic stance to the communicated information. Information about the speaker’s affective attitude or epistemic stance need not solely be represented in the latter, though. It could be included as beliefs in the mental files of pragmatically adjusted conceptual representations featuring in lower-level explicatures. Those beliefs would originate as lexical pragmatic processes operate and their representation would be triggered by elements like evaluative morphemes, expressive expletives, insulting terms and evidential participles. Although they may be true or false in their own right, such beliefs would not affect the truthconditional content of the expressed proposition. Keywords: Relevance Theory, explicit content, lower-level explicature, higher-level explicature, attitudinal representation, epistemic stance representation, evaluative morphemes, expressive expletives, insulting terms, evidential participles 1 Introduction Relevance-theoretic pragmatics depicts derivation of speaker’s meaning as an intricate process relying on mindreading or attribution of psychological states and intentions (Sperber & Wilson 1986/1995, 2015, Wilson & Sperber 2002, 2004). The mind creates various mental representations with a compatible format, one of which captures the message explicitly communicated through linguistic input. Resulting from decoding and inference, this representation is the lower-level or first-order explicature of an utterance. Another representation grasps the action that the speaker performs in uttering her1 words—i.e., the illocutionary force—her epistemic stance to dispensed information—e.g., (dis)belief, (un)certainty, etc.—her feelings while speaking and/or her affective or emotional attitude(s) towards either the message itself or something in the communicative situation. Termed the higher-level or second-order explicature of an utterance, this second representation is a superordinate mental representation subsuming a lower-level explicature. Its construction relies on paralinguistic clues like facial expressions, gestures or intonation, which are tracked by a specialised emotion-reading (sub-)mechanism included in the mindreading one, even though it may also be constrained by linguistic elements. Hence, that representation is the byproduct of decoding and (to a greater extent) inference. Along with the lower-level explicature, it is part and parcel of the content that the speaker explicitly communicates by means of an utterance. This paper does not question this twofold distinction, nor does it challenge the illuminating relevance-theoretic contributions concerning the construction of these two types of representations enabling recovery of the explicit import of speaker’s meaning. This distinction, however, may suggest a division of work: lower-level explicatures represent communicated messages, while information about actions, feelings, affective attitudes and epistemic stance would be solely restricted to higher-level explicatures. A lower-level explicature results from a series of pragmatic enrichments of decoded linguistic input. One of them involves modulating or adjusting the meaning of words endowed with conceptual content, or creating highly idiosyncratic occasion-specific conceptual representations (Wilson 1 Following a relevance-theoretic convention, reference to the speaker will be made through the third person singular feminine personal pronoun, whereas reference to the hearer will be made through the masculine counterpart. & Sperber 1998, Carston 2000, 2002, Wilson & Carston 2006, 2007). Such representations behave as mental files where the hearer may store varied information about what the speaker means (Wilson 2011, 2016, Carston 2013a, 2013b, 2016, Hall 2017). Although that information may pertain to specific characteristics, properties or nuances of their referents— e.g., category, shape, size, colour, flavour, style, number, parts, etc.—it may likewise consist of personal beliefs about the speaker and her relation and experiences with, feelings towards and/or stance about what those words refer to (Scott 2019). In relevance-theoretic pragmatics, construction of occasion-specific conceptual representations is regarded as a free pragmatic process. It is an inferential enrichment that is not enacted by any element in the linguistic signal, but is automatically performed as a necessary step to obtain a fully-fledged propositional representation of speaker’s meaning (Carston 2000, Jary 2016). Various lexical morphemes and lexical items ascribe conditions or properties to the referents of the words to which they are attached or appended. However, they often reveal the speaker’s attitudes, feelings or emotions to what those words allude to, or her epistemic stance about it. These morphological and lexical items could cause the hearer to represent their user’s psychological states, and to add information about them to the conceptual files activated by the words to which they are attached or appended. To put it differently, such elements could give rise to more fine-grained conceptual representations incorporating that sort of information. Accordingly, this paper argues that the morphological and lexical items in question assist the recovery of a specific portion of meaning that speakers communicate explicitly. These items facilitate representations of speakers’ psychological states and enact lexical pragmatic processes yielding highly idiosyncratic, nuanced, perhaps one-off, concepts that may comprise beliefs about them. In other words, these items increase the explicitness of the part of speaker-intended meaning that relies on linguistic encoding by enacting representations of speakers’ attitudes, emotions, feelings and belief states, as well as inferences yielding conceptual files storing those representations. This would involve admitting that information about psychological states would be represented at a conceptual level as a result of lexical pragmatic processes, so its representation need not be confined to higher-level explicatures. The possibility that the said linguistic elements trigger conceptual refinements seems more psychologically plausible and coherent with the relevance-theoretic framework than postulating the enactment of a further representational level capturing information about the speaker’s psychological states. Allegedly, that additional representation would be superordinate to, or would encompass entirely, a conceptual constituent of a lower-level explicature. It would not amount to a proper higher-level explicature, as long as its scope does not range over a whole propositional representation, but is just confined to some conceptual component of the lower-level explicature (Padilla Cruz 2018). However, that new representation would certainly contravene Ockham’s razor principle, as it involves an unnecessary increase of representational layers during comprehension. The information that it would include could instead be mentally represented as a consequence of the fine-tuning of conceptual material triggered by the morphological and lexical items under scrutiny, and be subsequently added to the mental file associated with that material. In addition to being more parsimonious, this account would be consistent with the relevance-theoretic description of the interpretation of the explicit portion of speaker-intended meaning as contingent on a series of parallel inferential tasks operating on distinct components of linguistic input. In fact, it is based on recent research that stresses the explanatory capabilities of the lexical pragmatic processes posited by relevance-theoretic pragmatics and their outputs, while showing that other linguistic elements may give rise to similar information likely to be filed in occasionspecific conceptual representations (Scott 2019). 2 Explicit meaning Utterances set in motion a complex mental machinery that works out their significance. This is an exercise in mindreading that takes as input coded and non-encoded elements, along with information perceptible through the senses or stored in the mind. The output is a hypothesis about what the speaker might have meant or intended to communicate explicitly and implicitly: her informative intention (Wilson 2017). Formulating a hypothesis about explicit meaning partially depends on decoding. This is performed by the linguistic module of the mindreading mechanism. It unpacks the semantic content of the acoustic signal, accesses its potential sense(s) and minimally structures it into a logical form, or a chunk of representations “in the appropriate format for integration with representations from other information sources” (Carston 2000: 6). Since this form is not yet fully propositional, it needs to undergo context-dependent pragmatic developments yielding a truth-evaluable form amounting to what the speaker might have communicated explicitly (Sperber & Wilson 1986/1995: 72, 181, Wilson & Sperber 2002, 2004). The inferential (sub-)module carries out a series of incredibly fast, parallel, non-sequential tasks while linguistic input is perceived and processed: mutual parallel adjustment (Sperber & Wilson 1986/1995, Carston 2000, 2002). One of them is disambiguation of the potential senses of lexical items and/or of specific sentential constituents. Other tasks are triggered by linguistic material in the acoustic signal (Carston 2000, Jary 2016): a. Reference assignment to pronouns, deictics or proper nouns, and delimitation of the temporal coordinates of the actions denoted by verbs. These tasks are constrained by the procedural meaning or processing instructions that such elements encode (Blakemore 1987, 2002, Wilson & Sperber 1993, 2002, 2004). b. Completing syntactically complete but semantically sub-propositional sentences (Carston 2000, 2002, 2009, Carston & Hall 2017, Hall 2017), as in (1), and establishing certain relations between states of affairs alluded to in a proposition, as in (2): (1) a. This is the same [as what?] b. Mary is too tall [for what? If compared to whom?] (2) John came to London and [then/while he was there] visited Mary. Still, other pragmatic developments are not triggered by linguistic elements, but are a necessary step to obtain a fully explicit expression of speaker’s meaning. They are known as free enrichment and result from two operations: a. Supplying of unarticulated constituents, such as the location or time of an event, or the instrument wherewith an action is performed. This process is free from linguistic control because it is the byproduct of “general and routine processes of reasoning” (Carston 2000: 35) based on knowledge about actions and events, their agents, requisites, consequences, etc.:2 (3) a. There are several boxes [in the warehouse/store] [now/today] b. Tom gave Mary the key and [then] she opened the door [with that key]. b. Lexical adjustment. The canonical relevance-theoretic view is that open-class words like nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs encode schematic concepts with a denotation—proconcepts—and procedures enabling their adjustment (Sperber & Wilson 1998, Wilson 2 In relevance-theoretic pragmatics this inferential development is not triggered by overt or covert indexicals, or empty constituent slots, in the logical form (Carston 2000, Wilson & Sperber 2000, Carston & Hall 2017). 2011, Hall 2017).3 A possible adjustment broadens or loosens the denotation of a concept towards something less specific than its literal meaning by dropping one or more of its logical or defining properties—i.e., by eliminating information from its logical entry (Carston 2000, 2002, Wilson & Carston 2006, 2007). Accordingly, the concept CIRCLE in (4) is modulated as the ad hoc, occasion-specific concept CIRCLE*, which does not denote a circular, but a circle-like shape (from Carston 2013b):4 (4) The children quickly formed a circle. Another adjustment narrows or strengthens a concept so that it refers to something more specific. This involves elevating information in its encyclopaedic entry to the status of logical, defining characteristic on the grounds of other co-occurring concepts and manifest assumptions about the communicative situation and the speaker’s intentions (Carston 2002: 339, Hall 2017: 93). Thus, in (5) DRINK is specified as DRINK* referring to ‘drinking large quantities of alcohol’ (from Carston 2013b): (5) Many doctors drink because of the stress of their job. Both adjustments take place in combination, for example, when words are metaphorically used. In this case, some of the defining properties of the encoded concept are eliminated and one or more items of encyclopaedic information become(s) content-constitutive. However, the most recent view contends that open-class words lack a denotational content 3 Carston (2013b) considers it unlikely that instructions attached to every lexical concept trigger lexical adjustment. They would be redundant when the communicated concept is the one literally encoded. 4 Following another relevance-theoretic convention, concepts are notated in small caps and ad hoc concepts with an asterisk. that can be abstracted away from any context of use. They simply encode “an address or file label giving access to associated information in memory” (Hall 2017: 97). They are conceptually underspecified and can express differing concepts depending on context and available world knowledge. They are purely procedural elements enacting the creation of occasion-specific conceptual files on the basis of co-occurring lexical items, other sentential material, paralanguage, available contextual information and general knowledge (Carston 2013a, 2013b, 2016, Wilson 2016).5 Thus, a demonstrative like that in the definite description in (6) may provide information concerning the fact that the referent of the noun it accompanies is unknown to the speaker: (6) That man is jumping over the fence. Instead of assisting the hearer in identifying the referent or contributing truth-conditional information, the demonstrative would trigger the ad hoc concept MAN* and add to its conceptual file assumptions about the fact that the speaker does not know the person she refers to (Scott 2019). Something similar would happen if a speaker uttered (7): (7) I will get some dark chocolate! The adjective preceding the noun, exclamatory intonation, facial expression and knowledge about the speaker would cause the hearer to create the concept DARK CHOCOLATE*. Its file might include varied assumptions about the brand or quantity—a square or a whole bar—meant by the speaker, her passion for or addiction to that type of 5 This is known as the meaning eliminativist approach (Carston 2013b). chocolate, or the time when she has some. Similarly, conceptual files could store beliefs about attitudes, emotions, feelings or belief states like (un)certainty, scepticism, etc. The output of these pragmatic developments is the lower-level or first-order explicature, or simply the explicature of an utterance. This is the portion of speaker’s meaning that is explicitly communicated through a linguistically encoded signal, which the speaker intends the hearer to represent to himself as true. An explicature is a fully-fledged propositional representation that results not only from decoding, but also from the inferential activity necessary for the aforesaid developments, among which is ad hoc concept construction. It is distinct and functionally independent from an implicature: it does not overlap in content, is not entailed by an implicature, has its own truth conditions, functions as an autonomous premise in inferences and is stored separately. However, like implicatures, explicatures are calculable and cancellable because their derivation involves inference (Carston 2013a: 261– 264, Wilson 2017).6 The more inference needed, the weaker explicatures will be, while the more decoding involved, the stronger they will be (Wilson & Sperber 2002, 2004). Explicatures heavily depending on decoding make speaker’s meaning relatively more determinate or explicit, while those greatly relying on inference render it less so (Carston 2013a, Wilson 2017). In addition to paralanguage and available contextual assumptions, morphological and lexical items may steer inferences conducive to speaker’s meaning, and more specifically ad hoc concept construction. These items would thus increase its explicitness. Lower-level explicatures, however, do not exhaust the representation of speakers’ explicit meaning. Its representation may also include beliefs about their psychological states—i.e., attitudes, emotions, feelings—and the actions that they seek to accomplish, which they reveal 6 Yet, Burton-Roberts (2005: 401) thinks that explicatures cannot be cancellable because they are part of the truthconditional content of an utterance. b. Marta es una mujerzuela. ‘Martha is a woman[+DIM]’. c. El otro día unos niñatos rompieron una ventana. ‘Some guys[+AUG] broke a window the other day’. Lastly, it also licenses the usage of the diminutive alone in approximate assessments: (23) a. El regalo es carillo. ‘The gift is expensive[+DIM]’. b. Marta está tristecilla porque su novio la ha dejado. ‘Martha is sad[+DIM] because her boyfriend left her’. Both morphemes may serve additional hearer- and/or speaker-supportive functions in positive-politeness contexts characterised by intimacy, solidarity, camaraderie and good—and egalitarian—relations, as well as in negative-politeness contexts characterised by social distance and/or power-differences (Brown & Levinson 1987). Functions common to both morphemes include (Sifianou 1992, Mendoza 2005; Badarneh 2010): - Showing positive emotions like affection, endearment or admiration: (24) a. ¡Qué perrito más bonito tiene María! ‘What an adorable doggie Mary has!’ b. ¡Qué cochazo se ha comprado Luis! ‘What a car[+AUG] Lewis has bought!’ - Asserting or strengthening intimacy: (25) a. ¡No me seas cabroncete! ‘Don’t be such a bastard[+DIM]!’ b. ¡Eres un cabronazo! ‘You are a bastard[+AUG]!’ Functions exclusively characteristic of the diminutive include (Sifianou 1992; Mendoza 2005; Badarneh 2010): - Showing modesty and avoiding bragging: (26) a. Me he comprado un apartamentito en la playa. ‘I have bought an apartment[+DIM] on the coast’. b. Tengo una casita en las montañas. ‘I own a house[+DIM] in the mountains’. - Hedging or mitigating directive acts like requests, commands or orders by minimising the degree of imposition: (27) a. ¡Anda, dame un vasito de agua! ‘Come on, give me a glass[+DIM] of water!’ b. ¿Puede esperar un segundito? ‘Could you hold on a second[+DIM]?’ When face is not an interactive concern, both morphemes may even increase the facethreateningness or aggressiveness of actions like insulting, offending or criticising (Brown & Levinson 1987): (28) a. ¡Eres un cabronazo! ‘You are a bastard[+AUG]!’ b. ¡Vaya perrucho se ha comprado María! ‘What a dog[+DIM] Mary has bought!’ This variety of functions renders the interpretation of both evaluative morphemes extremely discourse-sensitive and contingent on situational factors like the interlocutors’ identities, relationships and, most importantly, intentions (Würstle 1992: 50). It certainly unveils that their semantics cannot stably be connected with notions such as littleness, bigness or low/high amount or degree. Indeed, the speaker of (21a) would not be stating that the house is not very tidy, that of (22a) would not be asserting that the film that Mary watched was short, that of (23a) would not be saying that the gift is inexpensive and that of (24b) would not be exclaiming that the car that Lewis bought is big. Similar things would happen in the other cases where the diminutive and the augmentative express intensification, pejoration, approximation, intimacy or modesty, or are used to offend. Although both morphemes could encode a ‘[fictive]’ feature that is contextually specified as ‘[non-serious]’ (Dressler & Merlini Barbaresi 2001), their semantics could rather be seen as contributing to lexical adjustment in these cases. In (21a), attachment of the diminutive to the adjective ordenada (‘tidy’) expresses a higher degree of tidiness than average or expected; in (22a), the diminutive causes the noun película (‘film’) to denote a boring or bad quality film, and in (23a), it conveys the idea that the gift was overpriced or unexpectedly (very) expensive. In (25) and (28a), the diminutive and the augmentative help the speaker respectively communicate that she considers the addressee a special, outstanding, peculiar, miserable or disrespectful type of person, or that she ascribes to him any of a range of qualities or conditions like naughtiness, misbehaviour, impoliteness or wretchedness, while in (26), the diminutive makes the nouns apartamento (‘apartment’) and casa (‘house’) refer to an affordable, inexpensive or modest kind of second dwelling. These morphemes trigger the modulation of the concepts encoded or activated by these nouns and adjectives as ORDENADA*/TIDY*, PELÍCULA*/FILM*, CARO*/EXPENSIVE*, and so on. Those occasionspecific concepts would respectively capture subjective or objective assessments and estimates about the degree of tidiness of the house, the quality of a film, the price of a gift, personality or the features of a dwelling. Hence, the semantics of these morphemes would be procedural: it would enact and steer an inferential process of construction of highly idiosyncratic, perhaps one-off, concepts. In the canonical relevance-theoretic view of lexical adjustment, the defining properties of the concepts encoded by the words receiving the diminutive and the augmentative would be preserved. Since their encyclopaedic entries would include information about the speaker’s possible views, opinions, standards, appraisals, etc., that information, or part of it, would be shifted to defining property, even if momentarily. This would involve a narrowing towards some more delimited notional space that incorporates some evaluative component about the referent of the noun, or the condition alluded to by the adjective, to which these evaluative morphemes are attached. Its final output, nevertheless, would depend on the contextual and encyclopaedic information manifest to the hearer, among which would feature beliefs about the speaker and what she is referring to. In the more recent view, in contrast, these morphemes would cause the words to which they are attached to activate conceptual files where hearers would store highly idiosyncratic and specific beliefs concerning the speaker’s views, opinions, appraisals, assessments, etc., about what she alludes to by means of those words. Thus, the conceptual file PELÍCULA* resulting from the attachment of the diminutive to película in (22a) could store beliefs such as the following: (29) a. The plot was predictable. b. The story was not believable. c. The cast did not include famous actors. d. The special effects were terrible. e. The photography was miserable. f. The soundtrack was bad. g. The film budget was ridiculous. These beliefs could be true or false in their own right, as they stem from the hearer’s estimates about the speaker’s assessment, opinion, viewpoint, etc., on the grounds of knowledge about her, paralanguage and manifest contextual or encyclopaedic assumptions. In fact, the reason why the speaker refers to the film that Mary watched as peliculilla, and invites the creation of the concept PELÍCULA*, may be the actual features of its plot, story, cast, special effects, photography or soundtrack, but it need not be. Nevertheless, the representation and storage of similar beliefs within the activated conceptual file would not affect the truth-conditional content of the proposition that the speaker explicitly expresses: the speaker states that Mary watched a horror film and it actually was a horror film that she watched. Similarly, the speaker of (27a) does not ask for a small glass of water and that of (27b) would not expect the addressee to wait for literally less than a second or for something like ‘a small second’. While both perform requestive acts, they also provide estimates about the minimal demands of those acts through the diminutive. Its associated idea of littleness or smallness is somehow symbolically transferred to their actions. Thus, they insinuate that the requested good or action are not meant to significantly impose on their hearers, hamper their freedom of action or involve much effort or cost (Brown & Levinson 1987). As a result, the hearer of (27b) would create an occasion-specific concept denoting a wait time that does not exactly amount to a second, but to some short time span. He could also add to its file beliefs concerning the facts that the speaker does not regard it as excessively or unduly long or burdensome, finds it reasonable or considers it polite for the hearer to wait for some relatively brief time span in that particular situation. The diminutive in (27a) would cause ‘glass of water’ to give rise to an idiosyncratic concept, too. Perhaps that concept GLASS OF WATER* does not store or give prominence to assumptions about physical or size-related features of what the speaker refers to. Rather, it may highlight beliefs to the effect that a glass of water is a relatively free good in the interlocutors’ culture, asking for one is a permitted action in the interlocutors’ current relationship and giving one is an almost effortless action at the time of speaking. The speaker’s intonation, tone of voice, facial expression and gestures could also make manifest or bring to the fore assumptions regarding her relationship with the hearer and her attitude towards him. The interaction of the diminutive with those paralinguistic clues could result in the addition of such assumptions to the mental file of the created concept. This would hence comprise a constellation of beliefs of very varied content. In addition to expressing intensification, pejoration or approximation; showing intimacy or modesty, and being used to offend or mitigate actions, the diminutive and the augmentative also serve an expressive function (Potts 2007a, 2007b, Blakemore 2011, 2015). Both morphemes unveil the speaker’s attitudes, feelings or emotions about an individual, animal, object or entity alluded to in the proposition that she explicitly communicates. It might appear reasonable to postulate that they activate, or raise the activation of, the emotion-reading mechanism, thus facilitating the identification and representation of the speaker’s psychological states. The resulting representation might be thought to resemble a higher-level explicature, as long as its content captures the speaker’s attitudes, feelings or emotions. However, it would differ from a higher-level explicature in terms of scope: while a higherlevel explicature subsumes a whole pragmatically enriched propositional form, the scope of the representation enacted by the diminutive and the augmentative would only affect a conceptual component of a proposition. This new attitudinal or emotional representation could be some sort of intermediate-level explicature (Padilla Cruz 2018). Yet, postulating this becomes problematic. Firstly, its construction unnecessarily increases the complexity of the mutual parallel adjustment tasks yielding the explicit portion of speaker’s meaning. Secondly, it involves a superfluous augmentation in the number of representational layers with which the mind would work. Thirdly, the fact that this new representation was the output of the diminutive and the augmentative morphemes would render their procedural meaning polysemous: whereas these morphemes set in motion lexical pragmatic processes in most cases, only when they work as expressives would their encoded procedure yield that representation. If this was so, a further mental instruction would have to enact or impede one or the other procedure. Evaluative morphemes certainly make manifest information about the speaker’s attitudes, feelings or emotions. Its representation could even be secured by additional linguistic features, paralinguistic clues and available encyclopaedic information about the speaker. However, it seems more plausible that such a representation amounts to beliefs pertaining to some conceptual component of a logical form. They would emerge during pragmatic enrichment, their contents would be determined by these morphemes and they would be housed by the mental file for that component. So these morphemes also contribute to ad hoc concept construction when they fulfil an expressive function. They not only foster the enactment of occasion-specific mental files associated with elements of propositional forms, but also supply beliefs about the speaker’s psychological states with which to fill them. As a result, such mental entities will very likely host a doxastic universe made up of varied beliefs. Some of them will concern nuances, temporary conditions, stable peculiarities or size-related characteristics of what the speaker refers to by means of the word to which these morphemes are attached. Others, in contrast, may have to do with the attitudes that the speaker has towards it and/or the feelings and emotions that it causes her to experience. Thus, the diminutive in (24a) favours the creation of the mental file PERRO*/DOG*, which surely accommodates beliefs about the referred pet’s breed, size, coat, age, eyes, sex, tail, legs, mood, etc. Just as it could also incorporate assumptions concerning the animal’s calmness, shyness, braveness, playfulness or fierceness, it could also harbour beliefs about the fact that the speaker loves that sort of dog or breed, feels tenderness or admiration towards it, has an affectionate or paternalistic attitude towards it, etc. And the same would obviously apply to the augmentative in (24b): it would cause the storage of attitude- or emotion-related beliefs in the mental file of the idiosyncratic concept whose construction it prompts, possibly along with specific paralinguistic clues. This means that the procedural semantics of both morphemes yields the same output regardless of whether they behave as expressives or fulfil other functions, so it is monosemous. It activates mental files and directs, at least partially, how they are filled with beliefs of a specific content whose representation it also enacts. Their inclusion in those files would somehow increase the explicitness of a portion of meaning that the speaker expects the hearer to derive on the grounds of linguistically encoded input. 3.2 Expressive expletives, ad hoc concepts and psychological states Languages like English or Spanish commonly place seeming nouns and adjectival participles in pre-nominal position. Yet, they do not fulfil proper adjectival functions, as they do not denote stable qualities or gradable properties: (30) a. The fucking/bleeding bastard said he would come earlier! b. ¡El puto/jodido cabrón dijo que vendría más temprano! (31) a. Give it to that fucking/bleeding idiot. b. Dáselo a ese puto/jodido imbécil. Unlike prototypical adjectives, these words cannot be gradated or intensified with adverbs. They cannot receive prefixes that give rise to derived terms, either. Furthermore, movement from pre-nominal to predicative position, or replacement with defining relative clauses, dramatically distorts what speakers intend to communicate (Huddleston 1988: 108–110, Greenbaum & Quirk 1993: 142, Haegeman & Guéron 1999: 56–57, 71–72, Collins & Hollo 2000: 80–81, Börjars & Burridge 2001: 64–65): (32) *The bastard who/that was fucking/bleeding said he would come earlier! However, these words partake of adjectival features on some occasions, as they have heightening effects: (33) a. John is a fucking star/idiot. b. Juan es un puto crack/imbécil. In English, moreover, they can also precede adjectives. In this case, they achieve intensifying effects characteristic of some adverbs: (34) The cake was fucking/damn delicious!7 Like evaluative morphemes, these seeming nouns and adjectival participles would trigger and contribute to ad hoc concept construction. In the traditional account, they would prompt the 7 In Spanish this function is fulfilled by an adverb: “La tarta estaba jodidamente buena”. adjustment of the concept encoded by the phrasal head with which they co-occur. Given its descriptive content, it would be narrowed and the resulting concept would place its referent up—or perhaps down—an alleged scale of alluded types of persons or qualities. Accordingly, the concept IDIOT*, created by the hearer of (33a), would denote an outstanding or exceptional type of idiot, whereas DELICIOUS*, constructed by that of (34), would represent an extraordinary or unexpected degree of deliciousness. The semantics of these seeming participles would be rather elusive, but it would be closer to that of adverbs like extremely, incredibly, surprisingly or shockingly, than to that of adverbs like very, highly or fairly. Indeed, the former adverbs do not simply upgrade entities or increase qualities, but also add emotional touches connected with shock, surprise, unexpectedness, puzzlement, overwhelm, etc. Such touches would be captured by the fine-tuned concept. In the more recent account, the interaction of these seeming nouns and adjectival participles with the phrasal head would create a conceptual file likely to store a cascade of beliefs. That resulting from (33a) could include beliefs regarding the facts that the alluded person is not an average idiot or the speaker is surprised, amazed or overwhelmed to discover his actual degree of idiocy. In turn, that resulting from (34) might incorporate beliefs concerning the cake’s extraordinary degree of deliciousness, its uniqueness—which might be caused by the ingredients, flavour, texture or the way it was baked—or the fact that the speaker is positively impressed by it, admires and appraises it. Lack of a clearly identifiable or easily effable conceptual content places these seeming nouns and participles within the group of expletives, along with elements like the slot holder it or existential there in English. Their conceptual emptiness facilitates large expressive capabilities, among which features voicing elusive things like psychological states. This function further sorts these lexical items out as a sub-group of expressive expletives. Moreover, lack of conceptual semantics renders them procedural elements steering the mental case. In this regard, these participles differ from their hearsay counterparts. Those adverbials make up independent tone-units, are not integrated in the syntax of a sentence, and may precede, interrupt or follow it: (40) a. Allegedly, the robber was sent to prison. b. The robber was, allegedly, sent to prison. c. The robber was sent to prison, allegedly. With hearsay adverbials, speakers communicate uncertainty or lack of evidence about what the propositional content of a sentence asserts, thus cautioning epistemic vigilance mechanisms to its veracity. Those adverbials enact and constrain the construction of very specific higher-level explicatures. Evidential participles, however, would not trigger an additional representational layer capturing the speaker’s epistemic stance about a person or state of affairs alluded to in a proposition. Like evaluative morphemes, expressive expletives and offensive terms, they would instead give rise to mental files where highly idiosyncratic information could be stored. Among the wealth of beliefs that could sit in such files, some would concern the (un)likelihood of someone or something for being considered in a particular manner. Such beliefs would amount to personal estimates, judgements or considerations of an epistemic nature. They would pertain to the speaker’s uncertainty about an individual’s agency in some event or the actual occurrence of a state of affairs. They would capture the speaker’s attitude or stance of doubt, scepticism, caution or reservation about the fact that a person actually did something or an event really amounted to a particular state of affairs. Other beliefs could even concern the reason for the speaker’s attitudes or stance: lack of supporting evidence, reliance on the testimony of untrustworthy individuals, need for confirmation or investigation, etc. Still, other beliefs might even allude to the possibility to employ certain terms or labels in order to refer to that individual or state of affairs. Activated by the evidential participle in (36a), ROBBER* or MAN* would file beliefs concerning the man in question, what he could have done and the speaker’s epistemic stance about it: (41) a. The man went out of a bank shortly after a robbery. b. The man might have robbed the bank. c. The man had an enormous amount of money. d. People say that the man robbed a bank. e. A judicial investigation must determine whether the man actually robbed the bank. f. The man might be a robber. g. It is uncertain that the man is a robber. h. The man should not be called a robber yet. Representation and storage of these beliefs prevent the noun phrase in that sentence from simply denoting a ‘robber’. Instead, that noun phrase would spark a notional conglomerate like “the man who is said/thought to have robbed a bank, but supporting evidence must confirm whether he actually did so”. It would refer to a particular man while it makes manifest the speaker’s belief state about his involvement in a particular crime and the reason for that state. Available contextual assumptions or encyclopaedic knowledge would thus enable an occasion-specific mental concept to render explicit a variety of stances of which a speaker intends to inform. These could range from absolute certainty to utter uncertainty about the nature of an event or an individual’s agency or responsibility. They could even include shades like caution, scepticism, doubt or reservation. Nevertheless, a hearer would recover that information during mutual parallel adjustment, as he specifies the explicit import of an utterance and, among other operations, determines what some lexical items refer to. 4 Conclusion A variety of linguistic elements trigger and steer the construction of higher-level explicatures. Evaluative morphemes, expressive expletives, offensive terms and evidential participles could similarly be thought to enact a further mental representation capturing the speaker’s affective attitude, emotional state or epistemic stance not about a whole propositional content, but only about something alluded to in a proposition. The drawbacks of that additional representational layer, however, render it more plausible that such information will be represented as beliefs or assumptions that emerge as the conceptual representation of some entity or event is enacted and inferentially fine-tuned. Just as these morphological and lexical elements contribute to occasion-specific mental files by supplying varied beliefs about what the speaker refers to, they could also trigger the representation of assumptions about her attitudes, emotions, feelings or belief states about it, and cause such files to host them. Representation and storage of those assumptions could further be ensured by additional linguistic material or features, paralinguistic clues, available contextual assumptions or encyclopaedic knowledge about the user of the elements in question. In other words, evaluative morphemes, expressive expletives, offensive terms and evidential participles could activate and steer lexical pragmatic processes yielding some sort of notional conglomerate consisting of variegated information, among which would feature that about the speaker’s affective attitude, emotional state or epistemic stance about something she alludes to. The first and most obvious implication of this approach pertains to the amenability of the four elements discussed in this paper to a unitary pragmatic analysis. The second one is that lexical adjustment, or ad hoc-concept construction, should not always be portrayed as a free inferential development operating without mandate from other linguistic material. The third one has to do with the explanatory capabilities of the lexical pragmatic processes envisaged in relevance-theoretic pragmatics. Their output may accommodate beliefs regarding not only characteristics, properties or nuances of what speakers refer to, but also concerning their attitudes, emotions, feelings and epistemic stances. Their manifestness and storage in conceptual files significantly contribute to the explicitness of a portion of speaker’s meaning that is precisely connected with them. Therefore, hearers would recover information about them as they create and fine-tune such conceptual files during mutual parallel adjustment. Future research, nevertheless, could delve into the idea that lexical adjustment is linguistically mandated, explore if other linguistic elements and properties, or paralinguistic clues trigger it, and examine the type of information that its output could incorporate. References Aikhenvald, Alexandra. 2004. Evidentiality. 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