1. Ostension, Expectations and Non-Encoded Meaning
Kate Scott
This talks brings together some work that I’ve been doing on procedural meaning and pronouns with work that is in development in collaboration with Tim Wharton and Billy Clark on the role that expectations play in the interpretation of prosody and intonation.
I’m going to argue that contrastive stress in English, as a natural highlighting device, is a non-coded means of guiding a hearer’s interpretation, and I’ll be considering how this analysis fits within the relevance theoretic framework of utterance interpretation.

2. Contrastive Stress and Expectations
(1) Andrew hit Ben and then he hit Farooq
(2) Andrew hit Ben and then HE hit Farooq
So, these examples are fairly to familiar in the literature. The contrast between (1) and (2) lies in the stress on the pronoun ‘he’ and how this affects how reference is resolved - on Andrew in (1) and on Ben, or some other salient male in (2).
The existing relevance theory analysis of contrastive stress in this sort of example is that it is a natural highlighting device… and I want to unpack and explore this analysis and some of its consequences a little more.

3. Natural Highlighting Devices
Natural highlighting devices are a means of showing an object or word and also a means of showing communicative intent.
Natural highlighting devices are a means of showing an object, or in this case a word to an audience, and also to showing communicative intent…
According to relevance theory, it is not just linguistic utterances that trigger pragmatic interpretive processes, but any ostensive act, and showing is an ostensive act.

4. Showing as an ostensive act
So, in this (much discussed example)- in this painting we have the head of John the Baptist on a plate. That on its own conveys the information (to Salome) that John the Baptist is dead. However, what is depicted in this painting is more than that – it is an act of showing. Herod is showing the head to Salome and thus performing an ostensive communicative act – which will raise expectations of relevance…

5. Natural Highlighting Devices
Natural highlighting devices are a means of showing an object or word and also a means of showing communicative intent.
They both trigger the interpretive processes and guide the hearer’s inferential path.
So natural highlighting as a way of showing a word to an audience is an ostensive act – which interacts with the interpretation in two ways - first it triggers the interpretive processes, and at the same time it guides the hearer’s inferential path to where those effects can be found.
Let’s consider these in turn…

6. Triggering: the role of expectations
In English, pronouns are not usually accented (Wells, 2006).
Recency and frequency of use affect processing effort by facilitating ease of access.
Patterns that are frequently and consistently used will demand less effort from the hearer.
Pronouns are not usually accented – almost by definition they are used to refer to given information, and given information is usually de-accented.
How then, does accenting them interact with the interpretation?
Well, according to RT, recency and frequency of use affect processing effort…
Patterns that are frequently and consistently used with demand less effort from the hearer.

7. Triggering: the role of expectations
Unexpected prosodic patterns put the hearer to more effort to process.
According to relevance theory extra effort should be offset by extra effects.
The hearer of (2) is entitled to look for extra effects to justify the effort.
Unexpected prosodic patterns, however, will put the hearer to more effort to process…
And according to RT, extra effort should be offset by extra effects.
The hearer of (2) is entitled, therefore, to look for extra effort to justify this effort.

8. Triggering: the role of expectations
“It follows from the Communicative Principle of Relevance that if two stress patterns differ in the amounts of processing effort required, the costlier pattern should be used more sparingly, and only in order to create extra, or different, effects”
Wilson and Wharton (2006: 1567).
As Wilson and Wharton explain…

9. Contrastive Stress - triggering
(1) Andrew hit Ben and then he hit Farooq
(2) Andrew hit Ben and then HE hit Farooq
The stressed pronoun in (2) confounds the hearer’s expectations by deviating from the expected prosodic patterns.
This puts the hearer to more effort , thereby triggering the search for extra effects.
So let’s return to the examples….
(words on screen…)

10. Triggering: the role of expectations
In cases of contrastive stress, it is not the presence of absence of stress, per se, that puts the hearer to more effort, but the disconfirmation of their prosodic expectations.
(3) Jenny plays violin
(4) Jenny plays violin
(5) Jenny plays violin
It is important to notice, however, that it is not the presence or absence of a stress per se that triggers the search for more effects – but rather an unexpected pattern.
Consider the examples in (3) – (5):
In (4) and (5) we get a contrastive interpretation (explain)… however, in (2) the stress on the violin is expected – unmarked tonicity in English has the nuclear tone on the stressed syllable of the last content word, and so this is expected. No extra effects follow.
If we want to produce a contrastive interpretation on which violin is contrasted with something else (we can do so, by layering on another (unexpected) prosodic pattern))

11. Contrastive Stress - guiding
(1) Andrew hit Ben and then he hit Farooq
(2) Andrew hit Ben and then HE hit Farooq
The suprasegmental quality of prosody allows the speaker to simultaneously direct the hearer’s attention to the pronoun.
Following a path of least effort, the hearer will look for extra or different effects connected to the pronoun.
‘Stress is a sort of vocal equivalent of pointing’ (Sperber and Wilson 1995, p.203)
However, the work of the contrastive stress is not done – not only does it trigger the search for extra effects, but it also guides the hearer as to where they should expect to find those effects.
The supresegmental quality means that an extra layer of activation can be layered on top – there is no need for an extra linguistic element. Remember that a hearer will follow the path of least effort – and if attention has been drawing to something, then the hearer should expect to find something to justify of his attention related to it.
In this case it is there is another interpretation – with reference resolved on Ben - that would be tested next and justifies the extra effort.
As Sperber and Wilson say, stress is a sort of vocal pointing – pointing is an ostensive act, and so is vocal pointing.

12. Extra Effort and Effects
(6) Nobody told me SHE was coming
(7) I got her a birthday PRESent but I didn’t get her a birthday CARD (Wells, 2006, p.133)
Some previous accounts – accessibility theory/ the givenness hierarchy - have claimed that stress somehow encodes an instruction to look for a less accessible reference. However, stress doesn’t always have the same effect and it is always context dependent.

13. (8) In a case of this kind, Mrs Hall, our first concern is to persuade the patient that he is a stalagMITE [caption to a cartoon showing a patient standing upside down with his feet on the ceiling]

14. Where does this fit in the broader picture of communication assumed by the relevance-theoretic pragmatic framework?
So, with this natural highlighting approach, we might ask…

15. Linguistically encoded meaning
Regular content words (cat, book, telephone, run) encode concepts that figure in conceptual representations.
However, Blakemore ( ) points out that some expressions are better analysed in procedural terms.
And so we have a distinction in RT between conceptual and procedural meaning.
Go through very quickly…

16. Non-Truth Conditional Linguistic Encoding: Stage I
(9) Korina is feeling happy. So she is going to the party tonight. (10) Korina is feeling happy. After all, she is going to the party tonight.
We start with the basic motivation for procedural meaning – non- truth conditional discourse connectives.
For example –
Truth conditions are the same – but the implied connection between the two propositions is different.

17. Truth Conditional Linguistic Encoding: Stage II
(11) He has a big nose
It was, however, noticed that there are linguistic elements which seem to guide inferential processes which DO affect the truth conditions of the utterance. For example – pronouns.

18. Stage III: Expressive Devices and a move beyond the linguistic encoding
Interjections, expletives, prosody (natural and linguistic), inherently communicative facial expressions.
John’s arrived
(12) Jack is happy that [John’s arrived]
(Wharton 2009, p.129)
Stage 3 in the history of procedural meaning, widens the scope further, and considers the contribution made by expressive devices, such as interjections, expletives, affective prosody and facial expressions.
So, for example, if Jack utters ‘John’s arrived’ with a big smile on his face, he encourages us to infer the HL explicature in (4).
The devices in this stage are often connected to affect, attitudes and emotions. We are also moving away from linguistically encoded meaning….

19. Procedures…
‘the function of procedural expressions is to activate domain-specific procedures which may be exploited by inferential communication’
(Wilson 2016, p.11)
What then do these disparate elements have in common? What characteristics are shared by these different procedural items.
In recent work by Deirdre Wilson she says the following…

20. Procedures…
‘what they all do is constrain and guide pragmatic processes which are essential in deriving the intended interpretation (processes of reference assignment, identification of propositional attitude and/or speech act, and implicature derivation’
(Carston 2016 p.159)
This chimes with Carston’s observation that…
Thus we see that procedural elements share the fact that they both trigger and guide interpretation…
How does contrastive stress, and natural highlighting devices more generally fit in with this…

21. Showing as Procedural?
Contrastive stress is a non-coded communicative device that can be used to manage the accessibility and activation levels of discourse referents and interpretations.
Pragmatic principles then guide the addressee to the intended interpretation.
I want to end by tentatively suggesting that…

22. Showing as Procedural?
Whereas pronouns and discourse markers encode procedural meaning, contrastive stress is an instance of showing, and could thus be argued to be inherently procedural.
So…

23. References
Blakemore, D., Semantic Constraints on Relevance. Oxford: Blackwell.
Blakemore, D., Relevance and Linguistic Meaning: the Semantics and Pragmatics of Discourse Markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Carston, R., The heterogeneity of procedural meaning. Lingua, Volume , pp
Schiffer, S Meaning. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Sperber, D. & Wilson, D., 1986/95. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Second edition (with postface) ed. Oxford: Blackwell.
Sperber, D. & Wilson, D., Beyond speaker meaning. Croatian Journal of Philosophy 15(2), pp
Wells, J. C., English Intonation: an Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wilson, D., Reassessing the conceptual-procedural distinction. Lingua, Volume , pp
Wharton, T., Pragmatics and Non-Verbal Communication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

24. The case for…
Shared characteristics of triggering and guiding inferential processes
Why shouldn’t a communicator make use of non-encoded means of guiding interpretation?
Encoded procedures as meta-procedures?
For: The acts of showing seem to perform the same roles as those items traditionally classed as procedural – i.e. they guide the hearer’s inferential processes. In fact, everything we do that is ostensive does this – so perhaps everything IS procedural, and we need another category to capture the idea that some devices conventionally encode specific instructions which guide the hearer - above and beyond the RTCP and considerations of effort and effect.
Perhaps these are ‘meta-procedures’ – (personal communication via Tim Wharton (and Dan Sperber?))

25. The case against…
To say that showing is procedural amounts to saying that all ostensive communication is procedural;
We lose (or have to re-establish) the distinction between conceptually and procedurally encoded meaning.
Against: once we allow for the idea of expectation (confirmation and disconfirmation) then the interpretations fall out from the assumption that all ostensive acts trigger the RTCP, and that hearer’s follow this in their interpretations.
If we say that this is procedural (i.e. showing is procedural), then everything is procedural, and does the distinction between conceptual and procedural meaning really then amount to anything. It was, after all, first devised to capture the difference between content words and non-truth conditional indicators, and this is still a distinction that we need/want.

26. Sax (2011) considers timing and sentence stress in English and concludes that:
“aspects of relative timing which affect interpretive process but which do so via general processing mechanisms would be more accurately described as ‘having an impact on the procedures of comprehension’ rather than as ‘encoding procedural meaning’” (2011: 378).

27. Fretheim (2002: 59) suggests that:
“Some linguistic devices have no conceptual meaning, nor do they encode a specific procedural instruction for the hearer to follow. Rather, they can be said to offer the hearer procedural information by virtue of their interaction with other kinds of linguistic devices in the utterance.”

28. Other natural highlighting devices
Demonstrative gestures;
Contrastive (and other?) typography.

29. Relevance-theoretic comprehension procedure
a. Follow a path of least effort in computing cognitive effects: Test interpretive hypotheses (disambiguations, reference resolutions, implicatures, etc.) in order of accessibility.
b. Stop when your expectations of relevance are satisfied.