Pragmatics and Law by Francesca Poggi & Alessandro Capone

Author:Francesca Poggi & Alessandro Capone
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

But (1) has another mode of use. Imagine that we are at a party. Perhaps Feynman stands before us a short distance away, drinking punch and thinking about dancing; in any case, the exact degree to which Feynman is tall is common knowledge. You ask me what counts as tall in my country. “Well,” I say, “around here, …” and I continue by uttering (1). This is not a descriptive use in the usual sense. I have not provided any new information about the world, or at least no new information about Feynman’s height. In fact, assuming that tall means roughly ‘having a maximal degree of height greater than a certain contextually supplied standard’, I haven’t even provided you with any new information about the truth conditions of the word tall. All I have done is given you guidance concerning what the prevailing relevant standard for tallness happens to be in our community; in particular, that standard must be no greater than Feynman’s maximal degree of height. The context update effect of accepting (1) would be to eliminate from further consideration some candidates for the standard of tallness. My purpose in uttering (1) under such circumstances would be nothing more than to communicate something about how to use a certain word appropriately – it would be a metalinguistic use (Barker 2002, 1)

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