Linguistic Marking of Physical Giveness

What is the relevant unit for a linguistic analysis? We have gradually extended the context seen as necessary for explicating linguistic phenomena from the syntacticians’ S, to the larger linguistic text (see [Halliday and Hasan, 1976], [Stalnaker, 1978], [Gazdar, 1979]), and even to encyclopedic, general knowledge stored in our memory ([Prince, 1981b], [Clark and Marshall, 1981]). The relevance of background information extracted from the speech event, another type of non-linguistic context, was never really in dispute, but it was often conveniently ignored. Semanticists who were keen on equating sentential meaning with truth functional meaning had to be reminded by [Bar-Hillel, 1954] of the fact that indexicals, which required reference to the speech situation, quite clearly contributed to the truth-functional meaning of the sentence. In fact, the very same is true for encyclopedic background information, which is sometimes used in a manner which is truth-functional in natural language. The only reason this contextual information did not initially figure in the literature is that indexicality constituted a prominent topic for philosophers and was then inherited from them by the linguists, while the incorporation into linguistic theory of an encyclopedic type of context had to be initiated by linguists themselves, and took longer because of generative grammarians’ reluctance to incorporate into linguistic accounts nonlinguistic considerations. Be that as it may, since the late seventies, the common assumption among pragmatists re the relevant context for language is that encyclopedic knowledge is indeed crucial for linguistic interpretations. Context has since been seen as partitioned into the three types mentioned above, often with an additional assumption that the speech event context is more basic than the other types. Thus, linguisticexpressions, it is claimed, may require the retrieval of information from any of the components in 1 for their processing. Following [Ariel, 1985] , I shall refer to the three context types as providing three sources, or types of Givenness: