Jacques Moeschler
University of Geneva
Jacques.Moeschler@lettres.unige.ch

Propositional and non-propositional effects of manipulation discourse


 
Discourse pragmatics assumes that discourse interpretation implies not only the attribution of local informative intentions to utterances, but also the ability to hypothesize a global informative intention, responsible for discourse coherence. This requirement varies from discourse to discourse, but allows a precise criterion for distinguishing ordinary discourses from pathological ones (cf. Reboul & Moeschler 1998).

This global interpretation accessibility criterion is about propositions, that is, propositions intentionally conveyed by the speaker. These propositional effects are the addition of a new information, the strengthening of an old information, the eradication of an old information (cf Sperber & Wilson 1995), and contrast with non-propositional effects, the contents of which have to do with qualia in general, and emotions in particular.

We have two hypotheses about manipulation discourses: (i) manipulation discourses are non sensitive to the global intention accessibility constraint, that is, do not involve access to any global hypothesis; (ii) their effects are non-propositional, i.e. concerns mainly emotions vs propositional effects like contextual implications (new information drawn contextually). The adhesion to such discourses is thus by no way governed by general principles of human communication, as the Intentional Stance (Dennett 1987), the Principle of Cooperation (Grice 1975) or the Communicative Principle of Relevance (Sperber & Wilson 1995). Such an adhesion is dependent on the strength of non-propositional effects.

In this paper, I will give some exemplification on how such effects are obtained.

References
Dennett D. (1987), The Intentional Stance, Cambridge (Mass.), MIT Press.
Grice H.P. (1975), “Logic and conversation”, in Cole P. & Morgan J.L. (eds.), Syntax and Semantics III: Speech Acts, New York, Academic Press, 41-58.
Reboul A. & Moeschler J. (1998), Pragmatique du discours. De l’interprétation de l’énoncé à l’interprétation du discours, Paris, A. Colin.
Sperber D. & Wilson D. (1995), Relevance. Communication and Cognition, Oxford, Blackwell, 2nd ed.