Grammar, Pragmatics and Ontology

The aim of this volume is to do justice to the interdisciplinary complexity of the grammar and pragmatics interface and to evaluate its relevance in the development of cognitive science. By discussing general problems posed by different analyses, I bring under scrutiny some theoretical assumptions taken for granted in recent analyses, which may not be so obvious as they seem and I investigate how even apparently minimal choices in the description of phenomena may affect the form and complexity of the interface. The theoretical and methodological relevance of the tools developed in the area of pragmatics are focused on empirical data of different languages. The volume is organized in three sections, where the interface of grammar and pragmatics is discussed. The first part deals methodological problems of an area where linguists’ evaluations lack consistency, and the data are discordant: the distinction between interrogative clauses and independent relatives in those languages where there is an identity of morphological realization between interrogative and independent relative pronouns. Although the two omophonous constructions are acknowledged as syntactically and semantically different, a review of the linguistic literature on the topic reveals discordance in their interpretation, oscillating between interrogative and relative. The same structure, depending on semifactive assertive predicates, is interpreted either as interrogative or as relative according to the topic being dealt with: relatives or interrogatives. This discordant treatment of data constitutes, in itself, grounds for analysis. In the second section some ontological problems are considered in the early child language. It highlights the relevance of discourse tools not only in controlling linguistic stipulations, but in capturing wider generalizations and in abstracting properties at sentence level in early child language in two related inflectional Romance languages, early standard Italian and Vicentino, a Veneto variety of North-eastern Italian dialects. A descriptively adequate generalization of the absence of correlation between these two sets of phenomena, agreement properties and standard ordering of Grammatical Relations of Subject and Object in the first stage of early Italian and Veneto are offered by considering primitives of linguistic theory, as in the Relational Grammar framework (and in some minimalist versions). I argue, both on methodological and theoretical grounds, that that there are some discourse notions that must be constantly taken into consideration in searching for syntactic Subjects in children's utterances. Analysis of some syntactic and pragmatic distinctions at the level of the organization of the clause properties at sentence level raises some questions about the notion of Subject, its nature and properties. The third part deals with a classical philosophical problem, speech acts theory, and its rather controversial contributions in grammatical theory. In proposing and developing hypotheses relative to the identification and interpretation of a given speech act, as well as the analysis of its formulation, the interface between grammar and pragmatics has been only partially explored. The same reasons, which make speech acts interesting as a link between language and communication, language and action, are also a cause of theoretical and methodological difficulties in attaining descriptive adequacy, when dealing at the same time with both sentences and utterances, and when applying controversial distinctions at the boundaries between the grammatical and pragmatic properties of what is said. I discuss in what sense does grammatical information contribute, in a regular way, to the determination of the illocutionary force of a sentence.