Prepragmatics: Widening the Semantics-Pragmatics Boundary
Résumé
One of the most important and, at the same time, most controversial issues in metasemantics is the question of what semantics is, and what distinguishes semantic elements (features, properties, phenomena, mechanisms, processes, or whatever) from the rest. The issue is tightly linked with the debate over the semantics-pragmatics distinction, which has been vibrant for a decade or two, but seems to be reaching an impasse. I suggest that this impasse may be due to the failure to recognize a distinct realm that should be subsumed neither under semantics nor pragmatics, but may be labeled "prepragmatics". My ultimate goal is to put forward and defend a novel picture of our language architecture, according to which: semantic content is strictly poorer than the lexically encoded content (and therefore does not involve any contextually determined material - not even the reference of demonstratives); pragmatics, as widely held, does not reach into truth-conditions and does not affect truth-value, while its mechanisms require the capacity of reasoning about one's beliefs and intentions; and, finally, there is a distinct prepragmatic level at which sentences and/or utterances get evaluated for their truth value (but also for other properties, such as their modal status or assertoric content), and which takes into account various kinds of contextual information.