A Speaker-Referring OT Pragmatics of Quantity Expressions

Constraint-based approaches to pragmatics have customarily focused on the hearer, and offered accounts of the optimal interpretation of utterances. Blutner (2006, i.a.) has argued that it is necessary also to consider the role of the speaker, and thus motivates a bidirectional Optimality Theory (OT) approach to pragmatics. However, as he notes, this may have limited explanatory potential from a processing viewpoint. A recent account, focusing on expressions of quantity, aims instead to model the speaker’s choice of expression by means of unidirectional OT mechanisms. In this paper I discuss the merits of this approach versus OT-based alternatives. In particular, I explore the implications of this account for the hearer, who is required to solve the problem of utterance interpretation in a non-OT fashion in this model, and explore how this task can be made tractable. I briefly discuss the novel predictions about interpretation and processing that arise from such a development, and consider the theoretical implications for pragmatics in general.