4 On the Rigidity of Procedural Meaning

Victoria Escandell-Vidal; Manuel Leonetti

doi:10.1108/S1472-7870(2011)0000025008

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Current Research in the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface

ISSN: 1472-7870
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Subject Area: Education

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4 On the Rigidity of Procedural Meaning

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Title:	4 On the Rigidity of Procedural Meaning
Author(s):	Victoria Escandell-Vidal, Manuel Leonetti
Volume:	25 Editor(s): Victoria Escandell-Vidal, Manuel Leonetti, Aoife Ahern ISBN: 978-0-85724-093-4 eISBN: 978-0-85724-094-1
Citation:	Victoria Escandell-Vidal, Manuel Leonetti (2011), 4 On the Rigidity of Procedural Meaning, in Victoria Escandell-Vidal, Manuel Leonetti, Aoife Ahern (ed.) Procedural Meaning: Problems and Perspectives (Current Research in the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface, Volume 25), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, pp.81-102
DOI:	10.1108/S1472-7870(2011)0000025008 (Permanent URL)
Publisher:	Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Article type:	Chapter Item
Abstract:	This chapter puts forward the claim that rigidity is one of the central, characterising properties of procedural meaning, which plays a crucial role in accounting for the inferential resolution of a number of linguistic mismatches. Rigidity implies that linguistically encoded instructions have to be obligatorily satisfied in the interpretive process; contrary to conceptual information, they cannot be adjusted to comply with the requirements of other elements, nor can they be cancelled and modified by any pragmatic process. They systematically prevail over conceptual and contextual information whenever a mismatch or a contradiction arises between the meanings of two linguistic expressions or between a linguistic expression and the available contextual information. Three different kinds of mismatch involving procedural items are revised in order to show that the pragmatic processes triggered in the resolution of mismatches are to a large extent predictable. Conflicts between procedural meaning and contextual assumptions give rise to cases of accommodation; conflicts between procedural elements and conceptual content typically generate coercion phenomena; finally, a clash between two procedural items can only be solved, in the cases where this option is available, by means of a special ‘splitting’ mechanism and a reportive or quotative reading. Thus, significant generalisations about reinterpretation processes can be obtained if rigidity is taken as the most outstanding feature of procedural meaning.