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Interpretation rules are of the following sort:
Given a situation type S and an utterance U, interpret utterance U by means of a rule of interpretation R closely connected with S and consider that U in S means X (U/S) (X is a function of U in S).
Interpretation rules are the consequence of production rules obtaining and inducing speakers to choose certain expressions, instead of others, in order to signal that they are in a certain context/situation.
In this paper, I subscribe to Mey’s (2001, 6) authoritative definition of (societal) pragmatics:
Pragmatics studies the use of language in human communication as determined by the conditions of society.
I try to substantiate and articulate further this definition by my theory of ‘pragmemes’ (broached in Capone 2005). Pragmemes are speech acts in context and, in particular, are speech acts in which a particular linguistic form has been selected in view of the context or situation type in which the utterance has occurred (what Mey (2001, 30) calls “the linguistic version of the ‘human condition’”). Pragmemes mean what they mean in virtue of a speaker having resorted to a rule that obtains in that situational context, according to which a certain linguistic form or utterance U is associated with meaning X (a function of S and U). In other words, pragmemes are speech acts that, in addition to conveying a speaker’s intention to have a certain action performed, also bear the marks of the situation in which they are uttered: they are societal indexicals.
Having said this, to (just) say that pragmemes are speech acts in context is not very informative, as we would certainly like to distinguish pragmemes from indirect speech acts or explicatures that (see Carston 2002) are also calculated in context, but which do not stand in any special relation to the context, such a special relation being constituted by the fact that the utterances we consider in the analysis of pragmemes have been chosen following rules that are sensitive to context and also signal that speakers are in a certain context (in addition to shaping signification).
We remain agnostic as to whether pragmemes are cancellable meanings or not. If they are cancellable, then we have to allow semantic rules of the following type:
If U was uttered in context/situation S, then interpret U as having, as a function of that situation S, (defeasible) meaning M.
I do not attach particular attention to this possibility. After all, it is well-known that syntactic, as well semantic rules, admit exceptions. We should be prepared to say that situationally determined meaning, being linguistic, participates in the nature of linguistic phenomena. Presumably, Jaszczolt’s (1999) approach to pragmatic inferences (she calls them ‘default inferences’) tacitly rests on a principle like the one above. To be honest, I do not know whether she would assent to what I am saying or not, but I must have expressed a similar opinion in my review of her 1999 book:
We could set up the semantics in a different way, by allowing it to capture the default inferences and by obtaining the right semantics for the contexts in which the default interpretations do not obtain by letting the contexts override the default semantics. This is what the author argues, although her claim must be qualified further by the fact that intentions intrude into semantics. The default semantics ensures that the correct interpretations obtain in the default contexts, while in the specific contexts in which the default interpretations cannot hold, the alternative possible interpretations hold (Capone 2001, 366).
Nevertheless, we are more interested in claiming that, in general, semantic meaning is not cancellable and that the inferences that arise due to conventions that pertain to the interaction between contextually-determined rules and utterances are not (normally) cancellable.
My considerations (as well as my research question) interestingly intersect with the question of an important scholar in conversation analysis, Emmanuel Schegloff:
Even if we can show by analysis of the details of interaction that some characterization of the context or the setting in which the talk is going on (such as “in the hospital”) is relevant for the parties, that they are oriented to the setting so characterized, there remains another problem, and that is to show how the context or the setting (the local social structure), in that aspect, is procedurally consequential to the talk. How does the fact that the talk is being conducted in some setting (e.g. “the hospital”) issue in any consequence for the shape, form, trajectory, content or character of the interaction that the parties conduct? And what is the mechanism by which the context so understood has determinate consequences for the talk? (Schegloff 1992, 111).
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