Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

In this talk, I will try to provide a new argument in favour of the contextualist position on the semantics/pragmatics divide. This argument is based on an evaluation of the phenomenon of ambiguity as it occurs in puns. I will indeed try to argue that puns cannot be always dealt with in the traditional way, i.e., as displaying a phenomenon that has to be accounted for pre-semantically. If these were the case, puns would be a mere case of disambiguation, in which one pre-semantically mobilizes wide context in order to select different clauses (and indexes) to be attached to one and the same sentence in context; moreover, such clauses respectively and automatically possess different truth-conditions. I don't want to deny that some puns work as such - cognitively speaking, they are funny removals of misunderstanding. Yet many other puns do not work that way - cognitively speaking, they are like funny multistable figures allowing for more than one interpretation. In order to account for these puns, wide context must play a semantic role in contextually yielding one and the same sentence more than one truth-condition. That wide context plays this role goes along with the fact that meta-contextuality is at play: it is also wide contextual that a sentence wide-contextually has many truth-conditions. That a sentence (wide-)contextually has many meanings indeed depends on the intentions of the pun's creator. One may indeed account for this fact by gesturing towards a general theory of puns according to
which the creators' intentions make it the case that a sentence in context has either just one previously disguised meaning, or many meanings, or even, as in zeugmatic cases, a sort of ‘impossible' truth-condition.