© Deirdre Wilson and Dan Sperber 2012. Introduction In interpreting utterances such as (1) and (2), the hearer generally treats the events described as temporally or causally related: Such relations are not encoded in the meanings of the sentences uttered. This chapter is concerned with how they arise. We will look in particular at the following problems: The sequencing problem. Why does the hearer generally take the events to have happened in a certain order, so that in (1d), for example, he would assume that Peter left before Mary got angry? The interval problem. Why does the hearer generally take the events described to be separated by different intervals, so that in (1b), for example, he would assume that the glass broke as soon as it was dropped, whereas in (1c) he would not expect the acorn to have sprouted as soon as it touched the ground? The cause–consequence problem. Why does the hearer often take the events to stand in a causal or consequential relation, so that in (1b), for example, he would assume that the glass broke because it was dropped? In the recent linguistic literature, these problems have been approached from two rather different perspectives. Within the Gricean pragmatic tradition, a sharp line is drawn between decoding and inference, and the temporal and causal connotations of (1) and (2) are seen as purely inferential. Within this tradition, the aim is to find a few very general pragmatic principles which will interact with sentence meaning and contextual assumptions to yield the desired interpretations. In the framework of ‘discourse semantics’, by contrast, the dividing line between decoding and inference is less clear-cut, and a variety of special-purpose rules have been proposed to generate temporal and causal connotations. In this chapter, we will look mainly at issues that arise within the Gricean pragmatic framework. A fuller account would deal with the many interesting questions raised by the ‘discourse semantic’ approach.
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