Thoughts and utterances: the pragmatics of explicit communication

Thoughts and Utterancesis the first sustained investigation of two distinctions which are fundamental to all theories of utterance understanding: the semantics/pragmatics distinction and the distinction between what is explicitly communicated and what is implicitly communicated. Features the first sustained investigation of both the semantics/pragmatics distinction and the distinction between what is explicitly and implicitly communicated in speech.

Cover13; -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction -- 1 Pragmatics and Linguistic Underdeterminacy -- 1.1 Saying and Meaning -- 1.2 The Underdeterminacy Thesis -- 1.2.1 Sources of linguistic underdeterminacy -- 1.2.2 Underdeterminacy: essential or merely convenient? -- 1.3 Eternal Sentences and Effability -- 1.3.1 Eternal sentences and Platonism -- 1.3.2 Effability principles -- 1.3.3 Eternal reference? -- 1.3.4 Eternal predication? -- 1.4 Metarepresentation, Relevance and Pragmatic Inference -- 1.4.1 Mind-reading and ostension -- 1.4.2 Relevance and utterance understanding -- 1.5 Underdeterminacy, Truth Conditions and the Semantics/Pragmatics Distinction -- 1.5.1 A truth-conditional semantics for natural language? -- 1.5.2 A translational semantics for natural language? -- 1.6 Radical Underdeterminacy and the Background -- 1.6.1 The Background -- 1.6.2 Radical underdeterminacy and expressibility -- 1.6.3 Radical underdeterminacy and semantic compositionality -- 1.7 Underdeterminacy of Thought? -- 1.7.1 Mentalese, pragmatics and compositional semantics -- 1.7.2 Mental indexicals and the mind8211;world connection -- 1.8 Summary -- Notes -- 2 The Explicit/Implicit Distinction -- 2.1 Semantics/Pragmatics Distinction -- 2.1.1 Truth-conditional semantics and formal pragmatics -- 2.1.2 Semantic/pragmatic circles -- 2.2 Grice: Saying/Implicating -- 2.2.1 Odd statements but true -- 2.2.2 Contextual contributions to what is said -- 2.2.3 Implicature: conventional and conversational -- 2.2.4 Saying, meaning and making as if to say -- 2.3 Sperber and Wilson: Relevance-theoretic Distinctions -- 2.3.1 Explicature -- 2.3.2 Multiple speech acts and multiple logical forms -- 2.3.3 Implicature -- 2.3.4 Deriving explicatures and implicatures -- 2.3.5 Subsentential utterances, saying and explicating -- 2.3.6 Explicature and non-literalness -- 2.3.7 Blakemore: the conceptual/procedural distinction -- 2.4 Travis and Recanati: Enriched What is Said -- 2.4.1 Contextualist saying -- 2.4.2 Availability to intuitions -- 2.5 Bach: What is Said/Impliciture/Implicature -- 2.5.1 Impliciture vs. explicature -- 2.5.2 What is said and linguistic meaning -- 2.5.3 What is said and indexicality -- 2.5.4 Whats to be said about what is said? -- 2.6 Pragmatic Meaning: Enrichment or Implicature? -- 2.6.1 Minimalist principles -- 2.6.2 Functional independence -- 2.6.3 Embedding tests -- 2.7 Postscript: Hidden Indexicals or Free Enrichment? -- 2.8 Conclusion: From Generative Semantics to Pro-active Pragmatics -- Notes -- 3 The Pragmatics of And-Conjunction -- 3.1 Preserving the Truth-functionality of And -- 3.2 A Relevance-based Pragmatics of Conjunction -- 3.2.1 Cognitive scripts and accessibility -- 3.2.2 Enrichment or implicature? -- 3.3 The Semantic Alternatives -- 3.4 Cognitive Fundamentals: Causality and Explanation -- 3.5 Relevance Relations and Units of Processing -- 3.5.1 The conjunction unit -- 3.5.2 Elaboration relations -- 3.6 Processing Effort and Iconicity -- 3.7 Residual Issues -- 3.7.1 Pragmatic enrichment or unrepresented Background? -- 3.7.2 The semantics of and and the logic of and -- 3.8 Conclusion: From Generalized Conversational Implicature to Propositional Enrichment.

Thoughts and Utterances is the first sustained investigation of two distinctions that are fundamental to all theories of utterance understanding: the semantics/pragmatics distinction and the distinction between what is explicitly and what is implicitly communicated. The central claim of this book is that the linguistically encoded meaning of an utterance underdetermines the propositions explicitly communicated by the utterance. The arguments and analyses are developed within the relevance-theoretic framework of Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, so the approach is resolutely cognitive, focussing on the representational levels and mental processes involved in utterance interpretation. However, extensive comparison is made throughout with other pragmatic frameworks, including those of Paul Grice, Francois Recanati and Kent Bach, which are more philosophically based, and that of Stephen Levinson, which has a more linguistic and computational orientation. Finally, this volume assesses and attempts to reconcile the different perspectives of theories of human semantic competence and accounts of the pragmatic processes involved in communication and interpretation