Abstract
The aim of this chapter is to reflect on the necessity of the pragmatic development of propositional forms and to reach a better understanding of the level of meaning that Sperber and Wilson and Carston famously call ‘explicatures’ (or ‘explicature’) and to support the claim that (the pragmatically conveyed elements of) explicatures are not cancellable – unlike conversational implicatures (Someone alleged that my claim is not original; however, I have to modestly assert that I put forward this claim in my 2003 paper, which was revised and reprinted in 2006.). While Capone (RASK: Int J Lang Commun 19:3–32, 2003) (A paper that antecedes Burton-Roberts claim that explicatures are non-cancellable.) addressed the issue of the cancellability of explicatures from the point of view of Grice’s circle, a number of important theoretical questions are raised and discussed here. In particular, I propose that the analysis of the notion of intentionality and of the nature of pragmatic intrusion will settle the question concerning the non-cancellability of explicatures. An explicature can be considered to be a two-level entity, in that it consists of a logical form and a pragmatic increment which this logical form gives rise to (in the context of utterance). However, both the initial logical form and the pragmatic increment are the target of pragmatic processes, in that we need a pragmatic process to promote the initial logical form to a serious intended interpretation and another pragmatic process to derive further increments starting from this initial logical form and being promoted to serious utterance interpretations.
An explicature is a combination of linguistically encoded and contextually inferred conceptual features. The smaller the relative contribution of the contextual features, the more explicit the explicature will be, and inversely.
(Sperber and Wilson 1986, 182).
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
PCI = particularized conversational implicatures; GCI = generalized conversational implicatures.
- 2.
However, I am not saying that a specific pragmatic heuristic principle cannot be overruled by manifest contextual assumptions. I am only saying that the ultimate pragmatic process cannot be undone.
- 3.
I remain open to the view that potential implicatures can be cancelled in the sense that their potential is not fully utilised in real conversation.
- 4.
It is fair to acknowledge that radical pragmaticists such as Cohen (1971) have also discussed the phenomenon of pragmatic intrusion. Yet, I believe that their contributions were only programmatic, while Carston’s contribution to this issue is systematic and fully-developed.
- 5.
Burton-Roberts finds talk of full propositions bizarre. A proposition, by definition, cannot be non-truth-evaluable. He also asks: Why should a full proposition be the minimal proposition? Well, I am in agreement that something is either a proposition or it isn’t, and if it must be truth-evaluable then, presumably, the expression ‘a full proposition’ is redundant.
- 6.
Burton-Roberts (personal communication) states that he is only speculating that Carston, in fact, considers explicatures to be definable in terms of entailment (A is a development of B iff A entails B). This is a reasonable speculation. Her earlier Principle of Functional Independence declared that A cannot be an implicature of B if A entails B. Since a communicated assumption is EITHER an explicature OR an implicature (for RT), and it follows that any communicated assumption that entails the encoded logical form must be an explicature. So, with explicature defined in terms of “development”, it is reasonable to speculate that development should be defined in terms of entailment.
- 7.
This reminds us of a concern which was already expressed in Levinson (2000, 166).
- 8.
I should clarify that this is not a position that Carston has ever embraced. There are reasons to believe that Carston may react to Burton-Roberts in this way, but I have no textual evidence that she may be sympathetic to the hypothetical position expressed in this chapter.
- 9.
Specific comments by Burton-Roberts persuaded me that ‘explicatures∗’ cannot be anything other than potential implicatures.
References
Asher, N. and Lascarides, A. (2003). Logics of conversation. Cambridge: CUP.
Bach, K. (1994). “Conversational impliciture”. Mind and Language 9. 124–162.
Bach, Kent (1998). “Review of Thornstein, F. and Gundel, J. eds, Reference and referent accessibility”. Pragmatics & Cognition 8, 335–338.
Bach, Kent (2001), Semantically speaking. In Kenesei, I. & Harnish, R.M., eds., Perspectives on semantics, pragmatics and discourse. A festschrift for Ferenc Kiefer. Amsterdam: John Benjamins,146–170.
Bach, K. (2006). “Impliciture vs. Explicature: What’s the difference? Workshop on “Explicit communication””, May 31–June 2 2006, University of Granada.
Bezuidenhout, A. (1997). “Pragmatics, semantic underdetermination and the referential/attributive distinction”. Mind 106, 375–409.
Blakemore, D. (2000). “Indicators and procedures: nevertheless and but”. Journal of Linguistics 36. 463–486.
Blakemore, D. and Carston, R. (2005). “The pragmatics of sentential coordination with and∗”. Lingua 115/4. 569–589.
Borg, E. (2006). “Intention-based semantics”. In E. Lepore and B. Smith, (eds.), The Oxford handbook of philosophy of language. Oxford: OUP.
Brown, P. and Levinson, S.C. (1987). Politeness. Cambridge: CUP.
Burton-Roberts, N. (1994). “Ambiguity, sentence and utterance: a representational approach”. Transactions of the Philological Society 92/2, 179–212.
Burton-Roberts, N. (2005). “Robyn Carston on semantics, pragmatics, and ‘encoding’”. Journal of Linguistics 41. 389–407.
Burton-Roberts, N. (2006). “Cancellation and intention”. Newcastle University, School of English, Mn. To be published in the Newcastle working papers in linguistics. To appear in E. Romero & B. Soria (eds.). Explicit communication: Robyn Carston’s pragmatics. London, Plagrave-Macmillan.
Burton-Roberts, N. (2007). “Varieties of semantics and encoding: negation, narrowing/loosening and numericals”. In N. Burton-Roberts, (ed.), Advances in pragmatics. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 90–114.
Capone, A. (2003). “On Grice’s circle (further considerations on the semantics/pragmatics debate)”. RASK: International Journal of Language and Communication 19, 3–32.
Capone, A. (2005). Pragmemes. Journal of Pragmatics 37, 1355–1371.
Capone, A. (2006). “On Grice’s circle (a theory-internal problem in linguistic theories of the Gricean type)”. Journal of Pragmatics 38, 645–669.
Capone, A. (2008a). “Belief reports and pragmatic intrusion: the case of null appositives”. Journal of Pragmatics 40, 1019–1040.
Capone, A. (2008b). Review of Insensitive Semantics. Journal of Pragmatics.
Capone, Alessandro. 2016. The pragmatics of indirect reports. Socio-philosophical considerations. Cham, Springer.
Cappelen, H. and Lepore, E. (2005). Insensitive semantics: a defence of semantic minimalism and speech act pluralism. Oxford: Blackwell.
Cappelen, H. and Lepore, E. (2006a). “The myth of unarticulated constituents”. Rutgers University Mn.
Cappelen, H. and Lepore, E. (2006b). “Reply to Bach”. PPR Symposium on Insensitive semantics.
Carpintero, Manuel Garcia, 2001. Gricean rational reconstructions and the semantics/pragmatics distinction. Synthese 128, 93–131.
Carston, R. (1999). “The semantics/pragmatics distinction”. In K. Turner (ed.), The semantics/pragmatics interface from different points of view. Oxford, Elsevier, 85–125.
Carston, R. (2002a) Thoughts and utterances: the pragmatics of explicit communication. Oxford: Blackwell.
Carston, R. (2002b). “Linguistic meaning, communicated meaning and cognitive pragmatics”. Mind & Language 17, 127–148.
Carston, Robyn (2004a). “Explicature and semantics”. In S. Davis. & B. Gillon (eds.), Semantics: a reader. Oxford: OUP, 817–845.
Carston, R. (2004b). “Relevance theory and the saying/implicating distinction”. In L.R. Horn. and G. Ward (eds.), The handbook of pragmatics. Oxford: Blackwell, 633–656.
Carston, R. and Powell George (2006). “Relevance theory – new directions and developments”. In E. Lepore, and B. Smith (eds.), Handbook of philosophy of language. Oxford: OUP.
Castelfranchi, Cristiano, Paglieri, Fabio (2007). The role of beliefs in goal dynamics: prolegomena to a constructive theory of intentions. Synthese 155, 237–263.
Cohen, L.J. (1971). “Some remarks on Grice’s views about the logical particles of natural language”. In Y. Bar-Hillel (ed.), Pragmatics of natural languages. Dordrech: Reidel, 50–68.
Corazza, Eros. 2007. “Contextualism, Minimalism, and Situationalism”. Pragmatics & Cognition 15 (1): 115–37
Dummett, M. (1971). Frege philosophy of language. Harvard: Harvard University Press.
Fodor, J. and Lepore, E. 1991. Why meaning (probably) isn’t conceptual role. Mind & Language 6, 328–43.
Fodor, J. and Lepore, E. (1998). “The emptiness of the lexicon: reflections on James Pustejovsky’s The Generative Lexicon”. Linguistic Inquiry 29, 269–88.
Gazdar, G. (1979). Pragmatics. New York: Academic.
Grice, H.P. (1989). Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press.
Grundy, P. (2000). Doing pragmatics. London: Arnold.
Heath, J. (1997). “Foundationalism and practical reason”. Mind 106/423, 451–474.
Huang, Y. (2004). “Neo-Gricean pragmatic theory: looking back on the past; looking ahead to the future”. Journal of Foreign languages 149/1, 2–25.
Jaszczolt, K. (1999). Discourse, beliefs and intentions. Oxford: Elsevier.
Jaszczolt, K. (2005). Default semantics. Foundations of a compositional theory of acts of communication. Oxford: OUP.
Jaszczolt, K. (2006). “Defaults in semantics and pragmatics”. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Jaszczolt, K.M. (2007). “The syntax/pragmatics merger: belief reports in the theory of default semantics”. Pragmatics & Cognition 15/1, 41–64.
Kecskes, I. (2008). Dueling contexts: a dynamic model of context meaning. Journal of Pragmatics 40, 385–406.
Lepore, E. and Ludwig, K. (2005). Donald Davidson. Meaning, truth, language and reality. Oxford: OUP.
Levinson, S.C. (1983). Pragmatics. Cambridge: CUP.
Levinson, S.C. (2000). Presumptive meanings. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
Lyons, J. (1975) Semantics (vol. 1–2). Cambridge: CUP.
Marti, L. (2006). “Unarticulated constituents revisited”. Linguistics and Philosophy 29, 135–166.
Montminy, M. (2006). “Semantic content, truth conditions and context”. Linguistics & Philosophy 29, 1–26.
Powell, J. (2001). “The referential-attributive distinction: a cognitive account”. Pragmatics & Cognition 9/1. 69–98.
Recanati, F. (1989). “The pragmatics of what is said”. Mind & Language 4, 295–329.
Recanati, F. (2002). “Does linguistic communication rest on inference?” Mind & Language 17, 105–126.
Recanati, F. (2003). “Embedded implicatures”. Philosophical perspectives 1, 299–321.
Recanati, F. (2004). Literal meaning. Cambridge: CUP.
Recanati, F. (2007). Perspectival thought. A plea for (moderate) relativism. Oxford: OUP.
Sadock, J. (1978). “On testing for conversational implicature”. In P. Cole (ed.), Syntax and semantics 9: Pragmatics. New York: Academic, 281–298.
Saul, J.. (2002). “Speaker meaning, what is said, and what is implicated”. Nous 36/2, 228–248.
Saul, J. (2004). What is said and psychological reality: Grice’s project and relevance theorists’ criticisms. Linguistics & Philosophy 25/3, 347–372.
Sperber, D. (1997). “Intuitive and reflective beliefs”. Mind and Language 12/1, 67–83.
Sperber, D. and Wilson, D. (1986). Relevance theory. Oxford: Blackwell. Reprinted with postface in 1995.
Sperber, D. and Wilson, D. (2004). “Relevance theory”. In L. Horn and G. Ward (eds.), Handbook of pragmatics. Oxford: Blackwell, 607–632.
Sperber, D. and Wilson, D. (2005). “Pragmatics”. In F. Jackson and M. Smith, Oxford handbook of analytic philosophy. Oxford: OUP, 468–501.
Stainton, Robert J (1994). “Using non-sentences: an application of Relevance Theory”. Pragmatics & Cognition 2(2), pp. 269–284.
Stainton, Robert. 1998. Quantifier phrases, meaningfulness in isolation and syntactic ellipsis. Linguistics & Philosophy 21/3, 311–340.
Stanley, J. and Williamson, T. (2001). “Knowing how”. Journal of Philosophy 98/8.
Wedgwood, Daniel (2007). Shared assumptions: semantic minimalism and relevance theory. Journal of Linguistics 43, 647–681.
Wilson, D. (1998a). “Discourse, coherence, and relevance: a reply to Rachel Giora”. Journal of Pragmatics 29, 57–74.
Wilson, D. (1998b). “Linguistic structure and inferential communication”. In B. Caron (ed.), Proceedings of the 16 th International Congress of Linguists (Paris 20–25 July 1997). Oxford: Elsevier.
Wilson, D. and Sperber, D. (1993). “Linguistic form and relevance”. Lingua 90, 1–25.
Wilson, D. and Sperber, D. (2002). “Truthfulness and relevance”. Mind 111, 583–632.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Capone, A. (2019). On the Nature of Pragmatic Increments at the Truth-Conditional Level. In: Pragmatics and Philosophy. Connections and Ramifications. Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, vol 22. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19146-7_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19146-7_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-19145-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-19146-7
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)