Work

Exploding Explicatures

Year: 2016

Type: article

Abstract: ‘Pragmaticist’ positions posit a three‐way division within utterance content between: (i) the standing meaning of the sentence, (ii) a somewhat pragmatically enhanced meaning which captures what the speaker explicitly conveys (following Sperber and Wilson, I label this the ‘explicature’), and (iii) further indirectly conveyed propositions which the speaker merely implies. Here I re‐examine the notion of an explicature, asking how it is defined and what work explicatures are supposed to do. I argue that explicatures get defined in three different ways and that these distinct definitions can and do pull apart. Thus the notion of an explicature turns out to be ill‐defined.

Source: Mind & Language

DOI: 10.1111/mila.12109

Author: Emma Borg

Institutions: Australian Research Council, ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, University of Reading

Language: English

Topic: Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation

Subfield: Language and Linguistics

Field: Arts and Humanities

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: green

Funder: Arts and Humanities Research Council

Award: G2443272474