A Gricean rearrangement of epithets* Zsófia Zvolenszky Eötvös Loránd University Grice's Studies in the Way of Words (1989) - which turned twenty years old around the same time as the Theoretical Linguistics Program in Budapest did - included Grice's seminal 1967 William James lectures entitled "Logic and Conversation", thus bringing together Grice's theory of communication - about conversational implicatures - and his theory of meaning side by side for the first time, as parts of a unified picture. The connections between the two proposals have, since then, been extensively discussed and diagramed ("arranged") - we've seen the binary tree: the label ("epithet") 'implicature' branching into 'conventional' and 'conversational', the latter branching into 'particularized' and 'generalized'. Meanwhile, curiously, very little attention has been devoted to the issue of making room for the full range of commitments that a speaker undertakes in making an utterance. These commitments include unusual instances like slips of the tongue, to which Davidson called attention in his 1985 paper "A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs". When Mrs. Malaprop exclaimed: "Sure, if I reprehend any thing in this world it is the use of my oracular tongue, and a nice derangement of epitaphs!"1, by reprehend/oracular/derangement/epitaphs, she meant what speakers of English commonly mean by comprehend/vernacular/arrangement/epithets. We might doubt whether Mrs. Malaprop does in fact fully comprehend her vernacular tongue, but regardless, as her audience, we can comprehend her utterance. And what's more pertinent for our purposes and is an issue Davidson does not discuss, is that Mrs. Malaprop unwittingly commits herself to something quite bizarre about tombstone inscriptions - epitaphs. Likewise, when Mrs. Malaprop calls someone "the very pineapple of politeness"2 (intending to say 'pinnacle of politeness'), she commits herself to a claim relating to an extraordinarily exotic kind of fruit even though she ⇤For discussion on various parts of this material, I would like to thank Tibor Bárány, Ray Buchanan, Elisabeth Camp, Miklós Márton and Dan Sperber as well as audiences at the conference "Language, Human, Animal" at Péter Pázmány Catholic University, at a talk given at the Institute of Philosophy at the Czech Academy of Sciences, at the Central European University SUN course "Meaning, Context, Intention", at the Theoretical Philosophy Forum colloquium series hosted at my department, and last but not least, at the 20th-anniversary conference of the ELTE Theoretical Linguistics Program. Special thanks are due to Ray Buchanan and an anonymous reviewer who gave generous comments on an earlier draft; and to Sylvia Blaho for help with LATEX. This research was supported by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences' Bolyai János Research Fellowship. 1In R. B. Sheridan's 1775 play The Rivals, Act III Scene III. 2Sheridan: The Rivals, Act III Scene III. 184 ZSÓFIA ZVOLENSZKY had absolutely no intention of saying or conveying anything fruit-related. Slips of the tongue represent special cases of an otherwise far more widespread phenomenon: commitments undertaken by the speaker that aren't part of what the speaker intends to convey. Such unmeant commitments, as I shall call them, do not have a natural place in the traditional Gricean arrangement of epithets: the framework relating the various implicatures as well as other notions. In this paper, I aim to develop an extended version of the Gricean framework that allows us to locate all aspects of commitments, unmeant ones included. There is hardly any reference to unmeant commitments in Grice's papers. Still, I will argue that we can glean quite explicit textual evidence from his work supporting my proposal. The traditional framework features a key notion of Grice's theory of communication: what is said. This notion bears intimate ties to Grice's theory of meaning: what-is-said is, according to Grice, a species of utterer's meaning (what the speaker intends to communicate). This notion of what-is-said has come under attack from various directions, including minimalism, which construes what-is-said as potentially widely deviating from utterer's meaning. I will first delineate the disadvantages accrued by the alternative minimalist what-is-said. I will then go on to argue that this minimalist notion, introduced in large part to provide a superior account of nonliteral discourse (including metaphor and irony) and unmeant sayings (including slips of the tongue) ultimately fails to deliver on its promise. I will use the minimalist polemic as a foil for exploring features of an extended Gricean framework that handles unmeant commitments. I begin by outlining Grice's unified theory of communication and meaning (Section 1), emphasizing the theoretical role that the notion of what-is-said plays in it. Crucially, on Grice's special sense of 'say', speakers always mean what they say. We might call this an illocutionary sense of 'say' tantamount to 'assert'. I will then explore and critique Kent Bach's alternative: a locutionary sense of 'say' such that speakers often do not mean what they say (Section 2). The problems facing Bach's what-is-said might potentially be tackled by bringing on board a superficially similar but actually quite different locutionary notion of 'say', recommended by Elisabeth Camp; I'll discuss the prospects of her proposal briefly in Section 3. In Section 4, I'll return to the sorts of phenomena that, according to Bach, motivate the choice of a locutionary sense of 'say' over Grice's illocutionary sense of 'say'. In Section 5, I will use these phenomena, particularly slips of the tongue, as a springboard for extending the traditional characterization of Grice's theory of meaning and communication in a way that makes room for unmeant commitments. Ultimately, my aim is to show that the advantages of going minimalist evaporate in the light of the extended framework: "a Gricean rearrangement of epithets". A Gricean rearrangement of epithets 185 1 Grice on communication, meaning, and what is said Even though Grice did not think of himself as a linguist,3 his theory of communication - without its connection to his theory of meaning - has been foundational within the field of pragmatics. Based primarily on Neale (1992), let us take a look at Grice's views on communication set against the context of his 1967 William James lectures. This will allow us to reveal some crucial connections the theory of communication bears to the theory of meaning. The starting point for Grice's theory of communication4 is a simple observation: what we communicate/suggest/imply on a given occasion often outstrips what we say. Imagine the following conversation in front of a pet shop: PET-SHOP EXAMPLE daughter: Dad, can I have a rabbit? father: Rabbits favor country life over city life. what the father said: Rabbits favor country life over city life. what he conversationally implicated: The daughter cannot get a rabbit. The father is talking about the residential preferences of rabbits; yet with the words he uttered on the given occasion, he managed also to suggest/imply that he will not buy a rabbit for his daughter. As Grice put it: on the given occasion, the father said something (where the level of what-is-said is "closely related to the conventional meaning of the words . . . uttered", Grice 1989, 25),5 and thereby produced a conversational implicature to the effect that his daughter cannot get a rabbit. Accounting for the nuances and variations in everyday language use requires us to identify conversational implicatures, which are due to general norms of communication, expectations that are independent of the meanings of the specific words used. For example, we expect our conversation partner to pay heed to the goals and topic of the conversation and cooperate with us: provide responses that are informative, relevant. This expectation embodies an overarching norm about conversations, considered as instances of rational activity in which participants expect cooperation from one another: this overarching norm is the Cooperative Principle (in conversational settings, "make your conversational contribution such as is required . . . by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange", 26). Grice subsumes a nonexhaustive list of conversational maxims under the Cooperative Principle: the maxim of Quantity ( "Be as informative as is required", 40); the 3See Chapman (2005: 7, 186–187). 4Described primarily in Essays 2 and 3 of Grice (1989) ("Logic and Conversation"; "Further Notes on Logic and Conversation"); for a precursor, see the subsequently omitted parts of Essay 15 (Grice 1961, 126–132). 5In what follows, all "bare" page references are to Grice (1989). 186 ZSÓFIA ZVOLENSZKY maxim of Quality (don't lie; "have adequate evidence for what you say", 61); the maxim of Relation or Relevance ("be relevant", 27); and the maxim of Manner or Style (be clear, brief, orderly). Crucially, according to Grice, conversational implicatures call for a pragmatic explanation (concerning norms of communication) rather than a semantic explanation (concerning the conventional meanings of expressions).6 In the pet-shop example - plausibly enough - we are supposed to get a pragmatic explanation for the conversational implicature. From the expectation that the father is observing the Cooperative Principle and the maxims, including the maxim of Relevance, his listeners are in a position to infer the conversational implicature, even though the implicature is not encoded in the conventional meanings of the words used. Consider another example in which what-is-said and conversational implicature diverge: SOME/NOT-ALL EXAMPLE utterance: Some rabbits relish city life. what the speaker said: There is at least one rabbit that relishes city life. conversational implicature: (For all the speaker knows,) there is at least one rabbit that does not relish city life. Again, following Grice's lead, we can maintain that the conversational implicature is not the result of what 'some' means (whose meaning amounts to 'at least one', which is compatible with 'all'). Instead the listener arrives at the conversational implicature on pragmatic grounds. Based on the expectation that the speaker is obeying the Cooperative Principle and the maxims, including the maxim of Quantity, she would have given more information, to the effect that "All rabbits like city life", had she had that information. From the fact that she said the weaker "Some rabbits like city life" instead, her listeners can infer the conversational implicature in question. To get the inference to the conversational implicature, there is no need to posit that 'some' (sometimes at least) means 'at least one and not all'; it suffices to posit that 'some' unambiguously means 'at least one'. In the first, pet-shop example, we are imagining a specific conversational setting in which rabbit-acquisition is at issue. It is the specific details of the context that give rise to the conversational implicature - Grice calls these particularized conversational implicatures. In the second, some/not-all example, there is no need to outline the details of specific conversational situation to illustrate that the speaker commits herself to the contents of the conversational implicature, which is the result of 6Although Grice did not put it this way: in the William James lectures: the founder of pragmatics never used the word 'pragmatic', and apart from a handful of places, mentions conventional meaning/significance/force rather than 'semantic/semantics'. A Gricean rearrangement of epithets 187 general considerations about communication, quite independently of the particular details of the conversational context. Grice calls these generalized conversational implicatures.7 According to Grice, cases of conversational implicature - particularized and generalized alike - can be defined based on what the speaker says. The aim is also to allow for making principled distinctions about what is and what is not part of the conventional meaning of an expression like 'some'. GRICE'S ANALYSIS OF CONVERSATIONAL IMPLICATURE BASED ON WHAT-IS-SAID (based on Neale 1992, 527–9): in saying p, the speaker has conversationally implicated that q if and only if (1) "[the speaker] is to be presumed to be observing the conversational maxims, or at least the Cooperative Principle; (2) the supposition that he . . . thinks that q is required in order to make his saying . . . p (or doing so in those terms) consistent with this presumption; (3) the speaker thinks (and would expect the hearer to think that the speaker thinks) that it is within the competence of the hearer to work out, or grasp intuitively, that the supposition mentioned in (2) is required" (30–31); (4) q is intended by the speaker (Grice 1961, 130) (5) q is calculable from p (31, 39); (6) q is cancelable (39, 44); (7) q is (usually)8 nondetachable (39, 43–44). Let us illustrate these seven conditions on the already familiar examples. When I say "Some rabbits relish city life", for any conversational implicature to emerge, my audience and I must presume that I am obeying the norms of communication (1); maintaining this presumption calls for a requirement: it must be supposed that I am thinking that (as far as I know), not all rabbits relish city life (2); I also believe that my audience can work out that she must suppose that I am thinking this (and is in a position to realize that I believe she can work this out) (3). Further, I 7To account for such cases of generalized conversational implicature as having default interpretations, neo-Griceans like Horn (1989) and Levinson (2000) proposed to restructure the conversational maxims. 8A notable exception: conversational implicatures that exploit the maxim of Manner are detachable: consider Grice's example of someone making the verbose remark: "Miss X produced a series of sounds that corresponded closely with the score of 'Home Sweet Home'" (instead of the "nearly synonymous" rendition "Miss X sang 'Home Sweet Home'"), in order to conversationally implicate that it was a lousy performance (37, see also 43). Because of this exception, Neale (1992, 529, fn. 26) excludes nondetachability in his definition. 188 ZSÓFIA ZVOLENSZKY intend to convey to my audience that (as far as I know), not all rabbits relish city life (4). Calculability (5): it is possible to calculate the conversational implicature from the level of what-is-said based on background knowledge and assumptions along with the norms of communication. Switching to the pet-shop example, given the context of the conversation (with rabbit-acquisition at issue) and the norms of communication, including the maxim of Relevance, we are able to infer from the father's remark about the residential preferences of rabbits the implicature that the daughter cannot get a rabbit (this is how the remark becomes relevant in the light of the purposes of the conversation). Cancelability (6): we can explicitly (or contextually) deny the conversational implicature without contradicting ourselves. For example, "Some rabbits relish city life. In fact, all of them do." Nondetachability (7): had we tried to say the same thing differently (so what-is-said would remain the same: for example, "Not all rabbits oppose city life" uttered instead of the original sentence), the conversational implicature would still be present (after all, the speaker would generate the implicature the same way as before via the norms of communication, and the listener would calculate it the same way based on the level of what-is-said). These seven conditions are supposed to fit all and only conversational implicatures. For example, what-is-said is not cancelable. (Presuppositions, entailments and so-called conventional implicatures also fail one or another of the conditions; I won't go into these here.) The seven-clause definition of conversational implicature based on what-issaid constitutes Grice's theory of communication - almost. Before arriving at a complete answer, we need to ask how all this fits into a broader picture. What more can we say about what-is-said? To answer this question, it is helpful to consider a diagram of notions:9 9The grey labels are not covered in this section but are included in the diagram for the sake of completeness. As for nonconventional, nonconversational implicatures, Grice leaves room for this category without saying much about it beyond acknowledging that there are "all sorts of other [nonconversational] maxims (aesthetic, social, or moral in character), such as 'Be polite,' that are also normally observed by participants in talk exchanges, and these may also generate nonconventional implicatures." (28, see also 41). As for conventional implicatures-to be explored in detail in Section 5-the following is an example in a Gricean vein: utterance: Rabbits move around on the tips of their toes and are, therefore, quiet animals. what the speaker said: Rabbits move around on the tips of their toes and they are quiet animals. what the speaker conventionally implicated: The quietness of rabbits follows from their moving around on the tips of their toes. It is certainly plausible to think that the meaning of the word 'therefore' goes beyond that of 'and'. But Grice thinks the conventional implicature is not part of the truth-conditions of the utterance. A Gricean rearrangement of epithets 189 utterer's meaning nonconventional aspects of utterer's meaning nonconversational, nonconventional implicature conversational implicature generalizedparticularized conventional aspects of utterer's meaning conventional implicaturewhat is said (based on Neale 1992)10 The three notions in boldface occupy center stage: utterer's meaning, what-issaid, and conversational implicature. We have so far covered the definition of the last notion and still need definitions for the first two. Let us use the label 'utterer's meaning' for what an utterer means on a given occasion of utterance, whether it be a linguistic or nonlinguistic utterance (for example, a vigorous headshake instead of saying 'no' would constitute a nonlinguistic utterance).11 In Grice's theory of meaning,12 (i) utterer's meaning is the most basic notion, analyzed in terms of certain audience-directed intentions of the utterer. Grice then uses this notion to (ii) analyze utterance-type meaning (the conventional meaning of sentences, and more generally, words) in terms of regularities in utterer's meaning. And finally, he (iii) analyzes what-is-said in terms of the previously defined two notions: utterer's meaning and utterance-type meaning. Following Neale's (1992, 550), we can define (i), utterer's meaning as follows: Though Potts (2005) does not think we have a case of a conventional implicature above, he argues that we still need this category for examples like the following: utterance: Rabbits, which are shy animals, relish city life. conventional implicature (which is not part of what-is-said): Rabbits are shy animals. 10Neale's diagram emphasizes the distinction between conventional and nonconventional aspects of utterer's meaning, which is one of Grice's ultimate goals. I therefore prefer it to the far more common version - which follows Grice's presentation more directly - proposing to split 'utterer's meaning' into 'what is said' and 'what is implicated', splitting the latter further into 'what is conventionally implicated' and 'what is nonconventionally implicated' (see, for example, Horn 1992, 165; Carston 2002, 112). 11In the case of linguistic utterances, 'speaker meaning' is commonly used for 'utterer's meaning' (for example, in Bach 2005). 12Essays 5, 6 and 14 in Grice (1989). The last of these, Grice's article "Meaning", originally written in 1948, contains the first formulation of the views subsequently developed in the William James lectures. 190 ZSÓFIA ZVOLENSZKY By uttering x, U meant that p iff for some audience A (1) U uttered x intending A actively to believe the thought that p (or the thought that U believes that p), (2) U uttered x intending A to recognize that U intends A actively to believe the thought that p, (3) U does not intend A to be deceived about U's intentions (1) and (2). This way, Grice's overarching project is far more ambitious than what has been apparent from his theory of communication in isolation: he selects as his starting point a fundamental notion, that of utterer's meaning, defines it in psychological terms (in terms of intentions), and then analyzes all other semantic notions on its basis, including the notion of what-is-said, which is then deployed in the analysis of conversational implicature. We have already encountered one of Grice's constraints on what-is-said - that it is closely related to the conventional meaning of the words used. The diagram reveals another crucial aspect of what-is-said (a technical term: "a certain favored, maybe in some degree artificial sense of 'said'," 118): that it is part of what the utterer meant. One cannot, in this Gricean sense, say something one does not mean. This commitment about saying emerges in Grice's theory of meaning (also explored in the William James lectures), in the context of which Grice writes that "(1) 'U (utterer) said that p' entails (2) 'U did something x by which U meant that p'" (87).13 That is, when one says something, one means it, too. Given this constraint on what-is-said, when someone makes an ironic remark: "The boss is in a great mood today", meaning that the boss is in a grumpy mood, she does not, in Grice's sense say that the boss is in a great mood; she merely pretends to say it - makes as if to say it. According to Grice, instances of nonliteral language use - among others, metaphor and irony - constitute cases of making as if to say something (without saying it) (33–34, 53). He generalizes conditions (1)–(3) in the definition of conversational implicature above to include cases of making as if to say as well (30–31), so our ironic speaker makes as if to say (but does not mean and hence does not say) that the boss is in a great mood, and she thereby generates the conversational implicature that the boss is in a grumpy mood, something she does mean. 2 The minimalist's locutionary sense of 'say' at a disadvantage Let us summarize the two key constraints we have seen Grice impose on the notion of what-is-said: 13See also 119–120. A Gricean rearrangement of epithets 191 CONVENTIONAL: what-is-said is closely related to the conventional meaning of the words used. MEAN: what-is-said is also meant. When I say something, I mean it, too - or else I did not say it (in the relevant sense of 'say') in the first place. Contextualism is a view variously characterized as holding that "meaning underdetermines truth conditions" (Bezuidenhout 2002, 105) and that "the contrast between what a speaker means and what she says is illusory and the notion of 'what the sentence says' is incoherent" (Recanati 2004, 4). Besides Anne Bezuidenhout and François Recanati, proponents of contextualism notably include relevance theorists like Dan Sperber and Dierdre Wilson (1995) as well as Robyn Carston (2002). Contextualists agree that a notion of what-is-said adhering to CONVENTIONAL cannot be maintained. They hold instead that arriving at the truth conditions expressed on an occasion of uttering a sentence - what Sperber, Wilson and Carston call explicit content or explicature - involves a process that is not encoded in or controlled by the conventional meanings of the expressions used. Meanwhile, contextualists do maintain MEAN for their notion of explicature. In what follows, I won't go into issues having to do with maintaining or rejecting CONVENTIONAL, focusing instead on the costs of giving up MEAN. I therefore will not here address contextualist criticisms of the Gricean notion of what-is-said. Instead, I will turn to arguments for and against the so-called minimalist view, which proposes a notion of what-is-said for which MEAN does not hold. I will argue that this move accrues a disadvantage by making the minimalist alternative unfit to do some of the theoretical work that its Gricean counterpart accomplishes so effectively. In proposing his version of minimalism,14 Kent Bach's departure point is the same as that of contextualists: meaning underdetermines truth conditions. Yet Bach goes on to draw distinct conclusions about what-is-said: he proposes to part with Grice's constraint MEAN. Bach stresses the need "to account for (the content of) what a speaker does in uttering a sentence independently of whatever communicative intention (if any) he has in uttering it and regardless of how the content of that intention may depart from the semantic content of the sentence" (Bach 2005, 41–42; see also Bach 1994). Bach is therefore explicitly divorcing what-is-said from the second constraint, MEAN. Bach draws on "Austin's distinction between 'locutionary' and 'illocutionary' acts, between saying something and doing something in saying it" (Bach 2005, 25). He distinguishes the locutionary sense of 'say' from its illocu14The minimalist position is elsewhere labelled 'semantic modesty' (King and Stanley 2005) and the 'syncretic view' (Recanati 2004). The criticisms I raise here carry over to Cappelen and Lepore's (2005) version of minimalism as well. I discussed this in my lecture "What is Said, What is Meant" presented at the Central European University SUN course "Meaning, Context, Intention". 192 ZSÓFIA ZVOLENSZKY tionary sense, "roughly synonymous with 'state' (or 'assert'). In the locutionary sense, one can say something without stating it [. . . ] The illocutionary act a speaker performs in saying something depends on his communicative intention" (Bach 2005, 18–19). Bach is suggesting that the illocutionary sense of 'say' is one that does satisfy Mean. Let us call Grice's own notion of what-is-said, which is like the illocutionary sense of saying, what-is-saidG, to distinguish it from Bach's "strictly semantic notion of what is said" (Bach 2005, 25), a locutionary sense of saying: what-is-saidB. According to Bach, CONVENTIONAL does hold for what-is-saidB. Meanwhile, it is a distinct notion - that of conversational impliciture - that is in synch with utterer's meaning/communicative intentions, and that is arrived at via a processes of expansion and completion. Consider an example of the former: EXPANSION utterance: I haven't had breakfast. what-is-saidB: For all past times t, I didn't have breakfast at t. Bach's conversational impliciture: I haven't had breakfast today. What-is-saidB is clearly false and it is the impliciture that the speaker means and intends to communicate. Bach also thinks the semantic content of an utterance (what-is-saidB) is not always fully propositional, it is at times no more than a propositional radical, matrix or skeleton, and it is only at the level of conversational impliciture that a complete proposition is obtained, via a process of completion, as in the following example:15 COMPLETION utterance: Joe is ready. (said in the context of training for a marathon) what-is-saidB is not a complete proposition - we are missing the part: ready for what? conversational impliciture: Joe is ready to run a marathon. Crucially, for Bach, impliciture is the product of a process that is, in part, the output of rational reasoning: expansion and completion involve the same sort of pragmatic process of presuming adherence to the Cooperative Principle and the maxims that underlies conversational implicatures (Bach 1994).16 Thus, one major difference between Bach's approach and Grice's is that truth conditions that are in synch with the speaker's communicative intentions, that is, the conversational 15It is here that we can witness the major point of disagreement between Bach and Cappelen and Lepore (2005), as the latter authors hold that, even in this case, there is a complete proposition corresponding to what is said. 16In the literature, the label 'pragmatic enrichment' subsumes both processes posited by Bach: expansion and completion. A Gricean rearrangement of epithets 193 impliciture in question, involve the pragmatic processes of expansion and completion. For Bach, conversational implicatures are generated based on conversational implicitures (Bach 1994) - one (at least partially) pragmatic process following another. By contrast, given CONVENTIONAL, what-is-saidG is plausibly the result of a semantically controlled process in which all forms of contextual contribution to what-is-saidG are linguistically encoded - on the model of the sort of contextual contribution we encounter in connection with indexical expressions like 'I', 'today' and 'now'. Let us call such a position - defended, for example, by Jeff King and Jason Stanley (2005) - indexicalism.17 Bach faces various challenges given what-is-saidB. First, as King and Stanley (2005) argue, Bach does not have an explanation for the following two aspects of language understanding: • language understanding is systematic: if I can understand "Thumper chased Skippy", then I can also understand "Skippy chased Thumper"; • language understanding is productive: language users can in principle understand an infinite number of sentences of their language. Someone like Grice holds that language understanding consists in no more than grasping what-is-saidG, which, in turn, consists in no more than grasping what is linguistically encoded by the sentence uttered. At that point, the only assumption Griceans need is that what-is-saidG is compositionally determined (it is a function of the semantic values of the constituents and their mode of combination), and they thereby have an explanation of the systematicity and productivity of language understanding. By contrast, for Bach, language understanding consists in speakers grasping implicitures, which are not determined compositionally and are instead (partly) the result of unsystematic pragmatic processes. "So [a theorist like Bach] is committed to an alternative explanation of our grasp of an infinite number of novel utterances, one that does not proceed by attributing our competence to a simple, compositional mechanism" (King and Stanley 2005: 140). Second, Bach does not have an account of how theories of semantic content can appeal to the linguistic intuitions of speakers and audiences. Stanley and Szabó argue that "accounting for our ordinary judgments about the truth-conditions of various sentences is the central aim of semantics. Since these judgments are the data 17Recanati (2004) uses the label 'indexicalism', though King and Stanley (2005) do not. Carston (2002) (and many others) refer to it as a view that posits hidden indexicals; Camp uses another label-'semanticism'. Neale's (1992, 554–555) definition of what-is-said also attributes to Grice an indexicalist view, according to which what-is-said is (among other things) something that the given sentence means "in virtue of the particular meanings of the elements [in the sentence], their order and their syntactic structure. 194 ZSÓFIA ZVOLENSZKY of semantic theorizing, we should be careful with proposals that suggest a radical revision of these judgments" (2000: 240, see also King and Stanley 2005: 141). This consideration affects any theory, Bach's included, in which semantic content is very often out of synch with speakers' communicative intentions. Grice has an advantage here by maintaining MEANT for what-is-saidG. Bach says very little on these issues, apart from claiming that the intuitions about what is expressed by a given sentence are unreliable guides to semantic content, and that "[t]o keep one's semantic judgments from being pragmatically contaminated, it is always a good idea to imagine a variety of contexts of use, even wildly improbable ones" (Bach 2005: 29). Remarks like these provide little guidance for how we might obtain ordinary judgments about what-is-saidB, and how its compositionality can figure in an account of the systematicity and productivity of language understanding. Looking back a few pages at the diagram locating what-is-said and conversational implicature within Grice's framework, it becomes apparent that utterer's meaning, labeled on the top, provides crucial grounding for what-is-saidG, securing MEANT. And removing it, as Bach does by forgoing MEANT and opting for what-is-saidB leads to considerable theoretical challenges. To be sure, what-is-saidG is not without problems. For example, how can it serve as the unit of communication: the determinate content that a speaker expresses and her audience (potentially ignorant and/or mistaken about background information and aspects of the utterance context) grasps?18 And, crucially, can a notion of whatis-said that maintains MEANT adhere to CONVENTIONAL also?19 We have also found that what-is-saidG is committed to indexicalism: the view according to which all contextual contribution to truth-conditions is linguistically encoded in the way that the conventional meaning of indexical expressions like 'I' and 'here' control how context contributes to the content of these expressions on a given occasion of utterance. Indexicalism is an ambitious position that has met extensive criticism (including Recanati 2004, 98–114; Lepore and Cappelen 2005, 69–83; Carston 2002, 197–205, Wilson and Sperber 2002, 610–612). It is therefore interesting to see how the objections raised against what-is-saidB might be countered with an alternative nonminimalist construal of a locutionary sense of 'say'; to this we will now turn. 18Buchanan (2010) explores this problem. See also Cappelen and Lepore (2005) (186-89). 19As we have seen at the beginning of this section, proponents of contextualism - Bezuidenhout (2002), Carston (2002), Recanati (2004), Sperber and Wilson (1995, 2004) - criticize Grice on this point. A Gricean rearrangement of epithets 195 3 Prospects for an alternative locutionary sense of 'say' The two points of criticism we encountered against Bach - he cannot make room for linguistic intuitions of language users in semantic theorizing, and cannot straightforwardly account for the productivity and systematicity of language understanding - indicate the direction for defending a locutionary sense of what-is-said: one needs to show that (i) language users do, after all, exhibit implicit sensitivity to a locutionary level of meaning alongside an illocutionary level of meaning (similar to what-is-saidG), and that (ii) there are systematic connections and interactions between the two levels. In forthcoming work, Elisabeth Camp sets out to motivate these two points, drawing on a broad spectrum of examples involving sarcasm.20 Let's consider these points in reverse order. Addressing (ii), Camp (forthcoming, 2) distinguishes various species of sarcasm, and argues that despite the fact that they operate on a variety of levels, they still can and should be given a unified account: "I will defend the claim that sarcasm involves a unified operation of meaning inversion, which is manifested in distinct ways by four different subspecies of sarcasm. All four varieties invert something that the speaker pretends to mean (or presupposes someone else to have meant) relative to an evoked normative scale. But the target of the sarcasm, and the result of the inversion, vary widely depending on the species involved. Propositional sarcasm functions most like the traditional model, delivering an implicature that is the contrary of a proposition that would have been expressed by a sincere utterance [e.g. "Your plan sounds fantastic"]. Lexical sarcasm delivers an inverted compositional value for a single expression or phrase [e.g. 'diplomat' inverted in "Because George has turned out to be such a diplomat, we've decided to transfer him to Payroll, where he'll do less damage"]. 'Like'-prefixed sarcasm [e.g. "Like that's a good idea"] commits the speaker to the emphatic epistemic denial of a declarative utterance's focal content." (Emphasis in the original) According to Camp (forthcoming: 37–38), the key to providing a unified account of sarcasm rests on distinguishing various levels of meaning, including:21 20Camp takes sarcasm to be an extensive (and possibly exhaustive) subclass of verbal irony, the defining feature being that all instances of sarcasm involve meaning inversion. The examples I discuss are instances of both sarcasm and irony, so for the purposes of this paper, I will grant Camp's characterization and will not try to tease apart sarcasm from irony. 21Camp considers an addition class of examples of sarcasm: illocutionary sarcasm, in which the speaker expresses "an attitude which is the opposite of one that a sincere utterance would have expressed" (3). For example, "Thanks for holding the door", said to someone who has just slammed 196 ZSÓFIA ZVOLENSZKY • 'what is locuted' (for which MEAN doesn't hold, yet it involves more constraints than Bach's locutionary what-is-said), "roughly equivalent to 'what the uttered sentence means'"; "also including the assignment of an illocutionaryact-type correlative to grammatical mood, but without entailing actual illocutionary commitment"; • 'what is asserted/asked/ordered' (for which MEAN does hold): the speaker's primary illocutionary act: "what the speaker claimed"; • what is (nonconventionally) implicated: further illocutionary commitments undertaken by the speaker based on background information, the Cooperative Principle and the maxims (this is thus a level arrived at from the previous one by a Gricean process of generating conversational implicatures). Camp argues that propositional sarcasm always contributes to what is implicated, operating in some cases on what is asserted/asked/ordered and in others on what is implicated. Lexical sarcasm operates on (part of) what is locuted to contribute to what is asserted/asked/ordered. Meanwhile, like lexical sarcasm and unlike propositional sarcasm, metaphor can operate on what is locuted to contribute to what is asserted/asked/ordered, as in a nonsarcastic utterance of "She's the Taj Mahal"; here the speaker is committed to claiming (roughly) that the described person is remarkably beautiful. 'Like'-prefixed sarcasm always contributes the illocutionary force of denial to the level of what is asserted/asked/ordered, but it can combine either with what is locuted or with the output of e.g. metaphor, as in "Like she is the Taj Mahal" (Camp, forthcoming: 27, 43 fn. 34), committing the speaker to denying (roughly) that the described woman is remarkably beautiful. Notice that Camp is taking on board a complex project: just because nonencoded pragmatic processes (like lexical sarcasm and metaphor) contribute to what is asserted/asked/ordered does not mean that semantics ends before then, generating only what is locuted (as Bach had proposed). Instead, Camp holds that there are substantial connections and constraints to link the locutionary and illocutionary senses of what-is-said as two of several levels of meaning all of which are the subject matter of semantic theorizing. Revealing these connections and constraints requires far more detail than what Camp has given in the concluding section of her paper (the bulk of what she says on the two senses of 'say' I have reconstructed here), but this is certainly a direction in which we can hope to glean an explanation for (ii), the systematicity and productivity of language understanding based on the compositionality of what is locuted plus the ways in which that level is linked to the illocutionary sense of what-is-said. the door in the speaker's face. In part to accommodate this class, Camp posits a fourth level of meaning: 'what is perlocuted'. I have excluded these details to simplify the discussion. A Gricean rearrangement of epithets 197 Addressing (i), Camp (forthcoming: 21–25) points to the special rhetorical role that is played by cases of propositional sarcasm in which the speaker says P, for example, "The boss is in a great mood today", to implicate an inverted content Q, about the boss being in a grumpy mood. By speaking sarcastically, the speaker has put herself at a disadvantage in one respect, because she says something (in the locutionary sense) that she doesn't mean, and at an advantage in another respect, by meaning something she doesn't say. The disadvantage is that an uncharitable audience can, without violating the Cooperative Principle, hold the speaker committed to P, taking the utterance literally: "If the boss is so cheery, like you say, go and ask him if we could purchase that fancy coffee machine for the office." In response to this, the speaker is likely to retract her earlier utterance by saying "I was being sarcastic: I didn't actually mean P. I really think Q". This sort of problem with uncharitable interpretation does not arise in cases of assertion, when the speaker does mean what she says. But the vulnerable position of a sarcastic speaker is offset by the fact that what the speaker meant, Q, is something she hasn't said: she can, if prompted, deny Q: "How can you claim that I had said the boss was in a rotten mood? - I said no such thing." Camp takes this pair of phenomena to signal that language users are sensitive to the locutionary sense of what-is-said: they see it as providing grounds for uncharitable responses that hold the speaker committed to what is locuted (even if it isn't part of what the speaker meant), while what isn't part of the locutionary content has a degree of deniability (forthcoming, 38). This calls for refinements. At first it seems like Camp's point is that what isn't said in the locutionary or illocutionary sense has a degree of deniability; but to make that point, one only needs to invoke Grice's say/implicate distinction, and hold that what is implicated is deniable while what-is-said isn't. It is here that metaphorical utterances, mentioned only briefly in Camp's paper, are crucial.22 Consider a metaphorical (nonsarcastic) utterance 'She is the Taj Mahal': the speaker's commitment (roughly) to the described woman being remarkably beautiful is part of what is asserted/asked/ordered but not part of what is locuted. The former status - being asserted - results in a lack of deniability: the speaker cannot deny having committed herself to (roughly) the described woman being a beauty. With propositional sarcasm, due to its implicature status, there was room for the speaker to say "I have said no such thing"; with the metaphoric utterance, there is no room to say "I didn't say she was beautiful". The latter status - not being locuted - results in vulnerability to an uncharitable audience: the audience can hold the speaker committed to what was locuted: that a woman is (literally) the Taj Mahal - How can you say a person is a building?". In response, the speaker is likely to retract her 22Camp (2008) discusses metaphor and deniability in more detail. 198 ZSÓFIA ZVOLENSZKY earlier utterance by saying "I was speaking metaphorically: I didn't actually mean she is the Taj Mahal, I meant that she was a beauty". Metaphors therefore provide a distinctive combination of lack of deniability and vulnerability to uncharitable interpretation. That speakers indeed regard instances of propositional sarcasm and metaphor as Camp describes - as both vulnerable to uncharitable interpretation, while the first but not the second is deniable - requires empirical support. It would certainly be interesting to see if Camp's claims bear out, indicating (via the possibility of uncharitable challenges) that speakers are sensitive to what is locuted versus what is asserted, and (via considerations about deniability) that speakers take metaphors (and lexical sarcasm!) but not propositional sarcasm to carry the explicit commitment of assertion. These are intricate issues, judgments and distinctions that are crucial to making a case for speakers' implicit sensitivity to both a locutionary and an illocutionary 'say'. If the case could be made, we could hope to respond to (i) by accounting for the role of the linguistic intuitions of language users: first, semantics concerns the illocutionary sense of 'say' as well as the locutionary one; and more importantly, speakers are sensitive to the locutionary sense of 'say' not just the illocutionary one. We see then that Camp's proposal is a promising start for maintaining a locutionary sense of 'say' in addition to an illocutionary one, but there is far more work ahead to see if it can respond to the problems that affected Bach's minimalist notion of what-is-said. Camp suggests that all sarcastic utterances can be construed on a single, unified "model in terms of meaning inversion, so long as we are willing to understand 'meaning' in broader, but still fundamentally Gricean terms: as a speaker's reflexive intention to be recognized by her hearer, on the basis of her utterance, as holding some attitude, which may be partly or entirely evaluative or emotional rather than purely truth-conditional" (Camp forthcoming: 33–34, my emphasis). While steering away from indexicalism and what-is-saidG, Camp maintains a pair of closely connected notions substantially constraining one another: what is locuted as adhering to CONVENTIONAL, and what is asserted/asked/ordered as adhering to MEAN. It is the close connection and the mutual constraints (both of which await further motivation) that make for key differences between Camp's proposal and Bach's minimalism. 4 Minimalism at no advantage Let us return to Bach's locutionary sense of 'say', what-is-saidB, for which MEAN doesn't hold, and consider what advantages it might have over Grice's what-is-saidG, which maintains MEAN. I aim to show that the advantages Bach lists prove illusory, A Gricean rearrangement of epithets 199 and some of them, in particular, slips of the tongue, point the way toward a richer, more comprehensive Gricean framework than what philosophers and linguists traditionally recognize. Bach (2005: 25) motivates what-is-saidB as follows: Why is the locutionary notion of saying needed, along with the correlative, strictly semantic notion of what is said? It is needed to account for each of the following cases, situations in which the speaker: (i) says something but doesn't mean anything at all (by 'mean' here I mean 'intend to communicate'); (ii) does not say what he intends to say, as in the misuse of a word or a slip of the tongue; (iii) Means what he says and something else as well (cases of implicature [. . . ]); (iv) (intentionally) says one thing and means something else instead (nonliteral utterances). (25, italics and numbering added) Above, Bach suggests that what-is-saidB is required in an account of the phenomena in (i)–(iv). Let us consider these in (almost) reverse order. Grice already has the means to accommodate nonliteral uses (iv), with his own notion of what-is-saidG that is like the illocutionary sense of saying rather than the locutionary one. At the end of Section 1, we have already seen Grice bring in the notion of 'make as if to say' to handle nonliteral language use like the ironic remark "The boss is in a great mood today": the speaker doesn't say the boss is in a good mood, only makes as if to say it, and thereby generates the conversational implicature that the boss is in a grumpy mood. Exactly how is Bach's proposal to introduce what-is-saidB superior to Grice's alternative? Bach says very little on this, except for noting that "it seems obvious that in speaking figuratively one really is saying something (but meaning something else instead)" (Bach 2006: 28). Here, Bach seems to be taking for granted a notion of saying that is different from Grice's. But Grice has made it clear that his notion of what-is-said was not supposed to cover the full range of ordinary uses of 'say': he was seeking to define a notion of 'say' that he considered theoretically useful. Therefore, if 'making as if to say' is a viable notion, then Bach has not shown that what-is-saidB is indispensible if we want to account for nonliteral language use. Let me briefly respond to some contextualist criticisms concerning the Gricean notion of 'making as if to say'. Wilson and Sperber (2002: 588–592) set out to show that "Grice's treatment of tropes . . . is inconsistent with the rationale of his own enterprise", arguing as follows. Consider the first maxim of Quality: "Don't say what you believe to be false" (27), which Wilson and Sperber call the maxim of 200 ZSÓFIA ZVOLENSZKY truthfulness. In the maxim, 'say' might be interpreted in (a) a weaker, locutionary sense: "Don't utter things you believe to be false", or (b) a stronger, illocutionary sense: "Don't assert what you believe to be false". I'll discuss both options and raise problems for the proposed lines of criticism. The problem Wilson and Sperber raise for option (a) is this: when someone produces a figurative utterance such as the ironical one "The boss is in a great mood today", she flouts the maxim of truthfulness at the level of what-is-said; and that violation remains, even as she adheres to the maxim at the level of what's implicated (The boss is in a grumpy mood). But Grice explicitly allowed for such a possibility - listing, among others, an example in which a pupil is a candidate for a philosophy job, and in writing him a recommendation letter, his professor writes just one sentence "Mr. X's command of English is excellent and his attendance at tutorials has been regular". At the level of what-is-said, the first maxim of Quality ("Make your contribution as informative as is required") is irretrievably violated, though it is adhered to at the level of what is implicated ("Mr X. is no good at philosophy"). Grice lists various other instances of literal speech in which there is a real and not merely an apparent violation of a maxim at the level of what-is-said, with the maxim being observed at the level of what is implicated. Indeed, Grice takes floutings to come in two varieties: real versus apparent violations of maxims at the level of what-is-said. He writes: "[i]n these examples, though some maxim is violated at the level of what-is-said, the hearer is entitled to assume that that maxim, or at least the overall Cooperative Principle, is observed at the level of what is implicated" (33, see also 370). In short, Grice explicitly prepares to handle the sort of scenario that, according to Wilson and Sperber, catches him unprepared. Wilson and Sperber raise a pair of problems for option (b). First, if 'say' is interpreted as 'assert' throughout the maxims, then it is the making of an assertion that requires the speaker to commit to the truth of what she says, so "it is hard to see why a maxim of truthfulness is needed at all. It seems to follow from the very notion of an assertion as a commitment to truth (perhaps together with a proper understanding of commitment) that your assertions should be truthful" (Wilson and Sperber 2002: 589–590). I do not see how our understanding of commitment obviates the need for the maxim of truthfulness: when Richard Nixon asserted in connection with the Watergate investigation "I'm innocent", he did thereby commit to the truth of his assertion; but why is one obligated to commit to the truth of only those statements that (he thinks) are true? To this, construing 'say' as 'assert', and 'making a commitment to the truth of what's uttered' yields no answer; in A Gricean rearrangement of epithets 201 the Gricean framework, the maxim of truthfulness is still needed to explain the obligation to tell what (we think) is true.23 From the first criticism follows Wilson and Sperber's second, more decisive one: the only time the truthfulness maxim comes into play is when it is violated in the case of figurative utterances. But it fails to be functional even there. Here is why. Opting for the stronger, 'assert' reading of 'say' is supported by considerations about Grice's theory of meaning (discussed in Section 1: what-is-said must be meant), and also by his introduction of 'making as if to say' in the case of nonliteral utterances. But if someone speaking ironically only makes as if to say that the boss is in a great mood, how is the truthfulness maxim violated at all? And if it isn't, then how does the conversational implicature arise at all? "A flouting [in the case of tropes] is a mere appearance of violation. So why should it be necessary to retrieve an implicature in order to preserve the assumption that the maxims have been respected?" (Wilson and Sperber: 591).24 This second criticism disregards a crucial aspect of the Gricean framework: granted, in the case of an ironic remark, we have at hand an apparent violation, not a real one; but an apparent violation suffices to trigger a conversational implicature. This happens not just in the case of irony and metaphor, but also in the case of an apparent violation of the maxim of Relevance - indeed, Grice's recommendation-letter example ("Mr. X's command of English is excellent. . . ") we have just discussed could be construed as an apparent violation of Relevance at the level of what-is-said, with the violation proving merely apparent once we consider the conversational implicature (Mr. X. is no good at philosophy). Horn (2004: 8) summarizes this feature of conversational maxims: "Unlike syntactic and semantic rules, pragmatic principles and convention do as much work when they are apparenty violated - when speaker S counts on the hearer H to recognize the apparent violation and to perform the appropriate contextual adjustment - as when they are observed or ostentatiously violated." (Emphasis added) 23One might try to capture the presence of some sort of obligation to tell the truth via means other than the maxim of truthfulness. Indeed, this is what Wilson and Sperber do: they claim that considerations about relevance yield the obligation in question. "An assumption is relevant to an individual at a given time if and only if it has some positive cognitive effect in one or more of the contexts accessible to him at that time" (Sperber and Wilson 1995: 265); and overall, the positive cognitive effects of true information outweigh the positive effects of false information. Hence arises the obligation in many situations to tell the truth rather than say falsehoods. (Still, as Sperber and Wilson argue, in the case of the loose use of 'flat' in "If you want to plan an easy cycling trip, the Netherlands is a good choice. It's flat.", in uttering the last sentence, the speaker doesn't say something strictly and literally true, nor is it her aim to do so. See, for example, Wilson and Sperber (2002: 592–600). 24Carston (2002: 115) criticizes Grice in the same vein. 202 ZSÓFIA ZVOLENSZKY In the light of this, it is unwarranted to criticize Grice on the grounds that apparent maxim violations can't trigger implicatures. Grice construes floutings as violations - real or apparent ones. One might doubt how the latter kind of flouting could possibly work, and reason that a system operating with real violations only would be superior. But Wilson and Sperber take a different tack: they seem to assume that in the Gricean framework, it is only real violations of conversational principles that can trigger a conversational implicature; they then point out that implicatures that nonliteral utterances are supposed to give rise to remain unaccounted for on that model. But Grice explicitly rejects that very assumption: he mentions "examples in which an implicature is achieved by real, as distinct from apparent, violation of the maxim of Relation. . . " (35, see also 370). In sum, Wilson and Sperber's criticism of the maxim of truthfulness does not, in the end, achieve its aim: they undermine neither the maxim nor the notion of 'making as if to say'. Returning to Bach's list of cases that serve to motivate his view, let us consider implicatures (iii). As we have already seen in Section 1, Grice, with what-is-saidG on board, has the means to account for implicatures. We are therefore left with the unmeant sayings listed under (i) and (ii) as potential motivations for Bach; my aim is to show that on closer inspection, these, too, fail to provide sufficient grounds for introducing what-is-saidB. Concerning unintended sayings, specifically, slips of the tongue (ii): for all Grice has specified, he is certainly committed to the view that in uttering "she's as headstrong as an allegory on the banks of Nile,"25 Mrs. Malaprop has not saidG (in the relevant sense of 'say') that Lydia is as headstrong as an allegory on the banks of Nile (for she did not mean it). Mrs. Malaprop did mean that Lydia is as headstrong as an alligator on the banks of the Nile; yet as Grice's definition of conversational implicature stands, this does not count as an instance of conversational implicature. Why not? While it is fairly clear that we want the comparison between an alligator and Lydia to be part of Mrs. Malaprop's utterer's meaning (she did mean it, after all), it is far from clear that we want this to be the kind of utterer's meaning that is also a conversational implicature. By definition, a conversational implicature q is something that the speaker has to be assumed to believe in order to make her saying consistent with the Cooperative Principle and the maxims; and the speaker S has to also think that her audience can work out that the assumption that S believes q is required in this way. But Mrs. Malaprop doesn't fulfill either of these conditions - she did not even realize that she misspoke and her audience needs to do some extra work to make sense of the words she uttered.26 To be sure, the Gricean theory of meaning does not account for Mrs. Malaprop's unwitting commitment to a 25Sheridan: The Rivals, Act III Scene III. 26Here, I follow Saul (2002, 236) who argues that in cases of unsuccessfully attempting to say p while meaning p (like slips of the tongue, mistaken translations), p is part of the utterer's meaning that A Gricean rearrangement of epithets 203 comparison between Lydia and an allegory (because she didn't mean to commit to this). It would therefore be well to see how we might accommodate this in an extended Gricean framework; I will turn to this point shortly. Accounting for slips of the tongue does therefore pose a challenge for Grice, but - as I will try to show in Section 5 - such cases do not serve to motivate introducing what-is-saidB in the end. Concerning cases of acting, translation, or reading out a passage, when the speaker says something and doesn't intend to communicate anything at all (i): again, for all Grice has specified, he is committed to the view that these speakers haven't saidG anything, and his theory of meaning does not make room for such utterances. Yet these are meaningful utterances. Be that as it may, a crucial feature of such utterances is that the speaker does not commit to (because she does not assert) the given passage. Recall Grice's suggestion for handling nonliteral discourse: the speaker makes as if to say something rather than saying it. We can construe this as similar to what-is-said except the speaker does not commit to it. This model of pretending to say something and thereby pretending to take on a commitment but not actually doing so naturally lends itself for cases of acting or telling a story as well. There, too, the speaker pretends to make assertions and accrue commitments without actually doing either. Translation and reading out a passage are different in that they don't seem to involve any pretense; yet they are importantly similar: the speaker does not commit to what her utterance would commit her to if she were producing an assertion, a question or a request. So we should expect that something similar to Grice's proposal for nonliteral discourse will cover all cases of saying something while meaning nothing at all. I won't explore this further as I take it that the genuinely pressing issue is accounting for cases in which the speaker does accrue commitments, including unmeant commitments. (i), (ii) and (iv) are dissimilar in one crucial respect. When a speaker misspeaks, she does commit herself to what the conventional meaning of her words specify; for example, Mrs. Malaprop does (unintentionally) commit herself to a comparison between Lydia and an allegory. But that in itself is not sufficient reason to label this unwitting commitment as what-is-saidB. Indeed, with respect to commitments accrued by the speaker, there is a sharp contrast between slips of the tongue and misuses of words (ii) on the one hand, and nonliteral discourse (iv) plus utterances when nothing is meant (i) on the other: when speaking nonliterally (ironically or metaphorically, say) and when acting or reading a passage, the speaker does not commit to what the conventional meaning of her words specify - that is one of the hallmarks of these kinds of discourse. In sum, we have at hand distinct phenomena is neither said nor conversationally implicated. Slips of the tongue will be discussed in more detail in Section 5. 204 ZSÓFIA ZVOLENSZKY with respect to commitments accrued by the speaker. What follows from this? We are not dealing with like phenomena that definitely, without further argument, call for like treatment. Hence, a Gricean approach offering unrelated explanations for slips of the tongue and nonliteral discourse is not at a disadvantage with respect to Bach. Indeed, it is Bach who has to give further arguments for why the two kinds of phenomena should receive a related explanation, in terms of what-is-saidB. We have already observed that Grice's 'make as if to say' withstands various criticisms, so it is not at all clear that what-is-saidB has to be recruited to account for nonliteral discourse. We are about to see that the resources Grice has suffice to account for misuses of language also. 5 A more comprehensive Gricean framework In this section, I aim to extend the Gricean theory of meaning and communication (outlined in Section 1) to accommodate slips of the tongue and misuses of words. Recall the binary-tree diagram (adopted from Neale 1992) of the Gricean framework from Section 1, with utterer's meaning on top. Given that starting point, it is no wonder that we cannot place unwitting, unmeant commitments anywhere: nothing unmeant can be included under utterer's meaning. How might we make room for slips of the tongue then? I will argue that it is in keeping with the Gricean framework to place them under a more inclusive category recognized by Grice: that of the total signification of an utterance. The diagram below depicts my proposal. total signification of an utterance unmeant aspects of signification ?. . .due to slip of tongue, mistaken translation utterer's meaning nonconventional aspects . . . conventional aspects . . . (first pass at an extended Gricean framework) In addition to slips of the tongue, I have included the parallel case of mistaken translations as well. For example, when a German speaker says: "I'm becoming a steak", meaning "I'm ordering a steak", her inadvertent commitment to her becoming a steak is part of the total signification of her utterance.27 27On mistaken translations, see also Saul (2002: 236–237). A Gricean rearrangement of epithets 205 My proposal parts ways with Neale (1992: 520), who equates the total signification of an utterance with utterer's meaning:28 "Although there is no explicit textual evidence on this matter, it is at least arguable that a specification of the "total signification" of an utterance x made by U is for Grice the same thing as a specification of what U meant by uttering x." In fact, I think that there is fairly decisive textual evidence and a fairly strong case to be made for rejecting Neale's interpretation. Grice introduces the label 'total signification' in the 1967 William James lectures, in the context of his theory of conversation, where he says he is. . . "operating, provisionally, with the idea that, for a large class of utterances, the total signification of an utterance may be regarded as divisible in two ways. First, one may distinguish, within the total signification, between what is said (in a favored sense) and what is implicated; and second, one may distinguish between what is part of the conventional force (or meaning of the utterance and what is not. This yields three possible elements - what is said, what is conventionally implicated, and what is nonconventionally implicated." (41, emphasis added) The last sentence could be used to motivate Neale's proposal and the diagram in Section 1, but bear in mind the italicized qualification: there could be utterances, say, slips of the tongue, that aren't included in the large class of utterances for which the classification applies, so that what a speaker like Mrs. Malaprop unwittingly committed herself to (a comparison between Lydia and an allegory) could be part of the total signification of the utterance that isn't part of what the utterer meant.29 28Davidson (1985), whose discussion of Mrs. Malaprop's utterances is an inspiration behind this paper and its title, makes some puzzling claims in this connection. He is interested in the 'first meaning' of a specific utterance, which he admits is basically Grice's utterer's meaning (also widely called nonnatural meaning) (Davidson 1985: 467). Davidson argues that we cannot appeal to a shared language governed by rules and conventions between Mrs. Malaprop and her audience (474). Interestingly, in his discussion, Davidson is only interested in the possibility of interpretation, but remains silent about the commitments that Mrs. Malaprop undertakes when uttering a malaprop. What is puzzling is that elsewhere he seems to equate his notion of first meaning with what he calls "literal meaning", by which he appears to mean Grice's what-is-said: Grice "has shown why it is essential to distinguish between the literal meaning (perhaps what I am calling first meaning) of words and what is often implied (or implicated) by someone using those words" (468). So it is unclear if by first meaning, he means the broader category of utterer's meaning, or the narrower what-is-said. What is clear, however, is that he does not discuss a category as broad as the total signification of an utterance as I am characterizing it. 29Saul (2002: 247, fn. 32) also points out the qualification, but does not take it into account in the possible interpretations she considers, instead following Neale's lead and equating utterer's meaning with the total signification of the utterance. 206 ZSÓFIA ZVOLENSZKY When subsequently Grice mentions again (later on in the William James lectures) the three labels he wants to distinguish "within the total signification of a remark" (118), he no longer restricts to a certain class of utterances; but nor does he suggest that the three-way distinction within total signification is supposed to be exhaustive. So this (and the handful of other remarks Grice makes) is easily compatible with holding that the inadvertent and bizarre comparison between Lydia and an allegory is part of the total signification of Mrs. Malaprop's utterance. Not only do Grice's remarks allow that Mrs. Malaprop's unwitting commitment be classified under the total signification of her utterance. There are passages of the Retrospective Epilogue, written in 1987, that are best captured by my proposal. Grice (340–341) describes Strand Five of the Epilogue as proposing "that in considering the notion of meaning we should pay attention to two related distinctions. [. . . ] (a) between conventional and nonconventional meaning and (b) between assertive and nonassertive meaning" (emphasis added). Accordingly, Strand Five argues for "a feature [. . . ] which we may label 'centrality', which can plausibly be regarded as marking off primary ranges of signification from nonprimary ranges: the primary range comprises (a) conventional meaning and (b) assertive meaning (358, emphasis added). These two can come apart: for example, in the case of conventional implicature - such as that carried by 'but' and 'on the other hand' - the contrast between the two clauses connected by 'but' and 'on the other hand' is part of conventional meaning but not part of assertive meaning. Grice discusses an example of a conventional implicature (I underlined some crucial details): "(2) Suppose a man says "My brother-in-law lives on a peak in Darien; his great aunt, on the other hand, was a nurse in World War I"; his hearer might well be somewhat baffled; and if it should turn out . . . that the speaker had in mind no contrast of any sort between his brother-in-law's residential location and the one-time activities of the great aunt, one would be inclined to say that a condition conventionally signified by the presence of the phrase "on the other hand" was in fact not realized and so that the speaker had . . . misused the phrase 'on the other hand'." (361) Grice returns to the example a bit further down: ". . . speakers may be at one and the same time engaged in performing speech-acts at different but related levels. One part of what the cited speaker in example two is doing is making what might be called ground-floor statements about the brother-inlaw and the great aunt, but at the same time as he is performing these speech-acts he is also performing a higher-order speech-act of commenting in a certain way on the lower-order speech-acts. He is contrasting in some way the performance of some A Gricean rearrangement of epithets 207 of these lower-order speech-acts with others, and he signals his performance of this higher-order speech-act in his use of the embedded enclitic phrase, "on the other hand"." (362, Emphasis in the original) The underlined parts highlight Grice's position: although the speaker doesn't have in mind a contrast of any sort, because of his use of 'on the other hand', he is unintentionally performing a speech act about the existence of a contrast. That is, in uttering (1) the speaker intends to perform only the speech-acts under (2) and (3), yet ends up performing the speech-act under (4) also: (1) My brother-in-law lives on a peak in Darien; his great aunt, on the other hand, was a nurse in World War I. (2) My brother-in-law lives on a peak in Darien. (a lower-order speech-act of assertion) (3) My great aunt was a nurse in WW1. (a lower-order speech-act of assertion) (4) (2) contrasts with (1). (a higher-order speech-act of "commenting") Grice therefore adopts the position that (4) is part of the signification or meaning of the speaker's utterance. It therefore seems overwhelmingly plausible that even when the misuse of words does affect the truth conditions of the utterance - when Mrs. Malaprop, via the conventional meaning of her words, unintentionally commits herself to comparing Lydia to an allegory, the commitment (the speech act performed) is part of the signification of her utterance, albeit an unintended part.30 It is this idea that my proposal in the diagram above captures. Some refinements are in order. First, are there both conventional and unconventional varieties of unmeant aspects of signification? Second, once we have located in the diagram what Mrs. Malaprop commits to yet doesn't mean (a comparison between Lydia and an allegory), where should we place what she does mean (a comparison between Lydia and an alligator)? Third, what else besides slips up tongue and mistaken translations should be included under the conventional variety of 'unmeant aspects? Fourth, are we perhaps prompted to include more categories under utterer's meaning also? I will discuss these in turn. Concerning our first question, slips of tongue and mistaken translations are clearlyconventional aspects of the total signification of the utterance. Are there perhaps unconventional ones among the unmeant aspects of signification? One possibility that comes to mind, following an idea of Jennifer Saul's (2002, 242), 30Indeed, it would be ad hoc not to offer like treatment for the two instances of misuse: by the speaker of (1) and by Mrs. Malaprop. 208 ZSÓFIA ZVOLENSZKY are audience attributions that aren't intended by a speaker.31 Audience attributions can be conventional or nonconventional. Here is an example of the former: in a Thanksgiving episode of the TV show Friends, everyone is running to the roof to see a giant balloon that got away from the Macy's Parade. On the way out, Monica yells 'Got the keys', intending it as a question and an indirect request towards Rachel: "Remember to bring the keys". But Rachel misinterprets Monica's intonation, taking her to have asserted that she, Monica has the keys already. Because neither of them has the keys, their Thanksgiving turkey turns to charcoal inside the oven by the time they manage to get someone to open the apartment door. For Monica's utterance, there is an audience attribution of an assertion that is no part of Monica's utterer's meaning. Consider also a nonconventional example of audience attributions: in the context of deliberating over the balloon that got away and plans for the rest of the afternoon, Monica utters "I'm staying in today" (and she has in mind not leaving the apartment for an extended period because she is attending to the turkey), but Rachel takes Monica to imply that Monica chooses not to see the balloon from the roof. (As before, the turkey is incinerated.) It is certainly no part of what Monica said (or what Rachel took Monica to have said) that she chooses not to see the balloon. So this could be a candidate for a nonconventional kind of unmeant aspect. But audience attributions, whichever variety we consider, are in the eye of the beholder. They represent cases of miscommunication, the audience mistaking the speaker for having intended to get across something that the speaker had no intention of getting across. It is unwarranted to make audience attributions (conventional or not) part of the total signification of the utterance; they are more naturally construed as mistakes about what is part of the total signification. There is one nonconventional kind of inadvertent commitment worth including, however: contextual implications which are deducible in part based on contextual information and in part based on the utterance (among others, Sperber and Wilson 1995: 107–108). For example, if Monica says 'I'm staying in today' and it is part of the context that the Macy's Parade is taking place that day, then Monica has committed herself to not attending the Macy's Parade that year. Moreover, this is plausibly part of the total signification of her utterance whether or not she intends to convey that she won't be attending the Parade. Clearly, contextual 31Saul calls these 'audience-implicatures'; the term 'implicature' is not a good choice for my purposes, so I avoid it. First, the hallmark of audience attributions is that they aren't meant by the speaker; yet for Grice (86), 'implicate' is supposed to be a blanket word to cover 'imply' , 'suggest', 'indicate' and 'mean' (see also Grice 1961, where Grice is talking about cases of implication (the term 'implicature' is not introduced at that stage yet), and, besides latter-day implicatures, presuppositions are supposed to be kinds of implications). Second, as we'll see given the 'say'/'implicate', distinction, audience attributions come in two varieties: counterparts to saying and counterparts to implicature, so the more general 'audience attribution' works better for present purposes. A Gricean rearrangement of epithets 209 implications are all nonconventional aspects of the total signification of an utterance. Some of them are part of utterer's meaning, some aren't. There should accordingly be two entries for them in the diagram. Contextual implications are worth more extensive exploration that I leave for another day. Moving onto our second question: where should we place what Mrs. Malaprop does mean by her utterance "She is as headstrong as an allegory on the banks of the Nile"? There is an additional category that Saul (2002: 236–237) proposes in connection with slips of the tongue and mistaken translations: instances of near-sayings. When Mrs. Malaprop speaks, part of what she means is that Lydia is as headstrong as an alligator on the banks of the Nile. Indeed, she attempts to say this, but is unsuccessful - this is an example of a near-saying. What Mrs. Malaprop near-says is part of her utterer's meaning that is not a conventional aspect of her utterance: instead, it is a nonconventional aspect. In Section 4, I argued, following Saul, that near-sayings do not satisfy the conditions for conversational implicature. They therefore need their separate category under 'nonconventional aspects of utterer's meaning'. In addition to near-sayings, Saul (2002: 230–236) motivates an adjacent category of near-implicatures: failed attempts at generating a conversational implicature. For example, when a professor writes a recommendation letter for a philosophy student "Mr. X's command of English is excellent and his attendance at tutorials has been regular", intending to get across the following: "Mr. X is no good at philosophy", his efforts might be thwarted on two counts. First, imagine a situation in which the professor mistakenly thinks the letter is for a philosophy job, but in fact, the student is applying for a call-center job for which the skills sought are precisely command of English and reliability. What the professor intends to implicate doesn't satisfy the condition on conversational implicature according to which in order to maintain that the professor is cooperative, one is required to suppose that the professor believes Mr. X is no good at philosophy. The committee (or anyone) reading the recommendation letter in the context of the call-center job will not realize that anything beyond what the professor has written (said) needs to be attributed to him. So we have a failed attempt at conversationally implicating that Mr. X. is no good at philosophy. Second, imagine a situation in which the student is applying for a philosophy job, but the search committee has been told (falsely and unbeknownst to the professor) that the professor disapproves of the practice of writing recommendation letters, and accordingly, writes uncooperative, irrelevant letters. A condition on conversational implicature, that the speaker is presumed to be cooperative, is not realized. As a result, the speaker tries but fails to conversationally implicate anything. Near-implicatures should, accordingly be added under 'nonconventional aspects of utterer's meaning'. Moving onto our third question: what might be other instances of unmeant conventional aspects of signification? Examples of entailments readily come to 210 ZSÓFIA ZVOLENSZKY mind. Consider the standard definition for entailment: if B is an entailment of A, then the truth of A requires the truth of B. This time, imagine that Monica asserts "I found my keys" while Rachel is opening the door with her own set of keys. Monica's utterance does entail the following "Keys exist".32 Yet this isn't part of her utterer's meaning. Why? Because it does not fit the first two clauses of the definition for utterer's meaning in terms of audience-directed intentions (described in Section 1): Monica does not have the intention I: getting Rachel actively to entertain the thought that keys exist; nor does Monica intend Rachel to believe that keys exist via the recognition of Monica's intention I. Yet Monica's utterance does commit her to keys existing, so it is reasonable to expect that this sort of entailment - similarly to conventional implicature and slips of the tongue - should be part of the total signification of her utterance; a conventional part of it. So in the form of entailments that are excluded from utterer's meaning, it is well to add yet another category under the unmeant conventional aspects of the total signification of the utterance. One might object to the above line of argument on the grounds that I haven't taken into account a crucial parenthetical detail in the definition of utterer's meaning: the first clause mentions the possibility that Monica intended Rachel actively to entertain the thought that Monica believes keys exist. I don't think this shift is of help here: Rachel is fully aware not only that keys exist (she is opening the door), but also that Monica believes they exist; moreover, Monica believes all this. Given the definition of utterer's meaning, we still have to leave room for entailments that aren't part of what the speaker intended to convey. The case of entailments is worth further thought with respect to our fourth question: is there something missing from under utterer's meaning - entailments that the speaker does intend to convey, perhaps? Earlier, we've considered a passage from Grice in which, "for a large class of utterances", he calls for a two-way division under the total signification of an utterance between what-is-said and what is implicated, and under the latter, a two-way division between what is conventionally versus nonconventionally implicated. Grice mentions entailments in passing only, but seems to consider them as part of the conventional aspects of utterer's meaning; so what's entailed by a given utterance can't also be conversationally implicated.33 Evidence of this comes from Grice's discussion of the two readings of "The present king of France is not bald": a "strong reading", "The present king of France is such 32It is traditional to classify some of these entailments as presuppositions, for example, "I found my keys" is said to presuppose "my keys exist" in the standard, semantic sense that if A presupposes B, then for A to be true or false requires the truth of B. I will not consider the intricate issues surrounding presuppositions in this paper, accepting, for the purposes at hand, Neale's interpretation of Grice's view that all presuppositions (semantic and nonsemantic ones alike) fall into one of two classes: entailments and conversational implicatures (Neale 1992: 522, fn. 17). 33Neale (1992, 528–529) attributes this view to Grice, as does Carston (2002: 112–113). A Gricean rearrangement of epithets 211 that he is not bald" versus a "weak reading", "It is not the case that (the present king of France is bald)". The strong reading entails that a king of France exists, so it doesn't, Grice seems to assume, conversationally implicate that a king of France exists.34 Crucially, in the context of the strong reading, "There is a king of France" doesn't fit the definition of conversational implicature Grice gave earlier, in the William James lectures, on several counts: the Cooperative Principle and the maxims are not needed to derive it, so it isn't calculable; and it isn't, on the reading in question, cancelable either. Our present question then is whether, it is most in keeping with Grice's ideas to classify entailments under (i) what-is-said, (ii), what is conventionally implicated, or (iii) within a category of their own. I will provide motivations for option (i). Against option (ii): the key feature of conventional implicatures, according to Grice, is that they do not contribute to the truth conditions of an utterance: recall Grice's example from the Retrospective Epilogue, repeated here:35 (1) My brother-in-law lives on a peak in Darien; his great aunt, on the other hand, was a nurse in World War I. (2) My brother-in-law lives on a peak in Darien. (a lower-order speech-act of assertion) (3) My great aunt was a nurse in WW1. (a lower-order speech-act of assertion) (4) (2) contrasts with (1). (a higher-order speech-act of "commenting" or "indicating" (121)) According to Grice, in uttering (1), the speaker performs three speech acts: (2)–(4). Grice holds that the fact that the speaker fails to realize that his words commit him to (4), "a condition conventionally signified by the presence of the phrase 'on the other hand'", is "insufficient to falsify the speaker's statement" (361).36 Crucially, "[t]he truth or falsity . . . of his words is determined by the relation of his ground-floor speech-acts to the world; consequently, while a certain kind of misperformance of the higher-order speech-act may constitute a semantic offense, it will not touch the truth-value. . . of the speaker's words." (362) 34In "Presupposition and Conversational Implicature" (1970, 1977), Essay 17 in Grice (1989). See especially 270. 35In what follows, I will sometimes refer by (2)–(4) to the speech acts in question, and sometimes to the contents of those speech acts. This double-use is harmless-it should always be clear which interpretation I mean. 36See also 25–26. 212 ZSÓFIA ZVOLENSZKY The idea that conventional implicatures don't contribute to the truth conditions of utterances is suggested in the William James lectures as well37 (although in prior work, Grice shows hesitation on this38). In addition, conventional implicatures exhibit distinctive behavior with respect to detachability and cancelability. On the one hand, they are easily detachable (by uttering "My brother-in-law lives on a peak in Darien and his great aunt was a nurse in World War I" the speaker would say the same as before, without the conventional implicature present). On the other hand, "[a]lthough it will not lead to contradiction, attempting to cancel a conventional implicature will result in a genuinely linguistic transgression of some sort" (Neale 1992: 529, fn. 25). Consider two examples of entailments that the speaker intends to convey: in the letter-writing example, "Mr. X's command of English is excellent and his attendance at tutorials has been regular" entails the first conjunct, "Mr. X's command of English is excellent"; and "Phoebe is pregnant with triplets" entails "Phoebe is pregnant". Entailments such as these are markedly different from conventional implicatures: first, entailments aren't naturally construed as part of higher-order speech acts; second, they are naturally construed as part of the truth-conditions of the utterance; third, they are not detachable; and fourth, canceling them does result in a contradiction. Given these four respects of dissimilarity, conventional implicature is not the right category for classifying entailments in a Gricean framework, so we should discard option (ii). Grice's discussion of conventional implicatures does, however, reveal indirect evidence that he intended entailments to belong under what-is-said, as option (i) has it, rather than under a separate category, as option (iii) has it. In the William James lectures, Grice considers clarifications on the notion of what-is-said that he considers theoretically useful, aiming to exclude conventional implicatures. In the context of defining what-is-said, Grice introduces the idea of "being centrally meant" in order to exclude conventional implicatures from what-is-said: the latter, but not the former are part of what is centrally meant by an utterance (88). Grice subsequently (120–122) elaborates this idea by suggesting that what-is-said concerns a central speech act performed by the speaker, and that for "elements in the conventional meaning of an utterance which are not part of what has been said [that is, conventional implicatures]", ... "at least for an important subclass of such elements", we need an account according to which 37In Essay 2: "I do not want to say that my utterance ... would be, strictly speaking fails should the [conventional implicature] in question fail to hold" (25–26). 38Grice (1961: 127) suggests that even if a conventional implicature (or implication, as he called it then) is false, an utterance can still be false, but adds that one "might perhaps be less comfortable about assenting to its truth if the [implication] did not in fact obtain". A Gricean rearrangement of epithets 213 • the problematic elements are "posterior to, and . . . their performance is dependent upon, some member . . . of the central range"; for example, the performance of the noncentral speech act of commenting or indicating (4) is dependent on the performance of (2) and (3); and • the dependence of the noncentral speech act on the performance of a central one is supposed to explain why we are reluctant to classify, for example, commenting or indicating that (4) as an instance of saying that (4)."; • a noncentral speech act such as (4) is explicated in terms of utterer's meaning (122). Crucially, whenever Grice explores the need to exclude some aspect of conventional meaning from what-is-said, the central speech act, the only kinds of examples he mentions involve conventional implicatures that are due to expressions like 'moreover', 'but', 'therefore', and 'on the other hand'. Nowhere does he mention a concern to exclude entailments. Indeed, we have seen that for an utterance of (1), it is natural to break it down into two central speech acts of assertion, (2) and (3), each of which are in fact entailments of (1). It would be difficult and ad hoc to draw a line between entailments like (2) and (3), which are clearly part of what-is-said, and other entailments that are meant yet aren't part of what-is-said. It therefore seems in line with Grice's ideas to include entailments that are part of what the speaker meant under the already-existing label of what-is-said, in accordance with option (i). The following diagram depicts the various categories that are needed to present a more comprehensive picture in a Gricean vein, with the new additions in boldface. 6 Conclusions Several remarks are in order in the light of the Gricean extended framework: about, first, the status of Grice's theory of meaning; second, the degree to which speakers control the total signification of the utterances they make; third, the status of entailment; and, fifth, the status of a Gricean construal of what-is-said, one that (unlike its minimalist counterpart) satisfies MEAN. I'll discuss these briefly in turn. First, Grice's theory of meaning remains compatible with the extended framework. Granted, within the theory, the notion of utterer's meaning is taken as a basic notion defined in terms of certain audience-directed intentions of the speaker. This notion is then appealed to in the definition of the conventional meaning of words and sentences as well as in the definition of what-is-said. The fact that in the form of 214 ZSÓFIA ZVOLENSZKY to ta ls ig ni fic at io n of an ut te ra nc e un m ea nt as pe ct so fs ig ni fic at io n no nc on ve nt io na l: so m e co nt ex tu al im pl ia ct io ns co nv en tio na l so m e en ta ilm en ts du e to sli ps of th e to ng ue , m ist ak en tr an sla tio n ut te re r's m ea ni ng no nc on ve nt io na la sp ec ts (in cl ud in g so m e co nt ex tu al im pl ic at io ns ) no nc on ve rs atio na l im pl ic at ur e ne ar im pl ic . ne ar sa yi ng co nv er sa tio na l im pl ic at ur e co nv en tio na l as pe ct s co nv en tio na l im pl ic at ur e w ha ti s sa id (s om e en ta ilm en ts he re ) (a n ex te nd ed G ric ea n fr am ew or k, fin al ve rs io n) A Gricean rearrangement of epithets 215 slips of the tongue and certain entailments, the conventional meaning of expressions makes a contribution to the unmeant aspects of signification does not, as far as I can tell, interfere with the hierarchy of definitions. Indeed, this phenomenon is expected in a Gricean framework that defines conventional meaning in terms of regularities in utterer's meaning. Second, a question arises about the extent to which speakers do not control the total signification of their utterances: how much speaker control is there given that the basic notion of utterer's meaning is a function of the speaker's intention to influence her audience, and is not sensitive to whether the audience is actually so influenced. This suggests that utterer's meaning is under the speaker's control as long as she has the requisite intention, however farfetched that might be. Meanwhile, the extended framework shows four ways in which the total signification of an utterance is subject to criteria that lie beyond the intentions of the speaker. (i) The presence of conversational implicatures is, according to Grice, tied to a speakerindependent criterion that supposing the speaker to have a certain belief is required to maintain that she is being cooperative; it's not enough if the speaker thinks such a supposition is required. As a result, near-implicatures can arise when the speaker, despite her intentions, fails to generate a conversational implicature.39 (ii) What-issaid is in part dependent on the conventional meanings of the words used, giving rise to near-sayings in the case of slips of the tongue. Despite Mrs. Malaprop's intention to say that there is a comparison between Lydia and an alligator, she hasn't managed to say this. (iii) By uttering a slip of the tongue, Mrs. Malaprop has, however, quite independently of her intentions, incurred commitments due to the conventional meaning of her words. (iv) And we have observed that such unmeant contributions to signification due to the conventional meaning of the words used are not at all limited to the relatively rare cases of slips of the tongue (and mistaken translations), but arise quite generally in the form of entailments that aren't part of what the speaker intended to convey. This brings us to our third point, about entailments: given that they are due to the conventional meanings of the words used, it is not at all surprising that they come in two varieties: in ordinary cases (with no mishaps like the slip of a tongue) the speaker intends to convey some of the entailments of her utterance but not others, yet she is committed to them all as part of the signification of her utterance.40 39See Saul (2002: 243–245). She argues against Davis's (1992) construal of what speakers (conversationally) implicate as being, a matter of no more than speakers' intentions and therefore in speakers' control. 40For this reason, Dan Sperber (personal communication), proposes that not every entailment of an utterance is part of what he calls explicit content within a relevance theoretic framework. After all, the explicit content has to be something that the speaker intends to communicate to her audience, and not all entailments of an utterance fit this bill. 216 ZSÓFIA ZVOLENSZKY Fourth, we have seen that an extended framework that is Gricean in spirit, indeed, one for which we can find explicit textual evidence in Grice's work, can smoothly operate with a notion of what-is-said that satisfies the constraint under MEAN: in the relevant sense of 'say', the speaker must mean what she says, or else she hasn't said it at all. Accounting for slips of the tongue adequately does not require a notion of say, such as Bach's minimalist alternative, which parts ways with MEAN. We therefore have at hand a Gricean framework - featuring the original Gricean notion of what-is-said - which is able to handle just the sorts of issues that had prompted proponents of minimalism to move to an alternative notion of what-is-said. The extended Gricean framework encompasses a broad class of cases (not only slips of the tongue, but also certain entailments) which have traditionally been excluded from the purview of Grice's theory of meaning, with utterer's meaning at its foundation. The exclusion had meant that we could not, within the diagram of Grice's view that is so often appealed to, find room for commitments that the speaker undertakes yet does not mean. We have observed that such commitments are not such a rare breed; they don't just arise for those of us, who, on occasion, cannot fully comprehend the true meaning of what we are saying (or as Mrs. Malaprop would put it "cannot reprehend the true meaning of what [we are] saying").41 Instead, in the form of entailments, unmeant commitments are ubiquitous; and placing them under the total signification of an utterance can bring them into a Gricean fold. References Bach, K. (1994). Conversational impliciture. Mind and Language 9, 124–62. Bach, K. (2005). Context ex machine. In: Szabó (2005: 15–44). Bach, K. (2006). The top ten misconceptions about implicature. In: B. Birner and G. Ward (eds), Drawing the boundaries of meaning: Neo-Gricean studies in pragmatics and semantics in honor of Laurence R. Horn. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 21–30. Bezuidenhout, A. (2002). Truth-conditional pragmatics. Noûs 36(16), 105–134. Buchanan, R. (2010). A puzzle about meaning and communication. Noûs 44(2), 340–371. Camp, E. (2008). Showing, telling and seeing: Metaphor and 'poetic' language. In E. Camp (ed.) The Baltic international yearbook of cognition, logic, and communication, vol. 3: A figure of speech, 1–24. Camp, E. (forthcoming). Sarcasm, pretense, and the semantics/pragmatics distinction. To appear in Noûs 2012. 41Sheridan: The Rivals, Act I Scene II. A Gricean rearrangement of epithets 217 Cappelen, H. and E. Lepore (2005). Insensitive semantics: a defense of semantic minimalism and speech act pluralism. Oxford: Blackwell. Carston, R. (2002). Thoughts and utterances: the pragmatics of explicit communication. Oxford: Blackwell. Chapman, S. (2005). Paul Grice, philosopher and linguist. Houndmills: Palgrave MacMillan. Davidson, D. (1985). Reprinted in: Martinich (1996: 465–475). Davis, Wayne (1992). Conversational implicature: intention, convention and principle in the failure of gricean theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grice, H. P. (1961). The causal theory of perception. In: Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 35: 121–152. Grice, H. P. (1989). Studies in the way of words. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Grice, H. P. (1989/2011). Tanulmányok a szavak életéről [Studies in the way of words], companion essay written by Z. Zvolenszky. In T. Bárány and M. Márton (eds.), . Budapest: Gondolat. Horn, L. (1989). A Natural history of negation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Horn, L. (1992). The Said and the unsaid. Working papers in linguistics. Columbus, OH, 163–192. Horn, L. (2004). Implicature. In: Horn and Ward (2004: 3–28). (eds.) Horn, L. and G. Ward (eds.) (2004). The Handbook of pragmatics. Oxford: Blackwell. King, J. C. and J. Stanley (2005). Semantics, pragmatics, and the role of semantic content. In: Szabó (2005: 111–164). Levinson, S. (2000). Presumptive meanings: the theory of generalized conversational implicature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Martinich, A. P. (ed.) (1996). The Philosophy of Language, 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Neale, S. (1992). Paul Grice and the philosophy of language. Linguistics and Philosophy 15, 509–559. Potts, C. (2005). The Logic of conventional implicatures. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Recanati, F. (2004). Literal meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Saul, J. M. (2002). Speaker meaning, what is said and what is implicated. Noûs, 36(2), 228–248. Sperber, D. and D. Wilson (1995). Relevance: communication and cognition, 2nd edition, with a new Postface. Oxford: Blackwell. Szabó, Z. Gendler (ed.) (2005). Semantics vs. pragmatics. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 218 ZSÓFIA ZVOLENSZKY Stanley, J. and Z. Szabó Gendler (2000). On quantifier domain restriction. Mind and Language 15(2&3), 219–261. Wilson, D. and D. Sperber (2002). Truthfulness and relevance. Mind 111, 583–632.