Conversational Impliciture

Mind and Language 9 (2):124-162 (1994)
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Abstract

Confusion in terms inspires confusion in concepts. When a relevant distinction is not clearly marked or not marked at all, it is apt to be blurred or even missed altogether in our thinking. This is true in any area of inquiry, pragmatics in particular. No one disputes that there are various ways in which what is communicated in an utterance can go beyond sentence meaning. The problem is to catalog the ways. It is generally recognized that linguistic meaning underdetermines speaker meaning because of the need for disambiguation and reference assignment and because people can speak figuratively or indirectly. But philosophers and linguists are coming to recognize that these are not the only ways. The situation may be described in Gricean terms: the distinction between what is said and what is implicated is not exhaustive. Charting the middle ground between the two will require attending to specific examples, noting their distinctive features, and articulating the relevant concepts. That is what I aim to do here. The basic idea will be to distinguish not only the implied from the explicit but the implicit from the implied.

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reprint Bach, Kent (2013) "Conversational impliciture". In Ezcurdia, Maite, Stainton, Robert J., The Semantics-Pragmatics Boundary in Philosophy, pp. 284: Broadview Press (2013)

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Kent Bach
San Francisco State University

Citations of this work

Context and logical form.Jason Stanley - 2000 - Linguistics and Philosophy 23 (4):391--434.
Everything.Timothy Williamson - 2003 - Philosophical Perspectives 17 (1):415–465.
From contextualism to contrastivism.Jonathan Schaffer - 2004 - Philosophical Studies 119 (1-2):73-104.
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References found in this work

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Studies in the way of words.Herbert Paul Grice - 1989 - Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin, and Use.Noam Chomsky - 1986 - Prager. Edited by Darragh Byrne & Max Kölbel.
Logic and Conversation.H. Paul Grice - 2013 - In Maite Ezcurdia & Robert J. Stainton (eds.), The Semantics-Pragmatics Boundary in Philosophy. Peterborough, CA: Broadview Press. pp. 47.

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