The Implicit Dimension of Meaning: Ways of “Filling In” and “Filling Out” Content
Erkenntnis 80 (1):89-109 (2015)
Abstract
I distinguish between the classical Gricean approach to conversational implicatures , which I call the action-theoretic approach, and the approach to CIs taken in contemporary cognitive science. Once we free ourselves from the AT account, and see implicating as a form of what I call “conversational tailoring”, we can more easily see the many different ways that CIs arise in conversation. I will show that they arise not only on the basis of a speaker’s utterance of complete sentences but also on the basis of sub-sentential clauses—cases of so-called embedded implicatures—as well as from discourse segments containing several sentences—cases that Geurts calls ‘multiplicatures’. I will argue that they arise also from contents that are themselves implicit, such as presupposed contents or other implicatures. All but the first sort of case are difficult for the traditional Gricean AT account to handle, whereas they fall naturally out of an account that sees conversational participants as engaged in conversational tailoring—i.e., as engaged in a process of shaping informational and discourse structural properties of utterances in their successive conversational turns, and hence shaping their interlocutors’ cognitive environmentsAuthor's Profile
DOI
10.1007/s10670-014-9661-6
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Citations of this work
Embedding irony and the semantics/pragmatics distinction.Mihaela Popa-Wyatt - 2019 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 62 (6):674-699.
Compound Figures: A Multi-Channel View of Communication and Psychological Plausibility.Mihaela Popa-Wyatt - 2022 - Topoi 41 (3):527-538.
Cognitive Environments and Conversational Tailoring.Anne Bezuidenhout - 2015 - Croatian Journal of Philosophy 15 (2):151-162.
References found in this work
Relevance: Communication and Cognition.Dan Sperber & Deirdre Wilson - 1986/1995 - Oxford: Blackwell.
Thoughts and Utterances: The Pragmatics of Explicit Communication.Robyn Carston - 2002 - Oxford: Blackwell.