UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 12 (2000)
Explicature and semantics
ROBYN CARSTON
According to the relevance-theoretic account, identifying what is communicated
explicitly by an utterance (its explicature) involves several pragmatic
processes: disambiguation, saturation of indexical elements, the recovery of
unarticulated constituents and ad hoc concept construction, both of the latter
being free from any linguistic indication. This is at odds with a current
philosophical position according to which contextual contributions to the
proposition expressed are confined to the processes of disambiguation and
saturation; this view necessitates positing a number of hidden (unarticulated)
indexicals in the logical form of linguistic expressions. The arguments for the
two positions are assessed.
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