No. Not a typo, of course, but Bach's coinage in vol. 9 of the journal _Mind &
Language_. I note, incidentally, that Sperber's & Wilson's _Relevance_ (2nd
edn) quote (on p. 299) Bach's essay as being indeed on (the common-or-garden)
'_implicAture_, rather than the animal proposed by Bach hisself [sic]. (I
note, incidentally, too, that this author's surname is quoted in the 'Index'
(p. 321) as being 'BaTh').
The specific reference by Sperber/Wilson to Bach's essay is the notes 16 & 17
(p. 296) to p. 267, where they write: "[...] Carston has studied the
contribution of enrichment processes to explicatures in a series of important
papers (note 16: See e.g. Carston 1988a, 1993c, forthcoming b. For
discussion, see ... Bach ['Conversational Implic[i]ture'] [...]); the role of
inference in explicit communication is now being actively explored both
inside and outside the relevance-theoretic framework (note 17: On enrichment,
see, e.g. [...] Bach ['Conversational implic[i]ture'] [...])" (p. 267)". --
Indeed, Bach has now written on Carston's _Thoughts and utterances: the
pragmatics of explicit communication_ -- at
http://blackwellpublishing.com/more_reviews.asp?ref=0631178910 --:
"You don’t have to be a relevance theorist to appreciate
Carston’s challenge to influential Gricean views on the interaction
of pragmatics with semantics. [_Thoughts & utterances: the pragmatics
of explicit communication_], with its breadth of coverage and depth
of analysis, raises a good many questions and offers many good
answers."
I append below some relevant passages from Bach's essay on 'Conversational
Impliciture' -- now online at http://online.sfsu.edu/~kbach/impliciture.htm.
Cheers,
JL
J L Speranza
====
K. Bach writes: "Consider the following example, in which a woman says to her
husband, "She has taken enough from you." [e.g. +>This female employee has
tolerated enough from the utterer's husand, who happens to be the employee's
boss" itself e.g. +> Beware any possible retaliating from her. ] [The]
example illustrates the two ways in which [an utterer] can ... mean something
without making it fully explicit. The first way arises whenever an utterance
... does not by virtue of [expression] meaning express a complete
proposition. ... The second way occurs when the utterance does express a
complete proposition ... but some other proposition ... is being
communicated. ... The result of 'completion' and/or 'expansion' is what I
call _conversational impliciture_. Impliciture is to be distinguished from
Grice’s _implicature_. In implicature [the utterer explicitly convey] and
communicates one thing and thereby communicates something else. Impliciture,
however, is a matter of [explicitly conveying] something but communicating
something else instead [...]. [In impliciture] part of what is communicated
is only implicit in what is explicitly expressed, either because completion
[or expansion] is required [...]"
"[I]mpliciture as a middle ground between explicit content and implicature
[...]"
"[I]mplicitures are built up from the explicit content of the utterance by
conceptual strengthening or what Sperber and Wilson [...] call ‘enrichment’
[cf. my impoverishment. JLS] which yields what would have been made fully
explicit if the appropriate lexical material had been included in the
utterance. Implicitures are, as the name suggests, implicit in what is said,
whereas implicatures are implied by (the [uttering] of) what is [explicitly
conveyed] [...]"
"[I]mplicitures go beyond what is [explicitly conveyed], but unlike
implicatures, which are additional propositions external to what is
[explicitly conveyed], implicitures are built out of what is [explicitly
conveyed]. [... I]n impliciture what the [expression] means does not fully
determine what the [utterer] means [...]. So far as I can tell, the only
explanation for the fact that Grice’s critics count impl_i_citures as
explicit contents of utterances, or identify them with what is said, is that
they uncritically assume, along with Grice, that there is no middle ground
between what is [explicitly conveyed] and what is implicated. It is curious
to note that Grice himself occasionally [alludes] to what I am calling
impliciture, as when he [remarks] that it is often ‘unnecessary to put in […
] qualificatory words’ (1967b/1989, p. 44). Although he [does] describe such
cases as implic_a_tures, he appear[s] to have something distinctive in mind: ‘
strengthening one’s meaning by achieving a _superimposed_ implicature’
(1967b/1989, p. 48 [emphasis Bach's]). By ‘strengthening’ Grice appears to
mean increasing the information content of what is [explicitly conveyed], not
adding a whole separate proposition to it. Nevertheless, Grice does give the
impression that he intends the distinction between what is [explicitly
conveyed] and what is implicated to be exhaustive. Accordingly, since
expansions and completions are not related closely enough to [expression]
meaning to fall under what is [explicitly conveyed ...], it does seem that
for him they would have to count as implicatures. Sperber and Wilson,
Carston, and Recanati all find this result unintuitive. I agree with them,
but rather than suppose that ‘what is [explicitly conveyed] [...] and what is
implicated [...] exhaust the (propositional) significance of the utterance’
[...], I suggest that we simply recognise a distinct category [viz. the
impliciture].
"Given the criterion of close syntactic correlation, on which what is
[explicitly conveyed] need _not_ be a complete proposition, impliciture can
be a matter of either filling in -- or fleshing out -- what is [explicitly
conveyed]. Completion is the filling in of a propositional radical, and
expansion is the fleshing out of the minimal proposition expressible by an
utterance. I agree with Grice’s critics that neither is a case
of_implicAture_, although both involve basically the same sort of pragmatic
process as in implicature proper, but I see no reason, as they do, to extend
the notion of explicit content, of what is [explicitly conveyed]. For me
there is inexplicit meaning but no inexplicit [explicitly conveying]."
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