UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 13 (2001)
Relevance Theory and the saying/implicating
distinction
ROBYN CARSTON
A distinction between saying
and implicating has held a central place in pragmatics since Grice, with ‘what
is said’ usually equated with the (context-relative) semantic content of
an utterance. In relevance theory, a distinction is made between two kinds of
communicated assumptions, explicatures and implicatures, with explicatures
defined as pragmatic developments of encoded linguistic meaning. It is argued
here that, given a context-free semantics for linguistic expression types,
together with the explicature/implicature
distinction, there is no role for any minimally propositional notion of ‘what
is said’.
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