Dear all,
Perhaps someone has suggested this already - which I'd be interested to know. While the distinction between "explicature" and "implicature" has given rise to much discussion, I am wondering more and more how important this distinction actually is in the overall RT framework. Apart from having had a different "derivational history", it seems to matter very little whether an individual member of the set of assumptions contained in {I} is an "explicature" or "implicature". They do not appear to play different roles in the overall communication process. (I already stumbled over this when doing the research for my book 'Translation and relevance' back in the 1980s; to talk about the intended interpretation of an utterance one always had use the conjunction 'explicatures and/or implicatures'. I have repeatedly wondered why this should be so.) Is the implicature/explicature distinction perhaps another piece of 'baggage' inherited from earlier approaches (for other 'baggage' see e.g. Wilson & Sperber 2000, 'Truthfulness & relevance'). Perhaps I am overlooking something rather basic here, but if these considerations are true, would it not be better to use a single term like 'plicatures' which covers all assumptions of {I} as the theoretically more basic term, and only distinguish between "explicatures" and "implicatures" where this is actually necessary for communication-theoretical reasons?
Additional question: The boundary between the two may well be fluid (non-principled?), e.g. with single word comments or answers in a language like English. How far does the logical form go? Does every verbal utterance have a - linguistically determined - logical form?
Best wishes,
Ernst-August Gutt
----------------------------------
Dr. Ernst-August Gutt
The Wycliffe Centre
Horsleys Green
High Wycombe HP14 3XL
UK
tel. +44 1494 682 314 PLEASE NOTE NEW PHONE NUMBER
fax +44 1494 682 300
e-mail: ernst-august_gutt@sil.org
Affiliated as Honorary Reader with
Centre of Translation and Intercultural Studies
University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology
www.umist.ac.uk/ctis
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jun 28 2001 - 08:29:44 GMT