Dear all,
As we all know, the relevance-theoretic explicature is a
'semantic-pragmatic hybrid'. For a hearer it involves a component of
pragmatically derived meaning as well as a component of
linguistically decoded (conceptual) meaning, and the pragmatically
derived meaning is the output of saturation or free enrichment. Now,
if someone answers a yes/no question by uttering no more than "Of
course", or "Absolutely", or "Sure", or "Probably", there does not
seem to be any semantic template or logical form present that could
serve as the linguistic component of the input to a pragmatic process
whose output is a truth-evaluable proposition. The only
linguistically present items are clues to the pragmatic recovery of a
communicated attitude to some proposition; it appears that retrieval
of the (explicated?) proposition is wholly due to context-dependent
inference - hence technically speaking the proposition confirmed by
the speaker ought to be an implicature rather than an explicature.
Yet intuitively, that sort of answer is just as explicit as any other
subsentential answer.
Do you know of anyone who has proposed an RT analysis of this type of
subsentential answer?
Obviously, response words like "Yes" and "No" give rise to much the
same problem, though these seem to encode a procedure, while the
adverbials mentioned above certainly have a conceptual (but not
truth-conditional) meaning.
Cheers,
Thorstein Fretheim
Trondheim, Norway
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