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Implicature, Explicature, and Truth-Theoretic Semantics
... In contrast, implicatures consist of content that does not necessarily have roots in the logical form of the uttered sentence. Rather, an implicature could be represented by a proposition completely different from the one expressed through linguistic means (Carston 1988). Since explicature is intricately linked to the logical-syntactic structure and plays a crucial role in fully developing the explicit proposition ("what is said" in Gricean terms), it is quite surprising that Carston considers this inference to be cancellable (Carston 1988(Carston , 2010. ...
... Rather, an implicature could be represented by a proposition completely different from the one expressed through linguistic means (Carston 1988). Since explicature is intricately linked to the logical-syntactic structure and plays a crucial role in fully developing the explicit proposition ("what is said" in Gricean terms), it is quite surprising that Carston considers this inference to be cancellable (Carston 1988(Carston , 2010. Maybe her position stems from viewing all pragmatic inferences as akin to defeasible ("inductive") reasoning, which never yields certain conclusions. ...
Cancellability – one of the most important tests for implicatures – has been attacked from different perspectives, and its reliability challenged by several cases and examples in which conversational implicatures seem to be hard or even impossible to cancel. To account for these phenomena, distinct approaches have been advanced aimed at weakening Grice’s cancellability test. However, what do we exactly mean when we claim that an implicature cannot be cancelled? Grice pointed out that implicatures are triggered by a possible conflict with the cooperativeness principle, and for this reason it is always possible to opt out of the observation thereof. This theoretical possibility needs to be distinguished from the practical problem of explaining why some implicatures are intuitively less cancellable than others, or even not cancellable. To address this latter – practical – dimension of cancellability, the reasoning and the presumptive premises involved in drawing an implicature and justifying its cancellation needs to be represented and evaluated. This approach will be shown to provide a possible instrument for evaluating the reasonableness of cancellability and its costs.
... Kölbel claims that his arguments are also compatible with the conclusion that "true" is what he calls "pragmatically ambiguous": while a given occurrence "may semantically express concept c1, the speaker may intend to communicate, and succeed in communicating some distinct concept c2" (368). The idea is that "true" regularly contributes to what we might call "pragmatic inferences," where this phrase covers what has elsewhere been referred to as "conversational implicatures" (Grice 1989;Levinson 2000), "implicitures" (Bach 1994), "explicatures" (Carston 1988;Sperber and Wilson 1986), and "free pragmatic enrichment" (Recanati 1993). For those who uphold the standard view of the semantics-pragmatics distinction, the thesis that "true" contributes to pragmatic inferences does not count as a form of linguistic alethic pluralism: different uses of "true" would not express different contents, but would merely convey a range of contents that are distinct from the unique content expressed. ...
Some words express different meanings in different contexts, such as “bank” and “I.” Linguistic alethic pluralists claim that “true” is another such word. This is a surprising thesis that holds implications for debates about the nature of truth. Yet it is in need of careful elaboration and evaluation. I describe several versions of linguistic alethic pluralism, alongside tests that natural language theorists use to identify different types of meaning variation. I also consider empirical studies that have recently targeted the use of “true.” I conclude that there is currently no evidence for linguistic alethic pluralism, and unlikely to be any forthcoming.
... According to relevance theorists (Sperber & Wilson, 1995, Carston, 1988, the pragmatic processes underlying the global understanding of an utterance give rise to an appropriate hypothesis about the explicit content of a communicative act. This hypothesis takes the name of "explicature". ...
In most cases, when the left hemisphere suffers damage, there is a loss of language use. In the past, this evidence has led doctors to speculate on the presence of several language centres located in the left hemisphere, each specializing in a specific task. According to the classic model, Wernicke’s area is responsible for encoding incoming messages, while Broca’s area is responsible for encoding outgoing messages. These two areas communicate with each other thanks to specific nerve pathways (Arcuate Fasciculus). Selective damage to one of these areas causes different types of speech disorders, called “aphasias”. Although this model has lost validity over time, it has strongly influenced the current classification of aphasias.
Previously, scholars believed that the syntactic and semantic errors found in different types of aphasia were due to the role the left hemisphere plays in processing the formal aspects of language. In particular, they believed that the pragmatic skills of aphasics were intact or, if pragmatic deficits were present, they derived from syntactic and semantic ones. This view seems to go in the direction of the Gricean theory of implicatures. Grice argues that pragmatic processes depend on the ability to make inferences, operating on a linguistic input that already has a semantic structure. These processes enrich what is said, the proposition in a minimal sense. In other words, there is a separation between the domain of semantics and pragmatics. Each of the two fields maintains a specific character of autonomy and independence. This separation would also be maintained in the brain.
However, some recent studies on neuroscience are bringing up a different picture: It would seem that the integration of extra-linguistic data in language networks would actively affect the understanding and production of verbal messages. These new results move in the direction of contextualist positions. Proponents of this trend suggest that processes of pragmatic nature intrude into semantics to determine “what is said”. Some of these processes are not required by linguistic materials; nevertheless, they affect the propositional content conveyed by the utterance. Both the recent reflections in neuroscience and those in the philosophy of language have significant consequences on the way of seeing some neuropathological conditions, such as aphasia. Semantic and syntactic deficits do not determine pragmatic deficits, as was believed. On the contrary, the pragmatics of the discourse and the clues disseminated in the context can favour communication and compensate for deficiencies at the syntactic/semantic level.
Neste trabalho, o autor aborda o fenômeno da inferência no âmbito da
conversação. Adotando uma conduta descritiva e explanatória pluralista quanto
ao aspecto metodológico, busca fornecer um tratamento unificado dos vários
processos inferenciais enfocados pela literatura especializada na área da
pragmática, partindo da construção de um modelo para os mecanismos
interpretativos do discurso conversacional baseado nas ideias do filósofo Paul
Grice (1913-1988), especialmente em sua concepção de linguagem verbal como
uma variedade do comportamento racional humano, bem como na sua visão de
racionalidade enquanto a capacidade que têm as pessoas de justificar ideias e
ações por meio de raciocínios, ou arrazoados. A principal motivação para esse
esforço investigativo encontra-se na compreensão sobre a importância de se
analisar a comunicação verbal a partir de um conceito de racionalidade que
permita considerar o intercâmbio conversacional não apenas quanto à
adequação instrumental das estratégias empregadas em sua condução, mas
também quanto à possibilidade de se justificarem, com recurso a argumentos,
as interpretações feitas pelos participantes nas situações de interação.
The concept of inference is foundational to the study of pragmatics; however, the way it is theoretically conceptualised and methodologically operationalised is far from uniform. This Element investigates the role that inference plays in pragmatic models of communication, bringing together a range of scholarship that characterises inference in different ways for different purposes. It addresses the nature of 'faulty inferences', promoting the study of misunderstandings as crucial for understanding inferential processes, and looking at sociopragmatic issues such as the role of commitment, accountability and deniability of inferences in interpersonal communication. This Element highlights that the question of where the locus of meaning lies is not only relevant to pragmatic theory but is also of paramount importance for understanding and managing real-life interpersonal communication conflict.
In their capacity as language experts, interpreters are sometimes expected to deliver target texts that are better than their underlying source text, especially when the latter was produced by a speaker in a language that is not their L1. The spread of global English has given rise to ever more occasions when interpreters encounter non-L1 speakers of English as a lingua franca (ELF). The question as to whether or not interpreters try to
optimise those speakers’ input is addressed by applying Relevance Theory (RT) as a conceptual and methodological framework that helps to understand interpreters’ needs
or readiness to augment relevance for their audience. The paper builds on data from the larger project CLINT (Cognitive Load in Interpreting and Translation). The 56 renditions by all 28 professional interpreters participating in the project’s interpreting part of two original ELF speaker texts and their edited versions are analysed with a view to the enrichment processes undertaken by the interpreters. A comparison of the renditions of the
original versus edited versions of the two texts shows that interpreters do engage in such processes considerably more when rendering ELF texts, especially if they are technical in nature. Determining whether or not these interventions lead to actual cognitive effects in terms of information gains on the part of the audiences or to increased cognitive effort on the part of the interpreters requires additional comprehension testing and triangulation with other indicators of cognitive effort.
The aim of this paper is to shed some light on the linguistic concept of implicit offensiveness. On the one hand, implicitness will be juxtaposed with indirectness as the two concepts are not conceived of here as synonymous. On the other hand, a typology of offensiveness (vs offensive language and vs offendedness) will be proposed, as well as the overarching term ‘covert meaning’ that will span figurative implicitness and non-figurative implicitness. The gradability of various forms of covert meaning and its overlap with overt meaning (subsuming explicit literal meaning and implicit literal meaning) will also be discussed. In the analysis, two sample implicit concepts will be examined (irony vs sarcasm) based on corpus data (of general English and dedicated offensiveness corpus) and using non-contextual embeddings. Theory-wise, the paper demonstrates that implicitness is a complex term which is fuzzy and gradable; methodology-wise, it shows how computational tools can be used to attest theoretical assumptions related to offensive covert terms.
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