Book contents
- Linguistics Meets Philosophy
- Linguistics Meets Philosophy
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors
- Linguistics Meets Philosophy: A Historical Preface
- Introduction
- Part I Reporting and Ascribing
- Part II Describing and Referring
- Part III Narrating and Structuring
- Part IV Locating and Inferring
- Part V Typologizing and Ontologizing
- Part VI Determining and Questioning
- Part VII Arguing and Rejecting
- Part VIII Implying and (Pre)supposing
- 15 Implicatures
- 16 Presuppositions
- 17 Modals and Conditionals
- Index
- References
15 - Implicatures
from Part VIII - Implying and (Pre)supposing
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 October 2022
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Edited by
Book contents
- Linguistics Meets Philosophy
- Linguistics Meets Philosophy
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors
- Linguistics Meets Philosophy: A Historical Preface
- Introduction
- Part I Reporting and Ascribing
- Part II Describing and Referring
- Part III Narrating and Structuring
- Part IV Locating and Inferring
- Part V Typologizing and Ontologizing
- Part VI Determining and Questioning
- Part VII Arguing and Rejecting
- Part VIII Implying and (Pre)supposing
- 15 Implicatures
- 16 Presuppositions
- 17 Modals and Conditionals
- Index
- References
Summary
In a seminal contribution, Paul Grice took what he called the ‘total signification of an utterance’ (i.e. the complete content someone communicates by a linguistic signal) and divided it in two, distinguishing between ‘what the speaker says’ versus ‘what the speaker implies’. However, recent developments have served to throw doubt on Grice’s taxonomy, with both sides of his divide coming under fire. I examine these challenges to Grice’s framework, but argue that they do not show that Grice’s notion of implicature is ill-founded, nor that his ’favoured sense’ of what is said is unnecessary. What they do serve to highlight is a peculiar tension in Grice’s original account. For it seems Grice merged two distinct features when defining what the speaker says versus what the speaker implicates: the idea of a content dictated by word meaning and structure alone, on the one hand, and the idea of an asserted or directly expressed proposition on the other. Yet once we resolve this tension it is possible to deliver an account of the total signification of an utterance which is both (fairly) faithful to Grice’s original account and which is able to do a great deal of explanatory work.
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- Linguistics Meets Philosophy , pp. 441 - 469Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022
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