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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
‘There is a kind of eloquence’, maintained St Augustine,
which is manifestly inspired by God. Biblical writers have spoken with this kind of eloquence. … ‘On the other hand’ they have uttered some passages with a beneficial and salutary obscurity (salubris obscuritas), to exercise and, in a sense, to polish the minds of their readers, to break down aversions and spur on the zeal of those who are anxious to learn, as well as to conceal the meaning from the minds of the impious. (Augustine 1947: IV.6.9; IV.8.22, with one amendment to the translation)
1 Such integration may also help resolve some well-known difficulties with the analysis of implicature. Grice's insufficiently nuanced account of what it is to ‘say’, as distinct from to ‘implicate’, something (see, for example, Travis 1991) can be greatly enriched by use of Ross's account of linguistic inertia anchored by benchmarks. This account also provides a notion of initial context rather more plausible than the assumption of initially undifferentiated data which underlies Sperber and Wilson's ‘Principle of Relevance’, in terms of which they attempt to unify Grice's Principles of Conversation and to grade the strength of implicatures (Sperber and Wilson 1986: 46–50, 123–132; see also Cooper 1991: 6).