Abstract
It is now widely recognized that there is a middle ground between being literal and fully explicit in meaning something and merely implicating it. In this case what the speaker means is, unlike implicature, an enrichment of the semantic content of the uttered sentence. The hearer needs to recognize that this semantic content includes only part of what the speaker could mean, either because it falls short of comprising a proposition or because the proposition it does comprise is not specific enough to be what the speaker could plausibly be supposed to mean. The speaker intends to communicate, depending on the case, either a completion or an expansion of the semantic content. Depraetere & Salkie propose a novel conception of this distinction, on which disambiguation counts as a case of completion and resolving semantic underspecification counts as expansion (free pragmatic enrichment). Although their approach makes sense from the standpoint of the hearer’s task of figuring out what a speaker means, I will suggest that the completion/expansion distinction as well as several important subordinate distinctions should be understood more abstractly, as different relations between what the speaker means and the semantic content of the uttered sentence.
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- 1.
Unless otherwise indicated, I will use she for the speaker and he for the hearer, meaning the addressee, the person(s) to whom the utterance is directed. Also, like Depraetere & Salkie I will make the simplifying assumption throughout that utterances are of sentences, indeed declarative ones.
- 2.
Whether the proposition meant by the speaker is an implicature or merely an enrichment, it is misleading to say, as D&S do, that “the hearer needs to infer this proposition” (p. 12). To understand the speaker’s utterance the hearer does not need to infer this proposition but merely that the speaker means it. Identifying what the speaker means does not require buying into it.
- 3.
I am idealizing here, since I don’t suppose for a moment that speakers have to know before beginning a sentence what they will next attempt to communicate, never mind just what that sentence is going to be. Similarly, like D&S I reject the “sequential model” of the hearer’s process of inference. Yes, “it seems clear that the processes involved are concurrent” (p. 30).
- 4.
D&S add, “Carston and Recanati, on the other hand, use the verbs to saturate, to modulate and to (pragmatically) enrich to refer to inferential processes as part of utterance interpretation.”
- 5.
Whereas D&S “assume that meaning in context [of a declarative sentence] needs to be propositional – that is, truth-evaluable” (p. 30), I do not assume that, since for me the meaning of a sentence even in context, i.e., as the speaker intends to be using it, may fall short of what the speaker means in using it. So even if the latter is a proposition, the former need not be.
- 6.
Although I formerly characterized completion and expansion as processes (see the passage from Bach 1994 that D&S quote on p. 14), I did not think of them as inferential processes. Rather, I thought of them as abstract operations which, reflecting the speaker’s communicative intention, turn the semantic content of a sentence into a more elaborate, communicated content (an enrichment). To avoid confusion, I have since tried to avoid using the word process for these operations, since that word is commonly used for hearers’ inferences, as in the passages from Recanati and Carston that D&S quote in their §2.2.
- 7.
Note that D&S use what is communicated in a success-neutral way (it is roughly equivalent to my what the speaker means). That is, what is communicated in their sense may or may not be communicated successfully, depending on whether or not it the hearer gets it right.
- 8.
I say ‘generally’ because, for example, verbs like run, drag, and break have different intransitive and transitive meanings.
- 9.
See Bach 2012, the online version of which is entitled ‘Context dependence (such as it is)’: http://online.sfsu.edu/kbach/Bach.ContextDependence.pdf
- 10.
- 11.
See Bach 2000, 2001: §5 and 2012: §2.3, and references in them for discussion of examples illustrating the difficulty of answering such questions. In the case of Roger is ready, my inclination is to suppose that it differs from Roger is angry and Roger is happy simply because one can be just plain angry or just plain happy, but not just plain ready.
- 12.
D&S do not discuss modal adjectives, exemplified by possible and necessary. One might argue that these two adjectives are not polysemous but semantically underspecified, on the grounds that they need to be modified by an adverb like logically, metaphysically, physically, epistemically, or legally in order for a particular modality to be semantically expressed.
- 13.
I can’t resist making some observations about the word aunt, whose meaning, as D&S note, covers different kinship relations (p. 22). The four relations they mention – father’s sister, mother’s sister, wife of father’s brother, and wife of mother’s brother – can be consolidated into two: parent’s sister and parent’s brother’s wife. Indeed, in order to accommodate same-sex marriage, the latter needs to be broadened into parent’s sibling’s wife. For this relation English could, but doesn’t, have the term aunt-in-law. If it did, we’d expect aunt to be confined to parent’s sister. And whereas English has sibling to cover brothers and sisters and parent to cover mothers and fathers, it has no lexical item that covers aunts and uncles. It does have cousin to cover their children, but no pair of lexical items to distinguish male and female cousins.
- 14.
I am continuing to make, as do D&S, the simplifying assumption that utterances are of sentences. The discussion has been further restricted to utterances of declarative sentences.
- 15.
As indicated earlier, there is considerable disagreement among philosophers about which kinds of expressions have variable contents and/or have covert variables associated with them. See Bach 2012 for examples and discussion.
- 16.
Worth mentioning is the case of deliberate ambiguity, exemplified by many puns, in which at least two senses are operative.
- 17.
For much more on this theme see Bach 2013.
References
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Bach, K. (2000). Quantification, qualification, and context: A reply to Stanley and Szabo. Mind & Language, 15, 262–283.
Bach, K. (2001). You don’t say? Synthese, 128, 15–44.
Bach, K. (2005). Context ex machina. In Z. Szabó (Ed.), Semantics vs pragmatics (pp. 15–44). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bach, K. (2012). Context dependence. In M. García-Carpintero & M. Kölbel (Eds.), The Bloomsbury (formerly Continuum) companion to the philosophy of language (pp. 153–184). London: Bloomsbury.
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Recanati, F. (2004). Literal meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Bach, K. (2017). Drawing More Lines: Response to Depraetere and Salkie. In: Depraetere, I., Salkie, R. (eds) Semantics and Pragmatics: Drawing a Line. Logic, Argumentation & Reasoning, vol 11. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32247-6_3
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