On Three Theories of Implicature: Default Theory, Relevance Theory and Minimalism

Abstract

Paul Grice’s distinction between what is said by a sentence and what is implicated by an utterance of that sentence is, of course, extremely familiar. It is also almost universally accepted. However, in recent literature, the precise account he offered of implicature recovery has been questioned and alternative accounts, emerging from different semantic programmes, have emerged. In this chapter, I would like to examine three such alternative accounts. My main aim is to show that the two most popular accounts in the current literature (the default inference view and the relevance-theoretic approach) still face significant problems. If this is right then there is a reason to look for a third alternative and in conclusion I’ll suggest that it is the approach emerging from so-called semantic minimalism which is best placed to accommodate Grice’s fundamental distinction between what a sentence means and what utterances of it implicate.

Versions of this chapter were presented at a workshop on minimal semantics at the University of Valladolid, Spain, the 9th International Pragmatics Association conference in Italy, the Centre for Linguistics, Philology, and Phonetics in Oxford, Glasgow University, and Trinity College Dublin. I’m grateful to the audiences on those occasions, particularly Robyn Carston and Jim Levine, for comments. Thanks also to Kent Bach, Larry Horn and an anonymous reader for very useful comments on draft versions of the chapter. This contribution was completed during an AHRC research leave award.