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Article published In:
Language and Linguistics
Vol. 19:1 (2018) ► pp.1–31

Unarticulated constituents and neo-Gricean pragmatics

| The University of Auckland

In recent years, the concept of unarticulated constitutes has generated a fierce debate both in the philosophy of language and in linguistic semantics and pragmatics. By unarticulated constituent is meant a propositional (or conceptual) constituent of a sentence that is communicated by the speaker in uttering that sentence, but is not linguistically represented in that uttered sentence. The main aim of this article is to provide a neo-Gricean pragmatic analysis of unarticulated constituents, showing that the current existing mechanism of neo-Gricean pragmatic theory can handle unarticulated constituents in a straightforward and elegant way. Second, I defend the neo-Gricean position that the pragmatic enrichment of unarticulated constituents is nothing but a neo-Gricean, pre-semantic conversational implicature. And third and finally, I briefly evaluate an alternative, formal syntactico-semantic analysis of unarticulated constituents.

Keywords: unarticulated constituent, neo-Gricean pragmatics, pragmatic enrichment, pre-semantic conversational implicature, hidden indexical analysis
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.What is an unarticulated constituent?
    • 2.1Linguistic underdeterminacy
    • 2.2What is an unarticulated constituent?
    • 2.3Some representative examples
    • 2.4Two types of proposition with unarticulated constituents
      • Type (i)Propositions that need to be completed
      • Type (ii)Propositions that need to be expanded
  • 3.A formal syntactico-semantic account of unarticulated constituents
  • 4.A neo-Gricean pragmatic analysis of unarticulated constituents
    • 4.1Classic Gricean pragmatics
    • 4.2Horn’s bipartite neo-Gricean model
    • 4.3Levinson’s trinitarian neo-Gricean pragmatic model
    • 4.4Unarticulated constituents in neo-Gricean pragmatics
      • Type (i) propositions
      • Type (ii) propositions
  • 5.Pragmatic enrichment of unarticulated constituents: Explicature, the pragmatically enriched said, conversational impliciture or conversational implicature?
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 5 January 2018
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https://doi.org/10.1075/lali.00001.hua
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