This chapter discusses elements of communicative content that are not expressed by overt elements of a sentence. In the 1970s and 1980s, mostly inspired by the work of Grice, forms of ‘unexpressed elements of content’ not contemplated by linguistic theory of the time began to surface under a… read more
We do not always talk in complete sentences; we sometimes speak in “fragments”, such as ‘Fire!’, ‘Off with his head’, ‘From Cuba’, ‘Next!’, and ‘Shall we?’. Research has tended to focus on the ellipsis wars — the issue of whether all or most fragments are really sentential or not. Less effort has… read more
Grice proposed to investigate ‘the total signification of the utterance’. One persistent criticism of Grice’s taxonomy of signification is that he missed an important category of information. This content, and/or the process of providing it, goes by a variety of labels: ‘generalized implicature’,… read more
The idea that speaking a language is a rule‑ (or convention‑)governed form of behavior goes back at least to Wittgenstein’s language-game analogy, and can be found most prominently in the work of Searle and Alston. Both theorists have a conception of illocutionary rules as putting illocutionary… read more
Recanati (2004), Literal Meaning argues against what he calls “literalism” and for what he calls “contextualism”. He considers a wide spectrum of positions and arguments from relevance theory to hidden variables theory. In the end, however, he seems to hold that semantic and pragmatic theorizing… read more
Modules, as Marr (1982) and Fodor (1983) conceive of them, lie between sensory and central processes. Modules have the functional property of representing that portion of the world which turns them on, and nine non-functional or structural properties that facilitate carrying out that function.… read more