Publications

Publication details [#57064]

Feng, Guangwu. 2013. Speaker’s meaning and non-cancellability. Pragmatics & Cognition 21 (1) : 117–138.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Place, Publisher
John Benjamins
Journal DOI
10.1075/pc

Annotation

This article intends to reveal the unity between intention and other Gricean notions of signification, cancellability, and context. It argues that the total signification of an utterance is ultimately determined by speaker’s intention. It starts with Grice’s conception of meaningNN and then proceeds to argue that what is actually meant (both what is said and what is implicated) is hard to cancel without rendering the whole utterance self-contradictory. It is noted that cancelling p be differentiated from correcting p. It is also noted that contextual factors do not bear upon implicatures though a hearer or an analyst relies heavily on them for inference or interpretation. It is suggested that any Gricean account of meaning be ontologically clear that it is the speaker’s intention that we are really invoking and consequently capture the metaphysics of meaning in order to remove the fallacy that the meaning of an utterance is its interpretation.