Publications

Publication details [#64276]

Publication type
Article in book
Publication language
English
Place, Publisher
John Benjamins

Annotation

Pragmatics has been oriented, from its philosophical origins (Austin 1962; Grice 1975), in a direction which has made truth-conditional meaning either part of the semantic meaning (Gazdar 1979), or placed it outside the scope of pragmatics. Austin cogently argued against the “descriptive illusion,” presenting an assay of the classical philosophical description of meaning (sense and reference) as “the act of ‘saying something’,” corresponding to what he calls the locutionary act (Austin 1962: 94), whereas the main meaning part of an utterance would be captured by the illocutionary act. Gazdar, an emblematic defender of a formal approach to pragmatics, popularized its scope by means of his famous compare: “PRAGMATICS = MEANING – TRUTH CONDITIONS” (Gazdar 1979: 2). This general contract about the lockout of truth-conditional meaning from the scope of pragmatics has been taken as a common hypothesis of the evolutions of pragmatics following Grice (Gazdar 1979; Horn 1984, 1989), with as its chief research field implicatures, and more specifically generalized conversational implicatures, even if things are less simple when one looks at Levinson’s (2000) method to generalized conversational implicatures, as debated in Huang (2014).This labour partition between semantics (truth-conditional meaning) and pragmatics (non-truth-conditional meaning) has clearly been obelized since the publication of Relevance by Sperber and Wilson (1986), who presented a notion between what is said (in the Gricean sense) and what is implicated, that is, what is explicated (explicature). As such, an explicature is the evolution of the logical form of the utterance, in other words, the full proposition taking truth-values as the result of an inferential and pragmatic process. This novel version of pragmatic meaning has occasioned full-grown pragmatic accounts, e.g. Carston (2002), who gave convincing arguments about the nature and function of explicit meaning. In parallel, but with other empirical and theoretical arguments, Recanati (2010) presented a version of what truth-conditional pragmatics could be by discerning two types of pragmatic processes: primary ones which are mandatory, and secondary ones which are optional.