‘Free’ Enrichment and the Nature of Pragmatic Constraints

Abstract

The contextualist approach to utterance interpretation posits processes of “free” pragmatic enrichment that supply unarticulated constituents of the explicit content of utterances. While this proposal is faithful to our intuitions about the truth conditions of utterances, and accommodates the optionality of these pragmatic effects, there remains a doubt about whether contextualism can account in any principled way for what pragmatically derived material enters into explicit content, and what does not. This gap in the theory leads to objections that the putative process of pragmatic enrichment would massively overgenerate interpretations of utterances, having no way to exclude from explicit content elements of meaning that are truth-conditionally irrelevant. Here I discuss how a derivational account can sort explicit content from implicatures, where the former is a result of “developing” the linguistically-encoded form, while implicatures are entirely inferred, from fully propositional premises. Using the idea that enrichment is constrained to the minimum necessary to inferentially warrant the implications of the utterance, I show how the derivational account can address existing examples of alleged overgeneration, and that these rest on a failure to properly appreciate that the occurrence of such “free” pragmatic processes depends on the details of the particular context in which the utterance was tokened. I conclude with a discussion of what kind of systematicity should be expected from an account of processes whose outcome is inevitably context-specific.

3. Implicature and explicature

“…Stanley's question, then, is what prevents that same pragmatic process from supplying the constituent [OR DUTCHMAN] so that the utterance is predicted (wrongly) to communicate the proposition in (18c) in a context in which it would be relevant. Similarly, free enrichment should enable, he says, an utterance of the sentence in (19a), in a context in which it is common ground that John likes his mother, to communicate the explicature in (19b), which, however, it clearly does not: (18) This overgeneration objection is potentially serious and it has been addressed in some detail by Hall (2008aHall ( , 2008bHall ( , 2009, who sets out to show that a relevancetheoretic account of free pragmatic enrichment would not make the alleged predictions. We cannot review the arguments here (though the distinction we make in section 5.2. between local and global processes is relevant to the issue), but what emerges clearly from Hall's discussion is that when proper attention is given to the nature of the principles and processes at work in pragmatics, 'free' enrichment is in fact quite tightly constrained.…”

Polysemy: Pragmatics and sense conventions

“…22 22 For detailed arguments in favour of this position, see Sperber and Wilson (1986/1995), Carston (1988, 2002), Recanati (2010), and Hall (2014). The opposition case is put by Borg (2004) and Devitt (2013a, 2013b, 2020), among others. …”

Explicit Communication: An Interest and Belief-Based Model

“…There is also lively debate within pragmatics which treats and extends the previous issues: for instance, "what is said" vs. explicature, associative vs. inferential method, primary and secondary pragmatic processes, topdown vs. bottom-up processes, explicature vs. impliciture, ad hoc concepts construction, mutual adjustment, backward/forward inference, meta-representations in communication, radical vs. moderate contextualism, etc. Wilson, 1986, 2002;Levinson, 2000;Bezuidenhout, 2002;Recanati, 2007Recanati, , 2010Recanati, , 2012Carston, 2002Carston, , 2007Carston, , 2009Wilson and Carston, 2007;Bach, 2010;Mazzone, 2011;Wilson and Sperber, 2012;Carston and Hall, 2012;Belleri, 2013;Hall, 2014). This article will pay especial attention to the truth-conditional pragmatics of Recanati (2010) and the inferential approach to communication of Sperber and Wilson's (2012) relevance theory.…”