Relevance Theory and the Saying/Implicating Distinction

Abstract

A distinction between saying and implicating has held a central place in pragmatic s since Grice, with 'what is said' usually equated with the (context-relative) semantic content of an utterance. In relevance theory, a distinction is made between two kinds of communicated assumptions, explicatures and implicatures, with explicatures defined as pragmatic developments of encoded linguistic meaning. It is argued here that, given a context-free semantics for linguistic expression types, together with the explicature/implicature distinction, there is no role for any minimally propositional notion of 'what is said'. Robyn Carston1 I leave aside here any discussion of the Gricean notion of 'conventional implicature', a category which simply does not arise within Relevance theory and which is currently seen, across various pragmatic frameworks, to be in need of radical reworking. For instance, relevance theorists have reanalysed most of the linguistic devices allegedly generating conventional implicatures as encoding procedural constraints on the inferential processes involved in deriving conversational implicatures (see, for instance, Blakemore (1987), ( 2000), (forthcoming), and Iten ( 2000)) . Bach (1999), on the other hand, sees certain of these devices as contributing to 'what is said', where this is construed as an entirely semantic notion (see discussion of his concept of 'what is said' in section 7 of this paper). Note that, on both of these very different accounts, the phenomenon at issue is treated as falling on the semantic side of a semantics/pragmatics distinction. This is emphatically not how the explicit/implicit distinction is drawn within the relevance-theoretic account of utterance understanding, a basic difference being that pragmatic processes play an essential role on both sides of the distinction. The relevancetheoretic account is rooted in a view of human cognitive architecture according to which linguistic semantics is the output of a modular linguistic decoding system and serves as input to a pragmatic processor. This 'semantic' representation (or logical form) is typically not fully propositional, so does not have a determinate truth condition, but consists of an incomplete conceptual representation which functions as a schema or template for the pragmatic construction of propositional forms. The pragmatic system is in the business of inferring the intended interpretation (or 'what has been communicated'); this is a set of propositional conceptual representations, some of which are developments of the linguistically provided template and others of which are not. The former are called 'explicatures', the latter 'implicatures'; this is the explicit/implicit distinction made within relevance theory and it plainly does not coincide with the distinction between linguistically decoded meaning ('semantics') and pragmatically inferred meaning.The title of this paper notwithstanding, the terms 'saying' and 'what is said' do not feature in relevance theory, and the territory covered by the concept of expl...

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