What is Said and What is Infra-Said

What is Said and What is Infra-Said argues for a fundamental re-evaluation of the distinction between semantics and pragmatics in linguistic theory, highlighting the limitations of the prevalent view that sentences possess context-free propositional meanings. Traditional approaches in pragmatics concentrate on content inferred after a sentence's basic propositional meaning - commonly known as 'what is said' - has been processed. Relevance Theory is argued to open up the domain of the 'infra-said,' i.e. of pre-propositional content not determined by the Logical Form (LF) of a sentence. LF is the output of the syntax according to Generative Grammar, often presented as the core determinant of truth-conditions. Patrick Duffley critiques LF for two questionable assumptions: that sentences have stable, context-free meanings, and that their syntactic structures are constructed autonomously from meaning.The book thus challenges the idea that sentences are self-contained objects with intrinsic, context-independent meanings generated and interpreted solely by their internal syntactic configurations. Real-world usage, it argues, is highly context-dependent, casting doubt on the very existence of decontextualized meanings for sentences. The traditional starting-point of taking the sentence as the basic unit for semantic analysis is shown to obscure the genuine relationship between linguistic signs and their meanings, pushing linguists toward inappropriate reliance on propositional logic. Instead, the book advocates rebuilding semantic analysis from the 'ground up,' focusing on meaning stably and explicitly encoded by linguistic signs or stable sign-configurations. All elements of meaning not grounded in explicit linguistic form should, by this approach, be categorized as pragmatic.This redefinition of linguistic semantics has far-reaching methodological implications: semantics (what is said) is defined strictly as that which is explicitly and stably linked to linguistic form, while pragmatics (what is ultra-said and infra-said) encompasses a wide variety of contextual factors, world-knowledge and discourse background. Patrick Duffley argues that drawing the semantics-pragmatics boundary properly demands, rather than reliance on abstract logical or syntactic postulates, extensive empirical research into the actual uses of linguistic signs to separate out what they signify from what is contributed by contextual factors.