Thoughts and Utterances

"This book serves to advance the status of pragmatics, as in addition to presenting a theory free from serious errors, it is also a good example of a methodologically sound book. I heavily applaud this volume - which places students on the right path and is also a rare example of scholarly eminence. I believe the author must have had many sleepless nights to finish it - now she can take her rest and enjoy the success and the praise she fully deserves." Linguistics "Challenges current philosophical approaches to pragmatics and makes a substantial contribution to cognitive pragmatic theories such as relevance theory." Moderna Sprak "The book brings together a wealth of empirical observations and new analyses and is impressive in breadth and depth. It is also one of the most detailed and powerful expositions of relevance theory and enriches the framework in considerable ways." Lingua"This long-awaited treatise is the best case ever made for relevance theory, and a most stimulating piece of work on the semantics/pragmatics interface. I enjoyed it enormously." Franois Recanati, Institut Jean-Nicod "You dont have to be a relevance theorist to appreciate Carstons challenge to influential Gricean views on the interaction of pragmatics with semantics. This book, with its breadth of coverage and depth of analysis, raises a good many questions and offers many good answers." Kent Bach, San Francisco State University "Robyn Carstons combination of meticulous scholarship with deep insight has led her to cast new light on the vexed distinction between semantics and pragmatics, to provide new analyses of a range of problems in linguistics and the philosophy of language, and to illuminate the relation between language and thought more generally. This elegantly written and original work is the best book on pragmatics for a generation." Neil Smith, University College London "The author directly tackles the by now central issue of the interface between semantics and pragmatics... and addresses such important theoretical problems, within all of pragmatics, as the distinction betwen explicit and implicit communication." Pragmatics "As is usual with excellent books, Carston's book leads us to think further deeply and raises a good many questions... this book takes a resolutely cognitive viewpoint, sheds a new light on the semantics/pragmatics interaction and succeeds in elucidating the roles of language and inferences in communication. i strongly recommend this book not only to pragmatists, of course, but also to everyone who is interested in human communication." Akiko Yoshimura, Nara Women's University, Studies in English Literature

Robyn Carston is Reader in Linguistics at University College London. She is co-editor of Relevance Theory: Applications and Implications (1998).

Acknowledgements ix Introduction 1 1 Pragmatics and Linguistic Underdeterminacy 15 1.1 Saying and Meaning 15 1.2 The Underdeterminacy Thesis 19 1.2.1 Sources of linguistic underdeterminacy 21 1.2.2 Underdeterminacy: essential or merely convenient? 28 1.3 Eternal Sentences and Effability 30 1.3.1 Eternal sentences and Platonism 31 1.3.2 Effability principles 32 1.3.3 Eternal reference? 37 1.3.4 Eternal predication? 39 1.4 Metarepresentation, Relevance and Pragmatic Inference 42 1.4.1 Mind-reading and ostension 42 1.4.2 Relevance and utterance understanding 44 1.5 Underdeterminacy, Truth Conditions and the Semantics/ Pragmatics Distinction 48 1.5.1 A truth-conditional semantics for natural language? 50 1.5.2 A translational semantics for natural language? 56 1.6 Radical Underdeterminacy and the Background 64 1.6.1 The Background 64 1.6.2 Radical underdeterminacy and expressibility 69 1.6.3 Radical underdeterminacy and semantic compositionality 70 1.7 Underdeterminacy of Thought? 74 1.7.1 Mentalese, pragmatics and compositional semantics 74 1.7.2 Mental indexicals and the mindworld connection 78 1.8 Summary 83 Notes 83 2 The Explicit/Implicit Distinction 94 2.1 Semantics/Pragmatics Distinction 95 2.1.1 Truth-conditional semantics and formal pragmatics 95 2.1.2 Semantic/pragmatic circles 96 2.2 Grice: Saying/Implicating 101 2.2.1 Odd statements but true 101 2.2.2 Contextual contributions to what is said 105 2.2.3 Implicature: conventional and conversational 107 2.2.4 Saying, meaning and making as if to say 114 2.3 Sperber and Wilson: Relevance-theoretic Distinctions 116 2.3.1 Explicature 116 2.3.2 Multiple speech acts and multiple logical forms 125 2.3.3 Implicature 134 2.3.4 Deriving explicatures and implicatures 142 2.3.5 Subsentential utterances, saying and explicating 152 2.3.6 Explicature and non-literalness 157 2.3.7 Blakemore: the conceptual/procedural distinction 160 2.4 Travis and Recanati: Enriched What is Said 164 2.4.1 Contextualist saying 164 2.4.2 Availability to intuitions 166 2.5 Bach: What is Said/Impliciture/Implicature 170 2.5.1 Impliciture vs. explicature 170 2.5.2 What is said and linguistic meaning 171 2.5.3 What is said and indexicality 177 2.5.4 Whats to be said about what is said? 182 2.6 Pragmatic Meaning: Enrichment or Implicature? 183 2.6.1 Minimalist principles 185 2.6.2 Functional independence 189 2.6.3 Embedding tests 191 2.7 Postscript: Hidden Indexicals or Free Enrichment? 197 2.8 Conclusion: From Generative Semantics to Pro-active Pragmatics 205 Notes 206 3 The Pragmatics of And-Conjunction 222 3.1 Preserving the Truth-functionality of And 222 3.2 A Relevance-based Pragmatics of Conjunction 226 3.2.1 Cognitive scripts and accessibility 226 3.2.2 Enrichment or implicature? 227 3.3 The Semantic Alternatives 228 3.4 Cognitive Fundamentals: Causality and Explanation 235 3.5 Relevance Relations and Units of Processing 242 3.5.1 The conjunction unit 242 3.5.2 Elaboration relations 246 3.6 Processing Effort and Iconicity 250 3.7 Residual Issues 253 3.7.1 Pragmatic enrichment or unrepresented Background? 253 3.7.2 The semantics of and and the logic of and 254 3.8 Conclusion: From Generalized Conversational Implicature to Propositional Enrichment 257 Notes 258 4 The Pragmatics of Negation 265 4.1 Some Data and Some Distinctions 266 4.1.1 The scope distinction 266 4.1.2 The representational distinction 267 4.2 Semantic Ambiguity Analyses 271 4.2.1 Lexical ambiguity and/or scope ambiguity? 271 4.2.2 Arguments against ambiguity 273 4.3 Strong Pragmatic Analyses 278 4.3.1 Analyses in the Gricean spirit 278 4.3.2 Grice: structural ambiguity and implicature 281 4.3.3 Sense-generality and implicature 284 4.3.4 Pragmatic narrowing of negation 288 4.4 Presupposition-cancell