Relevance Theory and the SayingImplicating Distinction.pdf

Relevance Theory and the Saying/Implicating Distinction

Robyn Carston

University College London

1. Introduction

It is widely accepted that there is a distinction to be made between the explicit content

and the implicit import of an utterance. There is much less agreement about the precise

nature of this distinction, how it is to be drawn, and whether any such two-way

distinction can do justice to the levels and kinds of meaning involved in utterance

interpretation. Grice’s distinction between what is said by an utterance and what is

implicated is probably the best known instantiation of the explicit/implicit distinction.

His distinction, along with many of its post-Gricean heirs, is closely entwined with

another distinction: that between semantics and pragmatics. Indeed, on some construals

they are seen as essentially one and the same; “what is said” is equated with the truth-

conditional content of the utterance which in turn is equated with (context-relative)

sentence meaning, leaving implicatures (conventional and conversational) as the sole

domain of pragmatics.

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

relevance-theoretic 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 chapter notwithstanding, the terms “saying” and “what is said” do

not feature in relevance theory, and the territory covered by the concept of explicature is

significantly different from that of Grice’s notion of “what is said” and other semantically

oriented notions of saying. Necessarily, these differences entail corresponding

differences in those aspects of utterance meaning that are taken to fall under the concept

of implicature in the two frameworks. Some of what are taken to be conversational

implicatures on Gricean accounts, specifically certain cases of “generalized”

conversational implicatures, turn out to be pragmatic aspects of explicature. 1

The structure of the chapter is as follows. After a brief general discussion of the

relevance-theoretic distinction between explicature and implicature, I look at some of the

different ways in which pragmatic inference may contribute to explicated assumptions

(explicatures), at the conception of implicated assumptions (implicatures) that follows

from this, and at the nature of the relevance-driven processes of inferring these

assumptions. The consequence mentioned above, that certain Gricean implicatures are

reanalysed as explicatures, is considered in section 6. Lastly, I compare the

explicature/implicature distinction with some of the other ways of construing an

explicit/implicit distinction, most of which are geared towards preserving a conception of

“what is said” which is as close as possible to the semantics of the linguistic expression

used.

2. Decoding/inferring and the explicature/implicature distinction

There are two distinctions which are central to the relevance-based account of utterance

understanding. The first is the distinction between linguistically decoded meaning and

pragmatically inferred meaning. This can be viewed as a semantics/pragmatics

distinction though it is plainly not the only way, nor the most common way, of making

such a distinction (for surveys of different ways of drawing the semantics/pragmatics

distinction, see Bach 1997 and Carston 1999). Here “semantics” is a mapping between

elements of linguistic form and certain kinds of cognitive information, rather than

between linguistic expressions and truth conditions or real world referents. It is type-

rather than token-based in that it is context-free and invariant, entirely determined by

principles and rules internal to the linguistic system. The “semantic” representation so

generated provides input to the pragmatic processor which is triggered by ostensive

stimuli generally, that is, stimuli that are construed as indicating a communicative

intention on the part of the agent who produced them. This system has wide access to

extra-linguistic “contextual” information, including information gained from any

perceptual inlet and from memory stores of various sorts. While the linguistic processor,

or parser, employs a code (a natural language), the pragmatic processor does not. It is

said to be “inferential” in that its deliverances (the set of assumptions that are derived as

those communicated) are not determined by fixed rules, but merely guided and

constrained by a single comprehension strategy (the relevance-theoretic procedure

discussed in Wilson, this volume), so its output in any given instance is dependent on

such variable factors as the different degrees of accessibility of candidate interpretations. 2

The second distinction, the focal one for this chapter, concerns the two kinds of

assumption communicated by a speaker: EXPLICATURE and IMPLICATURE . Sperber &

Wilson’s (1986/95: 182) definitions are as follows:

(I)

An assumption communicated by an utterance U is EXPLICIT [hence an

“explicature”] if and only if it is a development of a logical form encoded by U.

[Note: in cases of ambiguity, a surface form encodes more than one logical form,

hence the use of the indefinite here, “ a logical form encoded by U”.]

(II)

An assumption communicated by U which is not explicit is IMPLICIT [hence an

“implicature”].

Let’s consider a simple example:

(1)

How is Mary feeling after her first year at university?

She didn’t get enough units and can’t continue.

Suppose that, in the particular context, X takes Y to have communicated the following

assumptions:

(2)

M ARY X DID NOT PASS ENOUGH UNIVERSITY COURSE UNITS TO QUALIFY FOR

ADMISSION TO SECOND YEAR STUDY AND , AS A RESULT , M ARY X CANNOT

CONTINUE WITH UNIVERSITY STUDY .

M ARY X IS NOT FEELING VERY HAPPY .

[Note: Small caps are used throughout to distinguish propositions/assumptions/

thoughts from natural language sentences; the subscripted x indicates that a

particular referent has been assigned to the name ‘Mary’.]

On the basis of the definitions above, it seems relatively clear that (2a) is an explicature

of Y’s utterance and (2b) is an implicature. The decoded logical form of Y’s utterance,

still more or less visible in (2a), has been taken as a template for the development of a

propositional form, while (2b) is an independent assumption, inferred as a whole from

(2a) and a further premise concerning the relation between Mary’s recent failure at

university and her current state of mind.

The representation in (2a) is much more specific and elaborated than the encoded

meaning of the sentence type “She didn’t get enough units and can’t continue”, which

could be developed in any number of quite different ways, depending on context. A

referent has been assigned to the pronoun (a concept of a particular person represented

here as M ARY X ), get and units have been assigned more specific meanings than those they

encode, additional conceptual constituents have been supplied as arguments of enough

and continue, and a cause-consequence connection has been taken to hold between the

conjuncts. These are all the result of pragmatic processes, context-dependent and

relevance-governed. I separate out some of these different processes and consider them

in more individual detail in the next section.

It is clear from the definitions above that the conceptual content of an implicature

is supplied wholly by pragmatic inference 3 while the conceptual content of an explicature

is an amalgam of decoded linguistic meaning and pragmatically inferred meaning. It

follows that different token explicatures which have the same propositional content may

vary with regard to the relative contributions made by each of these processes. The

greater the element of encoding, the more explicit the explicature. Consider the linguistic

expressions in (3), each of which could be uttered in a different context to communicate

one and the same explicature:

(3)

Mary Jones put the book by Chomsky on the top shelf in her study.

Mary put the book on the top shelf.

She put it there.

On the top shelf.

Clearly, (3c) and (3d) leave a good deal more to pragmatic inference than (3b), which in

turn is less explicit than (3a). It follows from the relevance-driven view of pragmatic

inference, as discussed by Wilson & Sperber (this volume), that the linguistically

encoded element of an utterance is not generally geared towards achieving as high a

degree of explicitness as possible. Taking account of the addressee’s immediately

accessible assumptions and the inferences he can readily draw, the speaker should encode

just what is necessary to ensure that the pragmatic processor arrives as effortlessly as

possible at the intended meaning. So, in many contexts, an utterance of the highly

indexical sentence in (3c), or of the subsentential expression in (3d), will be more

appropriate than either of the more elaborated ones.

The idea that linguistically encoded meaning is standardly highly

underdetermining of the proposition explicitly expressed by an utterance distinguishes

this view from Gricean conceptions of “what is said” by an utterance. 4 In fact, neither of

the distinctions discussed in this section meshes with the traditional saying/implicating

distinction: on the one hand, the meaning encoded in linguistic expression types falls

short of “what is said” and, on the other hand, the content of explicatures goes well

beyond “what is said”, requiring for its recovery the exercise of pragmatic principles, just

as much as implicatures do. 5 “What is said”, then, falls somewhere between the two.

Whether or not such an intermediate representational level is necessary is considered in

section 7.

3. Pragmatic aspects of explicature

3.1 Disambiguation and saturation

I put these two apparently rather different processes together in a single section because,

unlike the others to be discussed, there is general agreement that they play a crucial role

in determining the explicit content of an utterance. In his brief discussion of “what is

said” by an utterance of the sentence “He is in the grip of a vice”, Grice (1975: 44)

explicitly mentions the need for a choice between the two senses of the phrase in the grip

of a vice and for the identification of the referent of he . In the case of sense selection (or

disambiguation), the candidates are supplied by the linguistic system itself. In the case of

reference assignment, the paradigm case of saturation, the candidates are not

linguistically given but, rather, the linguistic element used, for instance, a pronoun,

indicates that an appropriate contextual value is to be found, that is, that a given position

in the logical form is to be saturated; see Recanati (1993, 2001) on this notion of

saturation.

Saturation is generally thought to be a much more widely manifest process than

simply finding values for overt indexicals. Arguably, it is involved in those pragmatic

developments of the logical forms of the following utterances which provide answers to

the bracketed questions:

(4)

Paracetamol is better.

[than what?]

It’s the same.

[as what?]

He is too young.

[for what?]

It’s hot enough.

[for what?]

I like Sally’s shoes.

[shoes in what relation to Sally?]

This ‘completion’ process is obligatory on every communicative use of these sentences,

since without it there is no propositional form, nothing that can be understood as the

explicit content of the utterance. So, although there is no overt pronounced constituent in

these sentences which indicates the need for contextual instantiation, the claim is that

there is a slot in their logical form, a kind of covert indexical, which marks the saturation

requirement. The lexical items better, same, too, enough and the genitive structure in

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