Exploding explicatures

Borg, E. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2725-9568 (2015) Exploding explicatures. Mind and Language, 31 (3). pp. 335-355. ISSN 1468-0017 doi: 10.1111/mila.12109

Abstract/Summary

‘Pragmaticist’ positions posit a three-way division within utterance content between: (i) the standing meaning of the sentence, (ii) a somewhat pragmatically enhanced meaning which captures what the speaker explicitly conveys (following Sperber and Wilson 1986, I label this the ‘explicature’), and (iii) further indirectly conveyed propositions which the speaker merely implies. Here I re-examine the notion of an explicature, asking how it is defined and what work explicatures are supposed to do. I argue that explicatures get defined in three different ways and that these distinct definitions can and do pull apart. Thus the notion of an explicature turns out to be ill-defined.

Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/40443
Identification Number/DOI	10.1111/mila.12109
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Interdisciplinary Research Centres (IDRCs) > Centre for Literacy and Multilingualism (CeLM) Interdisciplinary Research Centres (IDRCs) > Centre for Cognition Research (CCR) Arts, Humanities and Social Science > School of Humanities > Philosophy
Publisher	Wiley-Blackwell
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