Writing Letters in the Age of Grice [chapter]

Claudia Bianchi
2013 Perspectives on Pragmatics and Philosophy  
This article aims to investigate the notion of implicature and its connections with speaker's intentions, communicative responsibility and normativity. Some scholars stress the normative character of conversational implicatures more than their psychological dimension. In a normative perspective, conversational implicatures don't correspond to what the speaker intends to implicate, but should be interpreted as enriching or correcting inferences licensed by the text. My paper aims to show that
more » ... idea of an implicature that the speaker does not intend to convey is not persuasive. In Grice's theory conversational implicatures are speaker-meant: this means that inferences derived by the addressee but not intended by the speaker should not count as conversational implicatures. On the contrary, I will claim that propositions intended by the speaker and not recognised by the addressee should count as implicatures, if the speaker has made her communicative intention available to her audience. Grice: what is said and what is implicated As is well known, Grice distinguishes between "what is said" and "what is implicated" -between the proposition expressed by an utterance (the truth-conditions of the sentence uttered) and the implicit meaning of the utterance, "what is implicated" by a speaker using a sentence in a given context -an inference licensed in context, and which cannot be identified with logical implication, logical consequence or entailment (inferences derived solely from semantic content). 2 According to Grice, if someone asks S how Tom is getting on in his job, and S utters (1) Tom likes his colleagues and hasn't been to prison yet, she is only implying -and not saying -that Tom is the sort of person likely to yield to the temptation provided by his occupation. 3
doi:10.1007/978-3-319-01011-3_8 fatcat:nullmvwquzepjifpnzrju3i2yq