Reflection: On saying

One key question facing the Gricean notion of what is said is just how literal Grice envisaged it to be. Consider the following excerpt from the movie Chicken Little:

Here Chicken Little is responding to an accusation about the chaos he has caused by (falsely) raising an alarm that the sky is falling. His response is nonsensical, but that doesn’t stop the mayor repeating back verbatim what Chicken Little has said when asked by the mob leader. A number of scholars have noted that saying in English encompasses at least two different senses (Bach 2001, 2012; Burton-Roberts 2010):

In the example above, the mayor interprets say as the act of uttering (say1). We might have expected, however, that the mayor would interpret this as asking about what Chicken Little had meant (say2) through his prior utterance.

Both the first and second senses of say are important for the analysis of pragmatic meaning from the perspective of users of English (see Bach 2012, for further discussion). A question that is not often considered, however, is whether such distinctions, which are commonly made in English, are as equally useful for examining pragmatic meaning in other languages (at least in the sense of being intuitively accessible to speakers of that language).