Between what is said and what is implicated

While a speaker can mean both what is said and what is implicated, Grice’s main focus in theorizing meaning nn, as we have seen, was on what is implicated. He thus left what is said as something for those working in semantics to deal with. However, the assumption that speaker meaning is exhausted by Grice’s notion of what is said and what is implicated has been challenged by subsequent work where it has been argued that pragmatics is, in fact, required in order to account for what is taken to be said. In other words, a complex layer of pragmatic meaning representation has been found to lie between Grice’s minimalist notion of what is said and particularized conversational implicatures. At the risk of gross oversimplification, the various developments of pragmatic meaning representations can be roughly grouped into two schools. On the one hand, we have the so-called neo-Griceans who have expanded upon and further developed Grice’s original distinction between what is said and what is implicated.

They have emphasized the role of general expectations in relation to implicatures, focusing, in particular, on developing a more detailed account of generalized conversational implicatures. Neo-Gricean work has also tended towards a defence of a literalist notion of what is said, thereby maintaining a firmer boundary with semantics. On the other hand, post-Griceans, in particular Relevance theorists, have argued that we need a pragmatically enriched or contextualist notion of what is said, thereby abandoning Grice’s essentially syntactically-constrained conceptualization. They have focused on offering a detailed account of these pragmatic enrichments of what is said, leading to a much more looser boundary between the treatment of meaning representations in semantics and pragmatics. Another notable feature of post-Gricean approaches to pragmatic meaning is the shift away from a (neo-)Gricean focus on what a speaker intends to mean to a focus on how hearers figure out what speakers are meaning.