Thoughts and Utterances

Robyn Carston is Reader in Linguistics at University College London. She is co-editor of Relevance Theory: Applications and Implications (1998).

• Acknowledgements ixIntroduction 11 Pragmatics and Linguistic Underdeterminacy 151.1 Saying and Meaning 151.2 The Underdeterminacy Thesis 191.2.1 Sources of linguistic underdeterminacy 211.2.2 Underdeterminacy: essential or merely convenient? 281.3 Eternal Sentences and Effability 301.3.1 Eternal sentences and Platonism 311.3.2 Effability principles 321.3.3 Eternal reference? 371.3.4 Eternal predication? 391.4 Metarepresentation, Relevance and Pragmatic Inference 421.4.1 Mind-reading and ostension 421.4.2 Relevance and utterance understanding 441.5 Underdeterminacy, Truth Conditions and the Semantics/ Pragmatics Distinction 481.5.1 A truth-conditional semantics for natural language? 501.5.2 A translational semantics for natural language? 561.6 Radical Underdeterminacy and the Background 641.6.1 The Background 641.6.2 Radical underdeterminacy and ‘expressibility’ 691.6.3 Radical underdeterminacy and semantic compositionality 701.7 Underdeterminacy of Thought? 741.7.1 Mentalese, pragmatics and compositional semantics 741.7.2 Mental indexicals and the mind–world connection 781.8 Summary 83Notes 832 The Explicit/Implicit Distinction 942.1 Semantics/Pragmatics Distinction 952.1.1 Truth-conditional semantics and formal pragmatics 952.1.2 Semantic/pragmatic circles 962.2 Grice: Saying/Implicating 1012.2.1 Odd statements but true 1012.2.2 Contextual contributions to ‘what is said’ 1052.2.3 Implicature: conventional and conversational 1072.2.4 Saying, meaning and ‘making as if to say’ 1142.3 Sperber and Wilson: Relevance-theoretic Distinctions 1162.3.1 Explicature 1162.3.2 Multiple speech acts and multiple logical forms 1252.3.3 Implicature 1342.3.4 Deriving explicatures and implicatures 1422.3.5 Subsentential utterances, saying and explicating 1522.3.6 Explicature and non-literalness 1572.3.7 Blakemore: the conceptual/procedural distinction 1602.4 Travis and Recanati: Enriched ‘What is Said’ 1642.4.1 Contextualist saying 1642.4.2 Availability to intuitions 1662.5 Bach: What is Said/Impliciture/Implicature 1702.5.1 Impliciture vs. explicature 1702.5.2 What is said and linguistic meaning 1712.5.3 What is said and indexicality 1772.5.4 What’s to be said about ‘what is said’? 1822.6 Pragmatic Meaning: Enrichment or Implicature? 1832.6.1 Minimalist principles 1852.6.2 Functional independence 1892.6.3 Embedding tests 1912.7 Postscript: Hidden Indexicals or ‘Free’ Enrichment? 1972.8 Conclusion: From Generative Semantics to Pro-active Pragmatics 205Notes 2063 The Pragmatics of ‘And’-Conjunction 2223.1 Preserving the Truth-functionality of ‘And’ 2223.2 A Relevance-based Pragmatics of Conjunction 2263.2.1 Cognitive scripts and accessibility 2263.2.2 Enrichment or implicature? 2273.3 The Semantic Alternatives 2283.4 Cognitive Fundamentals: Causality and Explanation 2353.5 Relevance Relations and Units of Processing 2423.5.1 The conjunction unit 2423.5.2 Elaboration relations 2463.6 Processing Effort and Iconicity 2503.7 Residual Issues 2533.7.1 Pragmatic enrichment or unrepresented Background? 2533.7.2 The semantics of ‘and’ and the logic of ‘and’ 2543.8 Conclusion: From Generalized Conversational Implicature to Propositional Enrichment 257Notes 2584 The Pragmatics of Negation 2654.1 Some Data and Some Distinctions 2664.1.1 The scope distinction 2664.1.2 The representational distinction 2674.2 Semantic Ambiguity Analyses 2714.2.1 Lexical ambiguity and/or scope ambiguity? 2714.2.2 Arguments against ambiguity 2734.3 Strong Pragmatic Analyses 2784.3.1 Analyses in the Gricean spirit 2784.3.2 Grice: structural ambiguity and implicature 2814.3.3 Sense-generality and implicature 2844.3.4 Pragmatic narrowing of negation 2884.4 ‘Presupposition’-cancelling Negation and Metalinguistic Negation 2914.4.1 Semantic presupposition and negation 2914.4.2 Metalinguistic negation 2944.4.3 Negation and echoic use 2964.4.4 Truth-functional negation and metarepresentational enrichment 2984.5 The Pragmatics of ‘Presupposition’-denial 3024.5.1 ‘Presupposition’-denial and contradiction 3034.5.2 Negation and two kinds of pragmatic enrichment 3064.6 Conclusion: From Multiple Semantic Ambiguity to Univocal Semantics and Pragmatic Enrichment 311Notes 3125 The Pragmatics of On-line Concept Construction 3205.1 Encoded Concepts and Communicated Concepts 3215.1.1 Ad hoc concepts via narrowing 3235.1.2 The problem of concept broadening 3285.2 A Symmetrical Account of Narrowing and Broadening 3345.2.1 Consequences of the unified account 3375.2.2 Arguments for the unified account 3435.3 Metaphor: Loose Use and Ad Hoc Concepts 3495.3.1 Where does metaphorical meaning come from? 3495.3.2 Ad hoc concepts, explicature and indeterminacy 3575.4 Word Meaning and Concepts 3595.5 Conclusion: The Long Road from Linguistically Encoded Meaning to the Thought(s) Explicitly Communicated 364Notes 367Appendix 1: Relevance Theory Glossary 376Appendix 2: Gricean Conversational Principles 382References 384Index 408

"This book serves to advance the status of pragmatics, as in addition to presenting a theory free from serious errors, it is also a good example of a methodologically sound book. I heavily applaud this volume - which places students on the right path and is also a rare example of scholarly eminence. I believe the author must have had many sleepless nights to finish it - now she can take her rest and enjoy the success and the praise she fully deserves." Linguistics"Challenges current philosophical approaches to pragmatics and makes a substantial contribution to cognitive pragmatic theories such as relevance theory." Moderna Sprak "The book brings together a wealth of empirical observations and new analyses and is impressive in breadth and depth. It is also one of the most detailed and powerful expositions of relevance theory and enriches the framework in considerable ways." Lingua"This long-awaited treatise is the best case ever made for relevance theory, and a most stimulating piece of work on the semantics/pragmatics interface. I enjoyed it enormously." François Recanati, Institut Jean-Nicod "You don’t have to be a relevance theorist to appreciate Carston’s challenge to influential Gricean views on the interaction of pragmatics with semantics. This book, with its breadth of coverage and depth of analysis, raises a good many questions and offers many good answers." Kent Bach, San Francisco State University "Robyn Carston’s combination of meticulous scholarship with deep insight has led her to cast new light on the vexed distinction between semantics and pragmatics, to provide new analyses of a range of problems in linguistics and the philosophy of language, and to illuminate the relation between language and thought more generally. This elegantly written and original work is the best book on pragmatics for a generation." Neil Smith, University College London "The author directly tackles the by now central issue of the interface between semantics and pragmatics... and addresses such important theoretical problems, within all of pragmatics, as the distinction betwen explicit and implicit communication." Pragmatics "As is usual with excellent books, Carston's book leads us to think further deeply and raises a good many questions... this book takes a resolutely cognitive viewpoint, sheds a new light on the semantics/pragmatics interaction and succeeds in elucidating the roles of language and inferences in communication. i strongly recommend this book not only to pragmatists, of course, but also to everyone who is interested in human communication." Akiko Yoshimura, Nara Women's University, Studies in English Literature