Abstract not found

Communication is not a simple matter of coding and decoding as certain Cartesian theories of language have claimed. Relevance Theory (RT) carefully argues that inference is the basis of all communication, and of all aspects of linguistic communication (Sperber & Wilson 1986). Such inferences conform to certain expectations that are created by communication. The

As a post-Gricean pragmatic theory, Relevance Theory (RT) takes as its starting point the question of how hearers bridge the gap between sentence meaning and speaker meaning. That there is such a gap has been a given of linguistic philosophy since Grice’s (1967) Logic and Conversation. But the account that relevance theory offers of how this gap is bridged,

Speakers share content when they make the same assertion (claim, conjecture, proposal, etc). They also share content when they propose (entertain, discuss, etc.) the same hypothesis, theory, and thought. And again when they evaluate whether what each says (thinks, claims, suggests, etc.) is true, false, interesting, obscene, original or offensive. Content sharing, so understood, is the very foundation of communication. Relevance Theory (RT), however, implies that content sharing is impossible; or at least, we will argue as much in what follows. This paper divides into two parts. In Part I, we amplify on what we mean by 'shared content ' and its roles in how we think about language and communication; we discuss various strategies RT might invoke to account for shared content and why all these strategies fail. Part II is exegetical; there we show why RT must deny the possibility of Shared Content. The denial is a direct consequence of some of the most central tenets of RT. It is, however, a consequence downplayed by RT proponents. Our goal in Part II is to show how central the denial of shared content is to RT.

Cappelen & Lepore (2005) defend a version of semantic minimalism which they argue to stand in opposition to all forms of contextualism, whether ‘moderate ’ or ‘radical’. Relevance Theory (henceforth RT) is included among the latter group and indeed given particular attention as apparently a highly characteristic example of radical contextualism. Cappelen & Lepore (henceforth C&L) produce a number of arguments against both moderate and radical contextualism (many of which have been extensively discussed elsewhere 1); in this article I am interested in the ways in which they attempt to undermine the radical kind only. Specifically, I question whether C&L’s arguments against radical contextualism do in fact carry any weight when directed against RT—a question with implications for the way they draw their distinction of moderate versus radical contextualism. In particular, I look at C&L’s arguments from shared content, one of their primary arguments against radical contextualism, which is expanded in C&L (2006b) and applied specifically to RT in C&L (to appear a). My reasons for concentrating on RT, as opposed to the whole of radical contextualism, are the following. First, I find RT to be the most coherent radical contextualist approach; indeed, it may be the only approach that both is truly radically contextualist and fully enough worked out to constitute a linguistic framework. This is not the place to justify these claims in detail, but I give some arguments to this effect below (especially in section 5) and otherwise refer the reader to Wedgwood (2005, Chapter 2) and the extensive comparison of RT with other

Quantification is haunted by the specter of paradoxes. Since Russell, it has been a persistent idea that the paradoxes show what might have appeared to be absolutely unrestricted quantification to be somehow restricted. In the contemporary literature, this theme is taken up by Dummett (1973, 1993) and Parsons (1974a,b). Parsons, in particular, argues that both the Liar and Rus-sell’s paradoxes are to be resolved by construing apparently absolutely unrestricted quantifiers as appropriately restricted. Building on Parsons ’ work, I have advocated a contextualist version of the view that there is no absolutely unrestricted quantification (Glanzberg 2001, 2004a,b). I have argued that all quantifiers must be construed as ranging over contextually provided domains, and that for any context, there is a distinct context which provides a wider domain of quantification. Hence, there is no absolutely unrestricted quantification. Instead, quantification displays a contextual version of what Dummett calls ‘indefinite extensibility’. With Parsons, I have argued that this helps us to resolve the Liar as well as Russell’s paradoxes. There remain a great number of issues surrounding the sort of view Parsons and I advocate. Just how to understand the argument from paradox against absolutely unrestricted quantification remains a delicate matter. Questions about how our view might be coherently stated, and whether it is compatible with certain ideas in metaphysics, are often raised. (Many such questions are raised forcefully in Williamson (2004).) I take these sorts of issues seriously (and have tried to address

This paper is primarily intended to consider the role of grammatical gender on French pronouns in the process of their interpretation in utterance contexts. I will first discuss the theoretical context which underlies my general account of pronominal interpretation, the cognitive perspective of Relevance Theory, and sketch the bare bones of that account. I will then move on to a fuller discussion of grammatical gender on pronouns, its effect on interpretation and its representational status, using French as a test-bed, and taking psychological and psycholinguistic data into account. I conclude that in terms of their semantics, French pronouns carry primarily procedural meaning which has a fundamentally pragmatic effect on interpretation, but that gender is conceptual, and as such contributes in a rather different fashion both to the semantics of the pronoun, and to the process of its interpretation. 1. Concepts, Language and the Mind At some level it seems incontrovertible that linguistic interpretation is a cognitive process, and as such a theory which intends to explain and account for it must have some cognitive component at the very least. For Relevance Theory, the cognitive perspective is

This paper has two main parts. The first is a critical survey of ways in which the explicit/implicit distinction has been and is currently construed in linguistic pragmatics, which reaches the conclusion that the distinction is not to be equated with a semantics/pragmatics distinction but rather concerns a division within communicated contents (or speaker meaning). The second part homes in on one particular way of drawing such a pragmatically-based distinction, the explicature/implicature distinction in Relevance Theory. According to this account, processes of pragmatic enrichment play a major role in the recovery of explicit content and only some of these processes are linguistically triggered, others being entirely pragmatically motivated. I conclude with a brief consideration of the language-communication relation and the limits on explicitness. Key words: what is said, explicit communication, implicit communication, Relevance Theory, free enrichment, semantics, pragmatics, 1. Introduction: Aspects of

Propositional attitudes represent a highly debated topic within the philosophical semantic tradition of research, as well as within the truthconditionally oriented branch of semantics, and they have persistently provided very lively and problematic areas for discussion.

this paper have been presented at various conferences and to various philosophy departments. We would like to thank the audiences of all these institutions for their helpful feedback, in particular, we would like to thank Kent Bach, David Chalmers, Jerry Fodor, Jeff King, Kirk Ludwig, Mike Martin, Michael Nelson, Rob Stainton, Jason Stanley, Zoltan Szabo, Charles Travis, and Jessica Wilson