The central problem for pragmatics is that sentence meaning vastly underdetermines speaker’s meaning. The goal of pragmatics is to explain how the gap between sentence meaning and speaker’s meaning is bridged. This paper defends the broadly Gricean view that pragmatic interpretation is ultimately an exercise in mind-reading, involving the inferential attribution of intentions. We argue, however, that the interpretation process does not simply consist in applying general mind-reading abilities to a particular (communicative) domain. Rather, it involves a dedicated comprehension module, with its own special principles and mechanisms. We show how such a metacommunicative module might have evolved, and what principles and mechanisms it might contain.

This paper is designed to illustrate and consider the relations between three types of metarepresentational ability used in verbal comprehension: the ability to metarepresent attributed thoughts, the ability to metarepresent attributed utterances, and the ability to metarepresent abstract, non-attributed representations (e.g. sentence types, utterance types, propositions). Aspects of these abilities have been separately considered in the literatures on “theory of mind”, Gricean pragmatics and quotation. The aim of this paper is to show how the results of these separate strands of research might be integrated with an empirically plausible pragmatic theory. 1

This paper considers the implications for philosophy of some recent approaches to pragmatics (with a focus on relevance theory) and makes two main points. First, the widening gap between sentence meaning and speaker’s meaning increasingly brings into question a basic assumption of much philosophy of language: that linguistic semantics provides direct insight into the structure of human thoughts. Second, by describing comprehension as a richly context-dependent form of inference, pragmatics provides an illustration of how we might approach central cognitive processes, which have been seen by Fodor as a major mystery for cognitive psychology and philosophy of mind. 1

Grice (1957) drew a famous distinction between natural(N) and non-natural(NN) meaning, where what is meant(NN) is broadly equivalent to what is intentionally communicated. This paper argues that Grice’s dichotomy overlooks the fact that spontaneously occurring natural signs may be intentionally shown, and hence used in intentional communication. It also argues that some naturally occurring behaviours have a signalling function, and that the existence of such natural codes provides further evidence that Grice’s original distinction was not exhaustive. The question of what kind of information, in cognitive terms, these signals encode is also examined. 1

Prosody provides both ‘natural’ and properly linguistic input to utterance comprehension. It contributes not only to overt communication but to covert or accidental forms of information transmission. Its function is typically to convey emotions or attitudes or to alter the salience of available interpretations. How should these aspects of communication be described and explained? This paper takes a relevance-theoretic approach, focusing on four main issues: (a) how should the communication of emotions or attitudes be analysed? (b) how do ‘natural’ prosodic elements contribute to communication? (c) what does prosody encode? (d) what light can prosody shed on the place of pragmatics in the architecture of the mind?

Historically, interjections have been treated in two different ways: as part of language, or as non-words signifying feelings or states of mind. In this paper, I assess the relative strengths and weaknesses of two contemporary approaches which reflect the historical dichotomy, and suggest a new analysis which preserves the insights of both. Interjections have a natural and a coded element, and are better analysed as falling at various points along a continuum between ‘showing ’ and ‘saying’, where showing is relatively natural behaviour, and saying is properly linguistic.