This paper questions the widespread view that verbal communication is governed by a maxim, norm or convention of literal truthfulness. Pragmatic frameworks based on this view must explain the common occurrence and acceptability of metaphor, hyperbole and loose talk. We argue against existing explanations of these phenomena and provide an alternative account, based on the assumption that verbal communication is governed not by expectations of truthfulness but by expectations of relevance, which are raised by literal, loose and metaphorical talk alike. Sample analyses are provided, and some consequences of this alternative account are explored. 1

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

Abstract not found

As several linguists have pointed out, the occurrence of indefinite subject NPs (in initial or preverbal position) is more restricted than the occurrence of definite ones. There seems to be a widespread typological preference for definite preverbal subjects, and some languages (Arabic, for instance) even forbid the presence of preverbal indefinite subjects. Other languages (such as English

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

The –ing adjunct, by its very form, invites an inference to the effect that two event descriptions are very closely related. Consider the following examples: (1) Thorstein and his students often talked long into the evening in his office, arguing about the data and the theories.

The notion of implicature was first introduced by Grice (1967, 1989), who defined it essentially as what is communicated less what is said. This definition contributed in part to the proliferation of a large number of different species of implicature by neo-Griceans. Relevance theorists have responded to this by proposing a shift back to the distinction between explicit and implicit meaning (corresponding to explicature and implicature respectively). However, they appear to have pared down the concept of implicature too much, ignoring phenomena which may be better treated as implicatures in their over-generalisation of the concept of explicature. These problems have their roots in the fact that explicit and implicit meaning intuitively overlap, and thus do not provide a suitable basis for distinguishing implicature from other types of pragmatic phenomena. An alternative conceptualisation of implicature based on the concept of implying with which Grice originally associated his notion of implicature is thus proposed. From this definition it emerges that implicature constitutes something else inferred by the addressee that is not literally said by the speaker. Instead, it is meant in addition to what the literally speaker says, and consequently, it is defeasible like all other types of pragmatic phenomena.

König (1989) argues that there is a relation of duality between concessive and causal constructions. Therefore, he maintains, any account of the meaning of causal connectives like because, via duality, also provides an account of the meaning of concessive connectives such as although. This paper lists a number of problems with König's account. Appealing to notions central to relevance theory, it will be argued that context plays an important role in determining the propositions expressed by utterances of causal and concessive sentences. Because of this context-dependence there cannot be said to be a semantic relation of duality between because and although. 1

The explicature/implicature distinction is one manifestation of the distinction between the explicit content of an utterance and its implicit import. On certain ‘minimalist ’ approaches, the explicit/implicit distinction is equated with the semantics/pragmatics distinction or with Paul Grice’s saying/implicating distinction. However, the concept of ‘explicature’, which belongs to the relevance-theoretic pragmatic framework (RT), has closer affinities with the wider ‘contextualist ’ perspective, according to which context-sensitive pragmatic processes make a much greater contribution to the proposition explicitly communicated than merely resolving ambiguities and providing referents for indexicals. Crucially, there are pragmatic processes of meaning enrichment and adjustment which have no linguistic mandate but are wholly motivated by considerations of communicative relevance. Two consequences of this are that (a) explicit utterance content can include constituents which are not articulated in the linguistic form of the utterance, and (b) certain Gricean implicatures are reanalysed as components of the explicitly communicated truth-conditional content. In this chapter, we outline the explicature/implicature distinction and highlight some of the issues it raises for semantic/pragmatic theorizing. 1.