Are explicatures cancellable? Toward a theory of the speaker's intentionality
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Alessandro Capone
Abstract
The aim of this paper is to reflect on the necessity of pragmatic development of propositional forms and arrive at a better understanding of the level of meaning which Sperber and Wilson and Carston call ‘explicature’. It is also argued that the pragmatically conveyed elements of explicatures are not cancellable—unlike conversational implicatures. While Capone (RASK: International Journal of Language and Communication 19: 3–32, 2003) addressed the issue of the cancellability of explicatures from a merely empirical point of view, in this paper a number of important theoretical questions are raised and discussed. In particular it is proposed that the analysis of the notion of intentionality and the nature of pragmatic intrusion will settle the question of the cancellability of explicatures. An explicature can be considered a two-level entity. It consists of a logical form and a pragmatic increment that the logical form gives rise to in the context of an utterance. However, both the initial logical form and the pragmatic increment are the target of pragmatic processes. Consequently, we need a pragmatic process to promote the initial logical form to an intended interpretation and another pragmatic process to derive further increments starting from the initial logical form as promoted to an utterance interpretation.
© 2009 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Face and self-presentation in spoken L2 discourse: Renewing the research agenda in interlanguage pragmatics
- Not taking yourself too seriously in Australian English: Semantic explications, cultural scripts, corpus evidence
- Are explicatures cancellable? Toward a theory of the speaker's intentionality
- Language socialization: The naming of non-kin adults by African children and preadolescents in intercultural encounters
- On speakers and audiences, feminism and the lying/misleading distinction
- Book reviews
- Contributors to this issue
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Face and self-presentation in spoken L2 discourse: Renewing the research agenda in interlanguage pragmatics
- Not taking yourself too seriously in Australian English: Semantic explications, cultural scripts, corpus evidence
- Are explicatures cancellable? Toward a theory of the speaker's intentionality
- Language socialization: The naming of non-kin adults by African children and preadolescents in intercultural encounters
- On speakers and audiences, feminism and the lying/misleading distinction
- Book reviews
- Contributors to this issue