When a diplomat saysyes, he means ‘perhaps’;
When he saysperhaps, he means ‘no’;
When he saysno, he is not a diplomat.—Voltaire(Quoted, in Spanish, inEscandell 1993.)

These lines — also attributed to H. L. Mencken and Carl Jung— may or may not be fair to diplomats, but are surely correct inreminding us that more is involved in what one communicates than whatone literally says; more is involved in what one means than thestandard, conventional meaning of the words one uses. The words‘yes,’ ‘perhaps,’ and ‘no’ eachhas a perfectly identifiable meaning, known by every speaker ofEnglish (including not very competent ones). However, as those linesillustrate, it is possible for different speakers in differentcircumstances to mean different things using those words. How is thispossible? What’s the relationship among the meaning of words,what speakers mean when uttering those words, the particularcircumstances of their utterance, their intentions, their actions, andwhat they manage to communicate? These are some of the questions thatpragmatics tries to answer; the sort of questions that, roughlyspeaking, serve to characterize the field of pragmatics.

• 1. Introduction
• 2. Classical Far-side Pragmatics: Beyond Saying
  • 2.1 Austin, Searle, and Speech Acts
  • 2.2 Grice and Conversational Implicatures
  • 2.3 Bach, Harnish, and a Unified Theory
• 3. Classical Near-side Pragmatics
  • 3.1 Kaplan on Indexical and Demonstratives
  • 3.2 Strawson and Presuppositions
  • 3.3 Donnellan and Definite Descriptions
• 4. Contemporary Pragmatic Theory
  • 4.1 Two models of Linguistic Communication
  • 4.2 Relevance Theory
  • 4.3 A Theory of Utterance-Type-Meaning
  • 4.4 Border Disputes: Literalists, Minimalists, Contextualists and Others
  • 4.5 A Methodological Flaw of Linguistic Pragmatism?
• 5. Some Definitions of Pragmatics
• Bibliography
• Academic Tools
• Other Internet Resources
• Related Entries

1. Introduction

Pragmatics deals withutterances, by which we will meanspecific events, the intentional acts of speakers at times and places,typically involving language. Logic and semantics traditionally dealwith properties oftypes of expressions, and not withproperties that differ from token to token, or use to use, or, as weshall say, from utterance to utterance, and vary with the particularproperties that differentiate them. Pragmatics is sometimescharacterized as dealing with the effects ofcontext. This isequivalent to saying it deals with utterances, if one collectivelyrefers to all the facts that can vary from utterance to utterance as‘context.’ One must be careful, however, for the term isoften used with more limited meanings.

Different theorists have focused on different properties ofutterances. To discuss them it will be helpful to make a distinctionbetween ‘near-side pragmatics’ and ‘far-sidepragmatics.’ The picture is this. The utterances philosophersusually take as paradigmatic are assertive uses of declarativesentences, where the speakersays something.Near-sidepragmatics is concerned with the nature of certain facts that arerelevant to determining what is said.Far-side pragmatics isfocused on what happensbeyond saying: what speech acts areperformedin orby saying what is said, orwhat implicatures (see below for an explanation of theseterms) are generated by saying what is said.

Near-side pragmatics includes, but is not limited to resolution ofambiguity and vagueness, the reference of proper names, indexicals anddemonstratives, and anaphors, and at least some issues involvingpresupposition. In all of these cases facts about the utterance,beyond the expressions used and their meanings, are needed.

We can divide these facts into several categories. For indexicals suchas ‘I,’ ‘now,’ and ‘here,’ basicfacts about the utterance are required: the speaker, and when andwhere it occurred. For other indexicals and demonstratives, speakerintentions are also relevant. While it seems the referent of‘you’ must be a person addressed by the speaker, which ofseveral possible addressees is referred to seems up to thespeaker’s intentions. Within syntactic and semantic constraints,anaphoric relations seem largely a matter of speaker’s intent.Speaker’s intentions and the way the speaker is connected to thewider world by causal/historical ‘chains of reference’ arerelevant to the reference of proper names.

Far-side pragmatics deals with what we do with language,beyond what we (literally) say. This is the conceptionaccording to which Voltaire’s remarks belong to pragmatics.It’s up to semantics to tell us what someone literally says whenthey use expressions of a given type; it’s up to pragmatics toexplain the information one conveys, and the actions one performs, inor by saying something.

Pragmatics is usually thought to involve a different sort ofreasoning than semantics. Semantics consists of conventionalrules of meaning for expressions and their modes of combination. Lockesupposed that communication was basically a matter of a speakerencoding thoughts into words and the listener decoding words back intothoughts. The same basic picture is found explicitly in Saussure andother influential theorists. This picture seems to fit reasonably wellwith the picture that emerged from the logicians and philosophers oflanguage in the tradition of logical analysis, of language as a systemof phonological, syntactic and semantic rules, of which competentspeakers and interpreters have implicit mastery. Paradigmatically, thesincere speaker plans to produce an utterance with thetruth-conditions of a belief she wishes to express; she chooses herwords so that her utterance has those truth-conditions; the credulousinterpreter needs to perceive the utterance, and recognize whichphones, morphemes, words and phrases are involved, and then usingknowledge of the meanings, deduce the truth-conditions of theutterance and of the belief it expresses.

In contrast, pragmatics involves perception and rule-followingaugmented by some species of ‘ampliative’ inference— induction, inference to the best explanation, Bayesianreasoning, or perhaps some special application of general principlesspecial to communication, as conceived by Grice (see below) —but, in any case, a sort of reasoning that goes beyond the applicationof rules, and makes inferences beyond what is established by the basicfacts about what expressions are used and their meanings.

The facts with which pragmatics deals are of various sorts,including:

• Facts about the utterance, including: who the speaker is, when theutterance occurred, and where;
• Facts about the speaker’s intentions. On the near side, whatlanguage the speaker intends to be using, what meaning she intends tobe using, whom she intends to refer to with various shared names,whether a pronoun is used demonstratively or anaphorically, and thelike. On the far side, what she intends to achieve by saying what shedoes.
• Facts about beliefs of the speaker and those to whom she speaks,and the conversation they are engaged in; what beliefs do they share;what is the focus of the conversation, what are they talking about,etc.
• Facts about relevant social institutions, such as promising,marriage ceremonies, courtroom procedures, and the like, which affectwhat a person accomplishes in or by saying what she does.

We will divide our discussion, somewhat arbitrarily, into the‘Classic Pragmatics’ and ‘Contemporarypragmatics.’ The Classic Period, by our reckoning, stretchesfrom the mid-sixties until the mid-eighties.

2. Classical Far-side Pragmatics: Beyond Saying

Our initial focus will be on the traditions in pragmatics inauguratedby J. L. Austin and H. P. Grice. Both of these philosophers wereinterested in the area of pragmatics we call ‘far-side.’In the classic period, these phenomena were studied on the premise— a premise increasingly undermined by developments inpragmatics itself — that a fairly clear distinction could bemade between what is said, the output of the realm of semantics, andwhat is conveyed or accomplished in particular linguistic and socialcontext in or by saying something, the realm of pragmatics. What issaid is sort of a boundary; semantics is on the near side, and thoseparts of pragmatics that were the focus of the classic period are onthe far side.

2.1 Austin, Searle, and Speech Acts

The British philosopher John Langshaw Austin was intrigued by the waythat we can use words to do different things. Whether one asserts ormerely suggests, promises or merely indicates an intention, persuadesor merely argues, depends not only on the literal meaning ofone’s words, but what one intends to do with them, and theinstitutional and social setting in which the linguistic activityoccurs. One thing a speaker might intend to do, and be taken to do, insaying “I’ll be there to pick you up at six,” is topromise to pick her listener up at that time. The ability topromise and to intend to promise arguably depends on the existence ofa social practice or set of conventions about what a promise is andwhat constitutes promising. Austin especially emphasized theimportance of social facts and conventions in doing things with words,in particular with respect to the class of speech acts known asillocutionary acts.

Austin began by distinguishing between what he called‘constatives’ and ‘performatives.’ Aconstative is simply saying something true or false. A performative isdoing something by speaking; paradigmatically, one can getmarried by saying “I do” (Austin 1961). Constatives aretrue or false, depending on their correspondence (or not) with thefacts; performatives are actions and, as such, are not true or false,but ‘felicitous’ or ‘infelicitous,’ dependingon whether or not they successfully perform the action in question. Inparticular, performative utterances to be felicitous (i) must invokean existing convention and (i) the convention must be invoked in theright circumstances.

A clear delimitation between performatives and constatives proved tobe difficult to establish, however. There are explicit performatives;a verb used in a certain way makes explicit the action beingperformed: “I bet that there is a dangerous animal there,”“I guarantee that there is a dangerous animal there,”“I warn you that there is a dangerous animal there.” Butthe same action could be performed implicitly: “There is adangerous animal there,” where both issues of (in)felicities andissues of truth/falsity are simultaneously present. Instead ofpursuing the distinction between performatives and constatives, Austin(1962a) proposed a new three-fold distinction.

According to this trichotomy, a speech act is, first of all, alocutionary act, that is, an act of saying something. Saying somethingcan also be viewed from three different perspectives: (i) as aphonetic act: uttering certain noises; (ii) as aphatic act: uttering words “belonging to and asbelonging to, a certain vocabulary, conforming to and as conforming toa certain grammar”; and (iii) as arhetic act: utteringwords “with a certain more-or-less definite sense andreference” (Austin 1962a, 95). Now, to perform a locutionary actis also in general to perform an illocutionary act;inperforming a locutionary act, we perform an act with a certainforce: asserting, informing, ordering, warning, assuring,promising, expressing an intention, and so on. Andby doingthat, we will normally produce “certain consequential effectsupon the feelings, thoughts or actions of the audience, or of thespeaker, or of other persons” (ibidem, 101) that Austin callsperlocutionary. At the point of his untimely death,Austin’s work on speech act theory was far from complete. Hismain work,How to do things with words was publishedposthumously, based on lecture notes of Austin and his students.

Austin’s student, John R. Searle (1969) developed speech acttheory as a theory of theconstitutive rules for performingillocutionary acts, i.e., the rules that tell what performing(successfully) an illocutionary act (with certain illocutionary forceand certain propositional content) consists in. The rules areclassified as (i) propositional content rules, which put conditions onthe propositional content of some illocutionary acts; (ii) preparatoryrules, which tell what the speaker will imply in the performance ofthe illocutionary acts; (iii) sincerity rules, that tell whatpsychological state the speaker expresses to be in; and (iv) essentialrules, which tell us what the action consists inessentially.

Let’s return to our case of promising. According toSearle’s analysis, for an utterance byS toHto count as a promise must meet the following conditions:

• The propositional content represents some future actionAbyS;
• H prefersS’s doingA to her notdoing it, andS believes that to be so; and it is not obviousboth toS andH thatS will doAin the normal course of events;
• S intends to doA; and
• Promising counts as the undertaking of an obligation ofSto doA.

If someone, then, wants to make a (felicitous) promise she must meetthese conventional conditions. The study of these conventionalconditions for illocutionary acts, together with the study of theircorrect taxonomy constitutes the core of speech act theory.

Based on their essential conditions, and attending to the minimalpurpose or intention of the speaker in performing an illocutionaryact, Searle (1975a) proposes a taxonomy of illocutionary acts intofive mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive classes:

• Representative orassertive. The speaker becomescommitted to the truth of the propositional content; for example,asserting: “It’s raining.”
• Directive. The speaker tries to get the hearer to act insuch a way as to fulfill what is represented by the propositionalcontent; for example, commanding: “Close the door!”
• Commissive. The speaker becomes committed to act in theway represented by the propositional content; for example, promising:“I’ll finish the paper by tomorrow.”
• Expressive. The speaker simply expresses the sinceritycondition of the illocutionary act: “I’m glad it’sraining!”
• Declarative. The speaker performs an action justrepresenting herself as performing that action: “I name thisship the Queen Elizabeth.”

Speech act theory, then, adopts a social or institutional view oflinguistic meaning. This is sometimes opposed to the intentionalistview favored by Grice (1957) and Strawson (1964), but there need be noinconsistency. (For an interesting discussion on the relationshipbetween intentionalist and social, institutional and intersubjectiveviews on meaning and communication by Searle, Bennett, Habermas andAppel, see part I of Lepore & Van Gulick 1991.)

2.2 Grice and Conversational Implicatures

Herbert Paul Grice emphasized the distinction Voltaire makes, in ouropening quotation, between what words mean, what the speaker literallysays when using them, and what the speaker means or intends tocommunicate by using those words, which often goes considerably beyondwhat is said. I ask you to lunch and you reply, “I have a oneo’clock class I’m not prepared for.” You haveconveyed to me that you will not be coming to lunch, although youhaven’t literallysaid so. You intend for me to figureout that by indicating a reason for not coming to lunch (the need toprepare your class) you intend to convey that you are not coming tolunch for that reason. The study of suchconversationalimplicatures is the core of Grice’s influential theory.

Grice’s so-called theory of conversation starts with a sharpdistinction between what someone says and what someone‘implicates’ by uttering a sentence. What someone says isdetermined by the conventional meaning of the sentence uttered andcontextual processes of disambiguation and reference fixing; what sheimplicates is associated with the existence of some rationalprinciples and maxims governing conversation (setting aside‘conventional implicatures’ which we discuss below). Whatis said has been widely identified with the literal content of theutterance; what is implicated, the implicature, with the non-literal,what it is (intentionally) communicated, but not said, by the speaker.Consider his initial example:

A andB are talking about a mutual friend,C, who is now working in a bank.A asksBhowC is getting on in his job, andB replies:Oh quite well, I think; he likes his colleagues, and hehasn’t been to prison yet. (Grice 1967a/1989, 24.)

What didB say by uttering “he hasn’t been toprison yet”? Roughly, all he literally said ofC wasthat he hasn’t been to prison up to the time of utterance. Thisis what the conventional sentence meaning plus contextual processes ofdisambiguation, precisification of vague expressions and referencefixing provide.

But, normally,B would haveimplicated more thanthis: thatC is the sort of person likely to yield to thetemptation provided by his occupation. According to Grice, the‘calculation’ of conversational implicatures is groundedon common knowledge of what the speaker has said (or better, the factthat she has said it), the linguistic and extra linguistic context ofthe utterance, general background information, and the considerationof what Grice dubs the ‘Cooperative Principle (CP)’:

Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at thestage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of thetalk exchange in which you are engaged. (Grice 1967a/1989, 26.)

2.2.1 The maxims

According to Grice, the CP is implemented, in the plans of speakersand understanding of hearers, by following ‘maxims:’

• Quantity
  • Make your contribution as informative as is required (for thecurrent purposes of the exchange).
  • Do not make your contribution more informative than isrequired.
• Quality
  • (Supermaxim): Try to make your contribution one that is true.
  • (Submaxims):
    • Do not say what you believe to be false.
    • Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
• Relation
  • Be relevant.
• Manner
  • (Supermaxim): Be perspicuous.
  • (Submaxims):
    • Avoid obscurity of expression.
    • Avoid ambiguity.
    • Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity).
    • Be orderly.
    • Frame whatever you say in the form most suitable for any replythat would be regarded as appropriate; or, facilitate in your form ofexpression the appropriate reply (added by Grice 1981/1989, 273).

Grice sees the principles governing conversation as derived fromgeneral principles governing human rational cooperative action. Therehas been much discussion about the CP and the maxims. Are all of themnecessary? Do we need more? Are they normative or descriptive?What’s their exact role in the theory of implicatures: Are theyprinciples that speakers and hearers are assumed to observe inrational communication, or simply the theorist’s tools forrational reconstruction? Does the CP require from speaker and hearerfurther cooperation towards a common goal beyond that of understandingand being understood? What is clear is that Grice attributes to theseprinciples an essential role for the definition and the interpretationof conversational implicatures.

2.2.2 Implicatures

The paradigmatic kind of reasoning on the part of the hearer for thedetermination of implicatures, according to Grice, follows thispattern:

He has said thatp; there is no reason to suppose that he isnot observing the maxims, or at least the CP; he could not be doingthis unless he thought thatq; he knows (and knows that Iknow that he knows) that I can see that the supposition that he thinksthatq isrequired; he has done nothing to stop methinking thatq; he intends me to think, or is at leastwilling to allow me to think, thatq; and so he hasimplicated thatq. (Grice 1967a/1989, 31.)

Applied to the earlier example about the banker,A wouldreason in the following way:

B has said thatC has not been to prison yet(p); he is apparently flouting the maxim of relation(“Be relevant.”), but I have no reason to suppose that heis opting out CP; his violation of the maxim would only be apparent ifhe is thinking thatC is potentially dishonest (q);B knows (and knows that I know that he knows) that I canfigure out he is thinking thatq; …; so he hasimplicated thatq.

Conversational implicatures have the following characteristics:

1. They are cancelable:

   … a putative conversational implicature thatp isexplicitly cancelable if, to the form of words the utterance of whichputatively implicates thatp, it is admissible to add but notp, orI do not mean to imply that p, and it iscontextually cancelable if one can find situations in which theutterance of the form of words would simply not carry the implicature.(Grice 1967b/1989, 44.)

2. They are non-detachable:

   … it will not be possible to find another way of saying thesame thing, which simply lacks the implicature in question, exceptwhere some special feature of the substituted version is itselfrelevant to the determination of an implicature (in virtue of one ofthe maxims of Manner). (Grice 1967a, 1989, 39.)

3. They are calculable:

   The presence of a conversational implicature must be capable of beingworked out; for even if it can in fact be intuitively grasped, unlessthe intuition is replaceable by an argument, the implicature (ifpresent at all) will not count as a conversational implicature. (Grice1967a/1989, 31.)

Grice considers this last property to be crucial for distinguishingbetween conversational and conventional implicatures. Conventionalimplicatures are generated by the meaning of certain particles like‘but’ or ‘therefore.’ Consider the differencebetween (1) and (2):

(1)

He is an Englishman, therefore he is brave.

(2)

He is an Englishman, and he is brave.

According to Grice, a speaker hassaid the same with (1) aswith (2). The difference is that with (1) she implicates (3).

(3)

His being brave follows from his being English.

This is aconventional implicature. It is the conventionalmeaning of ‘therefore,’ and not maxims of cooperation,that carry us beyond what is said.

Grice’s concept of conventional implicatures (which hasantecedents in Frege; see Bach 1999b, Potts 2005, Sander 2020) is themost controversial part of his theory of conversation for manyfollowers, for several reasons. According to some, its application toparticular examples runs against common intuitions. By using the word‘therefore’ is the speaker notsaying that thereis some causal connection between being brave and being English?Isn’t shesaying and not merely implying thatone’s being brave follows from one’s being English?Moreover, the category ofconventional implicatures blurs thedistinction between what is said, usually conceived as determined bythe semantic conventions of language, and what is implicated, usuallythought of as a matter of the speaker’s intentions in sayingwhat she does. Conventional sentence meaning contributes crucially towhat is said, which is considered essentially different fromimplicatures; but now we have the result that some elements ofconventional meaning do not contribute to what is said but toimplicatures (albeit conventional). Finally, it places the study ofthe conventional meaning of some expressions within the realm ofpragmatics (study of implicatures), rather than semantics, usuallyconceived as the home of conventional meaning.

Among conversational implicatures, Grice distinguished between‘particularized’ and ‘generalized.’ The formerare the implicatures that are generated by saying something in virtueof some particular features of the context, “cases in whichthere is no room for the idea that an implicature of this sort isnormally carried by saying thatp.” (Grice 1967a/1989,37) The above example of conversational implicature is, then, a caseof particularized conversational implicature. A generalizedconversational implicature (henceforth GCI) occurs where “theuse of a certain forms of words in an utterance would normally (in theabsence of special circumstances) carry such-and-such an implicatureor type of implicature” (ibid). Grice’s first example is asentence of the form “X is meeting a woman thisevening.” Anyone who utters this sentence, in absence of specialcircumstances, would be taken to implicate that the woman in questionwas someone other thanX’s “wife, mother, sister,or perhaps even close platonic friend” (ibid). Being animplicature, it could be cancelled, either implicitly, in appropriatecircumstances, or explicitly, adding some clause that implies itsdenial.

Particularized conversational implicatures have a wide range ofapplications that Grice himself illustrates: the informative use oftautologies, irony, metaphor, hyperbole, meiosis and, in principle,any kind of non-literal use that relies in special circumstances ofthe utterance can be explained in terms of them. But GCIs apply tophilosophically more important issues, in particular, to what,according to the introduction to “Logic and Conversation”,was Grice’s most important motivation: the issue of thedifference of meaning between logical constants of formal languagesand their counterparts in natural languages, or the alleged meaningsof verbs like ‘to look like,’ ‘to believe’ or‘to know.’ GCIs are also at the heart of Grice’sModified Occam’s Razor (“Senses are not to bemultiplied beyond necessity,” Grice 1967b/1989, 47), whichhas served as a criterion for distinguishing semantic issues frompragmatic uses and for preferring, in general, an explanation in termsof implicatures rather than a semantic one that postulatesambiguity.

Grice is probably best known in the philosophy of language for histheory of implicatures. It is surely his most influential body of workfor those parts of linguistics, psychology, cognitive science andcomputer science that share philosophy’s interest in language.His theory of meaning, however, is indispensable for understanding hisoverall philosophical vision and his ‘big picture’ oflanguage and communication. We will not explain this project, whichconsists in part of ultimately reducing all semantic notions topsychological ones. But we will say a bit about its central concept of‘M-intentions,’ in order to develop an important aspect ofhis pragmatic theory, the concept of acommunicativeintention.

2.2.3 Communicative intentions

Grice conceived that semantic notions like word and sentence meaningwere ultimately based on speaker’s meaning, and this onspeaker’s intention, what he calledM-intentions. Whathe conceived as a study of the ontology of semantic notions has beenreceived, however, as a characterization of communicative intentions,the mental causes of communicative acts, and those that the hearer hasto understand for the communicative act to be successful.

So conceived, communicative intentions have these characteristicproperties:

• They are always oriented towards some other agent — theaddressee.
• They are overt, that is, they are intended to be recognized by theaddressee.
• Their satisfaction consists precisely in being recognized by theaddressee.

These properties are already pointed out in the first version ofGrice’s M-intentions:

“A meant something byx” is (roughly) equivalentto “A intended the utterance ofx to produce someeffect in an audience by means of the recognition of thisintention.” (Grice 1957/1989, 220.)

Grice later reformulated this definition, giving rise to a hot debateabout the precise characterization of communicative intentions, mainlyabout two points:

1. Communicative intentions are intentions to produce some responseon the part of the addressee, but what kind of response, exactly,should this be? Suppose I tell you, “It’s raining.”This act may have many results: perhaps you will hear the words,understand their meaning, come to believe that it is raining, searchfor your umbrella, fail to find it and grow angry, and finally becomeso angry you chew the rug. I may have planned all of this, but moretypically I will have had in mind that you be prepared for theweather. But my communicative intention seems to be directed at acrucial subgoal. If I get you to believe it is raining, your ownrationality will take over and you will get prepared. What I seem toaim at is changing your beliefs. It was this sort of response thatGrice took to be typical in his early work on meaning. But it isreally more in line with the spirit of his proposal that the crucialsubgoal be to get the audience to believe that the speaker believesthat it is raining. That’s really the change that language canbring about; having gotten the audience that far, the speaker needs tohope that the audience trusts her weather-knowledge, will take thesteps to themselves believing in rain, and then prepare adequately forthe weather.

   But even this rather modest subgoal may be too much to require for thesuccess of the communicative actionqua communicative action.Suppose I say that it is raining, and you hear me and understand themeaning of my words. But you don’t think I am being sincere; youdon’t believe that I believe what I said. But still, I have saidit. My overall plan to help insure that you don’t get wet andcatch cold may fail, but I do seem to have succeeded in saying what Iset out to say. It seems that the onlynew mental stateneeded is the audience’s recognition of the speaker’scommunicative intention; his understanding of the speaker’sutterance. This is what has been called ‘illocutionaryuptake’:

   In the case of illocutionary acts we succeed in doing what we aretrying to do by getting our audience to recognize what we are tryingto do. But the ‘effect’ on the hearer is not a belief or aresponse, it consists simply in the hearer understanding the utteranceof the speaker. (Searle 1969, 47.)

   So the most common answer has been to follow Searle on this point andexclude perlocutionary results, beyond uptake of this sort, from thecontent of communicative intentions.

2. Communicative intentions must be wholly overt:

   The understanding of the force of an utterance in all cases involvesrecognizing what may be called broadly an audience-directed intentionand recognizing it as wholly overt, as intended to be recognized.(Strawson 1964, 459.)

   The exact formulation of this requirement has been a subject ofintense debate, some arguing for a reflexive (self-referential)definition, others for a potentially infinite but practically finitenumber of clauses in the definition, with conceptual, logical orpsychological arguments. What seems to be a matter of consensus isthat every covert or even neutral (with respect to its intendedrecognition by the addressee) aspect of the speaker’s intentionmust be left out of the definition of communicative intentions.

   A short but comprehensive way of concluding would be to say that thefulfillment of communicative intentions consists precisely in beingrecognized by the addressee. (For this debate, see Searle 1969;Schiffer 1972; Harman 1974; Blackburn 1984; Sperber and Wilson 1986;Recanati 1986; Bach 1987 and Neale 1992.)

2.3 Bach, Harnish, and a Unified Theory

After the founding work made in parallel by Austin-Searle, on the oneside, and by Grice, on the other, Kent Bach and Robert Harnish(Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts (1979)) made animportant attempt to integrate the founders’ insights in aunified theory.

On the whole, if choosing the appropriate label for their theorybetween either ‘neo-Gricean’ or‘neo-Austinian/Searlean,’ the first seem the mostappropriate: their theory might be taken to lean toward the Griceanconception of inferential understanding of the speaker’scommunicative intentions rather than to the Austin-Searle view ofspeech acts as performed according to some conventional or‘constitutive’ rules. To obtain a unified theory theydeveloped their own conceptual framework, based on the ideas of Grice,Austin and Searle but including many important innovations of theirown. Here it is a brief description of some of them:

2.3.1 Locutionary acts

Like Austin, but unlike Searle, Bach and Harnish argue for the conceptof locutionary acts: acts of using sentences with “a more orless definite ‘sense’ and a more or less definite‘reference,’” in Austin’s words. They are moreexplicit than Austin, and argue that determining what someone has(locutionarily) said by uttering a sentence amounts to determining

1. the operative meaning of the sentence uttered
2. the referents for the referring expressions
3. the properties and relations being ascribed
4. the times specified

With this information the hearer identifies what a speaker has said,at the locutionary level. From a contemporary perspective, the mostremarkable point here is, in our opinion, that they see thedetermination of the locutionary act by the hearer, not as a matter ofmerely decoding the conventional meaning of the sentence uttered, butas a matter of inference that has to be based on linguistic meaningplus contextual information concerning the speaker’s intentions.Grice did not claim that what a speaker said was determinable withoutconsideration of the speaker’s intentions; quite the contrary.But he was not particularly explicit about the way it was done, andthe received view, anyway, has been that inference was exclusive tothe ‘calculation’ of implicatures.

The distinction between locutionary and illocutionary acts of sayingalso offers Bach and Harnish a useful conceptual tool for treatingpotentially problematic cases of discordance between utterance contentand speaker’s intentions, such as slips of the tongue, falsereferential beliefs, and irony.

To go from the locutionary to the illocutionary content, if there isany, the hearer has to infer the communicative intention of thespeaker, and to do that, the hearer needs more information. Amongother things, the hearer will have to make use of the CommunicativePresumption (CP) that they state as follows:

The mutual belief in the linguistic communityC_Lto the effect that whenever a memberS says something inL to another memberH, he is doing so with somerecognizable illocutionary intent. (Bach and Harnish 1979, 61.)

2.3.2 The taxonomy of illocutionary acts

Bach and Harnish accept most of Searle’s (1975a) critiques ofAustin’s taxonomy as well as his criteria for groupingillocutionary acts in terms of basic illocutionary intentions andexpression of mental attitudes; but they make some amendments. Tobegin with, they discard Searle’s class ofdeclarativeillocutionary acts (basically covering Austin’s explicitperformatives), because they take them to be basicallyassertives orconstatives (see Searle 1989, Bach andHarnish 1992 for a further discussion of this issue). Then, thecommunicative illocutionary acts are (Bach and Harnish 1979, ch.3):

• constatives, that express a speaker’s belief andher desire that the hearer forms a similar one.
• directives, that express some attitude about a possiblefuture action by the hearer and the intention that her utterance betaken as reason for the hearer’s action.
• commissives, that express the speaker’s intentionto do something and the belief that her utterance obliges her to doit.
• acknowledgments, that express feelings toward the hearer(or the intention that the utterance will meet some socialexpectations regarding the expression of feelings).

Bach and Harnish make a distinction betweencommunicativeillocutionary acts, the category to which these four typesbelong, and the category ofconventional illocutionary acts,which they take to be fundamentally different. Communicative acts areacts performed with certain communicative intentions whose recognitionby the hearer is necessary for the acts to be successful. Inconventional acts, on the other hand, no communicative intention needbe involved. Success is a matter of convention, not intention.Conventional acts determine and produce facts of institutional nature,if performed according to conventions that do not require anycommunicative intention on the part of the speaker and, a fortiori,neither its recognition on the part of any hearer. Among conventionalacts, Bach and Harnish (1979, ch. 6) distinguish between twoclasses:

• effectives, that when produced by the appropriate personin appropriate circumstances produce a change, a new fact in aninstitutional context; an example might the President of the UnitedStates statement that he vetoes a piece of legislation.
• verdictives, do not produce facts, but determine facts,natural or institutional, with an official, binding effect in theinstitutional context; an example is a jury’s verdict of guilt;it does not create the fact of guilt, but settles the issue of guiltin a binding way.

2.3.3 The SAS

The Speech Act Schema (SAS) gives the form of the required reasoningby the hearer to fully understand the speaker’s utterance: fromthe meaning of the sentence used all the way to the perlocutionary actperformed. This requires, besides linguistic information, a system ofcommunicative and conversational presumptions, together withcontextual mutual beliefs.

Bach and Harnish think that inference is involved, from the beginning,in the determination of the locutionary act. The next step is to inferthe literal illocutionary intentions and from here, in the simplestcase, go for the (intended) perlocutionary ones, if any. Roughly, anillocutionary act is literal when its propositional content coincideswith the content of the locutionary act, and the force of the formeris within the constraints imposed by the latter.

But it may happen that the literal illocutionary act cannot be takenas a reasonable thing to have been done by the speaker in somespecific circumstances (say, the literal claim is false and obviouslyso), and the hearer has to search for anothernon-literalact. Someone speaks non-literally when she does not mean what she saysbut something else instead.

It can also be the case that the speaker is doing more than merelyperforming a literal act. She means what she says but she means more.The hearer will have to infer theindirect act beingperformed. It must be noticed that indirect acts can also be based onnon-literal acts. Then the SAS extends to account for the intentionalperlocutionary effects of the speech act.

Bach and Harnish’s SAS offers a detailed study of the structureof utterance interpretation as an inferential process. Taken as anattempt of unification of the two main roots of pragmatics, it can beconsidered as the closing of the ‘Classic Pragmatics’period and the transition from ‘philosophical’ pragmaticsto linguistic and psychological pragmatics. They can be still locatedwithin far-side pragmatics but their clear idea of the role ofpragmatic ‘intrusion’ in the determination of what is saidis announcing the arrival of near-side pragmatics.

3. Classical Near-side Pragmatics

In logic and in many of the investigations of logical empiricists inthe first two-thirds of the twentieth century, artificial languageswere the focus of attention. First the predicate calculus, and thenvarious extensions of it incorporating modal and temporal operatorsseemed the appropriate linguistic vehicles for clear-thinkingphilosophers. Issues about the use of natural languages were oftenthought to be beyond the scope of the proof-theoretic andmodel-theoretic tools developed by logicians. As Stalnaker put it in1970,

The problems of pragmatics have been treated informally byphilosophers in the ordinary language tradition, and by somelinguists, but logicians and philosophers of a formalistic frame ofmind have generally ignored pragmatic problems … . (Stalnaker1970/1999, 31.)

(For an important exception, see Reichenbach’sElements ofSymbolic Logic (1947).)

The idea that techniques of formal semantics should be adapted tonatural languages was forcefully defended by Donald Davidson, ongeneral philosophical principles, and Richard Montague, who appliedthe techniques of possible worlds semantics to fragments of English ina body of work that was influential in both philosophy andlinguistics.

These attempts make clear that, on the near side of what is said,semantics and pragmatics are quite enmeshed. The interpretation ofindexicals and demonstratives seems squarely in the realm ofpragmatics, since it is particular facts about particular utterances,such as the speaker, time, and location, that determine theinterpretation of ‘I,’ ‘you,’‘now’ and the like. The relevance of these varying factorsis determined by a non-varying rule of meaning, as Bar-Hillel (1954)had already observed, but, here, we assume that facts about utterancesare relevant, not only in the case of indexicals and demonstratives,but also in the case of proper names and definite descriptions; sothey all raise issues in near-side pragmatics.

In his essay “Pragmatics” (1968), Richard Montaguegeneralized the concept of a possible world to deal with a number ofphenomena, including indexicals. A somewhat different approach toindexicality by David Kaplan has been much more influential,however.

3.1 Kaplan on Indexical and Demonstratives

The most influential treatment of indexicals and demonstratives hasbeen David Kaplan’s monographDemonstratives (1989),versions of which were circulated in the seventies. Kaplan’sbasic concepts arecontext,character, andcontent. Character is what is provided by sentences withindexicals, like “I am sitting,” or “You aresitting,” a function from contextual features to contents.

For Kaplan, a context is a quadruple of an agent, location, time andworld; intuitively, these are the speaker of an utterance, the timeand location of the utterance, and the possible world in which itoccurs; the beliefs of the speaker as to who she is, where she is, andwhen it is, and what the real world is like are irrelevant todetermining content, although not of course to explaining why thespeaker says what she does. (The possible world is the contextualfeature Kaplan uses to deal with “actually”). A propercontext is one in which the agent is at the location at the time inthe world, which is of course the characteristic relation among thespeaker, time, location and world of an utterance.

Kaplan did not officially take his theory to be a theory ofutterances. He thought of his account, or at least of the formaltheory he supplies, as a theory ofoccurrences, orsentences-in-context, which are abstract objects consistingof pairs of contexts and expression types. Utterances, Kaplan argues,are an unsuitable subject matter for logical investigation. Utterancestake time, for one thing, so it would not be possible to insist thatall of the premises of an argument share the same context, but thisstipulation is needed for logic. For another, since any utterance of“I am not speaking” would be false, we might have toconclude that “I am speaking” is a logical truth, anunwelcome result.

Kaplan does not call what he is doing “pragmatics” but thesemantics of indexicals and demonstratives.

Kaplan’s theory was part of a movement in the philosophy oflanguage that developed the sixties and seventies, which we will call‘referentialism.’ For our purposes, the salient aspects ofreferentialism are (i) in some forms, heavy reliance was made of theconcept of ‘what is said,’ — often equated with‘the proposition expressed’ — by a particularutterance of a suitably declarative sentence; (ii) referentialistsargued persuasively that ‘what is said’ or ‘theproposition expressed’ depends on reference of names, indexicalsand demonstratives, rather than any descriptive ‘backing’or identifying conditions speakers or hearers might associate withthem. More controversially, Donnellan (1966) argued that in the caseof ‘referential’ uses of definite descriptions, thereference of the description, rather than the descriptive condition,is a constituent of the proposition expressed. The contribution ofindexicals, demonstratives, proper names and descriptions is a matterof near-side pragmatics, with utterances at the center, as PeterStrawson’s emphasized.

3.2 Strawson and Presuppositions

In his ground-breaking article “On referring” (1950),Peter Strawson criticized Bertrand Russell’s (1905) widelyaccepted theory of definite descriptions and argued that definitedescriptions are referential terms, that, using definite descriptions,a speaker refers to an individual object, if it exists; but that itexists is not part of the speaker’s statement. Like GottlobFrege’s (1892), he held that, since France is a republic, astatement like (1) is neither true nor false. Given that (1′) isnot part of what an utterance of (1) states, but rather what ispresupposed, and given that the presupposition is false, the issue of(1)’s truth does not even arise:

(1)

The king of France is wise.

(1′)

There is only one king of France.

This “existential” presupposition is a necessary conditionfor the truth or falsity of the statement, but it is not part of theproposition expressed.

Definite descriptions such as “the king of France” are notthe only type of expressions that produce existential presuppositions.Frege (1892) already mentioned the case of proper names. If one utters(2), she presupposes that there is someone who bears that name or,what is the same, that the name “Kepler” designatessomeone. This constitutes a truth (and falsity) condition of (2), but,as Frege argues, the presupposition is not part of the meaning of (2)— or of the sense (Sinn) or thought expressed by (2), usingFrege’s terminology — because, if it were, it would bepart of what is denied in its negation. However, (3) still producesthe same presupposition (Kepler must exist for (3) to be true orfalse), so it is not part of the meaning of (2) or (3), but apresupposition that both sentences share.

(2)

Kepler died in misery.

(3)

Kepler did not die in misery.

Names and definite descriptions, or referential terms in general, arenot the only type of expressions that produce presuppositions.Existential presuppositions are not the only type of presuppositionseither. In saying (4), Elwood would not say, but merely presuppose,that the sea is salty. In saying (5) he would presuppose, but not say,that someone led America to defeat in the War of 1812. In saying (6)Elwood would presuppose that Bush invaded Iraq, and in (7) he wouldpresuppose that Trump had cheated on his wife, and then stopped doingso for a period of time (possibly rather short).

(4)

Juana knows that sea water is salty.

(5)

It was James Madison that led America to defeat in the war of1812.

(6)

Bush regrets invading Iraq.

(7)

Trump resumed cheating on his wife.

Presupposition has been treated as a semantic phenomenon and as apragmatic phenomenon. Arguably, each of (1)–(7) and itscorresponding negation would have the same presupposition. This hasled to the semantic conception of presupposition as a non-trivialentailment that is shared by a statement and its negation. Semanticalapproaches to presupposition encounter some tricky problems, the mostimportant of which is “the projection problem.” Ifpresupposition is semantic, then it seems the presuppositions ofcomplex sentences should be a function of the presuppositions of thesimple sentences that make them up, but it is at least not obviousthat this is so. Consider, for example,

(8)

The king has a son.

(9)

The king’s son is bald.

(10)

If the king has a son, the king’s son is bald.

(8) presupposes that there is a king, (9) that there is a king andthat the king has a son. (10) contains both (8) and (9). It seems toinherit the presupposition of (8) but not of (9); that is, (10)presupposes that there is a king, but not that he has a son. A correcttheory of just how presuppositions are inherited from simple tocomplex sentences would solve the projection problem, and doing soseems to be required for an adequate account of presupposition. Anumber of interesting theories have been put forward; it is not ourpurpose to claim that they are or are not successful. (See Karttunen1973, 1974; Karttunen and Peters 1979; Gazdar 1979; Soames 1989;Burton-Roberts 1989a-b, 1999; Heim 1992; Horn 19995; Asher andLascarides 1998; Carston 1998, 1999a; Kamp 2001; Beaver 2002;Schlenker 2010.)

The projection problem seems to favor a pragmatic treatment. Some,like Robert Stalnaker, believe that there is room for bothconceptions:

To presuppose a proposition in the pragmatic sense is to take itstruth for granted, and to assume that others involved in the contextwill do the same…. (Stalnaker 1970/1999, 38.)

Something similar could perhaps be said about another case in whichSemantics and Pragmatics are intertwined, as is the case of definitedescriptions.

3.3 Donnellan and Definite Descriptions

According to Russell (1905), definite and indefinite descriptionsbelong, together with quantifiers, to the class of denoting phrases,which, unlike (logically) proper names, may not designate anythingwithout the sentence lacking meaning and truth value, since itscontribution to the proposition expressed is not the designatedobject, but an identifying property of it. As we have already seen,Strawson (1950) held that definite descriptions, and proper names aswell, if they failed to designate, make the statement containing themto have no truth value, since their contribution to the propositionexpressed is precisely the object they designate, if they designateany. Using terminology now in common use, according to Russell,definite descriptions are denotative expressions; according toStrawson, they are referential expressions. After Strawson’scritique of Russell and his response (Russell 1957), the mostinfluential proposal about definite descriptions came from theAmerican philosopher Keith Donnellan.

Donnellan makes a sort of synthesis of these two positions —although he is closer to Russell than to Strawson —distinguishing between two uses of definite descriptions: theattributive use and referential use. In the case of assertions, hecharacterizes these two uses in the following way:

A speaker who uses a definite description attributively in anassertion states something about whoever or whatever is the-so-and-so.A speaker who uses definite description referentially in an assertion,on the other hand, uses the description to enable his audience to pickout whom or what he is talking about and states something about thatperson or thing (Donnellan 1966, 285).

Consider his example. A detective begins her investigation at thecrime scene where Smith’s body shows obvious signs of brutality.The detective says:

(11)

Smith’s murderer is insane.

Using the description, she is not referring to anyone in particular.It’s possible she doesn’t have any suspect in mind. Thenshe would be using the description to attribute insanity to whomeverSmith’s murderer is, assuming someone murdered Smith. The use ofthe description would be attributive in this case.

Let us now imagine that we are attending Jones’s trial, who isin the dock, accused of killing Smith. His behavior is strange, heresponds to the prosecutor’s questions with disjointed phrases,he has a lost look in his eyes, as well as several facial tics. Myfriend whispers to me, “Smith’s murderer is insane.”In this case, the speaker uses the description to get me to identifyJones as the guy he claims is insane. Its use is referential. A name,“Jones,” or a demonstrative, “he,” would haveworked equally well. In the case of an attributive use, however, thedescription is difficult to replace with a name or a demonstrative; asDonnellan says, the description occurs “essentially”(Donnellan 1966, 285).

The contrast between these two cases gets clearer, when consideringthe effect that the falsity of the implication (Russell) orpresupposition (Strawson) of (11) that there is a murderer of Smithhas on the truth-value of the statement. Suppose there is noSmith’s murderer because, for example, his death was due tonatural causes. It seems clear that, in the first case, thedetective’s statement is not true. Perhaps it is debatablewhether it is false — as Russell would say — or it lackstruth value — as Strawson would say. Donnellan does not takesides on the issue. If there is no murderer, there is no one to whomthe detective has attributed insanity. In the case of the referentialuse, however, things are not so clear. Although Jones is actually onlythe alleged murderer, it seems that, if he is indeed insane, myfriend’s statement is not completely false. My friend referredto Jones and attributed madness to him. Although it would have beenmore correct for her to have used the description “Smith’salleged murderer,” in any case, uttering (11), my friend seemsto have made a true statement. Or so argues Donnellan.

A similar contrast occurs with descriptions defined in interrogativeand imperative sentences. We enter a bar, my friend notices a man witha martini glass. She asks me, “Who is the man drinking amartini?” I know him. This is Charles, and he’s notdrinking a martini. He is a teetotaler. But he likes to drinkCoca-Cola in that kind of glass. My friend didn’t use thedescription correctly, but she managed to ask a question that I cananswer. If, on the other hand, at the annual party of TeetotalersUnion a rumor spreads that there is a man who is drinking a martini.The board president asks over the public address system: “Who isthe man drinking a martini?” Nobody answers. There’sactually no one drinking a martini. The question cannot beanswered.

The proposition expressed seems to vary according to the use kind ofuse of the description. With an attributive use, the proposition wouldbe general, that is, the description would contribute an identifyingproperty of an object. With a referential use, however, theproposition would be singular, including the object itself, regardlessof whether it fits the description or not.

Donnellan’s distinction raises once again the issue about theporousness of the boundaries between Semantics and Pragmatics. SaulKripke (1979), for example, argued for the distinction between thesemantic meaning of descriptions, which would invariably coincide withDonnellan’s attributional use, and the speaker’s meaning,which might include the object designated by the description or not,and would be explained in accordance with the Gricean principle andmaxims. In any case, it is clear that the determination of thereferent of the description, either through the semantic meaning ofthe description or through the referential intentions of the speaker,does not belong to the conversational implicatures of the utteranceor, in other words, if it is pragmatics, is a matter of localpragmatics.

We proceed now to present some of the general lines of contemporaryPragmatics.

4. Contemporary Pragmatic Theory

Most current pragmatic theorists are neo-Griceans in that they adoptat least some version of his main three contributions:

1. a fundamental distinction of what a speaker says and what sheimplicates;
2. a set of rules or principles, derived from general principles ofrationality, cooperation and/or cognition, that guide, constrain orgovern human linguistic communication (there are differences amongneo-Griceans on the exact nature of these principles and of pragmaticreasoning generally, as we shall see); and
3. a notion of communicative intention (called“M(eaning)-intention” by Grice) whose fulfillment consistsin being recognized by the addressee.

Given these similarities, there are many differences. One importantdimension involves disciplines and methodology. Following Carston(2005) there are at least three different general tendencies: thosewho see pragmatics, much in Grice’s vein, as a philosophicalproject; those who concentrate on its interaction with grammar; andthose who see it as an empirical psychological theory of utteranceinterpretation.

A second dimension has to do with the relative importance given to twomodels of communication. One is the coding-decoding model of Locke andSaussure, as developed in the twentieth century logic and philosophyin compositional theories of meaning and truth. The other model, whichwe owe mostly to Grice, also has Lockean roots, in that communicationof belief from speaker to hearer lies at its center. But the mechanismof discovery is not decoding according to conventional rules, butintention-recognition and discovery based on ampliative inference. Thetwo models are not inconsistent, and all theorists accept elements ofeach. The issue is their relative centrality and importance in thephenomenon of human communication with language.

4.1 Two models of Linguistic Communication

According to the coding model, communication consists in a sender anda receiver sharing a common code or language and a channel, so thatthe former encodes the message and sends it for the latter to decodeit. Communication is, following this picture, quite an easy matter. Itjust amounts to knowledge of language and a safe channel — i.e.,without too much ‘noise.’ If sender and receiver share theknowledge of the code and the message makes its way through thechannel the success of communication is guaranteed.

One of Grice’s major contributions to the theory ofcommunication was provision of an alternative to the Locke-Saussuremodel of communication as a coding and decoding of thoughts. One canthink of the alternative either as a supplement or a replacement forthe coding model.

Intentions and their recognition are at the heart of Grice’salternative. Even if the interpreter’s reasoning is guided bythe conversational principle or maxims, as Grice suggested,intention-recognition is not basically a matter of followingconventional rules, but ampliative reasoning about what is going on inother minds.

But how do the two models fit together? Is language mainly andcentrally a matter of deduction, of coding and decoding according tothe conventions of meaning, with a little intention-recognition aroundthe near and far edges to take care of ambiguity and implicature? Oris communication mainly a matter of acting in ways that getone’s intentions recognized, with the conventions of languagebeing just a helpful resource for accomplishing this?

In the classical period, near-side pragmatics tended to be ignored,and the Gricean model applied only to issues beyond saying; all ofthis is consistent with the first picture. Many neo-Griceans stilladopt much of the first picture, and see the core of language as anautonomous realm studied by semantics, in which the meanings of partscompositionally determine the meanings of wholes, the fundamentalconcept of meaning being the truth-conditions of sentences.Grice’s work is often used to bolster this picture; Griceanconsiderations serve as a sort of shock-absorber, where apparent datathat are difficult to handle on the autonomous-semantics picture aretreated as merely apparent, resulting from mistaking implicatures for‘semantic content.’ Recanati calls such theorists‘minimalists;’ (seesection 4.4 below) while no one denies that contextual facts and pragmaticreasoning are needed at the near side of what is said, according tothese theorists, there isminimal intrusion of suchconsiderations on autonomous semantics.

4.2 Relevance Theory

According to relevance theory this is a mistake. Sperber and Wilson(1986) see things the second way. Following Grice’s model,understanding what someone means by an utterance is a matter ofinferring the speaker’s communicative intention: thehearer uses all kinds of information available to get at what thespeaker intended to convey. The semantic information obtained bydecoding the sentence uttered is but one example of such information.But much more information has to be used to infer what the speakermeant — that includes both what she said and what she implicated— by her utterance. So central is intention-recognition tounderstanding language that the code model, with autonomous semanticsat its core, should largely be abandoned in favor of the inferentialmodel. One kind of pragmatic reasoning pervades language use,near-side and far-side, and the areas in which the code model isapplicable are basically marginal.

The need for supplementary information is too pervasive and tooimportant to be a matter of something specifically linguistic, asmight be suggested by Grice’s conversational principle andmaxims. Sperber and Wilson see the fundamental mechanism of suchinferences as going well beyond language, and beyond humans. In termsof Carston’s distinctions, relevance theory departs fromGrice’s philosophical project, and aims at an empiricalpsychological theory of human cognition and communication. They seethe phenomenon they call ‘relevance’ as a psychologicalphenomenon basic to the lives not only of humans but of all animalswith a cognitive repertoire sophisticated enough to have choices aboutwhich environmental cues to attend to. Evolution shapes the phenomenonof relevance; an animal’s attention is drawn to environmentalcues that provide the most crucial information. Sounds of anapproaching cat grabs a bird’s attention away from a worm;parents are alert to the sounds of their baby’s crying. Thephenomenon is extended through learning; the squeal of brakes grabs adriver’s attention away from a pretty sunset. And the cues canbe conventional; the dinner bell grabs the attention of the hungrychild. The phenomenon of relevance in language is anothermanifestation of this very general phenomenon. ‘Relevance’in relevance theory, then, should not be taken to be just our ordinaryconception of relevance; nor should it be equated with the‘relevance’ of Grice’s maxim, although it isconnected to that and intended to provide a deepened understanding ofwhat underlies the maxim.

Relevance theory emphasizes that the rules of language leave all sortsof issues open. Some words have too many meanings: ambiguity. Othershave too little meaning: ‘he,’ or ‘that.’Decoding alone won’t determine which meaning the speaker isusing, or which object she intends to refer to with a pronoun. So evenbefore we get to what is said, communication involves intentions onthe part of the speaker that go beyond what she “codes-up”into language, and inferences on the part of the hearer that go beyonddecoding. And, of course, when we consider what is conveyed beyondsaying, the coding model is even less adequate. In all of these waysin which knowledge of convention falls short, relevance fills thegap.

A second difference rooted in the psychological conception ofpragmatics is reliance on the representational theory of mind. Thetenets of relevance theory are couched in talk of processingrepresentations, rather than, and sometimes in addition to, theordinary terminology of philosophical psychology.

Thus, instead of Grice’s cooperative principle andconversational maxims, relevance theory postulates principles ofrelevance, which stem from the applicability of the general phenomenonof relevance to linguistic situations in the context of arepresentational theory of mind. There are two fundamentalprinciples.

4.2.1 The Principles of Relevance

Pragmatic relevance is a property of utterances as a particular caseof inputs to cognitive processes:

An input is relevant to an individual when it connects with availablecontextual assumptions to yield POSITIVE COGNITIVE EFFECTS: forexample, true contextual implications, or warranted strengthenings orrevisions of existing assumptions. (Sperber & Wilson 2005, 7)

The relevance of an input for an individual is a matter of degree. Ingeneral, the greater those positive cognitive effects with the smallermental effort to get them, the greater the relevance of the input forthe individual. Sperber and Wilson conjecture that the cognitivearchitecture of human beings tends to the maximization of relevance.This is what their first principle of relevance states:

First (cognitive) principle of relevance: Human cognition isgeared towards the maximization of relevance (that is, to theachievement of as many contextual (cognitive) effects as possible foras little processing effort as possible).

This is the general cognitive principle that serves as background forcommunication in general and linguistic communication in particular.Applied to linguistic communication, this involves the following: Fora communicative act to be successful, the speaker needs theaddressee’s attention; since everyone is geared towards themaximization of relevance, the speaker should try to make herutterance relevant enough to be worth the addressee’s attention.This leads us to the

Second (communicative) principle of relevance: Every act ofostensive communication (e.g. an utterance) communicates a presumptionof its own optimal relevance.

By ‘ostensive’ relevance theorists make reference to the‘overt’ or ‘public’ nature of thespeaker’s communicative intentions in acts of communication.Communication will be successful (i.e., understanding will occur) whenthe addressee recognizes those intentions. This process is mostlyinferential and it has costs. So, the addressee would not start theinferential process without a presumption that it will report her somebenefits, that is, without a presumption that the input is not onlyrelevant, but as relevant as it can,ceteris paribus. Then,when someone utters something with a communicative purpose, she doesit, according to relevance theory, with the presumption of optimalrelevance, which states that

1. The utterance is relevant enough to be worth processing.
2. It is the most relevant one compatible with thecommunicator’s abilities and preferences.

4.2.2 Implicated Premises and Conclusions

Although the principles of relevance account for near-side andfar-side inferences, relevance theory acknowledges a fundamentaldistinction. On the near side, ambiguities, references, and issues ofvagueness will be resolved so as to make the ‘explicature’— the relevance theoretic replacement for ‘what issaid,’ or ‘the proposition expressed’ —maximally relevant. A somewhat more complex sort of reasoning thenderives implicatures. But these processes are not sequential. The‘choice’ of explicature will be affected by the need tocome to an understanding of everything that is communicated,explicature and implicature, as maximally relevant.

The addressee’s understanding process starts then when sheperceives an ostensive stimulus and stops when her expectations ofrelevance are satisfied, that is, when she has the most relevanthypothesis (the one with the most positive cognitive effects at theleast processing costs) about the speaker’s communicativeintention. After decoding the sentence uttered and getting at theproposition expressed, the hearer will build a ‘context’of ‘implicated premises’ or assumptions for getting thecognitive positive effects that make the utterance relevant. Rememberthat those effects can be the reinforcement or revision of thoseassumptions but also conclusions obtained deducing then from theproposition expressed plus the context of premises. This contextbuilding will also be highly constrained by relevance, looking for asmany positive effects as possible with the fewer inferential steps aspossible. In addition, the hearer has to look for the contents orassumptions the speaker ostensively intends her to consider.

Consider the following exchange between A and B:

It is reasonable to think that in B’s response has the followingimplicatures, as implicated premise and conclusion, respectively:

• Premise: ThatThe Da Vinci Code is an actionmovie.
• Conclusion: ThatB has not seen it and, maybe,does not intend to see it.

A retrieves the premise that together with the content ofB’s response allows her to deduce a conclusion that isreasonable to thinkB intends her to make, given that itseems the most relevant (the one with more cognitive positive effects— as implicatures in this case — with low processingcosts).

This is how relevance theory re-interprets the Gricean notion ofparticularized conversational implicatures: they are treated asimplicated premises and conclusions, communicated beyond what thespeaker says. On the other hand, relevance theorists abandon thecategory of generalized conversational implicatures. The phenomenaGrice took to be as generalized conversational implicatures belong onthe near side according to relevance theorists. They are not part ofwhat is implicated by the speaker in making her utterance, but part ofthe explicature.

According to this view, pragmatics in general and the principle ofrelevance in particular have a lot to say about what happens on thenear side of the explicature. It is probably fair to say thatrelevance theorists are mainly responsible for contemporary pragmaticsfocusing not only on what is conveyed beyond saying but also on sayingitself, and for the fact that, as we shall see below, contemporaryphilosophical pragmatic theory tends to focus on the extent to whichpragmatics ‘intrudes’ upon the traditional turf ofsemantics.

4.3 A Theory of Utterance-Type-Meaning

Together with Horn’s (1984, 1989, 2004), Levinson’s work(2000) is a good representative of grammar-oriented pragmatics.Levinson is only marginally a neo-Gricean. He is not committed toGrice’s fundamental two-fold division between what is said, onthe one hand, and implicatures, on the other — he proposes athird level of default or preferred interpretation. He does notprovide a theory of utterance comprehension based primarily onrecognition of communicative intentions, for default interpretationsare not concerned with that. However, he does assume conversationalprinciples and maxims, formulating a series of heuristics, inspired byGrice’s maxims, for a theory of Generalized ConversationalImplicatures (GCIs) that, as important as they were in Grice’sprogram, have been neglected by many post-Gricean authors.Levinson’s GCI theory is not a philosophical theory of humancommunication, nor a psychological theory of utterance understanding,but a partial theory of utterance-type meaning with its focus onlinguistics. As he puts it:

In the composite theory of meaning, the theory of GCIs plays just asmall role in a general theory of communication… It is just tolinguistic theory that GCIs have an unparalleled import.(Levinson 2000, 21–22.)

The two-layered view of utterance content consisting, according toLevinson, of a level of encoded meaning (sentence-meaning)and a level of inferential meaning (speaker’s orutterance-(token)-meaning), must be supplemented by a thirdintermediate layer ofutterance-type-meaning which is notbased “on direct computations on speaker-intentions but ratheron general expectations about how language is normally used”(22).

These expectations are formulated by Levinson as a series ofheuristics, that have a clear connection with Grice’s maxims ofquantity and manner:

First (Q) Heuristic: What isn’t said, isn’t(i.e., what you do not say is not the case)

This is related to Grice’s first maxim of quantity (“Makeyour contribution as informative as required”) and is heldresponsible for the inference of so-called scalar implicatures, amongothers. So from an utterance of “Some students came to theparty” it is inferable by default that not all the studentscame. It is not part of the meaning of ‘some,’ yet, ingeneral — by default from the utterance-type — it is whatone would infer in absence of evidence to the contrary. In this case,the heuristic has to be restricted to a set of alternates in a‘scale,’ so that the use of one implicates thenon-applicability of the other.

Second (I) Heuristic: What is expressed simply isstereotypically exemplified

This is related to Grice’s second maxim of quantity (“Donot make your contribution more informative than necessary”),and is taken to be involved in cases of interpretation of conditionalsas bi-conditionals, the enrichment of conjunctions with the expressionof temporal and causal relations among the conjuncts,‘bridging’ inferences, collective reading of plural nounphrases, and so on.

Third (M) Heuristic: What is said in an abnormal way,isn’t normal (i.e., marked message indicates marked situation)

This heuristic is related to Grice’s maxim of manner and,specially, to the first submaxim (“Avoid obscurity ofexpression”) and the fourth (“Avoid prolixity”). Ifaccording to the second heuristic an unmarked utterance gives rise toa stereotypical interpretation, now we have that this interpretationis overruled if a marked utterance is produced. One of the clearestexamples is double negation versus simple positive assertion. Compare“It’s possible the plane will be late” with“It’s not impossible that the plane will belate.”

When conflict among these three heuristics arise, Levinson argues thatthese are resolved in the following way:Q defeatsM, andM defeatsI.

4.4 Border Disputes: Literalists, Minimalists, Contextualists and Others

Contemporary philosophical approaches to pragmatics are oftenclassified by their view of the two models discussed inSection 4.1. ‘Literalists’ think that semantics is basicallyautonomous, with little ‘pragmatic intrusion’;‘contextualists’ adopt the basic outlines of the RelevanceTheory view of the importance of pragmatics at every level, whileperhaps demurring on many of the details and the psychologicalorientation.

Take, for example, an utterance of “It is raining” by Johnnow on the CSLI patio in a telephone conversation with Kepa, who is inDonostia. John is talking about the weather in Stanford. Arguably,what John says isthat it is raining in Stanford. This iswhat he intends for Kepa to understand, and it is the content of thebelief, formed by looking at the weather around him, that motivateshis utterance. Stanford, then, seems to be a constituent, part of thesubject matter, of John’s remark. But how did it get there? Itseems that it is a matter of pragmatics; it is a fact aboutJohn’s intentions that makes his remark to be about Stanford,and that suffices. This is an example of what Perry (1986) calls an‘unarticulated constituent,’ and an instance of a moregeneral phenomenon we will call ‘unarticulatedcontent.’

The same basic choice, about what to do with apparently unarticulatedcontent that seems to be part of what is said, presents itself inconnection with a number of other phenomena: ‘enriched’uses of logical operators and numerals (“Mary got married and[then] had [exactly] three children”),quantifier domain restriction (“Nobody [in the class]was paying attention”), comparative adjectives (“John isshort [for a football player]”), and a long list ofphenomena reconsidered now as possibly being part of what is said, theexplicature or the content of the utterance, rather than part of whatis implicated.

Most contemporary theorists would acknowledge that in such cases onemight describe ‘what is said’ in terms of theunarticulated content: John said that it was rainingatStanford; the speaker said that Mary got married andthen had children, and so forth. And there is generalagreement that intuitions about ‘what is said’ cannot bythemselves carry much theoretical weight, and there is considerabledisagreement about theoretical interpretation of unarticulatedcontent.

Literalists argue that the important divide, traditionally marked by‘what is said,’ should be maintained, although marked bynew terminology. Cappelen and Lepore’s (2005) term is‘semantic content.’ On the near side of semantic contentwill be only the factors acknowledged by Grice: conventional meaningof words and modes of composition; resolution of ambiguity (including,perhaps, issues of standards of precision and vagueness), andresolution of reference of indexicals, demonstratives and names. Onthe far side are Gricean implicatures.

Among literalists, we may distinguish between minimalists and‘hidden indexical’ theorists. Literalists, do not acceptany pragmatically determined element in utterance content that is nottriggered by grammar, i.e., by a particular context-sensitive elementin the sentence used. Minimalists try to keep context-sensitiveexpressions to a minimum and hidden-indexicalists pose acontext-sensitive expression whenever is needed. The latter admit the‘unarticulated’ content into the proposition literallyexpressed by the utterance, but hold that it is not‘really’ unarticulated, since below the surface grammar,at some deeper level, say logical form, the sentence provide anindexical to be resolved pragmatically (Stanley 2000; Stanley andSzabo 2000).

Cappelen and Lepore are both literalists and minimalists. They use theterm ‘semantic content’ for propositions determined solelyby conventions of meaning, precisification, disambiguation andreference fixing. They allow that semantic content, so conceived, isoften not what ordinary speakers would identify as ‘what issaid’; but they take what is said to be a pragmatic concept, andso do not see this as an objection to their scheme. The semanticcontent of John’s utterance above, for example, is somethinglike the proposition “Rain is occurring,” a relativelytrivial proposition, that will be true if it is raining anywhere onearth (or perhaps, anywhere in the universe). (See Cappelen and Lepore2007 and Perry 2007.) The triviality of John’s remark, literallyinterpreted, sets Kepa on the search of some relevant proposition hemay have meant to convey, and this proposition, that it is raining inPalo Alto, is what satisfies our intuitive concept of ‘what issaid.’ But that shows only that ‘what is said’ isbasically a pragmatic concept, that shouldn’t be used todelineate true semantic content. We need to change the sign from‘what is said’ to ‘semantic content,’ ratherthan move the boundary to fit the sign. On the near side of semanticcontent, we find only conventional meaning, disambiguation, andresolution of reference and vagueness. On the far side we findimplicatures, that contribute not only what is suggested, conveyed,and the like, but even what is said, as ordinarily conceived.

Those over on the Contextualist side, in contrast, see the levelcorresponding to Grice’s ‘what is said’ asdetermined not only by semantics, disambiguation and reference-fixing,but also by a number of other pragmatic processes that‘intrude’ on the near side and enrich semantic content.Contextualists include relevance theorists and such philosophers asRecanati (2004), Travis (1997), Korta and Perry (2006a, 2006b, 2007a,2007b, 2008, 2011, 2013) and Neale (2004). Contemporary contextualistsdo not insist on the term ‘what is said,’ but provideother criteria for the boundary between the proposition more or lessdirectly expressed and implicatures. Recanati argues that this level— which he sometimes calls ‘what issaid_max’ in contrast of the ‘what issaid_min’ of minimalists — shouldconsist of a proposition that is consciously available to the speakerand the proposition he intends to express, and that any plannedimplications should also be consciously accessible. Cappelen andLepore’s proposition would not usually pass this test. In ourexample, John would not be consciously aware of having expressed aproposition that would be true if it was raining on Venus, nor wouldhe at any remotely conscious level have planned for Kepa to reasonfrom the triviality and irrelevance of the proposition that rainoccurs to the one he meant to convey, that it rains at Stanford.

In Korta and Perry’s ‘Critical Pragmatics’ (2008,2011, 2013; see also de Ponte et al. 2020, 2023a, 2003b), the conceptof ‘what is said’ is replaced with two concepts. The‘reflexive’ or ‘utterance-bound content’ andthe ‘referential’ or ‘locutionary content’ ofan utterance. The ‘utterance-bound content’ is itstruth-conditions, as determined by the conventional meanings of thewords used and modes of composition, and thus corresponds to the‘semantically determined content.’ This content will notbe the proposition expressed, but rather a set of conditions on theutterance and the proposition it expresses, with quantification overall relevant factors not determined by meaning — includingfactors that resolve ambiguity and reference. At this level, then,Critical Pragmatics is radically minimal. For example, an utteranceu of “Elwood touched that woman” will be true(roughly) if and only if there is anx andy suchthat the speaker ofu refers tox with‘Elwood,’ refers toy with ‘thatwoman,’ and uses ‘touches’ with for some action Apermitted by the conventions of English, and at some time prior to thetime ofu, x A’ed y. The condition on the utterancegiven to the right of the ‘if and only if’ comprise thereflexive content of the utterance. On the other hand, the referentialcontent ofu will be the proposition that, say, Elwood puthis hands on Eloise, if the actual facts aboutu provideElwood, Eloise as the referents and putting one’s hands on asthe relevant sense of ‘touches.’ Critical Pragmaticsemphasizes the speaker’s plan, a hierarchy of intentions, as themain source of the facts that supplement conventional meaning to getus from reflexive to incremental meaning.

The second concept employed to do the traditional work of ‘whatis said’ is ‘locutionary content.’ Theintended locutionary content is basically the referentialcontent the speaker intends to express, given her conception of thecontext — that is, roughly, the speaker, time, place and whomand what she points at. The locutionary content is fixed by the actualcontextual facts, so a speaker’s intended locutionary contentmay not be the locutionary content of the utterance she produces.

An intermediate position — called ‘syncretic’ byRecanati (2004) — has been subtly defended by Kent Bach (1994,1999a, 2001). Bach is on the literalist, minimalist side of thespectrum with respect to semantic content (for which he continues touse the term ‘what is said.’) But he agrees withcontextualists that unarticulated contents are not implicatures, andare not triggered by the meaning of the sentence uttered. Heintroduces an intermediate category between what is said, in hisminimalist sense, and implicatures, which he calls‘implicitures’ —with ‘ci’ pronounced asin ‘implicit’ — to include these elements.

4.5 A Methodological Flaw of Linguistic Pragmatism?

The philosopher Michael Devitt (2013) raised an interesting issueabout an alleged methodological flaw of many, if not most, approachesto pragmatics. The flaw consists in conflating the metaphysics ofmeaning — the study ofwhat constitutes the meaning ofan utterance — and the epistemology of meaning — the studyofhow the hearer interprets the meaning of an utterance. Inhis words:

Consider the ‘meaning-properties’ of an utterance in asbroad a sense as you like, cover all its ‘semantic’ and‘pragmatic’ properties, in whatever preferred sense. Sothe properties we are concerned with include conventional properties,‘what is said’, ‘what is implicated’, and soon. [footnote omitted] Now, what constitutes one of those propertiesis one thing, how the hearer discovers the property, another. Theproperty is constituted by what the speaker does, by the conventionsshe participates in, the objects she has in mind, or messages sheintentionally conveys. [footnote omitted] That is where we look forthe ‘metaphysics of meaning’. And what needs emphasizingis that none of these meaning-properties is constituted in any way atall by what the hearer does in trying to interpret what is said ormeant (Devitt, 2013, 288).

Devitt attributes the confusion between the metaphysics and theepistemology of meaning to most contextualist proposals (or what hecallslinguistic pragmatism), such as Bezuidenhout (2002),Capone (2012), Carston (2004), Crimmins and Perry (1989), Elugardo andStainton (2004), Green (1989), Korta and Perry (2008), Levinson(2000), Parikh (2010), Recanati (2004), Sperber and Wilson(1986/1995), Saul (2002), Stanley and Szabo (2000) and Taylor (2001).The exceptions, on the other hand, would be Bach (1999a, 2005), Neale(2004, 2016) and Fodor and Lepore (2004) (for a recent discussion, seethe exchange between Korta and Perry (2019a, 2019b) and Devitt (2019)in theJournal of Pragmatics.)

Relevance theory, for example, certainly takes pragmatics to be thestudy of thecomprehension processes of the utterance on thepart of the hearer (Sperber and Wilson (1986/1995), Carston (2002),Wilson and Sperber (2012)). And, as Devitt claims, the study of thoseprocesses should not be confounded with the study of what constitutesthe pragmatic properties of an utterance. In this case, however, therelevance-theoretic hearer-oriented perspective seems a matter ofdeliberate choice rather than a confusion.

Following Neale (2016), besides the distinction between themetaphysics and the epistemology of meaning, we should also considerformatics: the study of how the speaker forms the plan thateventually causes the production of her utterance. It is reasonable tobe clear about these three approaches, because though different, theyare closely interconnected. The speaker’s beliefs about thehearer’s capability of understanding in the circumstances of theutterance may affect, and typically do affect, her formation ofcommunicative intentions, which, in turn, constrain what she says andimplicates. Some approaches combine the three perspectives, and beingexplicit about their difference may be often welcome.

Contemporary pragmatics is a large, active, interdisciplinary field.The work we have considered here merges into important work in logic,computer science and other areas we have not been able to discuss.Philosophers, the founders of the discipline, continue to play animportant role in this field. Philosophically oriented pragmatists (togive an old term a new meaning) usually consider pragmatic issues withan eye towards large issues in the philosophy of language and beyond.But in the course of this, they provide detailed analyses and considera wide variety of cases that continue to provide ideas and inspirationfor pragmatists from other disciplines. There is formal andcomputational pragmatics; theoretical and applied; game-theoretical,clinical, experimental pragmatics and even neuropragmatics; there isalso intercultural, interlinguistic and intersociocultural pragmatics;historical pragmatics and history of pragmatics. And this list, as thewhole entry, is not exhaustive.

5. Some Definitions of Pragmatics

Many of the definitions reproduced below contrast pragmatics withsemantics.

Morris 1938. Semantics deals with the relation ofsigns to (…) objects which they may or do denote. Pragmaticsconcerns the relation of signs to their interpreters.
By ‘pragmatics’ is designated the science of the relationof signs to their interpreters. (…) Since most, if not all,signs have as their interpreters living organisms, it is asufficiently accurate characterization of pragmatics to say that itdeals with the biotic aspects of semiosis, that is, with all thepsychological, biological, and sociological phenomena which occur inthe functioning of signs.

Carnap 1942. If in an investigation explicitreference is made to the speaker, or, to put it in more general terms,to the user of a language, then we assign it to the field ofpragmatics. (…) If we abstract from the user of the languageand analyze only the expressions and their designata, we are in thefield of semantics. And if, finally, we abstract from the designataalso and analyze only the relations between expressions, we are in(logical) syntax.

Bar-Hillel 1954. I believe, therefore, that theinvestigation of indexical languages and the erection of indexicallanguage-systems are urgent tasks for contemporary logicians. May Iadd, for the sake of classificatory clarity, that the former taskbelongs todescriptive pragmatics and the latter topurepragmatics (in one of the many senses of the expression)?

Stalnaker 1970. Syntax studies sentences, semanticsstudies propositions. Pragmatics is the study of linguistic acts andthe contexts in which they are performed. There are two major types ofproblems to be solved within pragmatics: first, to define interestingtypes of speech acts and speech products; second, to characterize thefeatures of the speech context which help determine which propositionis expressed by a given sentence. … It is a semantic problem tospecify the rules for matching up sentences of a natural language withthe propositions that they express. In most cases, however, the ruleswill not match sentences directly with propositions, but will matchsentences with propositions relative to features of the context inwhich the sentence is used. Those contextual features are part of thesubject matter of pragmatics.

Katz 1977. [I] draw the theoretical line betweensemantic interpretation and pragmatic interpretation by taking thesemantic component to properly represent only those aspects of themeaning of the sentence that an ideal speaker-hearer of the languagewould know in an anonymous letter situation,(…) [where thereis] no clue whatever about the motive, circumstances of transmission,or any other factor relevant to understanding the sentence on thebasis of its context of utterance.

Gazdar 1979. PRAGMATICS = MEANING − TRUTHCONDITIONS. What we need in addition is some function that tells usabout the meaning of utterances. (…) The domain of thispragmatic function is the set of utterances, which are pairs ofsentences and contexts, so that for each utterance, our function willreturn as a value a new context: the context as changed by thesentence uttered. (…) And we can treat the meaning of theutterance as the difference between the original context and thecontext arrived at by utterance of the sentence. [This applies toonly] a restricted subset of pragmatic aspects of meaning.

Kempson 1988. Semantics provides a complete accountof sentence meaning for the language, [by] recursively specifying thetruth conditions of the sentence of the language. … Pragmaticsprovides an account of how sentences are used in utterances to conveyinformation in context.

Kaplan 1989. The fact that a word or phrase has acertain meaning clearly belongs to semantics. On the other hand, aclaim about the basis for ascribing a certain meaning to a word orphrase does not belong to semantics… Perhaps, because itrelates to how the language is used, it should be categorized as partof (…)pragmatics (…), or perhaps, because itis a fact about semantics, as part of (…)Metasemantics.

Davis 1991. Pragmatics will have as its domainspeakers’ communicative intentions, the uses of language thatrequire such intentions, and the strategies that hearers employ todetermine what these intentions and acts are, so that they canunderstand what the speaker intends to communicate.

The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (Fotion1995). Pragmatics is the study of language which focusesattention on the users and the context of language use rather than onreference, truth, or grammar.

The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (Lycan1995). Pragmatics studies the use of language in context, andthe context-dependence of various aspects of linguisticinterpretation. (…) [Its branches include the theory of how]one and the same sentence can express different meanings orpropositions from context to context, owing to ambiguity orindexicality or both, (…) speech act theory, and the theory ofconversational implicature.

The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy (Davies1995). The distinction between semantics and pragmatics is,roughly, the distinction between the significance conventionally orliterally attached to words, and thence to whole sentences, and thefurther significance that can be worked out, by more generalprinciples, using contextual information.

Carston 1999. The decoding process is performed by anautonomous linguistic system, the parser or language perceptionmodule. Having identified a particular acoustic stimulus aslinguistic, the system executes a series of deterministic grammaticalcomputations or mappings, resulting in an output representation, whichis the semantic representation, or logical form, of the sentence orphrase employed in the utterance. (…) The second type ofcognitive process, the pragmatic inferential process (constrained andguided by the communicative principle of relevance) integrates thelinguistic contribution with other readily accessible information inorder to reach a confirmed interpretive hypothesis concerning thespeaker’s informative intention.

Bach 2004. Semantic information is informationencoded in what is uttered — these are stable linguisticfeatures of the sentence — together with any extralinguisticinformation that provides (semantic) values to context-sensitiveexpressions in what is uttered. Pragmatic information is(extralinguistic) information that arises from an actual act ofutterance, and is relevant to the hearer’s determination of whatthe speaker is communicating. Whereas semantic information is encodedin what is uttered, pragmatic information is generated by, or at leastmade relevant by, the act of uttering it.

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