Do discourse connectives encode concepts or procedures?

Abstract

Discourse connectives such as but and moreover, while obviously meaningful, are widely seen as not affecting the truth conditions of the utterances they occur in; instead, they indicate how the truth-conditional content is to be understood. One way of explaining this is to analyse them as encoding procedural meaning, whose function is to guide pragmatic inference rather than to form part of the communicated message (cf. Blakemore, 2002). In this paper, I defend the idea of procedural meaning and reply to the main objections that have been raised against it. I focus on discourse connectives, showing how a procedural analysis explains their non-truth-conditional contribution, and compare this approach with that of Bach (1999), on which some discourse connectives are seen as contributing to ‘what is said’ by an utterance. I also discuss cases of discourse connectives embedded in attitude contexts, where their behaviour has been seen as a major obstacle to a procedural account, and suggest how such examples can be accommodated.