Interpreting What Speakers Say and Implicate

Abstract

The traditional view in pragmatic theory is that a distinction exists between what speakers say and what they mean, communicate, or implicate in context. For example, when uttering Jane has three children, a speaker might only say that “Jane has three children but may have more than three,” but the speaker implicates that “Jane has exactly three children.” Under this view, pragmatics plays only a small role in determining what speakers say and has a primary part in interpreting speaker's intended messages. My aim in this article is to challenge this view. I describe empirical work showing that pragmatics has a fundamental role in determining both what speakers say and implicate. Thus, when a speaker utters Jane has three children, enriched pragmatic information is used to infer that the speaker says “Jane has exactly three children” and that in specific contexts, the speaker can go on to express additional pragmatic meanings, such as “Jane is married” or “Jane is very busy because she has three children.” I also describe work on the importance of complex pragmatic, metarepresentational reasoning in understanding irony and metaphor. Finally, I briefly discuss the relevance of these new developments in pragmatics for neurolinguistic research.