What would it be like for prelinguistic communication to be Gricean?

Abstract

It is often claimed that infant communication is premised on the recognition of Gricean communicative intentions. This picture rests on an equivocation between features of communication and features of cognition. Following Bart Geurts, I argue that the notion of common ground is best conceptualised as a normative condition. The overtness of a communicative act is the publicity inherent to shared commitments, and since commitments can be shared unknowingly, communicative intentions are not necessary for communicating. I discuss two key experiments with infants and I argue that, for the prelinguistic case, giving a commitment-based interpretation is always possible, and so communicative intentions are here explanatorily dispensable. Therefore, there is no obvious way of proving experimentally that infant communication is Gricean.