Do we need four different kinds of analysis for literal, vague, loose, and figurative meanings? Relevance theory is unique in proposing a unified account of all these cases. From the general claim that an utterance is a piece of evidence about the speaker’s meaning, it follows, at the lexical level, that the function of words in an utterance is not to encode but merely to indicate the concepts that are constituents of the speaker’s meaning. We are not denying that words do encode concepts (or at least semantic features), and that they are (at least partly) decoded during the comprehension process; however, we are claiming that the output of decoding is merely a point of departure for identifying the concepts intended by the speaker. The presence in an utterance of an expression with a given sense licenses a variety of (typically non-demonstrative) inferences. Some of these inferences contribute to satisfying the hearer’s expectations of relevance, and are therefore drawn. Others don’t, and aren’t. In the process, there is a mutual adjustment between explicatures and implicatures. The decoded content helps to identify the inferences that make the utterance relevant as expected, and is readjusted so as to warrant just those inferences that contribute to the relevance of the utterance as a whole. In particular, the constituent concepts of the explicature are constructed ad hoc, starting from the linguistically encoded concepts, but quite often departing from them so as to optimise the relevance of the overall interpretation (Carston 1997, 2002: chapter 5; Sperber & Wilson 1998a; Wilson & Sperber 2002; Wilson 2003).

Suppose, for instance, you have a lecture one afternoon, but don’t know exactly when it is due to start. You are told, ‘The lecture starts at five o’clock.’ From this utterance, and in particular from the phrase ‘at five o’clock’, together with contextual premises, you can draw a number of inferences that make the utterance relevant to you: that you will not be free to do other things between five and seven o’clock, that you should leave the library no later than 4.45, that it will be too late to go shopping after the lecture, and so on. None of these inferences depends on ‘five o’ clock’ being strictly understood. There are inferences that depend on a strict interpretation (for instance, that the lecture will have begun by 5.01), but they don’t contribute to the relevance of the utterance, and you don’t draw them. According to the relevance-theoretic approach, you then take the speaker to be committed to the truth of a proposition that warrants just the implications you did derive, a proposition which might be paraphrased, say, as ‘The lecture starts between five o’clock and ten past,’ but which you, the hearer, would have no need to try and formulate exactly in your mind. Note that if the speaker had uttered the more accurate ‘between five o’clock and ten past’ instead of the approximation ‘at five o’clock,’ the overall effort required for comprehension would have been increased rather than reduced, since you would have had to process a longer sentence and a more complex meaning without any saving on the inferential level. Note, too, that we cannot explain how this approximation is understood by assuming that the standard of precision in force allows for, say, a variation of ten minutes around the stated time. If the lecture might start ten minutes earlier than five o’clock, then the inferences worth drawing would not be the same.

This process of ad hoc concept construction via mutual adjustment of explicatures and implicatures is quite general. It works in the same way with metaphors. Consider the metaphor ‘John is a computer’ in two different exchanges:

20a. Peter: Is John a good accountant?

20b. Mary: John is a computer.

21a. Peter: How good a friend is John?

21b. Mary: John is a computer.

In each case, the encoded sense of ‘computer’ draws the hearer’s attention to some features of computers that they may share with some human beings. Like the best accountants, computers can process large amounts of numerical information and never make mistakes, and so on. Unlike good friends, computers lack emotions, and so on. In each case, Peter builds an ad hoc concept indicated, though not encoded, by the word ‘computer’, such that John’s falling under this concept has implications that answer the question in (20a) or (21a). Note that Mary need not have in mind the precise implications that Peter will derive, as long as her utterance encourages him to derive the kind of implications that answer his question along the intended lines. So the Romantics were right to argue that the figurative meaning of a live metaphor cannot be properly paraphrased. However, this is not because the meaning is some non-truth-conditional set of associations or ‘connotations’. It is because it consists of an ad hoc concept that is characterised by its inferential role and not by a definition, and moreover this inferential role, to a much greater extent than in the case of mere approximations, is left to the hearer to elaborate. Metaphorical communication is relatively weak communication.

In the case of approximations or metaphors, concept construction results in a broadening of the encoded concept; in other cases, as in (5a) (‘I’ll bring a bottle’) and (6b) above, it results in a narrowing. Recall that in (6), Lisa has dropped by her neighbours, the Joneses, who have just sat down to supper:

6a. Alan Jones: Do you want to join us for supper?

6b. Lisa: No, thanks. I’ve eaten.

As noted above, in order to produce a relevant interpretation of Lisa’s answer ‘I’ve eaten’, some enrichment of the encoded sentence meaning must take place. In particular, the time span indicated by the perfect ‘have eaten’ must be narrowed down to the evening of utterance, and ‘eaten’ must be understood as conveying the ad hoc concept EAT SUPPER. If Lisa has eaten supper on the previous day, or eaten an olive that evening, she would literally have eaten, but not in a relevant sense. In still other cases, the result of the same process of meaning construction is that the concept indicated by use of the word ‘eaten’ as a constituent of the intended meaning is the very one it encodes. If Lisa is supposed to follow a religious fast and says ‘I’ve eaten’, then the concept EAT that is part of her meaning is just the linguistically-encoded one: a single olive is enough to break a fast.

The comprehension process itself does not involve classifying interpretations as literal, approximate, loose, metaphorical, and so on. These classifications belong to linguistic theories, including folk and philosophical theories, and play a role in metalinguistic arguments. However, a pragmatic approach suggests that these notions may denote regions on a continuum rather than sharply distinct categories, and may play no role in a proper theory of language use.

6. Procedural meaning: speech acts, presuppositions and indexicals

We have tried to show that a contextualist approach to semantics combined with a relevance-oriented approach to pragmatics can yield appropriate accounts of speaker’s meaning. Starting with the strongest candidates for literalist treatment – constructions which are plausibly analysed as encoding concepts that contribute to explicit truth-conditional content – we have argued that even with these strongest candidates the case for literalism does not go through. Many aspects of explicit truth-conditional content are not encoded at all, and utterances do not always communicate the concepts they encode. Moreover, a wide range of linguistic constructions contribute to other aspects of speaker’s meaning than explicit truth-conditional content, or encode aspects of meaning that are not plausibly analysed in conceptual terms. Examples include illocutionary force indicators, presupposition triggers, indexicals and demonstratives, focusing devices, parentheticals, discourse connectives, argumentative operators, prosody, interjections, and so on. Because these constructions fall outside the scope of standard literalist approaches, their linguistic meaning is sometimes characterised as ‘pragmatic’ rather than semantic (although the proposed analyses have rarely shown much concern for how they might contribute to a properly inferential pragmatics). We see these items as providing strong evidence for a contextualist approach to semantics combined with a relevance-oriented pragmatics, and will end by briefly considering how they might be approached within the framework we have outlined.

Speech-act theorists such as Austin, Searle, Katz and Bach & Harnish underlined the fact that a speaker’s meaning should be seen not merely as a set of (asserted) propositions, but as a set of propositions each with a recommended propositional attitude or illocutionary force. The treatment of illocutionary and attitudinal meaning has developed in parallel to the treatment of explicit truth-conditional content, with early literalist accounts replaced by more contextualist accounts in which the role of speakers’ intentions and pragmatic inference is increasingly recognised.[17] In relevance theory, these non-truth-conditional aspects of speaker’s meaning are analysed as higher-level explicatures constructed (like the basic explicatures considered in section 4) by development of encoded schematic sentence meanings. In uttering (22), for example, Mary might convey not only the basic explicature in (23a), which constitutes the explicit truth-conditional content of her utterance, but a range of higher-level explicatures such as (23b-d) (any of which might contribute to overall relevance):

22. Confidentially, I didn’t enjoy the meal.

23a. Mary didn’t enjoy the meal.

23b. Mary is telling Peter confidentially that she didn’t enjoy the meal.

23c. Mary is admitting confidentially to Peter that she didn’t enjoy the meal.

23d. Mary believes she didn’t enjoy the meal.

As this example shows, higher-level explicatures, like basic explicatures, are recovered through a combination of decoding and inference, and may be more or less explicit. Thus, Mary could have made her meaning more explicit by uttering (24), and left it less explicit by merely indicating through her behaviour or tone of voice that she was speaking to Peter in confidence:

24. I tell you confidentially, I didn’t enjoy the meal.

Speech-act theorists distinguish describing from indicating. Descriptive expressions may be seen as encoding concepts in the regular way (although we have argued that the encoded concept gives no more than a schematic indication of the speaker’s meaning). Indicators are seen as carrying other types of information, which contribute to speaker’s meaning in other ways than by encoding regular concepts. As illustrated by (22)-(24)(‘Confidentially, I didn’t enjoy the meal’, ‘I tell you confidentially, I didn’t enjoy the meal’), higher-level explicatures may be conveyed by a mixture of describing and indicating. While illocutionary adverbials and parentheticals such as ‘confidentially’, ‘I tell you confidentially’, ‘I tell you in total and utter confidence’ clearly have descriptive content, mood indicators such as declarative or interrogative word order, imperative, indicative or subjunctive verb morphology and exclamatory or interrogative intonation fall on the indicating side. How is their encoded meaning to be analysed, if not in conceptual terms? We would like to suggest that their semantic function is to guide the hearer in the inferential construction of higher-level explicatures by narrowing the search space, increasing the salience of certain candidates, and diminishing the salience of others. In some cases, the search space may be reduced to a single plausible candidate, while in others, there may be several, so that the resulting implicatures may be stronger or weaker. As expected, conceptual encoding leads to stronger communication than linguistic indication (Wilson & Sperber 1988, 1993; Sperber & Wilson 1986/95: chapter 4.10; Ifantidou 2001).

As noted at the beginning of this section, languages have a rich variety of indicators, which contribute to other aspects of speaker’s meaning than illocutionary force; in the framework we have outlined, these would be analysed on similar lines to mood indicators, as contributing to relevance by guiding the hearer towards the intended explicit content, context or conclusions. Consider, for instance, the contribution of the indexical or demonstrative ‘here’ to the explicit truth-conditional content of (25):

25. I have been here for two hours.

The semantic function of ‘here’ is simultaneously to indicate that a referent is required and to restrict the search space to a certain class of candidates, some of which may be made more salient by gesture, direction of gaze or discourse context (and will therefore be more accessible to the relevance-theoretic comprehension heuristic). Even when all these clues are taken into account, they may not determine a unique interpretation. For example, (25) may be true (and relevant) if ‘here’ is understood to mean ‘in this library’, but false if understood to mean ‘in this room’ or ‘on this spot’. The encoded meaning of ‘here’ is only a clue to the speaker’s meaning, which is recovered, as always, by mutual adjustment of explicatures and implicatures in the search for optimal relevance.

Finally, a range of items such as ‘even’, ‘still’, ‘but’, ‘indeed’, ‘also’ and ‘after all’, which have been seen as encoding information about ‘presuppositions’, conventional implicatures or argumentative orientation instead of (or as well as) descriptive information,[18] may be analysed as restricting the search space for implicated premises and conclusions, or as indicating what type of inferential process the hearer is intended to go through in establishing relevance. To give just one illustration, compare (26a) and (26b):

26a. John is a philosopher and he enjoys detective stories.

26b. John is a philosopher but he enjoys detective stories.

As these examples show, although ‘and’ and ‘but’ are descriptively equivalent, they orient the hearer towards different types of interpretation (Ducrot 1984; Blakemore 1987, 2002; Hall 2004). The use of ‘and’ in (26a), for example, is compatible with an interpretation in which the fact that John enjoys detective stories is unsurprising given that he is a philosopher, while the use of ‘but’ in (26b) suggests an interpretation in which the fact that John is a philosopher makes it surprising that he enjoys detective stories. The effect of ‘but’ is to narrow the search space for inferential comprehension by facilitating access to certain types of context or conclusion: it may therefore be seen, like mood indicators and indexicals, as indicating a rather abstract property of the speaker’s meaning: the direction in which relevance is to be sought.[19]

The few attempts that have been made to provide a unified account of indicators have been based on the speech act distinction between conditions on use and conditions on truth (Recanati 2004b). However, as noted above, not all indicators are analysable in speech-act terms, and the distinction between conditions on truth and conditions on use runs the risk of becoming trivial or non-explanatory when removed from the speech-act framework. While it is clear why certain acts have felicity conditions (e.g. only someone with the appropriate authority can give an order, perform a baptism, and so on), it is not clear why linguistic expressions such as ‘it’ and ‘that’, or ‘even’ and ‘also’, which have no obvious analysis in speech-act terms, should have conditions on their appropriate use. By contrast, if the function of indicators is to contribute to inferential comprehension by guiding the hearer towards the speaker’s meaning, the conditions on their use fall out as a natural consequence. More generally, from a radical literalist perspective, it is surprising to find any items at all that contribute to meaning without encoding concepts. From the perspective outlined in this chapter, there is no presumption that all linguistic meaning should be either conceptual or truth-conditional: the only requirement on linguistic meaning is that it guide the hearer towards the speaker’s meaning by indicating the direction in which relevance is to be sought.

7. Conclusion

When pragmatics emerged as a distinct discipline at the end of the 1960s, analytic philosophy was dominated by philosophy of language, and the cognitive sciences were still in their infancy. Since then, as the cognitive sciences have matured and expanded, priority in philosophy has shifted from philosophy of language to philosophy of mind. The development of pragmatics reflects this shift. Part of Grice’s originality was to approach meaning as a primarily psychological phenomenon and only derivatively a linguistic one. By underlining the gap between sentence meaning and speaker’s meaning, he made it possible, of course, for ideal language philosophers to ignore many context-dependent features of speaker’s meaning that ordinary language philosophers had used as evidence against formal approaches. However, far from claiming that linguistic meaning was the only type of meaning amenable to scientific treatment and worthy of philosophical attention, he suggested that speaker’s meaning was relevant to philosophy and could be properly studied in its own right. As pragmatics has developed, it has become increasingly clear that the gap between sentence meaning and speaker’s meaning is wider than Grice himself thought, and that pragmatic inference contributes not only to implicit content but also to truth-conditional aspects of explicit content. While the effect may be to remove from linguistic semantics more phenomena than some semanticists might be willing to relinquish, it does not make the field any less challenging: in fact, the semantics-pragmatics interface becomes an interesting interdisciplinary area of research in its own right. However, as the gap between sentence meaning and speaker’s meaning widens, it increasingly brings into question a basic assumption of much philosophy of language, that the semantics of sentences provides straightforward, direct access to the structure of human thoughts. We have argued that linguistic meanings are mental representations that play a role at an intermediate stage in the comprehension process. Unlike speaker’s meanings (which they resemble in the way a skeleton resembles a body), linguistic meanings are not consciously entertained. In other words, whereas speakers’ meanings are salient objects in personal psychology, linguistic meanings only play a role in sub-personal cognition.

Within pragmatics itself, there is a tension between more linguistically-oriented and more cognitively-oriented approaches. By idealising away from properties of the context that are hard to formalise, and focusing on aspects of interpretation (e.g. ‘presuppositions’ or ‘generalised implicatures’) which exhibit a kind of code-like regularity, it is possible to extend the methods of formal semantics to a sub-part of the pragmatic domain (assuming that these phenomena are genuinely pragmatic, which is in some cases contentious) (Kadmon 2001; Blutner & Zeevat 2003). Good or bad, the resulting analyses are unlikely to generalise to the whole domain of pragmatics. The cognitive approach, and in particular relevance theory (on which we have focused here), approaches verbal comprehension as a psychological process. The challenge is precisely to explain how the closed formal system of language provides effective pieces of evidence which, combined with further evidence from an open and dynamic context, enable hearers to infer speakers’ meanings. The methods to be used are those of cognitive psychology, including modelling of cognitive processes, experimental tests, studies of communication pathologies (e.g. autism), and evolutionary insights. Pragmatics so conceived is relevant to linguistics because of the light it throws on the semantics-pragmatics interface. Its main relevance is to cognitive psychology, and in particular to the study of mind-reading and inference mechanisms. Its implications for the philosophy of language are largely cautionary and deflationary, amounting mainly to downplaying the philosophical significance of linguistic meanings. Its main philosophical relevance is to philosophy of mind. In particular, by describing comprehension, a very common, easy, everyday process, as a form of richly context-dependent inference, pragmatics provides an illustration of how to approach central cognitive processes, which, precisely because of their context-dependence, have been treated by Fodor as a major mystery for cognitive psychology and philosophy of mind.

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Notes

[1] In Grice’s original formulation, “‘[Speaker] meant something by x’ is (roughly) equivalent to ‘[Speaker] intended the utterance of x to produce some effect in an audience by means of the recognition of this intention’” (Grice 1957/89: 220). For discussion and reformulation, see Strawson (1964); Searle (1969, 1983); Schiffer (1972); Recanati (1986, 1987); Grice (1982); Sperber & Wilson (1986/95); Bach (1987); Neale (1992).

[2] The wording of this maxim (and perhaps of the supermaxim of Manner) is a nice illustration of Grice’s playfulness.

[3] In this chapter, we will focus on the recovery of explicit truth-conditional content and implicatures; for brief comments on the treatment of presupposition and illocutionary force, see section 6 and footnote 15.

[4] On generalised implicatures and the neo-Gricean approach, see Horn (1984, 1992, 2004, 2005); Levinson (1983, 1987, 2000); Hirschberg (1991); Carston (1995, 1998); Green (1995); Matsumoto (1995); Sperber & Wilson (1995).

[5] Grice himself does not seem to have seen the distinction between generalised and particularised implicatures as theoretically significant. For discussion, see Carston (1995, 1998, 2002); Sperber & Wilson (1995); for experimental evidence on default inference, see Noveck (2001); Chierchia et al. (2001); Bezuidenhout & Morris (2004); Papafragou & Musolino (2003); Breheny, Katsos & Williams (2004.); Sperber & Noveck (2004).

[6] On the saying-implicating distinction, see Carston (2002: chapter 2.2); Wilson & Sperber (2002: section 7); Recanati (2004a: chapter 1). For representative collections on the semantics-pragmatics distinction, see Turner (1999); Szabo (2005).

[7] Karttunen & Peters (1979) extend Grice’s notion to other non-truth-conditional items such as ‘even’. Blakemore (1987, 2002) and Bach (1999) criticise the notion of conventional implicature and offer alternative accounts; on non-truth-conditional meaning, see section 6.

[8] Hedges are necessary because Grice does occasionally suggest that what is said may go beyond the literal meaning. See his comments on “dictiveness without formality” in Grice (1989: 361).

[9] Decoding and inferential elaboration actually overlap in time as online comprehension proceeds, with components of the sentence providing input to elaboration as soon as they are decoded. Moreover, disambiguation, i.e. the selection of one of several decoding hypotheses, is typically affected by pragmatic elaboration.

[10] For accounts along these lines, see Sperber & Wilson (1986/95, 1998a); Carston (1988, 2002); Recanati (1989, 2004a); Wilson & Sperber (2002); Neale (2004, forthcoming). Alternative, more literalist accounts, have been defended in Stanley (2000, 2002); Stanley & Szabó (2000).

[11] We are considering here only what we call basic or first-level explicatures. We also claim that there are higher-level explicatures incorporating speech-act or propositional-attitude information; for comments, see section 6.

[12] For discussion of the relevance-theoretic account of explicatures and alternative views on the explicit-implicit distinction, see Bach (1994, 2004); Levinson (2000: 186-98); Horn (2004, 2005); Stanley (2000, 2002); see also Carston (2002: chapter 2.5); Recanati (2004a). Bach introduces a notion of ‘impliciture’, distinct from implicature, to cover those aspects of what is said that are not linguistically encoded. He rejects the notion of explicature on the ground that pragmatic inferences are cancellable and nothing cancellable can be explicit. By this criterion (on which the explicit-implicit distinction essentially reduces to the coding-inference or semantics-pragmatics distinction), not even disambiguation and reference assignment can contribute to explicit content, and the resulting notion falls well short of Grice’s notion of what is said.

[13] On the explicit-implicit distinction in relevance theory, see Sperber & Wilson (1986/95: chapter 4.2, 4.4); Carston (2002: chapter 2.3); Wilson & Sperber (2004). For a more detailed analysis of the mutual adjustment process for (6b), see Wilson & Sperber (2002, Table 1).

[14] Definite descriptions such as ‘the rent’ in (9b) have been treated in the pragmatic literature as cases of ‘bridging implicature’ (Clark 1977) and analysed using relevance theory by Matsui (2000), Wilson & Matsui (2000); Sperber & Noveck (2004).

[15] To the extent that pragmatic ‘presuppositions’ can be analysed as implicated (or accommodated) premises (cf. Grice 1981; Atlas 2004), the mutual adjustment process also sheds light on their derivation. On other types of ‘presuppositional’ effect, see Sperber & Wilson (1986/95: chapter 4, section 5) and section 6 below.

[16] Here we will consider metaphor and related phenomena. For analyses of irony and understatement, see Sperber & Wilson (1981, 1986: Chapter 4.7, 4.9, 1990; 1998b); Wilson & Sperber (1992).

[17] See e.g. Strawson (1964); Searle (1969, 1975); Katz (1977); Recanati (1987); Tsohatzidis (1994); Sadock (2004).

[18] See for example Stalnaker (1974); Wilson (1975); Gazdar (1979); Karttunen & Peters (1979); Grice (1981); Anscombre & Ducrot (1983), Sperber & Wilson (1986/95: chapter 4.5); Blakemore (1987, 2002); Wilson & Sperber (1993); Bruxelles, Ducrot & Raccah (1995); Horn (1996); Kadmon (2001); Atlas (2004); Hall (2004); Iten (forthcoming).

[19] For an account of interjections within this framework, see Wharton 2003.