What Is Said: Semantic Or Pragmatic

In the course of introducing his theory of conversational implicature, Grice adopted a notion of what is said with which to contrast what a speaker implicates in uttering a sentence. In general, what is said is determined by semantics and what is implicated is determined by pragmatics. In recent years, however, several linguists and philosophers have cogently argued that the Gricean view ignores the fact that essentially the same sorts of inferential processes used to determine conversational implicatures also enter into determining what is said. (Carston, 1988, 1993; Recanati, 1989, 1993; Sperber and Wilson) In particular, it has become increasingly widely accepted that Grice's notion of what is said is too limited, and that pragmatics has a far larger role to play in determining what is said than Grice would have allowed. Carston, Recanati, and Sperber and Wilson transform Grice's distinction to include under the category of what is said other elements, besides disambiguation and referent assignment, whose determination is pragmatic. Following them, many things taken as implicatures in the Gricean framework are better explained if taken as pragmatically determined aspects of what is said. The experiments are quoted to show that pragmatics plays a critical role in how ordinary people determine what speakers say. We specifically examined if people distinguished what speakers say, or what is said, from what speakers implicate and to see if people viewed speakers'said meanings as being determined by enriched pragmatic knowledge (i.e., pragmatic information beyond that needed to determine lexical disambiguation and reference assignment). It seems clear that this debate about what is said has a crucial impact on some foundational distinctions of semantics and pragmatics such as literal/non-literal...